Shareables n. 2

Here is this week’s shareables.

Shares

- Buy books secondhand online for way cheaper than new at Better World Books

The next time I need a physical book, I’m going to try out Better World Books. They sell every book you can think of, for sometimes half the listing price on other websites, simply because they’re used. $15 worth of books earns you free shipping, and classics/older books especially will be about $6 a piece.

- Cooking

I have been getting more into cooking lately, especially after binging Tasting History with Max Miller. I have been moving toward a Mediterranean diet more both for health and personal taste, and that has been going great so far (actually getting enough fiber in a day, wow!), so I want to try a lot of new recipes. Not all of them will be strictly Mediterranean, but they will at least be plant-based and use fresh ingredients as much as possible.

Of course, I still bake like usual, and made some vegan dinner rolls the other night that tasted fantastic. I made a couple bread loaves earlier last week as well, although the first one turned out too cakey (didn’t have a gram scale in my new place yet) and then second one is getting harder to finish the more I’m trying to cut down excessive eating throughout the day.

- Free download of Microsoft Office 2007 from Archive.org

For if you want to avoid paying for modern MS Office but don’t want to switch to LibreOffice for some reason. Or, you think 2007 Office is fun.

- Upcoming trips, continued

We had to cancel our Ireland trip this year due to financial uncertainty, but we rescheduled for sometime in February or April. The Massachusetts trip was extremely fun, with a lot of seafood (my favorite genre of food), chatting with family, trying Dunkin Donuts that is actually good.

- If nothing is curated, how do we find things? article by Tadaima

Just a small blog post I found interesting about the emphasis on curation. It is indeed annoying having to search through reddit to get real human opinions on things, or find really interesting stuff on my own that none of my friends know about because some random blog or Hacker News thread talked about it. I meet people who seeimgly only get news by scrolling Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook (really?), etc. and it’s concerning. I wish more people would make RSS feeds of things they actually like, including certain social media accounts, and ditch algorithmic slop recommendation altogether.

- On a similar note, here’s a cool website called minifeed I found to browse small blogs and even follow them directly from the site!

The best content that I come across online is from small blogs writing about whatever they want. Minifeed, in their own words, says

Minifeed is a curated blog reader and search engine. We collect humans-written blogs to make them discoverable and searchable. Sign up to subscribe to blogs, follow people, and save favorites.

I read a really good post just by clicking a random one off this site about job-searching that hit home (someone hire me please). Now, I understand that for non-technical people, a lot of small blogs focus on technical concepts and may seem pretty boring. I think it’s still worth it to look through some to find ones that post about things you care about instead.

Why should I care about Bluesky’s Lossy Timelines?

- Check out retro website-building on MelonLand

MelonLand is a site dedicated to what’s called web revival, or

The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it’s not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days.

Check out the wiki and maybe get interested in creating your own basic HTML websites with fun, flashy gifs and silly buttons. They also have a Minecraft server!