syllopsium

Still around, doing stuff

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 01:58:21 GMT

Having a doing evening, and decided to post on my infrequently used geekfest techiesnippets for some FreeBSD pokery. That led me to realise that I've neglected DW/LJ quite badly.

I do miss both DW/LJ and CIX, it's just that after it lost critical mass, Facebook and Twitter became the places to stay in touch (despite their faults). Please do feel free to add me on there.

Anyway, apologies for the long delay in adding jack and bugshaw to my journals, and I'll try and follow this a little more often.

Tonight was spent refereeing for Rainy City Roller Girls C Team, BLM - the Bet Lynch Mob. They are a lovely crowd and it's great to see everyone improve.

I'll be spending Saturday evening officiating at Dolly Rockit Rollers vs Tender Hooligans (RCRG B Team) , and (if it's on) Saturday morning training with the Knights of Oldham. You should come and cheer along this Saturday night, it'll be awesome :).

Roller derby is great, but it does tend to eat your life - another reason why I've been absent from here.

I will be changing some things, however. A recent quote I appreciated at the last weekend (attending the Nantwich Jazz and Blues festival for Blues and beer) was to the effect that it may be necessary to stop doing some of the things you'd quite like to do, so that you can do the things you really want to do.
( things I've been doing )

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Roller Derby

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:20:48 GMT

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'd been to a couple of roller derby games and was just about to start training. Since then it's become a really quite serious part of my exercise regime and social life.

I've passed the point of commitment for a new hobby - that is to say, I've now bought my own pads and have skates on order. Next Monday I move up to the advanced class and people start hitting me rather more than they have been doing so far.

It's a bit of a misnomer to say I'm now advanced; that's an aim rather than my status. It's entirely true that my stance and performance at stops and falls has dramatically improved, but there's still a long way to go, my laterals (quick moving from side to side, i.e. round cones) and transitions (front to back skating) need a lot of work not to mention I've only just started blocking and coping with people blocking me.

I'm thoroughly enjoying this though. It's a lovely supportive community where everyone wants each other to do well.

I've also managed to quash a few body image issues. For running and cycling I've never had any real quibbles, but there was a degree of uncertainty over whether the fact my legs aren't straight (I have bandy legs; my knee bends to the side then my lower leg bends round) would cause an issue. I can't tell whether they're a factor affecting my performance in derby, but what I can say is that my ability to skate on my right leg is slowly improving, that I can happily stand on my right leg (without skates on, with skates on it's more tricky) and that whilst I am far from the best skater I'm probably not the worst..

So far as helping out in games goes, I need to master my transitions and work on rules before I can start refereeing (this is one of the moves that is more important to refs than players. Refs often have to go back and forth around the track, players don't.). In the meantime there are plenty of Non Skating Official (NSO) roles I can do that help in learning the rules, the team rosters and generally concentrating in a fairly complex environment.

I'm running the scoreboard at this weekend's event. Should hopefully be fun!

If you want to come along, or do skate training check out the Rainy City Roller Girls' website!

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Bicon 2012

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:07:08 GMT

yep, going again!

Whilst last year was pretty good, I'm hoping to enjoy it substantially more this year as a) Whilst work isn't awesome it's not as stressful as last year b) there are (hopefully) no impending deaths in the family this time and c) it won't be just after another fun but intense festival (Colne)

Plans are to chill out, help on reception a bit, maybe have a few snogs but I'm not looking to take on any new activism at this time - too many other things I want to do in the next year and I have to set a deadline for various existing plans..

Will have to see if I can arrange a last minute ball costume; nothing planned currently.

I'm in Merryweather 2, floor 3 for accommodation apparently. See some of you there!

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я изучю русский язьік!

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:39:16 GMT

As the above says (badly, haven't mastered how to use a Cyrillic keyboard or charmap properly yet), I'm learning Russian in some idle moments/walking to work and suchlike.

Originally I was learning German, but decided that I'd prefer something that was spoken a little more widely. Of course, given that criteria, the obvious choices are Spanish or Chinese, but I didn't really fancy those. Additionally I fancied learning Cyrillic.

What I didn't realise is that learning Cyrillic is the relatively easy bit. Leaving aside the confusion between э and з, and that even with the pronunciation rules it doesn't seem to quite match up with the spoken course I have..

I didn't realise at the time that whilst various European languages (French, Spanish) are supposed to be reasonably easy to learn, Russian is ranked a level below Mandarin.. It also appears that there are not a wealth of English<->Russian dictionaries, but never mind - I don't have a time limit set for learning.

It's going slowly, but productively so far (languages are not one of my core skills). Pondering changing my operating systems over to Russian locale at some point so that I'm forced to read more text, coupled with a handy dictionary..

Next step is probably to find some online Russian radio stations to listen to in the background, and once my skills are considerably higher than now - reading some Russian or dual Russian/English books.

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orgy v4

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 07:26:00 GMT

Oh look. katieastrophe has started up another darkroom orgy on Dreamwidth.. Could be fun ;)

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Update : exercise - running, biking, kayaking and roller derby

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:39:50 GMT

Updating now, because if I don't I'll never get around to it.. Have an Android phone now, though, so can spend a bit more time during train journeys etc catching up.

Anyway, exercise. Whilst some of you may be aware that I've been walking/hiking for a very long time and occasionally have days where I get away from it all (no electronics, at all) or walk long distances that could quite easily be achieved with paid for transport simply to remind me of the advantages and privileges of modern life, I also do other stuff.

There's mountain biking (or to be more accurate, off road biking). Around four years ago I decided to extend my repertoire of exercise for two main reasons - first that I have some excellent countryside mere minutes from my house, and second that frequent meals out and several pints of beer were taking a slow toll on my waistline. Biking worked well for this, and by doing long rides twice a week I lost around a stone in three months.

Since I got the bike I've been riding reasonably regularly, and have nipped to trails both at Gisburn Forest (Forest of Bowland) and Billage Woods (Blackburn). I am still very much an off road person rather than a mountain biker - going on the trails (raised platforms, steep drops and bends) involves a lot of braking and swearing, but it's generally enjoyable and I may improve over time.

I've also been kayaking for two years, with mixed success. On the bright side Bolton Canoe Club are lovely and helpful, but my skills are variable. It took two years to be able to roll the boat some of the time, and whilst I'm not too bad at manoeuvring I'm not really an adrenalin junkie and prefer to cover a fair bit of ground in the countryside. Kayaking in the UK is not ideal for this (Canada, New Zealand etc are a different matter).

Running has been sporadic - both because it has a somewhat higher pain to benefit ratio early on and also because if I want to run direct from home it involves a hill after a couple of minutes. I countered this with a new pair of running shoes and driving up the hill initially. I'm now at the stage where the uphills are substantially less difficult (I do not yet call them easy) and my speed is increasing. I'm not doing serious training - instead preferring to just get out there and occasionally push myself a bit harder. Still, one route over the moors (Spittlers Edge to Great Hill) has gone down from around 25 minutes to 21:56, and 17:48 on the way back (there's a very steep bit to start, which I tend to walk).

I'm rather hopeful that I can keep running a couple of times a week and maintain my fitness levels. Ideally this should be done in the morning, but whilst I admire greatly liv's ability to get up early for over the last year and go to the gym, I resent the discipline required to do this. There's also the fact that I'm getting a little older, there's a lot going on at work, and coupled with less than optimal bedtimes this equals some evening naps when I should be going directly out to exercise.

I am conscious, though, that I need to get a regular schedule sorted out, if I want to improve fitness levels and more importantly continue doing so as the nights draw in and motivation is much harder to find.

I have pondered doing a triathlon for my 40th birthday year, and still might manage it - although perhaps with kayaking rather than swimming. My swimming is somewhat subpar, but maybe I'll check out the locals baths sometime.

The result of this pondering is that I'm probably de-emphasizing kayaking in favour of skating[1]. Two friends skate for different teams - Rainy City Roller Girls and Manchester Roller Derby.

I hadn't skated on quads for a very long time (since I was about 8-10..) although I have done some inline skating a number of years ago. When S invited me to see a RCRG bout and come to a roller disco I thought it would be fun. Since then I've been to another disco and seen an inter team bout rather than people from the same team playing each other. The result? I start skate training tomorrow.

Everyone seems lovely, and I'm not doing too badly considering I have all of about 4 hours of experience on quads. Definitely improving at moving, much better at T stops, beginning to manage a plough stop and my falls have been at least semi controlled. Of course I can't actually play for RCRG (it's a women's team) but I can ref, and then decide if I also want to explore playing for the men's Manchester roller derby team.

Two teams within half an hour's drive, and also Europe's largest roller rink five miles away - that'll do nicely!

[1] Unfortunately kayaking and skating training are on the same day. This doesn't preclude me doing some weekend kayaking events occasionally

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Still here. Very Busy.

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 23:45:55 GMT

Here. Not dead. Update soon at some point including precisely what I'm busy with.

Whilst posting, you have just under 24 hours to buy Humble Bundle 5. The games on there aren't entirely to my taste (and it's ages since I've spent time playing games, other than at retro gaming nights), but Limbo is well worth a look, even if it's a bit sick in parts.

If you want to keep up with what I'm doing on a more regular basis, try Twitter or Facebook. I'm trying to cram in an awful lot at the moment and updating online isn't fitting into the time I have available.

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Update later, but where's my reading page?!

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 10:40:23 GMT

Am I being daft, or is DW broken? Why can I only read my reading page back to about 20 March?!

edit : ah, I see LJ isn't much different only letting me skip back up to 120 entries.. Y'know, would it really be unreasonable to expect some of us to have other priorities and not be able to sign in every day?

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easter - eastercon or blues?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:46:05 GMT

tired. Busy. More soon

For the past few years ive been to the rather fab nantwich jazz and blues festival for good blues and beer.

Ive been pondering eastercon though but not entirely certain if im enough of a media fan to go. The website isnt entirely helpful either.

Oh dw/lj is it a) too late to book and b) should I go or stay with the blues? Any advice/info welcome!

I dont watch much tv other than doctor who these days, am not up to date with sarah jane or that crappy torchwood mini series and one night of board gaming a month is probably enough for me - although maybe with different games and people id do a bit more

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Posts of more substance at some point, maybe

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:02:10 GMT

I have been, as usual busy - work is annoying and I've been out every night on the basis that it's good to get out there whilst there's interesting stuff to do (This coming week will be a bit quieter..).

I've been rather lax with DW/LJ because of this, and also because both have in general been a bit quiet themself. This'll only get worse if no-one ever posts, so I plan to do a weekly list of new and exciting things (skipping over regular drinkies with friends/things I usually do)

This 'week' will comprise the last three weeks, however :

Seen Mission Impossible : Ghost Protocol with Manchester Film Fans. Actually quite good, not too silly and Simon Pegg is for once reasonably amusing.

Saw, the weekend before, The Artist - great lighting, decent acting and a dash of humour. Understandably silent films aren't made these days, so when a decent (mostly silent) one comes along it's worth a look.

Went to a talk with Manchester Skeptics - Professor Jeff Forshaw talking about his Quantum Universe book and other things. Interesting and amusing - he's a knowledge yet blunt northerner.

Discovered, again, how much fun Warioware is with a bunch of other retro gamers.

Spent more than I intended to on the Steam sales, but all items were reasonably cheap (most expensive was Sonic Generations at 7 quid). Most pleasant surprise has been Rochard - a action puzzle game using a gravity/object manipulation tool. Has a demo, so can be checked out!

Completed LIMBO - continually inventive, even if some of the timing really is a tad too precise for my liking. Also almost finished Super Mario Land 2 - unimpressed that it's not too bad up until the last level which ramps up the difficulty considerably, has no save points and requires several deaths to learn what you can and cannot do..

Finished Pride and Prejudice. Starts off terribly witty, has moments of brilliance but an awful lot of less than exciting interfamily politics and an ending signposted pages in advance. I wouldn't call it bad, but it's not about to go to the top of my reading list. Also completed Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning, which has confirmed to me I don't enjoy mystery thrillers where the identities of the protagists are known and it's generally clear that all will be okay in the end. It reminded me in a few ways of the Millennium trilogy, which definitely goes downhill after the first book..

Had the first New Years Day for a while that did not feature a hangover. This is definitely an improvement. Drink less, enjoy the next day more..

My Dad found and gave me the tape drive for my MSX - no longer having to use a custom lead and huge tape deck to play retro games. Eeee!

Wasted far too much time reading about a) canalboats (interesting, amusing, re-inforces the fact I don't think I'd ever want to live on one) and b) Amstrad PCWs

Drank Cassis Beer for the first time. It's a very interesting fruit beer, but expensive at £3-3.50 per bottle in the shops (&deity; knows what it'll be if I ever find it in a pub). With 25% blackcurrant juice in the beer, it's got a sweet but sharp taste with none of the sourness that blemishes the peach offering somewhat. Interesting!

Probably other stuff. Will add it in if I remember.

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More ReplayExpo..

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:09:06 GMT

Saturday at ReplayExpo was awesome. Sunday was likewise damned good.

There were a number of amusing moments - seeing one of the people developing the spectrum emulation for the Chameleon FPGA based C64 emulator run Manic Miner and needing to be assured that yes, it really does sound that bad..

Played the latest Sonic Generations on XBox360 and was rather impressed at how the sense of speed had been preserved. Completing levels with the necessary number of rings can be tricky though.

Had an interesting chat with a guy that's used a very professional looking expansion module to an Atari 7800 to create new games - more colours, sprites and memory. Impressive!

It's also intriguing to see which machines have aged well, and which have not.

The Vectrex still rules. Most of the examples at Expo only had Minestorm installed, with another with Scramble. My favourite game is probably Space War though - stunning game. I suspect it's unlikely many other vector based consoles will exist.

The Megadrive with Sonic has aged better than the NES - it's still fast and colourful, whilst the Sam Coupé and Turbographx 16 impressed with their hardware. The Sam Coupé was pretty much a dead duck from the start, but its ports of Prince of Persia and Manic Miner do show what a custom chipset can do - achieving effectively 16 bit levels of performance. Elite on the Archimedes looked amazing although I couldn't remember all the keys.

Likewise, the Turbographx 16 is very able at throwing around large sprites. The only pity is that the game I tried wasn't particularly fun.

It was interesting to try the Enterprise which many people confused with an MSX. I can see why, as it's not dis-similar to an MSX2. Had a good long chat with the owner who brought in the Sam Coupé and Enterprise on the train journey back, especially about the fact emulation is never quite right, and that in the modern era of non CRT display devices, that games simply play differently, especially when designed to muck around with the CRT raster. Certainly, watching people play arcade Gradius it still seemed a bit different from the (mostly pretty good) emulation offered by MAME.

Some machines seemed to have aged badly, though, and I will probably be slated for saying that one of these is the Amiga, in my opinion. The hardware is very capable, but I've not seen much that's particularly standout recently. It seems to offer an uncomfortable space between the high end 8 bit computers and the older consoles. Perhaps I need to try an Amiga emulator again.

Portables are another area where things have radically improved. Having a Gameboy Advance here I can fairly firmly state that the best device for playing Gameboy games is a Gameboy Advance, or a Gamecube with a Gameboy Player attachment. Gameboys are good for playing Tetris and... Tetris. I never liked the Gameboy at the time (other than for Tetris), and still don't.

It beggers belief that in the same year the ~~Tetris machine~~Gameboy was released, the Atari Lynx came out with solid custom chips and a backlit LCD. For the next fourteen years practically all other handhelds lacked a backlight. The Gameboy color, PC Engine and Gameboy shown at the Expo were all but unusable.

On the bright side, I bought Crash Bandicoot XS and Super Mario Land 2 (Gameboy) - with the greyscales converted to colour and a decent backlit screen, it shows the games at the time really were much better than the faint smears bouncing around on the Gameboy..

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ReplayExpo is so far, utterly awesome!

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:33:01 GMT

Other updates later, but for now Replay Expo is completely awesome. It's on for another day too, if you want to go!

For a while I've been going to the computer club (retro gaming) at the Lass O'Gowrie (last Tuesday and second Friday of the month. Usually I attend the Tuesday). From that and possibly other sources I learnt about Replay Expo, two days of gaming in Blackpool - both modern and retro.

Therefore this Saturday I jumped on the train and nipped up to Blackpool North, followed by a tram ride looking at the sea. Norbreck Castle Hotel is really rather large; rather necessary considering the amount of computing gear shoved in the conference room. This included in no specific order :

Vendors, including basic programmable circuit board computers, OpenPandora, a series of speccys networked to a VAX(!), Amiga emulation and the development of a single chip speccy. Retro consoles, games, etc - bought myself Crash Bandicoot XS for my Gameboy Advance.

Many, many, many retro computers including several I'd not used before : Dragon 32, Sam Coupé, Tatung Einstein, TurboGrafx16. New ports such as Prince of Persia for the Commodore 64 and Sam Coupé, the Manic Miner demo running on a ZX81.

Tournaments and Cosplay. Multi player gaming.

Lots of pinball machines including 'history of pinball' - old mechanical, electro mechanical and fully modern machines. This was really rather fascinating and fun too.

Then walking back home via the illuminations.

I'm going again tomorrow, and this time I'm taking my camera..

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Party and Orgy!

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:45:49 GMT

Splendid party last night with decent chat, munchies and lovely cocktails. I may well have to make my own cherry margharitas in future :). Also good at reminding me that staying in Manchester beyond 11pm is practical, provided I'm prepared to pay the taxi fare from Bolton.

In unrelated news, katieastrophe has made a new virtual darkroom orgy. My thread in it starts here.

There may be the slightest possibility that I have my suspicions to who is posting the anonymous comments on my thread, but I'm maintaining the fourth wall for now..

Of course, there's always the small chance someone available might come along too..

Now time for long delayed tidying up and locating a copy of Solaris for Goth Book Group; I've been rather lax and need to start and finish it by Wednesday night!

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Bicon was damned good

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:16:44 GMT

Bicon rocked, especially all the lovely people I chatted to, generally finding the right balance of long and short conversations, not drinking too much and pretending to be Blackadder the 2nd in Fictional Speed Dating.

More updates later, to pinch a post from other people, is there anything you'd like to say to me post Bicon? Comments screened..

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holiday goes on

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:39:23 GMT

The holiday started with Colne Blues Festival and now im off to Manchester for a lunch time meal and drinkies with T.

Colne was interesting. Decided in the end to travel in each day rather than camp and not to bother with the international stage as that's £130 quid for the weekend whilst the remainder is only a £5.50 pledge badge!

Bought two t shirts and three cds, plus a sensible amount of beer. The long train journey (2 hours each way) let me finish Jill the Reckless and improve my skills at Gradius Advance.

Colne was a good experience but it was a pity to miss friends at Pride. Im still at the lower age range for Blues events attendance (there are several exceptions) and hat wearing is more common than usual. I wouldnt mind a hat if I could find one that suited me.

I did fall prey to new festival-itis by trying to fit too much in on Sunday and not eating properly. Fortunately I was more sensible on Monday and not knackered at the end of the day.

Next - onwards to Bicon!

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Awesome weekend

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:27:58 GMT

This weekend has been especially awesome. E came up to stay and chill out, and the visit was cunningly timed so that they could attend Ara, a goth night in a real church in Salford. I've been meaning to go for ages but have been frequently distracted by friends offering beer or, on two occasions, falling asleep and waking up early in the morning.

Ara was lovely; splendid people, a bit of dancing and someone offering free flapjacks! :)

Ara resulted in a 4am bedtime, so Saturday was quite chilled out and involved some chat and a bit of shopping for Teawitter ingredients for Sunday. There was insufficient time for baking as we had to go out and attend S' recommendation of Platform 4 in Castlefield after a quick Wagamamas.

My review of platform 4 can be summed up as : Go. Sell small children if you have to, to attend.

It was especially impressive that all this was free! Starting with a marching band (fun, but we didn't have a particularly good view) and then moving onto a stage with a large arch where Atempo Circ cavorted in perfect harmony. Starting off with interpretative dance and rapidly moving on to perfectly timed and choreographed acrobatics it was frankly an utterly stunning spectacle and I urge everyone to see it.

The evening completed with the wired aerial theatre - a large crane helped a stage move from a horizontal drama piece to a vertical projection screen where the participants interacted with the images hanging down by their safety ropes.

Grabbing the last train home and pimping computer games at E (including Machinarium[1], VVVVVV and Samorost 2) finished Saturday, then Sunday started fairly early to bake food for Teawiter, as mentioned in the last post.

I did intend to go for a run over the moors, but at that point late bedtimes caught up with me and a degree of sleep resulted. Now to make lunch for work and stock up on more zzz..

[1] If you've played the Machinarium demo and like it, drop me an e-mail. I have a spare copy :). If there's more than one response the most deserving/random person gets it.

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Food

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:12:32 GMT

There has been an awful lot of food involved in my life as you might expect. Not only am I a fan of going out with friends and trying new culinary delights (especially when combined with alcoholic refreshments and conversations of serious and irreverent nature..) but also of cooking and baking myself.

Thus not only have I tried a few new restaurants in Manchester, but have also learnt a lot of new vegan food recipes (to the point where I could be vegan if I wanted to, but I really quite like my meat) and a few non vegan ones. I've developed a particular taste for using coconut milk (despite the fact it's more than double the price it used to be) and my collection of spices has increased even more. Next up is obtaining some ground cardamom - one of the few spices I don't have (or I could grind it myself, I suppose).

Baking has also featured somewhat - increasing my cake and biscuit baking abilities. I've been to both Cake Liberation Front (vegan) and Teawitter events. Today was a DIYBio and Teawitter crossover event - anything with bacteria in it was appreciated. I therefore made some Tomato bread, some alcoholic ginger beer and dark chocolate bread (very tasty, quite bready. Vegan if you use the right ginger beer), homemade tomato houmous, falafel and some goats cheese (I have found that I'm ok with goats and ewes cheese. Cows milk is still a particularly bad idea).

Finding new food and ingredients is always fun. The only limitation is with complex dishes that don't keep : for that I really need willing ~~victims~~ volunteers as spending large amounts of time on something for myself that doesn't freeze is beyond my level of cooking commitment.

I broke my soup virginity with the aid of a delightful stick blender (I have been so enthusiastic in this that the blender has in fact broken part of its plastic :( ) - spicy carrot and lentil is a particular favourite. My biscuit ability is increasing (although I really need some biscuit moulds), and I should really try and do pies beyond pasties at some point.

Any recommendations of new recipes or sites is most thoroughly appreciated.

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Exercise

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:38:07 GMT

My ongoing intrepid culinary adventures with T have led to a challenge maintaining, as they put it 'a pie neutral lifestyle'. Rather like the rather dodgy carbon credits used to achieve dubious claims of environmental neutrality elsewhere, there are no genuinely safe shortcuts to maintaining pie neutrality, particularly when giving up the meals and beer aren't a favoured option.

I have been kayaking for nigh on two years now, biking for at least a few and walking for more than I care to count. These are all enjoyable activities but each feature difficulties.

( why kayaking, open boating, mountain biking and hiking are awesome but I've just started running again. Plus also, post party walking insanity. )
Since then I've been out at least a couple of times a week. Running has progressed to the point where I'm not stopping much, am actually enjoying the vast majority of it (other than the steep uphills) and can now tackle a moderate slope without stopping. Provided my legs and knees keep up, this rules! Most of my racing is off road, and my next challenge is to run the home to Darwen Tower route I walked earlier this year. Once I can do that without stopping I might start to consider myself reasonably fit.

After that, it's been suggested that as part of reaching the big 40 birthday year, I do a triathlon, with kayaking in place of the swimming. There's one in the Lakes.. I'm not discounting or confirming it entirely yet, but I may start aiming for it. Watch this space!

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quick update

Wed, 04 May 2011 16:39:27 GMT

details and photos will follow soon. Over the past few weeks i have :

Been to manchester skeptics for galaxy zoo and a social
Listened to lots of lovely blues and drunk beer at nantwich jazz and blues festival
Been on a 20 mile hike to darwen tower and back
Attended retro gaming at the lass o'gowrie
Bought a second hand gamecube and gameboy advance sp to become less crap at retro gaming..
Been up crib goche
Begun to port an X driver from xfree86 to Xorg
Other cooking, meals and drinks out.
Probably other stuff too
Now off to madlab to gather microbes

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Food!

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:29:54 GMT

This weekend has been rather food filled. First up, we have Saturday lunch - I'd almost run out of homemade soup, so a quick couple of litres of stock and lots of leek and potatoes created this :

That night was drinkies and food with a friend, so we'll skip forward to Sunday lunchtime when the Cakes for Japan event ran at Madlab. It was a large success, and I may die when the sugar crash hits..

Unfortunately my original picture of my lemon cake was a little poor, so have a piccy of the final slice I kept back (the rest of it was taken to the event and sold)

Next time I will use more baking powder to raise the cake a little extra, and will probably bother with a topping.

Finally, I've been having a couple of weeks of running the stocks in my freezer low - so now it's time to build them back up again.

That's eight Cornish pasties (plus a little one), plus a mixture of mince, left over pastie filling and tomato all cooked up so as not to let it go to waste.

Finally, we have my 'instant access' shelf that's on top of the cupboards; really should have thought of it earlier to prevent me rummaging in cupboards for frequently used items.

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Thoughts - the wireless e-book group

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:24:44 GMT

I already go to the Goth Book Group roughly every month, and it is good - discussing vaguely Goth-ish books followed by lots of Filth in a pub with nice food, drink and if I remember correctly, wifi.

The Kindle (and other e-books from Sony, Rex and some of the minority players) allow a huge number of books to be stored and read. Many of the devices load content over wifi or 3G. This means you can turn up to chat with your chums, discuss books and download samples or the entire book *there and then!*.

I wonder if this would be workable on a more regular basis. It might perhaps be necessary to set two topics - 1) a book to be read and 2) a general genre to be investigated. It would then be up to each person to look at a mixture of paid for (Amazon, WHS, Waterstones) and free (gutenberg, archive.org, baen, PDFs) to recommend and discuss.

It would ideally be held in a pub with Wifi, although Manchester alternatives like Madlab might be a possibility (nice, but lacking beer and food).

Obviously all attendees would need an ebook, and it'd probably require a wifi laptop with a copy of Calibre or similar and a USB port, too.

Thoughts? Would it be hit by spoiling of plots, usual group organisation issues or complicated copyright stuff (Gutenberg is a US site with US copyright - H G Wells is available. In the UK his material is still under copyright)

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That valentines thing

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:33:56 GMT

Go on then, if you want.

Communities :

14022011
021411

Valentinr

Get your own valentinr

Or comment here.

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Kindle is Awesome

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:26:56 GMT

I thought I'd posted something earlier this year, but obviously not.

The Amazon Kindle 3G is definitely my best purchase of 2010. I've used it practically every day this year.

There are many reasons to love the Kindle, but the major ones have to be the e-ink display followed by the free 3G. It really is almost as good as a book with all the advantages (readability) and disadvantages (needs an external light source) of a real book.

Of course, the Kindle is not alone in supplying an e-display - so why did I buy it? Frankly, because I believed it would offer a better platform for text based media than the other devices. There are niche third party products, but they don't offer 3G, the breadth of market to target applications (leaving aside the fact Kindle apps are currently US only..) or the convenient form factor - having page turning buttons on both sides is incredibly useful for reading one handed when sardined on a train.

The web browsing is a bit lacklustre, but the Kindle is not designed for that. The fact it works at all, occasionally works really well and includes free 3G is exceptional. I wonder how long users will be able to browse the entire web for free..

The number of free books I've downloaded on to the Kindle is quite large, and has undoubtedly saved me a load of money. I really must get around to buying some of the Stieg Larrson books that have been repeatedly recommended to me.

The Kindle is also usable for reading PDFs - I've spent a happy few hours reading The Unix Hater's Handbook; although many PDFs benefit from changing the orientation to landscape.

I know there's Calibre to convert formats, but frankly I'm spending enough time ploughing through existing material!

I look forward to improved facilities in future firmware.

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Free Angry Birds

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:18:33 GMT

Free Angry Birds for the first 15,000 people to sign up to the Intel app store.

Mind you, it's rather busy and falling over, so whether you can get a copy or not..

edit : got it working by installing the app store, starting it up until it connected to the app store, selecting angry birds and then on 'buy' - at which point it asks you to register and lets you on for free..

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bye bye bulb

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:09:30 GMT

Buggrit. My Androv Medical full spectrum daylight bulb has failed after two years. That's about the same as the Biobulb lasted.

Again, 10,000 hours out of a CFL bulb? hahahahaha (at least in my house's wiring).

Sadly Androv's products are better than Biobulb whilst they last, so I'll fork out for another one. Perhaps the eye searing 45W(160W) this time.

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