adoption curve dot net

(but only if you’re a Mac geek, that is.)

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 2 (to give it the full, formal title) is a port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. There’s been an X11 port for a while, but the downside of that is that you need to run an X Windows emulator for the OpenOffice application to sit in – which sucks, to put it mildly. So the fact that there’s now an Aqua version is Rather Good News as far as I’m concerned. So far, so good – it’ll get a thrashing tomorrow as I’ve got a couple of large-ish documents to write.

Via Euan Semple I came across MacGourmet, which is billing itself as the iTunes of recipes. A neat idea, but it’s lacking the one thing I really need in a system like this – reverse-engineering of recipes. Otherwise known as “I’ve got two tins of kidney beans, half an onion, three cloves of garlic and a jar of something vaguely oily and threatening that the label has come off – what can I make with this?” But the idea of making the recipe display bigger so you can park your PowerBook out of batter range is a neat one.

Cooking For Engineers is a definite find, though – where else would you find a page dedicated to the smoking point of various fats? The recipes also use a diagramatic format rather than the traditional Delia-esque linear style – it doesn’t make the end results any more consistent, but it’s satisfyingly geeky. There’s also a fair dose of tool pr0n as well – because as any fule kno, you can never have too many gadgets for removing cloves of garlic from horses’ hooves…

Getting bored with using webfeeds to read blogs? Then here’s the Cutting Through Guide To 10 Cool Things You Can Do With Webfeeds

Get a new slant on the news

Get a new perspective on the world by subscribing to a webfeed from the world’s most respected broadcaster. The BBC offers webfeeds for all its news and current affairs output, together with much more besides.

Find out what’s going on with the weather

Want to know if it’s raining in Linton-on-Ouse? Pay a visit to RSSWeather.com and enter a city, state or ICAO airport code to find out what the weather’s doing at your nearest airport.

Follow in a guru’s footsteps

The management guru’s management guru Tom Peters has a blog where he holds forth about all things guruish – and the contents of his suitcase…

Find out when Granny lands at Heathrow

Waiting for a flight to arrive? Then use Robert Price’s UK flight arrival and departure feeds to check on the ;latest movements of flights to and from the UK. Want to know if her flight from JFK left late – PubSub’s airport alerts feed will keep you informed.

Spy on other people’s bookmarks

Interested in what other people are linking to? Then take a look at the webfeeds at del.icio.us. You can subscribe to the latest bookmarks or an individual keyword that you’re interested in.

Keep track of your bookmarks

Once you’ve set up your own del.icio.us account, grab a webfeed of your bookmarks straight into your newsreader…

Keep an eye on what others are saying about you

Want to know what’s being said about you on the web? Don’t bother Googling when you can use PubSub – just create a personalised feed to search for the search term of your choice, and have the results delivered driect to your newsreader

Find out what your MP has been up to

Wondering what your Member of Parliament has been doing to justify your vote come the next election? Subscribe to their Recent Appearances webfeed, and get details of their questions and contributions to debates in the House of Commons – then fax them about it

Roll your own newsfeed

Found a news source that hasn’t got webfeeds yet (oh, the shame)? No problem – use Newsisfree to grab and build a custom webfeed from their database of 14,000 sources…

Look for items on eBay

Looking for that perfect Christmas present? Set up an eBay search, and then subscribe to the results in your newsreader…

If you’re a fan of the management guru’s management guru Tom Peters, you’ll be interested to see that he’s started blogging at his site.

Tom being Tom, he’s not doing things by half-measures, either. He’s prolific, wide-ranging and controversial – everything from his thoughts on the dominance of US universities to the contents of his suitcase (you have to hope it has wheels, if only for the sake of his back!) And it’s not just a token effort ‘vanity blog’ – it comes with comments and permalinks too (no sign of trackbacks, however.)

And if you follow some of the ‘blogging gurus’ (actual and so-called) you may have seen a lot written about ‘finding your blogging voice’ and so on. Personally I tend towards the opinion that it’s better just to get posting than agonise too much about such things – part of the appeal of weblogs in a corporate setting is that they get away from the bland over-produced voices that you tend to find in too many press releases and corporate information material. But interestingly, Tom Peters blogs in exactly the same way as he writes – LOTS OF CAPITALS and many exclamation marks!!!! You almost get the feeling that what he really wants are sidebars and graphics and typographic gizmos of the kind that pepper his books.

The upshot of his blog is that he’s now front-of-my-mind on a daily basis, whereas previously the closest I’d come to remaining aware of him was seeing the spines of his books when I happened to glance at my bookshelf…