PigPog

For some reason, I ended up taking a few self portraits over the weekend, using handy reflective surfaces.

Here in the UK, Channel Four have been lacking any way for Mac users to watch TV online for a while. They’ve just made it work for us online, and have made us a video apology:

• Sorry, Mac Users

It’s been mostly good weather for the long weekend here. We even managed a walk on Saturday, which we’ve been failing on for quite a while. Grabbed this shot on the way back up Canal Hill to home:

You may well have heard of Twitter. It’s quite popular, and some people are getting quite large numbers of followers these days.

I have 228 (I’m @pigpogm).

It’s not just people, though. There’s a cat called Sockington, who is celebrating getting over 300,000 followers. That’s one popular puddy. His celebration video is well worth watching – a special device has been built – have fun guessing what it is.

I’ve made a few minor changes here again today. This sidebar section used to be called Oinks. The idea was they were the PigPog equivalent of Tweets. The term probably meant nothing to most people, though, so I’ve changed it to the term being used for services like Twitter – Microblogs.

I’ve also modified the feeds so that if you subscribe to the main default feed, you won’t get the Microblog posts. We’ve been a bit reluctant to make much use of these little posts, as they’d be too much chatter for most people. Now, if you want our inane chatter, you have to specifically choose it.

I’ll post in the main area about it to let subscribers know once it’s settled down a bit.

I’ll say this right up front – I’m posting this at least partly in the hope of getting more free stuff.

If you use a Mac, though, and you haven’t seen this year’s MacHeist promotion yet, it’s well worth checking out. You get a bundle of apps, for one price: $39. Many of the apps would cost more than the bundle on their own, and 25% of the money goes to charity.

So, what are the highlights? That will depend on what you have a use for, but for me:

• Two great fun games – World of Goo and Cro-Mag Rally.
• Acorn – a reasonably well-featured photo editor. I trialed it a while ago, and decided to pass, but it’ll do nicely when thrown in with so much else.
• Picturesque – makes it very easy to apply some simple 3D effects to photos – I certainly wouldn’t have bought it at full price, but it’s cute, and works well.
• Espresso – looks like a very nice web editor. It’s locked until they reach $500,000 raised for charity, but it seems pretty likely they’ll manage that.

I took part in a ‘TweetBlast’ to get a couple more apps, including the fun Delicious Library.

If a couple of people use the following link, and decide to buy the bundle themselves, I’ll get a couple more freebies, including the rather decent Koingo Utility Package.

It’s well worth a look, and probably worth buying if there are a couple of items there you’d use – there are only two days left to buy.

• MacHeist Bundle 2009