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  5. Made a simple garlic+mushroom+cheese risotto from this recipe — results were adequate, ignore the instructions to put salt in at the beginning though — it’s easy to put way too much in then have it concentrated as more water evaporates. Best leave it till later, or put a tiny amount in.

  6. Archiving some of my old email, I find this blast from the recent past (March 2012) in Mac app idea form:

    Postflow: A tool for social media power-users. Interactively create automator-like 'postflows' that allow you to quickly and effectively post the same bit of content to lots of different social networks.

    With useful features, such as:

    • Real-time execution and editing: Work through a postflow step by step, changing it and the content you're posting as you go along.
    • Floating Results window that displays text and links to everything you've posted so far in the flow. Automatically shorterns URLS.
    • Preset Variables: Set a list of commonly used items e.g. your URL, @twitter_name, other social network profile page URL, etc.
    • Fully automated postflows (?): Set up postflows that take one input and does everything else by it's self.
    • Extensive library of posting actions
    • Quick Post UI: For small updates that still need to go out to lots of people. Forego some of the fine-grained control of a full postflow for sheer speedyness.
    • Ability to add other networks through a plugin creator (?) will work provided basic API types are supported.
    • Automated admin work: Change profile photo, description, details on multiple networks simultaneously.

    The Quick Post utility by it's self could be given away as a free sampler of the more advanced full Postflow — gives people the 'post to lots of networks intelligently' ability, but not the advanced features or customisation

    Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like a certain Yahoo Pipes clone I’m working on…

  9. A bottom-up, building blocks approach to interoperability makes the barrier to entry small and the value large, as opposed to a monolithic all-or-nothing protocol approach, which demands compliance due to its implementation’s incapability of gracefully handling partial support.

    Building blocks give creators freedom to implement what’s important to them in the order it makes most sense, getting positive feedback from low hanging fruit and making complex tasks managable.

    Stop designing protocols. Create building blocks.

  20. jQuery and jQuery UI are amazing tools. They shouldn’t be used everywhere by default, but they do allow some complex stuff to be made extremely fast.