Nadria Tucker

In keep­ing with the theme of new begin­nings and res­o­lu­tions to try new things, this set of links focuses on mak­ing your world a bet­ter place.

My favorite link of the week — The Phone Stack. Brought to us by Kempt, the phone stack is a sim­ple idea that could make a huge impact on the way we inter­act with each other in per­son, while being con­nected to the rest of the world via our devices. At din­ner, every­one stacks their phone on the table face down. The first per­son who answers picks up the tab!

Over at Brain Pick­ings, there’s a cute arti­cle about a little-known children’s book by Gertrude Stein called The World is Round. The book is gor­geously illus­trated in blue ink on pink pages, and a few copies are still float­ing around on the inter­net. How does this fall into the res­o­lu­tion cat­e­gory? As an ebook maker, one of my res­o­lu­tions is not to for­get just how spe­cial paper books can be.

Albert Ein­stein defined insan­ity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expect­ing dif­fer­ent results.” That’s why this help­ful arti­cle from 99% makes so much sense when it argues that to cre­ate pos­i­tive change in our lives, we should con­sider our pat­terns, the mis­takes we repeat­edly make, and try to change the way we try to get things done.

Part of being an ebook maker is learn­ing how ebooks are made. And, in case you didn’t know, they func­tion pretty much exactly like web­sites. That’s sim­pli­fy­ing things a lit­tle, but basi­cally to learn how to make ebooks, you need to learn how to make web­sites. That’s why I’ve resolved to learn cod­ing in 2012 with Codeacademy.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?