I have to admit that I never saw the attraction. I think I looked at the sampler once – just once.

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone across the globe who needs a loan for their business – like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent – and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back – and Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

It’s finally easy to actually do something about poverty – using Kiva I know exactly who my money is loaned to and what they’re using it for. And most of all, I know that I’m helping them build a sustainable business that will provide income to feed, clothe, house and educate their family long after my loan is paid back.

You choose who to lend to – whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq – and as they repay their loan, you get your money back. It’s a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.

Please consider joining Kiva and helping to change the world – one loan at a time.

Sources say that iTunes representatives have been urging labels to rethink their participation in the Amazon promotion and that they have backed up those warnings by withdrawing marketing support for certain releases featured as Daily Deals

I hope Amazon fights back, and hard. I’ve grown to love their mp3 downloads, and now buy far more from there than iTunes. They tend to have more variety, generally better prices and I don’t have to pay sales tax.

As an example, today’s daily deal – Hospice by The Antlers – is $2.99 on Amazon and $9.99 (plus tax) on iTunes. Moving away from the daily deal because it really is a special price just for today, one of my favorite albums – The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit – is currently $5.00 on Amazon and $9.99 (plus tax) on iTunes.

My biggest worry about something like this happening is that it will drive up prices for consumers. We’ve already seen indications of that happening with electronic books and I would hate to see it happen with music as well. So much of the music today is already overpriced nonsense – raising prices will only make it harder for people to find the really good stuff.

Sure, you can do a google search and get the exact code to enter into the Terminal, but there’s a reason I use a Mac and not some obscure variant of Unix.

Today I stumbled across a great little utility for turning the hidden file view on and off. Where? Surprisingly, on the Apple site.

showHiddenFiles does exactly what Apple should have included in the first place. The only thing that could make it better would be if it was a checkbox in Finder.app, but I guess it’s too much to hope for for Apple to include it in the upcoming 10.6.3 release.

I just put it into my Applications > Utilities folder hoping that I’ll remember it’s there next time I need it.

I’ve recently realized that you don’t go out much when you work from home, and you go out even less when it starts snowing. You could say I’ve been getting a little stir-crazy. We had a brief lull between snow storms today so I took the opportunity to go for a walk.

Sadly, we had so much snow yesterday that this very large shed just couldn’t hold the weight. The roof has collapsed, taking the four walls with it.

For the longest time, I was strongly against showing any form of advertising on this site. Partly because I just don’t like it, and partly because the site doesn’t really look that big. Looks can be deceiving however, and the reality is that I get close to 1000 unique hits per month because of other projects that I am involved with. Still not a lot, but bandwidth adds up.

Am I selling out? No. To help myself justify the presence of advertising, I’ve committed to only showing products and services that I regularly use and recommend to my friends.

As a strong believer in Open Source, I also plan to show some unpaid advertisements to help play my part in the process. Again, only for those projects that I regularly use and recommend.

Will it make me rich? Not at all, but hopefully it will cover the cost of my web hosting and maybe the occasional caffeinated beverage.

Thanks for your understanding.

When I first moved here from the warmth of Australia, I really wasn’t looking forward to the winter season. Coming from a place that had just two seasons, warm and not-so-warm, it rarely got anywhere close to freezing temperature!

I slowly began to enjoy winter after I learned how to dress for it – layer upon layer upon layer. Now I really love the season, mainly because of scenes like this one.

The Oatmeal obviously feels the same way. Matthew somehow has the gift of taking the things that annoy us all and describing them in a simple, easy to read format. Seriously, take a look.

His latest creation, entitled How to Suck at Facebook, is an excellent pictorial summary of everything that annoys me on Facebook. I know every single one of those people – maybe I’ll post it over there as well in the hope they get the message…

I almost bought a Kindle. Several times. Then I almost bought a Nook. Then I almost bought a Kindle. Again.

The thing that kept stopping me was that I wanted something that could do more. I like to travel, but I don’t like to carry a lot of stuff – my devices need to multitask. I needed to at least be able to email with the same device I read on.

I carried my 17″ laptop with me everywhere, but you really start to notice the weight after a few hours of lugging it around an airport. Then I started carrying a netbook instead. It’s a lot lighter and therefore, easier to travel with. I could do watch movies on the plane and do email at my destination, but I couldn’t read documents because of the screen size. It was just frustrating.

I think Apple’s new iPad could be an answer to my problems. I don’t know how long I would be able to read books on it for, but I’m guessing longer than my current solution. The screen is the same size as my netbook, but you can turn it to portrait mode. Plus, I can watch movies and do email.

It’s a great start. I’m still undecided, but I like what I see. Watch this space.

Simple Notepad is a theme for the WordPress platform. It was intentionally designed without a lot of visible frills in the background with the goal of keeping the reader’s attention focused on the content.

• Compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above
• Gravatars
• Tags
• Threaded comments
• Widgets
• Suitable for multiple authors. It also features an about page for each one, based on the information entered in the WordPress user settings.
• SEO optimized
• Two columns
• Note paper

Version 1.0.1 – 22 July 2009

• Corrected formatting error when readers are leaving comments

Version 1.0 – 17 July 2009

• Initial public release