I like being able to put things up here on the internet, not just to feed my ego but also because I genuinely think other people may find them just a teeny bit diverting. Lord knows, it is easy enough to do that, what with all the options out there that make sharing banalities just a click away. The problem with most of those for me, however, is that I want to be the customer, not the product. I actually want to pay for the services I use. Lately, though, that hasn't been working out too well.

Before I get to that, though, I want to complain about one of those free services, one where I didn't actually mind being the product: Tumblr.

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In the latest Eat This Podcast, Victoria Young talks about living with, and indeed enjoying, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™. For those of you who don't know it, this is a very restrictive diet that people claim can reduce the symptoms of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease and, with time, perh...

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I am in a mess, and for a whole slew of different reasons. This afternoon, a few minutes ago, I recognised a definite warning sign. In pursuit of doing something new and different, I got completely stuck in how to do it instead of what to do. Classic prevarication. Figure out a way to make the process more efficient before I have even decided what the outcome of the process should be. So I spent the better part of an hour futzing around with Workflow on the iPhone to see whether I could send some information directly to a nascent bit of what. And why? Because simply emailing the information and then using that as the basis for a bit of what seemed clumsy. It isn't.

Well, it is, but it will at least get the job done.

At least, it will if I let myself let it.

Starch is not the first substance that springs to mind when someone mentions chili peppers. What one is interested in is capsaicin, heat. I mean, who cares about the starch in peppers? Linda Perry and her colleagues, that’s who, because by studying starch grains from chili peppers they have shown th...

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Spam is hateful stuff. It clogs up my email inbox. I have to scan that inbox and deal with it. I have to scan my spambox in case something meaningful accidentally ended up there. Despite the best efforts of my mail service, spam is both a time waster and deeply annoying, not least because it forces me occasionally to dwell on human greed and gullibility.

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