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Gemma Copeland

New tools

Lately I’ve been enjoying using Arc , a new Chromium-based browser. It’s such a joy to use: they’ve completely rethought the UI / UX design of a browser. There are big changes (like spaces; easels; a sidebar with all your tabs, including pinned tabs with previews) and little details like “mini-Arc” (which opens a small version of the browser when you follow a link in a messaging app or email). The only problem is that it they haven’t worked out the performance issues yet so it crashes quite often. I have high hopes though!

I’ve also migrated from using Feedly + Pocket to using Readwise Reader for everything. It’s really well designed and great to have everything in the same place. The highlighting works really well, including over the original article, and it’s fun to play with their Ghostreader GPT tooling.

I’m also using the original Readwise app, which surfaces three random highlights from my collection every morning. It’s surprisingly hard to get highlights off a Kobo (something I miss about my Kindle, which just had all highlights in a plain text file). However, I found this tool called October which syncs from Kobo to Readwise. I added my old Kindle highlights too, which means it’s been surfacing my highlights from the last decade or so, which has been amazing.

The other tool that I’m happy to have found recently is Voiceliner, a simple app that allows you to record voice notes which it then automatically transcribes. You can rearrange the hierarchy of notes and attach a location too. It’s super useful — basically what I was using my Signal note to self for anyway. Plus, it’s open source and does everything locally.