listening to @phoneboyspeaks Episode 919 about Social Network News stiffened my resolve to take back control of my online presence(s). While dismissing the Ello iOS app, as everyone else has, Dameon casually mentioned Yet Another Social Platform that he signed up for "because". I too like to sign up for and play with all the shiny new things, but I also want to make life easier for myself and anyone who has the slightest interest in interacting with me.

So I've signed up for a shiny new thing.

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.

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...

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...