Oh lordy. How about a site that lists every over-priced exclusively wonderful thing in the world. Infinite Plastic

For the past 6 months or so I’ve been shaving with as many retro-snooty-geek-hip products as I could find. Merkur safety razor (and blades), badger hair brush and Taylor of Old Bond Street creme. I love them all, especially the creme. I still can’t shave daily or my neck looks like a close-range shotgun wound, but when I do shave, it’s almost enjoyable. You can keep your silly 4-bladed Fusion nonsense at what, a buck a shave?

As a fan of Mind Mapping, I had always heard great things about Mindmanager but with no Mac version available I had no good way to find out for myself. Turns out Mindjet has just released version 6 and it includes a Mac version. It’s not just a port, but a complete rewrite as a native, universal binary Cocoa app. I of course grabbed the trial. It’s expensive, so it will need to be significantly better than NovaMind for me to consider switching.

PXN8 is new to me. Upload an image, then edit it with all of the basic editing tools and save it or upload it to Flickr or AllYouCanUpload. There’s a little magic in there.

I ran across the Blogging bundle for TextMate. Now I can write a blog post without leaving my favorite editor. You’ll need the latest bundles from the Subversion repository. Start here

Disk Image (DMG) files on OS X are handy. They can be compressed, password-protected, read/write, you name it. Spotlight and Quicksilver skip their contents, which can be good or bad depending on your needs. I was archiving a bunch of files and thought using .dmg files would be nice. But how? I looked for some free/shareware and found a number of solutions that seemed reasonable. Then I ran across a MacOSXHints article.

When I first installed Parallels on my MacBook Pro I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Neat, but useless? Nope. Since installing it I’ve found all sorts of reasons… Microsoft Office. I’m reusing and old Office license from a PC I no longer use. This is especially handy since I don’t use Office enough to justify a new OS X license and NeoOffice doesn’t yet run on Intel Macs.

Remember Apple’s Pippin? I barely do, and am better for it. More photos and information here

DevonTHINK is great for collecting and organizing tons of reference materials. I’ve mentioned how much I like DT before. Merlin at 43Folders does a good job explaining some of the things he likes about it, including Smart Folders. Here’s a bit of my database (which contains 2,498,863 words so far)

Parallels on MacBook Pro Originally uploaded by JackBaty. It's pretty sweet being able to easily test web sites in IE and never leave my MacBook Pro. Setting up Parallels was a piece of cake. It's still beta, and has crashed once or twice, but I'm sure the final product will take care of that. Using full-screen mode and virtual desktops to switch between XP and OS X is a little freaky – in a good way.

Rails Day 2006 is officially on. June 17th. Get yourself a team, registration will open soon. We at Fusionary Media are participating as a sponsor by providing the web site design and hosting. Our own Dan, Jay and Rex have done a fantastic job putting the site together. And of course, it’s all due to Mr. Bryan Helmkamp’s effort putting things together. See you on June 17th.

Campfire is a wonderful app. Just the right balance of immediacy and “whenever I need it.” And now, with the nifty Marshmallow library, it’s also a bot-driven notification tool. We’ve got all of our Subversion commit messages and Capistrano deployment notifications posting to a Campfire room. With the right hooks, this could be what I wanted Jabber to be several years ago.