It’s time again for your cool things for cool people here at the Foundation blog! And my do we have some cool things for you this month to check out. Let’s get right into it, shall we?
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: November 2025”The Search for the Perfect (Free) Email Marketing Tool
Email marketing is a tricky thing. Mainly, you don’t want to pay for email marketing if it doesn’t pay off for you. When you’re starting out, you’re going to have a small list doing small numbers. It doesn’t make sense to invest in an email marketing tool if you’re firing off emails to say, 20 people.
Continue reading “The Search for the Perfect (Free) Email Marketing Tool”Cool Things for Cool People: October 2025
It’s time for another COOL THINGS edition! It’s hard to believe the weather is turning so fast. Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Something like that anyway. I’ve got a round up of some neato things for you to look at as usual, so let’s get right into it.
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: October 2025”Cool Things for Cool People: September 2025
Hey folks! I feel like I just sent you a batch of cool things, but these days it feels like I blink and two weeks dash right on by. Can you believe it’s almost the spooky season, and then after that it’s the season-we-don’t-name? This year has flown by. I can’t even believe that summer is basically over.
Anyway, I have an exciting little batch for you this month, including some fun freebies and a bunch of upcoming stuff. You ready? Let’s go!
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: September 2025”Cool Things for Cool People: August 2025
Welp… I missed last month’s cool things roundup. It’s been so busy. With the world seemingly falling apart, but not ever being able to slow down and stop, sometimes you’re feeling like you’re watching Rome burn… Can’t really do much about it but you’re still a villager having to plow your little field or else your family isn’t going to eat come fall. I also wrote that huge article about AI last month that went viral so I figured the cool things could wait.
Anyway, I missed last month, but I figured that was okay, because I can just add twice as many cool things in this month’s edition. Let’s go!
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: August 2025”Opinion: Is the use of AI worth it?
It’s really hard opening emails, social media, or really anything today without being inundated with AI. AI, is, of course, a short-hand acronym for Large Language Models (LLM). Despite the widespread knowledge of the impact on everything from media to the human brain, many people are still blissfully unaware of a lot of things happening in the AI sphere and don’t know how detrimental this tech, in its current form, actually is.
It’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago this technology was in limited use; we had seen drips and drabs of what would eventually come to be full-fledged LLMs like Gemini or ChatGPT in forms like Google Lab’s Between the Lines or even MidJourney. These tools were either not open for public use or had specific use cases, rather than this all-out AI integration we’ve seen today. As one who never shies from at least trying out a new technology, I tested DALL-E early on to see how well it could generate things like my artwork from my alternative text (essentially, testing my alternative text), as well as the reverse, how well it could generate alt text from an image, and at the time, the results were disastrous and laughable at best.
Nowadays, the technology itself is improving. When once we could immediately tell when AI was used in the generation of an image by the amount of fingers and teeth a human being would have in it, changes to algorithms have made a lot of AI art and writing nearly indistinguishable from an amateur artist or a clumsy writer. Many of us can still tell, however, but I don’t imagine that will last for long.
For many of you I am telling you things you already know, but this post is for the people who don’t know, who have somehow still skirted past all of the red flags about AI and its usage, and the way the technology is being force-fed to us en masse. So, let’s get into it, and I’ll link as much as I can as sources so you can see exactly what I mean. Here’s why, long form, you should think twice about utilizing AI:
Continue reading “Opinion: Is the use of AI worth it?”Cool Things for Cool People: June 2025
Time for another fun roundup of cool things! Hopefully this is hitting your inbox at a time where you could use a few more cool things… I know I can. So let’s just get on with them, shall we?
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: June 2025”Cool Things for Cool People: May 2025
The sun is shining and my latest obsession is watching The Murderbot Diaries on Apple TV. I read all the books over the course of a few days before the TV show came out and I am vibrating with anticipation over the next episodes to come. Looks like Martha Wells (the series author) is having a great time too. Sanctuary Moon even got a full opening title sequence this episode (you can watch it unglitched on YouTube). Anyway, Murderbot is pretty cool, but let’s go over a few more cool things for May!
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: May 2025”“Fancy Fonts” and using unicode characters on social media
If you’ve been on the web for a while, you may remember the MySpace days. MySpace, preceding Facebook, was a home where you could connect typical social media style with friends, but one of the key factors of MySpace was that your profile was a little home base you could customize to your heart’s desire… To a degree. You could place all kinds of cool code to give your profile a background image, or make it play a song when someone arrived at your profile. Users could concoct really unique experiences from profile to profile.
Places like Facebook, Twitter, and others homogenized the whole experience, and with good reason; really, no one loves to have Green Day blast at them when they open someone’s profile, and then wait five hours for all the moving and flashing animated gifs to load. Plus, all the ability to customize nearly fully meant MySpace profiles could be a vector for delivering malware, spyware, and more. Allowing users a small level of customization rather than a vast all-inclusive customization experience meant it was easier to browse as a whole.
Now, in 2025, we’ve got a whole lot of homogenized social media. It can be difficult to customize your profile or stand out in a crowd of many when almost all profiles look the same, barring the profile picture, header graphic, and actual copy.
Why did we go down this quick trip down memory lane?
Because today I’m going to be talking about “fancy fonts” in use on social media, what they are, and how they affect other users.
Continue reading ““Fancy Fonts” and using unicode characters on social media”Cool Things for Cool People April 2025
The flowers are all popping out and it’s time for another installment of Cool Things for Cool People! Well, now it’s April, which means here in New England a lot of the trees are blooming, flowers are starting to show, green is the color outside, and seasonal allergies are beginning to take hold. There’s a lot more happening too! Here’s some fun and mildly interesting things:
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People April 2025”