4 min read

Current State of Things + Some Cool Software I've Found 🗞️🔥🗞️

What have I been up to in December?
Current State of Things + Some Cool Software I've Found 🗞️🔥🗞️
Photo by Nijwam Swargiary / Unsplash

This past month, I've been in two different trainings outside my daily job at Praxent.

  • Communication Training with Thaíssa Candella a very cool tech influencer from Brazil.
  • Wealth planner training with Olívia Carneiro(From Econolívia or Olívia Sensata), an University of Chicago graduate economist.

And in the meantime, I've been testing out some software to help out my daily life and publishing schedule.

Analytics

I chose to replace Google Analytics since I heard they were going to go full paid and still not solve privacy concerns overseas, and that means a bad rep on Europe's servers for any website using it.

I chose to go with Fathom, as they are very privacy concerned and have a very useful tool for a cheap enough price.

Here's how their dashboard looks:

I find it to be very neat to look at and has fewer bugs than Google Analytics for my particular use case.

+ they don't put in a cookie banner on your website, so COOL!

Spaced Repetition Reading

I've been enamored by Readwise for a while now. Imagine an app that syncs up your highlights on Kindle's ebooks and then shares them with you using spaced repetition?

Here's how cool it is:

I can not only tag my favorite highlights but also click on "Master" and turn a highlight into an active way of studying it.

Now I can turn this specific highlight into a Question and Answer, or Cloze Deletion, meaning I can blank out some words and later have this highlight quizzed back at me with a word missing. I then engage in active recall to cement even more of that information in my brain. Cool hm?

Here's after I blanked out the word "water":

And here's if I choose Question & Answer instead:

This is awesome.

But you know what is even cooler?

One Place to Read every Feed 📖👀

Imagine having one place to read all your social media Feeds + books + pdfs + newsletter emails + any article you find on the web.

Imagine now that it has a neat interface + allows you to highlight things and have those highlights feed into Readwise?

No need to imagine it anymore, the folks at Readwise have been busy and developed such an App. It's called Reader.

Let's take a moment to breathe in and look at its interface:

Breathe in, breathe out to contain excitement. - Me right now

But you must have thought "But Lucas, isn't this expensive somehow? I mean if I do buy every app on this list, Fathom, Readwise, and now Reader how much will I be spending?"

Well, hold your horses, who told you that you had to buy Reader?

It comes with Readwise.

Let.

That.

Sink.

In.

While you are sinking it in, let's look at how it's easy to read on Reader:

You can move your focus between paragraphs by using  ↑ ↓ on your keyboard.

And as you highlight you can also add notes:

That is so cool. But to me what is even better is the fact that I can forward any email newsletter I read to it, and have it be the place to read everything.

Now my email inbox automatically archives newsletters and then forwards them to Reader.

One place to read everything. It is magical for folks that love to read as I do.

Here's a final example of an academic paper on it:

Brilliant. Just perfect.

Sign up for Readwise here to get Reader (also an app on Android and iOS).


It's been a hell of a month and I'm planning on starting posting on youtube again after I finish up my communication training with Thaíssa, it's not going to be as regular as this newsletter but from time to time I'll make videos regarding deeper topics.


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