Viewbook is an application I’ve had my eye on for a long time now. It is, I think, the simplest and most elegant way to display photographs on a website or blog.

The control panel is where you upload all of your photographs and then sort them into presentation folders. So lets say you have just done a photowalk and have 10 or 15 photographs you would like to show. You will probably spend a fair bit of time sizing the images, uploading them, placing them in your blog post and so on. At the end of your efforts, you will have a post which (in my view) takes up far too much space.

With viewbook, all you need to do is select all your photos, add titles and comments to them, and finally copy & paste a bit of code to your blog post. The result is much cleaner and easier in the long run. Sample below shows “one I created earlier” using le craic header images for demonstration. Every presentation you create has its own url so you can email it or post it on twitter.

Sign up for a free account and try it for yourself, I think you’ll like it.

Looks like you might be a new visitor to le craic. If you like what you see here and fancy some daily diversions delivered to your favourite feed reader, why not click to join Club le craic. Go raibh maith agat! Thanks a thousand!

One of my favourite charities is the RNLI. I think the volunteer crews are extraordinary, dedicated and brave. They basically put their lives on the line every time they respond to a call.

Living in a seaside town with an RNLI station, during really stormy weather the thought always enters my mind “I hope there’s no one in trouble at sea today”. Sometimes, if there is a launch, the sound of the launch flares boom reverberates around the town and draws me to the door to look out to sea.

This doesn’t happen so much now though, as the crew all have bleepers to call them for a launch.

There are 43 lifeboat stations around Ireland and they rescued 8,000 people last year. That’s an average of 22 per day.

Sean Olohan is a resident of Wicklow Town and heads the folk band ‘Avoca’. Sean and the band have released a single called ‘Saving Lives’. All the proceeds from the sale of the single will go to the RNLI.

The single is at Number 6 in the Downloadmusic.ie charts right now and it would be amazing for it to get to number 1. It’s only 99cent to download.

Pay by credit card (or laser) on Downloadmusic.ie

Or text music 1231 to 57501

There is also a full CD single available for €4.99

I see that Dublin City Council are currently revising the bye laws on liquor consumption in the fair city.

There’s a link to a word document (wtf? word, why word?) that has all the salient details. Here’s the definition of liquor:

“intoxicating liquor” means spirits, wine, beer, porter, stout, cider, perry and sweets and any fermented, distilled or spirituous liquor which cannot, according to any law for the time being in force, be legally sold without a licence from the Revenue Commissioners or any drink or other liquid containing alcohol.

What on earth is perry? And sweets - presumably liqueurs. I may have missed the liqueur problem on the streets. There’s aytin’ and drinkin’ in the them so where’s the harm.

Didn’t have the willpower to see if there is any provision for citizens arrest/ninja punches to the throat of any stumbling drunk that staggers over to me on the boardwalk looking for money. Or how about a headlock provision for the drunks that follow me into Spar begging me to buy them a sandwich.

I jest of course, I’d never punch anyone in the throat (unless severely provoked) and I will often give spare change when I have it, but there’s a certain very aggresive element to some of the drunks in Dublin and I’ve been intimidated by them several times.

Don’t know what big difference bye-laws make, other than serve to clog the courts up and waste Garda time. It would make more sense to invest heavily in accommodation for the homeless and treatment programmes for alcohol abuse instead.

Unfortunately, sense doesn’t come into things when it’s a lot easier to draft a word document and play god from a pokey office looking down on the Liffey.

TV3 missed out on this one. What with this R*******n and all, skips are the new black. Their programme output could have been taken to a whole new level. They might even have tempted Brendan Courtney back to grace our screens again. I’m sure he’d be in his element having a good old rummage through bins.

Ready, Steady, Skip is set to delight the tastebuds in online format only from July.

I’m not much of a cook but one of my “specialties” is tortilla wraps with quorn mince. I usually make the sauce with onions, peppers, can of tomatoes and a pack of mexican spice mix that I pick randomly off the shelf in the supermarket. Once the ingredients are all cooked, I slap the mixture onto the tortilla, add some salsa, jalapeno peppers and sliced cherry tomatoes. Once the tortillas are wrapped, I top them off with some grated cheese, dash of tabasco and into the over for 10 to 15 minutes.

I’m sure foodies will read that and think to themselves “hope he never invites me for dinner”, but it’s simple to make – and I like that. All of this is by way of introducing a website which just launched today. It’s called Spicendipity and comes from Deborah who was a regular follower of the weekly Apprentice reviews I published on a Wednesday. But for the fact that I joined twitter earlier in the week I might not have known about this until after everyone else, so twitter is proving useful already!

Spicendipity has got a really lovely range of sauces, spice mixes, baking mixes and gift hampers for people like me and foodies too. It’s all natural goodness as well. You won’t find any of the gunky stuff that you get in a lot of supermarket bought product. 

I just ordered some of the chilli seasoning, the tex mex seasoning & dip mix, and the chocolate brownie mix. I can’t wait to give them all a go.

Spicendipity also has a blog called tast.ie where the grand opening of Spicendipity was announced. The Loudervoice Blog has a competition to win a hamper by reviewing The Taste of Cork festival.

Here’s one customer who will look forward to trying out the various recipes on the blog and the product on the website.

There’s something hypnotic about tennis. It’s one of only a couple of sports I can sit and watch without getting fidgety.  Caught the end of Andy Murray’s game this evening - exciting stuff. Nothing says summer like Wimbledon – even if we’re not getting very summerlike weather.

Chicken tennis anyone?

Ireland’s first card operated service station has just opened on the Aran islands. Eamon O’Cuiv was the man who cut the ribbon at the official ceremony.

“The station provides the islanders with diesel at present and I believe that one tank has been earmarked for biofuels, for when they become commercially viable on the island.”

The Department of Community, Rural & Gaeltacht Affairs said the station will be unmanned and members of the public will be able to refuel and pay at pumps using special cards, details of which have yet to be revealed.

Intrigued at the mention of these “special cards”. Presumably islanders will be issued with a card that they swipe on filling up and settle their bill later. I wonder will the cards only release the pump mechanism once swiped or will an honour system be employed? An honour system would allow an islander to fill up, swipe the card and enter how much you filled up by.

Coincidentally, I was listening to a recent edition of Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 that covered the subject of the honour system. It reported on a Strawberry farm in England which had to close down after 50 years in operation. Greedy and dishonest people were eating strawberries in the fields rather than picking them and paying. £10,000 worth of strawberries were stolen - 1/4 of the crop.

At the other end of the scale was a caravan park that has a shop for customers that is open 24 hours a day. People get what they want from the shop and write it all down in a book and pay at the end of their stay. A really nice idea but one which assumes that most people can be trusted. It works for the caravan park but sadly, it’s doubtful if it would work beyond a small community type setting.

Think back a few years when most supermarkets allowed us to weigh our own fruit and veg. Presumably they were losing so much money due to pilfering that they brought it to an end. Maybe there was another reason, but I can’t think of one.

It’s very sad to see a business have to close down because of dishonest people. Even sadder is the fact that the small minority (or maybe it is a large minority) responsible for it probably didn’t see any wrong in what they did.

Recently stumbled on wordle and was immediately impressed. I used it to create this weeks le craic header. Having read all the Spencer Tunick posts I thought it would be interesting to take the words from the various accounts of the experience and see what the word cloud would look like.

It’s a fascinating tool and my new favourite plaything. There is also a tag text generator for flickr that makes it really easy to create a word cloud of your flickr account.

(note : as I type this, 9.54 pm Mon 23^rd June, wordle is down for maintenance – I think I’ve broken it )