I’m a huge fan of Basecamp and have been a happy and productive basecamper for six months or so. My favourite feature has always been the To-Do list and now 37signals have released this as a separate app: Ta-da Lists. In their own words, “just what you need and nothing you don’t”. Best of all, it’s free.

One of the highlights for me at the PAL Digital Science Lab for Wellcome/NESTA I attended recently was an evening spent sampling a couple of Dean Maddon’s cocktails of nucleic acids. I’m pleased to note that the recipe is available online. Best served in a test tube, obviously.

One of my erstwhile heroes, Jacques Derrida, the Blake Carrington of French Philosophy, is dead. Or perhaps now we just refer to him ’sous rature’: Jacques Derrida.

This installer adds ActionScript syntax colouring and a Test Movie in Flash command to the awesome TextMate editor for Mac OS X. Test Movie in Flash works with .fla files added to your project (hit Cmd-Rtn with a .fla file selected), although at the moment TextMate displays binary files as text, which for a large file can be slow. Hopefully this issue will be dealt with in the upcoming 1.0.1.

The installer adds the bundle to /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/. If you prefer to do it manually (if you want to put it in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/ for example), download the bundle.

The Getting Things Done meme is not just exploding across the web: recently Victoria Moore in the Weekend Guardian refered to a liquorice tea as stuff that “somehow encourages the transparent and focused mind required to Get Things Done” (it’s the capitalisation that gives it away, surely: and clearly a reference to David Allen’s “mind like water”, a state in which you only give the attention to things that they deserve).

Now liquorice is one of my favourite things, and something described as “more like a shape than a taste” just had to be worth trying, especially if it was likely to give me a productivity boost too. I managed to track it down at Goodness Direct and ordered three boxes*. And then had to wait ages, as a high demand for Yogi Tea Licorice Egyptian Spice meant there was none in stock. The verdict? Yes, it really does “curl around your mouth in the most extraordinary way”…

(*If you decide to order some for yourself, tell them I sent you and quote this reference: RB38986W.)

A guy called Jacob called at my house today. He said he’d been staying with my neighbour Roger and was on his way back to Holland after a catering trade show at RAF Benson, nearby. He didn’t want to take all his stock back on the ferry with him: were we interested in taking any of it off his hands? If we could cover his costs he’d let us have an entire case of knives and a 12-piece cookware set for roughly 10% of the retail price (1425 EURO for the pans, 795 for the knives). Apparently Roger had already bought three sets! He produced lots of fancy documentation, guaranties and certificates when we agreed to purchase one of each.

It didn’t occur to me to google the Berghaus brand, or Polstar Trading, his company’s UK partner, until *after* Jacob left, even though I was sat next to a laptop in the kitchen throughout. When I did, soon afterwards, I found this entire forum and a few other links devoted to stories of the tactics used by the salespeople selling these ‘non-existant’ brands. Obviously we stopped the cheque immediately.

Since this is my personal site and I get to make the rules, please write in English. I also reserve the right to delete comments for whatever other reasons I see fit.

( Technorati tags: knives | kitchenware | scam)

I wish I’d had the benefit of this article a few months back when I was setting up my Subversion server. Although the svn documentation is excellent, it’s good to see a Mac OS X specific tutorial.

Installing Subversion (plus dependencies) using DarwinPorts is really simple: just cd to your darwinports/dports/ directory and type sudo port install subversion +mod_dav_svn. Instructions on how to install DarwinPorts are here.

I put together a Subversion startup item (installed into /Library/StartUpItems/), although really this is just an Apache2 startup item, but I called it Subversion since that’s all I’m using Apache2 for. The script assumes you’ve installed Apache2 in /opt/local/apache2, and requires SVNSERVER=-YES- to be added to /etc/hostconfig.

(Technorati tags: subversion | darwinports)

This discussion (”Sourdough puts the art of hacking back into breadmaking”) reminded me that my sourdough starter is currently in hibernation:

I’m not really a big fan of custom desktop backgrounds, generally prefering to stick with the default ‘Aqua Graphite’ image that I’m used to, but if I was, one of John Maeda’s food images would be my first choice. Perhaps this Damien Hirst’s shark-in-the-tank influenced “geometrical paradise of dried anchovies”:

John Cage’s most famous composition in MIDI, OGG, Sun .au and .wav formats!