🆒Cool Supply #002: Commuter life

It’s Tuesday (Again)! Last week I started a new job and it was my first time commuting into a real office. I’ve done it in the past as a student but it was a part-time on-campus job so I’m not sure if that counts. I didn’t have to sit in rush hour traffic and now I do. Either way, I spent the long weekend looking for things to make commuting a little more enjoyable and I actually found some cool stuff.

In this issue

📻 A website that lets you listen to radio stations around the world.

💳 I found a pretty cool method for carrying my keycard around.

🅿 There is a life-saving Twitter account that automatically tweets alternate side parking news!

Worldwide Radio

This tweet from @Pogue has me hyped for my drive in to the office today. This website looks a lot like Google Earth but it lets you listen to radio stations anywhere on the planet! The list isn’t exhaustive but it might as well be.

I randomly find myself looking at the top songs from other countries on Spotify and Apple Music just out of curiosity, but now I can just scroll over to some random radio station in a city I’ve never heard of and get a glimpse into what music is like over there.

DSPTCH Fidlock Keychain set

So this doesn’t have to do with my actual drive, but it does have to do with my commute. My building requires a keycard for entry, so every time I want to get inside I have to pull out my wallet and dig around for the card. It might not seem like a huge (because it isn’t), but navigating a wallet pocket while wearing thick winter gloves and simultaneously holding a water bottle is very time consuming and it just irked me. So I spent hours researching what card holder system would work best for me and I landed on this one.

I never realized how much I buy from this place but now that I think about it, the team at DSPTCH really has my number. I have the Daypack, one of their RND pouches, a sling, and a mask they make (see issue #001). Now I’m adding the fidlock keychain set to my collection. It’s a small magnetic attachment meant to quickly detach and reattach your keys, but they also make other useful attachments. The one I picked up is for ID cards. Now I can just grab the keycard off my bag, scan it, and snap it back into place without breaking stride. It’s the little things.

NYC Alternate Side Parking Twitter

Let me make this clear: alternate side parking SUCKS. I actually watched a street cleaner do its thing once, and it’s less of a street cleaner and more like a snowblower. It doesn’t really clean it just moves the garbage somewhere else. But regardless of how inefficient I think the entire process is, it’s still a thing that I need to be aware of. Every person that owns a car in NYC has at some point had a mini-heart attack wondering if alternate side rules are in effect.

Thankfully, there’s a Twitter bot for that. It seems to actually be an official NYC Twitter account that tweets information about whether or not alternate side rules are in effect. It does this every day at 7:30am EST and 4pm EST, and I LOVE IT. This is the only genuinely useful tool the MTA has made in recent memory so credit where credit is due.

Also, the poll I ran last week regarding Teva vs Birkenstocks were pretty close, but Birkenstocks won fair and square.