“I remember my Yorkshire grandmother, when as a small child I asked her if she used herbs, went very tight-lipped and said well there was pennyroyal … She had had a hard life, a brutal husband and too many mouths to feed.”

Pennyroyal is Mentha pulegium, a mint whose Latin name indicates that it was once used to deter fleas and other insect pests. For Gillian Riley’s grandmother, and women since at least the time of Aristophanes, it was probably more useful as an abortifacient. Which was why I saw red when a respected food blogger in Rome referred parenthetically to “mentuccia (pennyroyal)”. But I need to backtrack.

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Turmoil is roiling my online world, if that isn't too dramatic.

A week or so ago, work upgraded my PC to Windows 7 and fiddled around with the network. As a result, I’m all over the shop on my PC and discovered that the mail client on my Mac (Sparrow) could no longer send mail. Some kind of firew...

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My lifetime will end on 31 October 2012. So I am informed by Joyent, which has decided to "sunset" my Lifetime Shared Hosting Agreement. This cost me some $400, back when Joyent was Textdrive, and Textdrive needed money to grow. I was happy to fork over the cash. Dean Allen had a solid reputation, h...

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As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It's an RSS reader that claims to offer "Visual feed reading with intelligence" and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there's anything wrong with GReader, apart from the fact that it is from the Don't Be Evil boys themselves. I just like the idea of paying for service, which then gives me a full-on right to demand more of it. That's why I use Pinboard and Instapaper rather than alternatives.

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