🙋 My favorite miscellaneous things – Dec 2023

Now it’s time to share some of the random things I’ve found and liked over the year!

Trying to find that perfect emoji that conveys your feeling at the moment can be difficult. Most operating systems and apps have an emoji picker, but sometimes you can’t remember how to bring it up. That’s where a site like Emoji Pickercomes in to play. You can easily search and find that perfect emoji to copy and paste. And if the emoji doesn’t exist? Then it’s time to start cooking with the Emoji Kitchen. The site lets you combine emojis, so the next time you need a unicorn laughing crying emoji, you can make it:

The fun doesn’t stop with emojis though, because you can always use more animated gifs. And what’s more animated than the GIPHY for Gmail Extension? Now you can add your favorite animated gifs directly to email. They also have a Chrome extension, but I don’t use it as much as the Gmail extension.

When I get a chance to listen to music, my go-to streaming service is AccuRadio. It’s not on-demand music, which is what I want sometimes. They have channels for every musical taste. It is ad supported, but the ads aren’t that annoying. If you create an account and sign in you’ll get fewer ads. This is the station that introduced me to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, “the most famous bagpipe bad on the planet – ever!”.

Browser bookmarklets are one of the silent heroes of the internet. These are small pieces of Javascript code that live in a bookmark. They kind of act like extensions, but can easily work on all browsers and are more lightweight than extensions. A couple of my favorite bookmarklets include:

• Copy URL & Title
• Open site in Archive.is – Opens the site in the current tab in Archive.is. I use this when a page isn’t working right for me.
• Google Switch – Switches the current Google document between /edit and /preview modes

Browser bookmarklets can usually work on mobile, which is where the Copy URL & Title comes in handy.

Finally, a list of my favorite things can’t end without including my hobbies. These include a healthy dose of RetroComputing with my Atari computers, along with RetroGaming. I also run, although I’ve slacked off a bit this year and probably won’t break 700 miles. There are also tons of geek activities where I try out things to see if they would work for anyone else.

What are your favorite things?