Living in Spain it is hard not to become a lover of coffee, and as a bit of a self-confessed gadget junkie I love the effective appliance of technology in every day life, and if you throw in some Apple like packaging and a range of cool accessories you pretty much guarantee making me a happy chappie.

The Magimix M190 certainly qualifies – am a very happy chappie indeed.

Picked up a couple of neat headset adapters recently from the aptly named Headset Buddy company, that specialise in adapters for your headsets. As such it is possible, and extremely easy, to use your existing headsets with your PC, Mac, iPhone, Mobile Phone, Home Phone, Office Phone etc.

Having recently embarked on a bit of a de cluttering project I am all for anything that means that I can use less for more.

Living in Spain as a British Expat I am always keen to look at applications that make my limited use of the Spanish language better, so I was excited to take a look at Jibbigo which promised:

Your world just got smaller thanks to a speech-to-speech translation app for your iPhone.

Hmm what is the point of having a application launch on an iPhone with the message that this is the first time you have launched the application and suggesting you watch the introductory video which ……….. doesn’t work on the iPhone!

If you haven’t already then please read my review of ipadio.com

My Mac set up has been pretty stable for a while now. By that I mean that I haven’t had the need or desire to add any new applications for many months now. The reason is pretty simple; what I have is doing the job that I need doing more than adequately, and I really can’t be bothered to change for changes sake. Incidentally this carries over to Snow Leopard as well, I just can’t be bothered to upgrade 5 Macs that are all working just fine!

I have a perfectly good Bluetooth Headset already, the Blue Ant Z9, that I really haven’t used all that much so why did I want another Bluetooth Headset, and why did I decide on the Jawbone 2?

Why Another Bluetooth Headset

A number of things have happend in the last couple of months:

My Phlogs from ipadio is my latest addiction!

ipadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the internet, live. Phone blog, commentate, collect audio data, record and update the world or simply let your mates know what you’re doing – ipadio is integrated with Twitter & Facebook

When I was in the UK last month I picked up a Pro 15/17 Backpack Laptop Backpack from Brenthaven ($179). At the time I have avery specific and somewhat urgent need and that was to safely transfer the 17″ MacBook Pro down through Spain on the back of the Road King Classic. Without doubt the overrideing requirement was for something that was extremely robust and secure. In addition to the MacBook Pro the backpack was going to have a camera, camcorder, couple of phones, chargers, portable hard drive etc etc. It was going to be strapped onto the Road King Classic, yet at the same time I wanted to have access to some of the stuff without having to unstrap it every time. Oh yes, I really don’t like backpacks either!

Using Balsamiq Mockups ($79) feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

I am in no way a Software Developer, Designer, Engineer or any other type of Software person at all. The closest I ever come is when I have an idea that I want someone to develop, or get involved in a projcet that includes the development of a new application.

Tracks is a web based application that helps you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I have looked at a few of these applications recently, specifically Things and gtdagenda but what makes Tracks different is that it is free (donation gratefully received) and based on ruby on rails the open source web framework that’s optimised for ‘programer happiness and sustainable productivity’

It lets you write beautiful code by favouring convention over configuration

Tracks comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux.

It has a number of features that I liked.

Flexibility: If you have read either of the above reviews then you will know that being able to mould a application like this to my own specific needs is a must have for me, and very much like Things it is very accomodating.

When I first got a Mac I thought that the Finder was so much better than anything I had ever experienced on a Windows PC it never dawned on me to consider an alternative. Over the years Apple have fiddled a little with it (Cover Flow for example), but basically have left it well alone.

While this may well be OK for the majority of users, the more experienced Mac users have long bemoaned the lack of a more ‘powerful’ Finder substitute that would allow them to assign colours to labels, change the Font size, unlink the toolbar and sidebar, move stuff around easier etc.

Cats play a huge part in my life, whether it be our two adopted cats Moreno & Saidi or the project Sands has set up to help the stray cats in Almerimar.

Tehnology plays a huge part in my life, in particular the iPhone which I find myself using more and more as the days go by. I had the original iPhone as soon as it came out, and enjoyed the form factor etc but didn’t really use it. The 3G iPhone is a different story althogether, primarily because of the 3G and the Applications that are available, and I must admit the games.