MISCELLANEOUS

Useful stuff, doesn’t really fit in the other categories.

Mechanical Turk ♣︎

Crowdsourcing Marketplace

Even now that we’re deep in the digital era, there are still some computing tasks that are easy for people and hard (or downright impossible) for AI. If you want to recruit actual humans to do any number of tedious web-based things on the cheap, check out Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. It’s basically a crowdsourcing marketplace, like Fiverr but for even smaller things, like menial tasks that require only basic computing skills. As two simple examples: (A) spreadsheet data entry with a lot of repetition and (B) data collection, whether from the Internet or elsewhere (we saw one example where a restaurateur got M-Turk to send pictures of printed menus from restaurants in a certain area).

🌐 mturk.com
💰 Variable, roughly $10/hour for contract labor; no account/membership fees

Banner Season ♣︎

Automation-Powered Personalized Gifting

Someone saying “you’ve outdone yourself” with a gift is, if unintentionally, a bit of a backhanded compliment. (Are they saying that what you just gave them is somehow, at the same time, beyond your means?) Still, Banner Season might be how you literally outdo yourself—because their personalized-gift service is built around automation. Two cool things: (1) you can set up gifts to be created and sent automatically, without having to manually process each one, and (2) with Zapier’s help, you can connect your Banner Season account to countless apps and platforms for deeper automation. Sounds like a great way to spend money, if also a great way to land more prospects and retain more high-value customers.

🌐 bannerseason.com
💰 It’s basically automated gift shopping for actual physical stuff, so… that’ll depend.
🔗 Can be connected to tons of other platforms via Zapier

Noisli ★♣︎

Background-Noise Mixing Table

If you like white noise, you’ll love Noisli. It’s basically a mixing table for background noises: layer any combination of their 16 sounds (rain, train, coffee shop, etc.) at any volume levels. You can use Noisli at their website, via the smartphone app, or as a Chrome extension — and with a free account, you can save your favorite background mixes for quick access across all devices.

🌐 noisli.com
🆓 100% Free

Remove.bg ★♥︎

Image Background Removal

If you create content for the web, you’ve likely needed to remove the background from an image at one time or another. If not, carry on—but if so, you need this free tool and it does just one thing, which is precisely the one thing you’d expect. It removes the background from images. Which, otherwise, is a massive pain in the ass.

🌐 remove.bg
🆓 100% Free

HEIC to JPG

Quick Image-Format Conversion

Apple’s newer HEIC format—short for “High Efficiency Image Container”—is a cool upgrade on JPEGs for two reasons, both in the name: you can package multiple high-res photos into one HEIC (think Live Photos) and the resulting file compresses down better than JPEGs. However, the HEIC format is still uncool for one reason: 99% of places on the internet don’t yet accept it. To fix this problem, just head to HEICtoJPG.com and you’ll find exactly what you’re expecting.

🌐 HEICtoJPG.com
🆓 100% Free

TextCleaner ★

Automated Editing on Selected Text
➕ Chrome Extension for Google Docs

The idea behind Text Cleaner is that you can select specific text in a Google Doc and then automatically “clean it up” in certain ways using drop-down menu options—for example, removing and replacing (specific types of) formatting. Think of it as Paste Without Formatting, but way more customizable and for stuff already on the page!

🌐 Chrome Store
🆓 100% Free

ChangeCase

Change Casing on Selected Text
➕ Chrome Extension for Google Docs

Compared to TextCleaner, ChangeCase serves a slightly more specific function: allowing you to select text freely and then change its casing (i.e. what’s uppercase and what’s lowercase). Aside from helping save time and tedium, this might also be helpful if you want to ensure uniform style for important elements like headlines.

🌐 Chrome Store
🆓 100% Free