Lifehacker founder and ThinkUp co-founder, Gina Trapani introduces us to a few web based apps that offer elegant design and features well worth their minuscule price-points. Fans of an uncluttered web experience will rejoice to hear what Gina offers up in this installment of the Cool Tools Show.

012: Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani

In this week's episode of the Cool Tools Show, Gary Wolf, Co-founder of Quantified Self, shows us how his favorite Quantified Self inspired apps help him stay consistent, motivated and aware about his most important daily routines. If you're struggling to keep your healthy habits in check, this week's episode may help you diagnose where those dips in motivation are coming from.

015: Co-founder of Quantified Self, Gary Wolf

Aishwarya Khanduja is the founder of a stealth entity working to solve wicked problems through lenses of complexity, markets, and power. She's spent the majority of her career thus far being a founder or supporting founders. Her companies span biotech, ed-tech, and the future of work. She writes a weekly letter, essays, technical primers, and other musings on . &nbsp; TOOLS: 0:00 - Intro 1:08 - Hero 329 pen:  8:48 - bamboo book stand:  11:06 - tetr app:  16:30 - vestoj: the journal of sartorial matters:  24:20 - The Analogue:  &nbsp; Watch on YouTube:  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  &nbsp; To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

405: Aishwarya Khanduja

ABOUT DANNY KIM: 20+ years of vehicle architecture &amp; prototype development. Inventor w/ 65 issued int’l patents, 22 USPTOs. Focus of HBS case study: Industrial design &amp; sustainable transportation. Former Land Rover mechanic, machinist, woodworker, welder, and vehicle integrator. Reed College, UCB, RISD, &amp; Media Lab. LINKS:     TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 1:19 – 48″ Margining steel lead screw shaft Rockwell 52 (AKA Handy File) 7:48 – Spectrum 375 Plasma Cutter (1/2″ lightsaber “Scissors’) 14:35 – Edwards 65 Ton Ironworker 16:07 –&nbsp; 23:58 –&nbsp; 23:49 –&nbsp;  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:

406: Danny Kim

&nbsp;is an accomplished Creative Director with over two decades of experience in design leadership, brand building, and environmental experiences. As NASA’s current Creative Director, he oversees the agency’s visual brand and iconic Graphics Standards Manual and is responsible for reintroducing the NASA Logotype (Worm). Previously, Rager led teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Disney, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the New Museum, and co-founded Weekends, a design studio operating between Paris and Los Angeles. TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 1:29 –&nbsp; 11:27 –&nbsp; 14:41 –&nbsp; 21:51 –&nbsp; 30:11 –&nbsp; 30:35 –&nbsp;  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  &nbsp; To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

#407: David Rager

Mac Moss is an Idaho based graphic designer who operates his own one man studio known as mm.s. Heavily inspired by science fiction and the American West, his work has naturally drifted into predominantly the outdoor industry. Outside of work, Mac races competitively at ultra marathon distances. &nbsp;  TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 1:29 –&nbsp; 11:27 –&nbsp; 14:41 –&nbsp; 21:51 –&nbsp; 30:11 –&nbsp; 30:35 –&nbsp; &nbsp;   LINKS:&nbsp; Instagram:  Website:&nbsp;  &nbsp;   &nbsp;  For show notes and transcript visit:  &nbsp;  To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

408: Mac Moss

Julian Bleecker, Ph.D., is an accomplished engineer and author with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, an MSEng from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz. He founded Near Future Laboratory in 2005 and OMATA, a one-person innovative hardware product design studio, in 2014, which he sold in 2022. Julian has written&nbsp;It’s Time To Imagine Harder&nbsp;and co-authored&nbsp;The Manual of Design Fiction. He also wrote the influential essay,&nbsp;Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. His engineering expertise and innovative work in Design Fiction have significantly shaped creative practices worldwide.    TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 0:34 –&nbsp; 7:43 –&nbsp; 17:08 –&nbsp;&nbsp;and&nbsp; 24:23 –&nbsp;&nbsp;+&nbsp;  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

409: Julian Bleecker

Data storyteller RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems with visual metaphors and persuasive graphics. He recently produced designs for The White House, Google, and MIT. RJ’s newest book is “Info We Trust: How to Create Value with Data Graphics.” He is also author of “Florence Nightingale: Mortality and Health Diagrams” and other works. Learn about all publications at&nbsp;. RJ lives/works in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Links:    TOOLS:0:00 – Intro 0:47 –&nbsp;&nbsp;(airplane neck pillow) 2:30 –&nbsp; 9:00 –&nbsp; 12:58 –&nbsp; 20:43 –&nbsp; 20:43 –&nbsp;  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  &nbsp; To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

410: RJ Andrews

Based in Texas, Chordophony, is a software engineer by day who moonlights as a music technologist and sound explorer. He has developed innovative devices and software to facilitate sonic creation and streamline production workflows. Chordophony is an avid collector and enthusiast of music-related tools and instruments. Social Media Links:  TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 0:45 –&nbsp; 8:18 –&nbsp; 13:45 –&nbsp; 20:10 –&nbsp; (aka CHyPboards)  &nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  &nbsp; To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

411: Chordophony

Christina K. is a home organizer based out of metro Vancouver area. She helps the neurodivergent to the neurotypical find space and peace in their home whether virtually or in person. She also in a previous life was a marketing coordinator helping small and big businesses in the tech space find their voice in a loud world. When not working you can find her baking, watching educational YouTube or collecting too many squishmallows.   TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 0:38 –&nbsp; 4:57 –&nbsp; 9:50 –&nbsp; 15:21 –&nbsp; Watch on YouTube:  For show notes and transcript visit:  To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

412: Christina K

Mr. Burke is a serial entrepreneur. Mr. Burke has over 34 years of enterprise software company management and start-up experience and has worked for 11 software and technology services companies. Mr. Burke is a father of 3 kids and husband to his lovely wife, Irina.  TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 0:31 –&nbsp; 6:13 –&nbsp; 14:26 –&nbsp; 19:27 –&nbsp; 23:17 –&nbsp; For show notes and transcript visit:  To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:&nbsp;

413: Doug Burke

Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield works in mind-jazz across genres to help navigating our world of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play for people to thrived in it. Host of Future Fossils, former Digital Media Strategist for The Santa Fe Institute and host of Complexity Podcast, former Community Manager for The Long Now Foundation and Research Analyst for a stealth Mozilla AI spin out, his latest project Humans On The Loop examines agency in the age of automation through conversation, music, essay, social weaving, and the rearing of bespoke language models.     TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 1:01 –&nbsp; 16:53 –&nbsp; 25:47 –&nbsp; 33:17 –&nbsp; 42:14 –&nbsp; Watch on YouTube:  For show notes and transcript visit:  To sign up to be a guest on the show, please fill out this form:

414: Michael Garfield

Alexander "Zander" Rose is the executive director of The Long Now Foundation, which was founded in 1996 to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution that fosters very-long-term planning. He was hired to build their clock that lasts 10,000 years. He’s also the founder of the Robot Fighting League, and a contestant on the ABC series Battlebots (airing Sunday nights)

32: Zander Rose

Ryan Holiday is a well respected marketing guru, media strategist and author. He spearheaded viral marketing campaigns as Director of Marketing for American Apparel and has produced several world renowned books on his marketing strategies and philosophy. The list of tools Ryan brings to the table this week emphasizes quality and simplicity above all else, priorities we can all get on board with.

36: Ryan Holiday

Andy Baio loves making things online. He’s written waxy.org for the last 13 years, helped build Kick Starter, and organizes XOXO — an independent art tech festival in Portland. His upcoming projects include the XOXO Outpost, which is an experimental workspace opening this January, and the reboot of the collaborative event calendar, upcoming.org.

48: Andy Baio

Our guest this week is Eri Gentry. Eri is the founding president of BioCurious. It's the first hackerspace for biology, and she's also a research manager at the Institute for the Future. Some interesting facts: she shares a birthday with President Donald Trump and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

75: Eri Gentry

Nick Bilton is a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of 3 books, including Hatching Twitter and his latest, American Kingpin, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Silk Road and the Dread Pirate Roberts.

76: Nick Bilton

Our guest this week is Scotty Allen. Scotty is a nomadic engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer and storyteller who orbits around San Francisco and Shenzhen, China. He runs a YouTube channel Strange Parts, a travel adventure show for geeks where he goes on adventures ranging from building his own iPhone in China to trying to make a manhole cover in India.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/scotty-allen-strange-parts

123: Scotty Allen

Becky is a Content Creator at Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/becky-stern-content-creator-at-instructables

127: Becky Stern

Our guest this week is Dan Ruderman. Dan is a physicist and technologist. He is faculty at the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC, where he applies machine learning to individualized cancer treatment. Dan enjoys overseas travel, and picking up enough foreign language to never again order a plate of organ meat.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/dan-ruderman-physicist-and-technologist

128: Dan Ruderman

Our guest this week is Jake von Slatt. Jake von Slatt is someone that delights making things. Hours spent in the workshop are a meditation, an end unto themselves. This results in adventures that Jake has coined “toolchain journeys,” the most recent of which started with a desire to learn blacksmithing and lead to 3D printing a model to cast in aluminum to make a pulley to drive an alternator converted to a welder with a 1946 car engine to weld a pile of scrap steel into a serviceable anvil. The process is the thing.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/jake-von-slatt-hardware-hacker

129: Jake Von Slatt

Our guest this week is Alex Glow. Alex creates electronics videos and tutorials at Hackster.io in San Francisco; she loves building wearable tech, EEG, music, bikes, holograms, and more. Alex grew into hardware as a FIRST Robotics team member, then as a director of the AHA and Noisebridge hackerspaces and Artist in Residence at Autodesk's Pier 9.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/alex-glow-hackster-io

131: Alex Glow

Our guest this week is Danielle Baskin. Danielle is an entrepreneur, painter, and performance artist based in San Francisco. She's created internet jokes, like Custom Avocados and Drone Sweaters. She's also the founder of Inkwell Helmets, a custom bike helmet company, the co-founder of Your Boss, a voice-chat based productivity app, and has started many other companies.

For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/danielle-baskin-product-designer

132: Danielle Baskin

Our guest this week is Theodore Gray. Theodore is the co-founder of Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. He's also the founder of App publisher Touch Press and the author of many books that Kevin and I own and love, including The Elements, Molecules, Reactions, and Mad Science. He's also the proprietor of periodictable.com.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/theodore-gray-co-founder-of-wolfram-research

Cool Tools

133: Theodore Gray

Our guest this week is Dan Dubno. Dan is an Emmy Award winning journalist, technologist, curator, and founder of nonprofit organizations. At CBS News, he developed many new technologies that have changed the face of broadcast television. Presently, Dan is working for DARPA and is also Contributing Editor for Popular Mechanics.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/dan-dubno-contributing-editor-for-popular-mechanics

135: Dan Dubno

Our guest this week is Larry A. Larry is a longtime subscriber to Cool Tools and an occasional contributor. He's an engineer who loves technology, and who sees things differently and in more depth than the average consumer. Kevin and I picked Larry as a guest for the Cool Tools Show because he's active in the comment boards. He has great things to say: questions, assumptions, interesting opinions.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/larry-a-engineer

136: Larry A

Our guest this week is Michael Dubno. Michael is a former Wall Street CIO/CTO and a software developer. He's an inventor, artist, welder, machinist, polar explorer, photographer, roboticist, tech entrepreneur, mentor, co-founder of Gadgetoff, co-chair of FIRST in New York City, and exaggerator of accomplishments, and a collector and user of tools.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/michael-dubno-founder-of-gadgetoff

137: Michael Dubno

Our guest this week is Bran Ferren. Bran is the former President of Research and Development of Walt Disney Imagineering and is now the Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, which he co-founded in 2000 with Danny Hillis.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/bran-ferren-chief-creative-officer-of-applied-minds

140: Bran Ferren

Our guest this week is Carl Bass. Carl has been designing and making buildings, boats, sculpture, and machinery for the last 40 years. He is the former CEO of Autodesk and now spends his time researching the boundaries of digital fabrication in his shops in Berkeley and with a number of companies he’s working with.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/carl-bass-former-autodesk-ceo

143: Carl Bass

Our guest this week is Laura Cochrane. Laura Cochrane is a content strategist living in Berkeley, California. She currently works at NEO.LIFE, a biotech publication. Before that, she was an editor at two different DIY project publications: MAKE magazine, where she worked alongside Mark, and Instructables. Her hobbies include rock climbing, drawing, dancing, and yoga.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/laura-cochrane-content-strategist

144: Laura Cochrane

Our guest this week is Saul Griffith. Saul is a compulsive user of tools, he works across disciplines with a focus of making tools and technologies that help us solve climate change. Consequently, he ends up doing thermodynamics, precision machine design, and robotics on a daily basis.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/saul-griffith-inventor

145: Saul Griffith

Our guest this week is Elan Lee. Elan is a professional game designer. He is a co-creator of Exploding Kittens, the most backed crowdfunded project in history. And before that, he was Chief Design Officer for Microsoft's Xbox.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/elan-lee-co-creator-of-exploding-kittens

147: Elan Lee

Our guest this week is Jeri Ellsworth. Jeri is an inventor, entrepreneur and amateur scientist. Her career started when she dropped out of high school and formed a business building, selling and racing quarter-mile dirt-track cars. In the mid-90’s she founded a small retail computer store chain, and in the 2000’s she launched her engineering career where she designed a wide variety of electronic components and consumer products. She's passionate about educational outreach and maintains a youtube channel devoted to demonstrating engineering and science techniques. 

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/jeri-ellsworth-ceo-at-tilt-five

148: Jeri Ellsworth

Our guest this week is Trey Ratcliff. Trey is a photographer, artist, writer and adventurer. Each day, Trey posts a new photo to his website, StuckInCustoms.com, the #1 Travel Photography blog. His images and stories capture the beauty of exotic travel destinations as well as the humor of bizarre situations he often finds himself in. There is always something new, unexpected and beautiful to see.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/trey-ratcliff-photographer

149: Trey Ratcliff

Our guest this week is Anne Briggs. Anne grew up on Montana and spent a lot of her young life abroad because her parents are missionaries. She majored in Chinese and Business hoping to become an international business mogul, but quickly realized that working in the tech industry wasn't a life she wanted to live. So she started a garden and built a workshop in her spare time. One thing led to another and now she's a farmer, woodworker, blacksmith, musician, and full-time content creator.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/anne-briggs-anne-of-all-trades

151: Anne Briggs

Our guest this week is Gever Tulley. Gever is founder of Tinkering School, an internationally famous summer camp where kids build amazing things from rollercoasters to wind-powered trains. He is also the founder of SF Brightworks, a K-12 school where the student is the co-author of their education, with an emphasis on learning by doing. He also co-author of 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do), a book to help children and families learn to assess and mitigate risk by doing dangerous things together (and is now available in seven languages). He speaks and hosts workshops internationally on education and the empowerment of children, and he is  constantly fooling around in the shop, building things with kids

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/gever-tulley-founder-of-tinkering-school

152: Gever Tulley

Our guest this week is Maggie Tokuda-Hall. Maggie is the author of the Parent's Choice Gold Medal winning picture book, Also an Octopus. Her debut young adult novel, The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea is due out in Fall 2019. She is the host of the Drunk Safari podcast.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/maggie-tokuda-hall-children-and-ya-author

153: Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Our guest this week is M.G. Siegler. For the past 5-plus years, M.G. Siegler has been a general partner at GV — Google’s venture capital arm. Before that, he helped start a seed fund called CrunchFund. And before that, he was a tech reporter for a number of years at publications such as TechCrunch and VentureBeat. Way back when, he was a front-end web developer.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/m-g-siegler-general-partner-at-gv

154: M.G. Siegler

Our guest this week is Aaron Lammer. Aaron is the co-host of the Longform Podcast, which has interviewed non-fiction writers weekly for over half a decade. He has been writing songs with the music project Francis and the Lights since college and lives in Brooklyn.
For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/aaron-lammer-longform-co-founder

155: Aaron Lammer

Our guest this week is Michael Kupperman. Michael is an artist and writer in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in or on The New Yorker, Fortune, The New York Times, Nickelodeon Magazine, Forbes, Playboy, Heavy Metal, McSweeney’s, DC, Marvel, Vice, Saturday Night Live, Adult Swim, and Comedy Central, and six of his own books. All the Answers is his first serious book.

For show notes visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/michael-kupperman-author-of-all-the-answers

156: Michael Kupperman

In each episode of the Cool Tools Show, Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder talk to a guest about some of his or her favorite uncommon and uncommonly good tools they think others should know about. 

Popular tracks by Cool Tools