If you take a look over to the right of your screen between 'How to contact me' and 'Donation' you'll see a new link. I've decided to try and set up a mailing list.

Partly it is so that should the blog fail again I can let people know that I'm still alive. Partly it's for putting stuff that doesn't really fit on this blog and partly I'm wondering if some new and interesting function will come out of it.

It will be an announcement only list, with a fairly low amount of traffic. Needless to say, if you do sign up, then I won't be selling your email addresses to spammers.

This won't detract any writing from this blog, you won't be missing anything if you don't sign up to it.

Hell, given my technical skills, it might not even work.

Now - for a bit of advice, that is advice that you are going to send me, not the other way around...

I've recently moved my 'business' computing work to an Intel Macbook. And very nice it is too. However I'm wondering if I'm missing some essential 'must-have' bit of software or widget. At the moment I'm using Colloquy for IRC chat, Adium and Skype for MSN and similar (I have iChat, but have no contacts). Obviously I'm using Firefox. For writing I'm using Writeroom and SubEthaEdit (although at some point I'll get Pages as NeoOffice seems a bit flaky for me). For blogging I have Ecto and for FTP I use Cyberduck. Most importantly I've found a game of Solitaire and have managed to get World of Warcraft working (although Second Life is terribly slow).

So my question is this - what should I be installing on this computer? What is the essential, or just plain enjoyable, software should I be getting.

Any advice?

Oh yes...Big news in a few days...