Podcast

Tina Roth Eisenberg, Swissmiss

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Cool Tools Show 172: Tina Roth Eisenberg

Our guest this week is Tina Roth Eisenberg. Tina is a Swiss born, raised, and trained graphic designer. In 1999, she came to New York City for a three-month design internship and never left. Over the past 13 years, Tina started numerous side projects that have organically turned into businesses. A creative co-working community called FRIENDS, a global monthly lecture series called CreativeMornings, a simple to-do app called TeuxDeux, and Tattly, a high-end temporary tattoo shop. She lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with her two kids, Ella and Tilo, who are teaching her the art of making slime and building forts. Tina is often referred to as Swissmiss, after her popular blog. She likes that. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @swissmiss.

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Show notes:

Freitag
FREITAG zippelin Inflatable Travel Bag ($980)
I really love the ZIPPELIN inflatable travel bag by FREITAG. FREITAG, for those who don’t know it, is a Swiss company. They make bags out of truck tarp and they started I think over 30 years ago. If you’re not familiar with truck tarps, in Europe, most trucks are not made out of metal, but they’re made out of this really, really solid tarp. They turn these recycled tarps into bags. They’re so cool. They last forever, and the two founders, the Freitag brothers, they’re really incredible humans. They just keep reinventing this thing, and they just came out with this travel bag that has an inflatable bike tube inside, which is the frame for the travel bag, so you pump it up and that makes it solid enough to be a large travel bag. When you’re done traveling, you can let the air out and roll this bag up and take the wheels off and it’s tiny. Imagine you have a giant suitcase, but you can roll it up. It’s waterproof as well, and it looks good and every single bag looks different because they use truck tarps, so a lot of these tarps are also printed on.

raclettegrill
Artestia Electric Raclette Grill ($74)
Raclette is a very traditional meal you eat in Switzerland. You have it a lot on Sundays or on special occasions. It’s this little grill that comes with teeny tiny sort of Teflon pans where you can put a slice of Raclette cheese, it’s a certain type of cheese that melts really beautifully. You put that in and then you put it on this grill and you wait and that cheese melts away and you chit chat, and so everybody sort of cooks. It’s a bit like the Korean barbecue of Switzerland, and while the cheese melts you can grill meat and vegetables on top of the grill. I’ve had many of these and it’s a really cool communal way of having dinner because everybody chips in. You just sit there and you help each other grill the meats and then when the cheese has melted, you scrape it over, soft boil potatoes and put some Swiss spices on it. It’s delicious. It’s my favorite way of entertaining. As the host, you don’t have to run around. You prepare everything ahead of time, and then everyone sits and cooks, and you smell cheese.

revlon
Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer ($60)
Anyone that knows me knows that I’m actually not a very girly lady, but my downstairs neighbor, I saw her put a box out with this blow dryer. It’s a blow dryer and a round hair brush in one, and I saw her put the box out and I noticed that her hair was amazing and I thought she was constantly getting Blowouts. I was like, “Wait a second. You’re not getting blowouts and you use this thing?” She goes, “Yeah, it’s incredible”. So I got this thing and it’s totally life changing. If you like long, shiny, straight hair, this hair dryer/hair brush all in one is really a game changer.

ukonserve
U Konserve Stainless Steel Tumblr ($14)
We call it an insulated tumbler. Where you can keep your hot and cold beverages like at the temperature that you poured it into, and this one is just really beautiful. I think it’s great that more and more people bring their mugs in the mornings and I see a trend now here in New York. A lot of people don’t want to do the throw-away cups so they bring their own … I found this one and it looks a bit like a stemless wine glass just out of metal and white at the bottom, so it’s super sleek, it’s super modern. I actually found it in California while I was in a supermarket. I was like, “This is just so pretty that I don’t mind walking around with this on the street.” Now I have like five of them. I’ve keep three at work and two here and it’s just a really pretty, sleek tumbler. When I sit on the stoop in the summer I drink out of it, and I have my wine it it and nobody knows I’m drinking wine on the stoop.

Also mentioned:

teuxdeux
TeuxDeux
My Studiomate, Cameron Koczon and I built this because I was just lamenting the world of to-do apps in 2010, and I said, “I just want it to be as simple as a paper list of digital.” We sort of took that as a joke. He at one point just said, because I was ranting about it over lunch, and he just said, “Just design it. I’ll build it for you.” It took me three hours and I was done, and then 48 hours later we had a working prototype and I was using it and then we were like, “Let’s give it away. Let’s just give it to the world.” It’s very simple, but it’s so useful.

CreativeMornings
CreativeMornings was my response to the conference world. When I first moved to New York from Switzerland, it was really hard for me to find my creative people. I couldn’t really afford lots of the design events. I made very little money, so I basically built what I wished existed. A few years later when I was still in New York, I just had this vision for an ongoing gathering for the creative types in New York City that is completely accessible. For the last 10 years, with the support of 1500 volunteers, I have slowly but surely been building the largest face to face creative community in the world. CreativeMornings happens in 201 cities and 65 countries every month, bringing over 20k people together for a free breakfast and an inspiring talk. It’s an engine of generosity.

We have hired professional editors to help create our weekly podcasts and video reviews. So far, Cool Tools listeners have pledged $400 a month. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. We have great rewards for people who contribute! If you would like to make a one-time donation, you can do so using this link: https://paypal.me/cooltools.– MF

04/26/19
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Writing Tools

Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, but the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

The best writing tips

Writing Tools

This two-sided page contains the wisdom of an entire book on how to write better. Nay, it distills an entire shelf of the world’s greatest writing manuals (and I have them all). After 30 years as both a writer and editor I can’t think of much I would add to these 50 short tips. This PDF is now my favorite guide to writing well. You can print it out for free. If you want its pithy reminders fleshed out with more examples, see the book form, or the website. But the free tip sheet itself — one paper printed both sides — rewards a quick review anytime you get down to serious writing.. – KK

How to liveblog a conference

Tips for Conference Bloggers, Free PDF Bruno Giussani & Ethan Zuckerman, 2007, 6 p.

There’s an emerging new media I use more and more: an online summary of a conference. Known as liveblogging, it presents a synopsis of each presentation, talk-by-talk, in nearly real time. This saves you time and money traveling to distant cities, and suffering through introductions and equipment failures. At its best, reading the liveblog can be better than attending the talk. All the chaff has been winnowed, and almost every talk captured. (Most conference attendees don’t even get to every talk.) Video recordings of conferences are becoming more popular, but a good liveblog is much quicker to scan and digest. But at its worse, a liveblog will offer little more than snarky comments about the speaker.

At the creation end, you need some skills to separate the best from the worst. Ethan Zuckerman, of Geek Corp, is one of the best conference bloggers alive. He teamed up with Bruno Giussani, another star liveblogger, to produce this free short 6-page PDF booklet on how to blog a conference with effectiveness. When you blog a conference it forces you to pay attention. My first book Out of Control began as an online blog of every talk at the first Artificial Life Conference (although no one called it blogging in 1987). The requisite focus of summarizing each talk clarified many ideas for me, and the response to the “blog” of the conference encouraged me to write a book. Other livebloggers find the same. They listen harder, and remember more.

Get good at this and you have a free pass to many high-priced conferences. Organizers are increasingly looking for first-rate livebloggers to generate press and future attendees. Or, like Ethan you can generate your own audience who follow you because your liveblogging skills. – KK

  • It’s relatively easy to blog good and great speakers: They follow a narrative path through their talks and speak at a pace the audience can understand. It’s harder to blog inexperienced speakers(because they may be too technical, confusing, fast, etc.) and multispeaker panels (because the discussion can take many different unstructured turns). But you don’t need to transcribe the whole talk, you need to capture the gist of it. A 20-minutes talk can often be summarized in a 20-lines post.
  • Always remember that what you’re writing will be read by people who weren’t in the room, so they haven’t seen the slides, the video, or the gesture. Hence, you have to compensate for the lack of context. Don’t be afraid to create a narrative by saying “He shows a slide with data on …” or “She walks on stage carrying a big suitcase” or “He shows a YouTube video” etc. And if the speaker shows a YouTube video, or a picture, remember that you’re online: Open another browser window, go to YouTube, find that video, and link to it; or go to the speaker’s website, find that picture or another similar or related item, and link to it (or republish the picture within your post). Yes, this requires effective multitasking. It’s at the root of conference blogging.
  • Conferences usually give out a program ahead of time. Use it to prepare for blogging: Do a quick Google search for each speaker, and save (in the same text file) links to their sites, blogs, and the institutions they’re affiliated with; write a one-or-two-sentences “biography” for each; and for the speakers you’ve never heard of, try to get a general sense of who they are and what they do. To write the mini-biography, use also the speaker information distributed by the conference organizers (booklet, website, etc.). For the key speakers, save a picture on your laptop (from their websites) and pre-format it for Web use, in case you will need it. If you prepare sufficiently, you’ve got the first paragraph of each post almost written ahead of time.

The best thesaurus ever

The Synonym Finder

This is the best thesaurus there is. It supplies more synonyms, analogs, parallels, equivalents and comparable words in English than any other source, online or off. No other thesaurus comes near to it for completeness or breadth. Compiled in dictionary form, like the one in your word processors, there’s no index or cross-referencing. Just look up a word, any word, and it proceeds to overwhelm you with alternative choices (a total of 1.5 million synonyms are presented in 1,361 pages), including short phrases and only mildly related words. Rather than being a problem of imprecision, the Finder’s broad inclusiveness prods your imagination and prompts your recall.

Its single downside, however, is a major frustration: it is not available digitally, in a form compatible to the way most people write these days. It should live on your computer in a pull-down option, or plug-in for Word or the like. I’m totally baffled why it is not. As it is, it’s a huge fat book — a great book! — sitting within arm’s reach when I write, but not near enough for the power that it offers. – KK


KEVIN KELLY SITES

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