In my efforts to give up smoking I decided to investigate these so called electronic cigarettes. To my surprise the reviews all seemed to rave about them and people were claiming they never looked back, what has a lot to do with the smoking bans, so I thought sod it lets buy one. There are so many out there it is damn hard to choose, but in the end I went for the one pictured left from Totally Wicked Eliquid where they call them Electronic Nicotine Inhalers (e-NI) rather than e-cigarettes, which is in fact what they are.

I have to say I am shocked at how good it actually is, not only does it taste very similar to a cigarette, but I actually prefer it and have been smoking it far more than I do cigarettes. You get all the things that keep you hooked on smoking, something to hold in your hand and put in your mouth, the taste, the inhalation of smoke and of course the nicotine high but without any of the nastiness, here are some of the benefits.

• They contain no tobacco,Nor do they contain any of the multitudes of harmful, carcinogeous ingredients found in traditional tobacco products
• No Smoke (it is actually water vapour)
• doesn’t make you or your clothes smell
• no chance of causing fire as it is not alight
• legal to smoke in public places due to above
• no where near as bad for your health
• no more mouth like a litter tray in the mornings
• will not effect those around you
• saves you money
• wont give you cancer
• you don’t have to go outside in the cold to smoke

There are many different types, some look like cigarettes and some don't, like mine above, and some look just plain weird, add to that the fact that there are 30+ different flavours of nicotine liquid (or cartridges) to choose from, and you can see the whole smoking experience suddenly has a bit more depth to it.

So far I have only tried regular and cherry flavour nicotine and I like them both. I used to only smoke menthol ciggies and couldn't stand anything else, but this is not an issue with the e-NI as it is far less harsh due to the lack of tobacco. I am a big fan of the flavours too, back in the days of pipe and tobacco shops I used to smoke flavoured pipe tobacco and use liquorice rizla papers, so itsa bit of a blast from the past and I expect I will have a nice selection soon.

So if you are a smoker, I would definitely recommend you give it a try, i'm sure those around you wont miss your stinky clothes and smelly breath either. If you are worried about looking like a bit of a ponce, all I can say is grow a pair? and stop worrying about what others think, it's your life after all.

In a previous article I extolled the virtues of Adobe's new InContext Editor (ICE) which is a new online CMS service that is integrated in Dreamweaver 4. Since then I have  discovered that are in fact other much better solutions out there which do essentially the same thing, only better and cheaper. PageLime is the first of these which I have been trying out and will review here.

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For quite some time now I have been using ProWorkFlow for my time tracking and project management, which I found to be the most fully featured of all the project management solutions I tried and really is very good. However the amount of development work I do these days is very small, so I couldn't really warrant paying for something that gets used so rarely, so I decided it was time to look for an alternative and preferably FREE solution.

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I recently came across this rather nifty new service (called ICE for short) from Adobe, which essentially allows you to add basic content management facilities to any website with zero coding and allow your clients to manage it via their browser. You just take a simple flat HTML page, add in some markup to identify editable regions and your done. Granted it has very basic WYSIWYG capabilities, but it is perfect for those small clients who only want basic editing capabilities and don't have much money to spend on implementing a fully featured solution even with an open source CMS such as the very cool Mura CMS.

If you already use Dreamweaver then you already have everything you need to get started and easily create Incontext editable regions, but there are in fact no special requirements for using this service, you do not need to use Dreamweaver other than to create the javascript files, so you could in effect just download a Dreamweaver trial to see how it works and get the code then you can insert the required markup via notepad if you wish. To use the service all you need to do is sign up for an Adobe ID, and then login to the IncontextEditing Admin portal. From here you setup and manage your sites. Check out the getting started video below.

Currently the InContext Editing service is FREE and in the forums Adobe have quoted that it will remain free until 2011, after which it will be a subscription service costing $10-$20 per month. This information was actually quite hard to find, I tried calling Adobe to enquire about pricing, I spoke to customer services, sales and technical support and amazingly no-one had any idea what Incontext Editing was or that it was even an Adobe product.

To get started with ICE try out these tutorials.

I recently decided to save myself some money and switch over to Sky Talk and Sky Broadband at home. They were offering a pretty good package deal and sky seemed to be rated quite high on broadband review sites. Sadly this turned out to be a big mistake.

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