Gar’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here.

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded ...

Sign up here to get What’s in my NOW? a week early in your inbox. I am a K-12 Technology Teacher who presents globally on student agency and educational technology ...

Anthony Bourdain is an idol of mine. I read his breakout book Kitchen Confidential while I was working in a dingy Teriyaki Bar. I’ve watched as he’s eaten his way around the world. I’ve read every ...

It’s not easy to prop a phone up at the right angle. For video calls using the phone, or for photography I sometimes want a steady position sans arms. I use this itsy-bitsy holder from Peak Design ...

I heard multiple frustrating stories last year about people locating where their lost bags were with Apple or Android device trackers, but the airline customer service people refusing to do anything ...

It’s always fun to read about a rascally creature who does terrible things. In Dragon Was Terrible, Kelly DiPucchio’s frank, conversational telling and Greg Pizzoli’s bright, clear illustrations ...

A cool way to make some unusual art is to render an image in Lego. I used a kit from BrickMe that turned a photo of my wife into 5,625 pixels, and then they supplied me with Lego tiles in 50 different ...

A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and ...