Kix and I are on a health drive (because of my weight issues and because of Chloes herniated disk) so Chloe cooked prepared a recipe from a friend of ours who only eats raw food!
This is raw Satay style butternut noodles and raw brownies:
It was delightful. The “noodles” were tasty and surprisingly filling. You would think it tasted like eating a salad, but the recipe cleverly makes it taste more like a real meal. And the brownies are very rich, probably richer than the real thing. They taste like nakd bars.
I don’t think it’s easy to make – I was on a two and a half hour phone call and she was still working away at it when I had finished! It uses a weird machine that looks like torture equipment (a spiralizer).
This keyboard with integrated mouse only came out this week in the UK and I’ve no idea why it took so long because I would have thought anyone with a media center TV were crying out for this form factor.
I highly recommend it as a remote control for a MythTV box. It’s a good small size (it’s smaller than it looks in the picture), the integrated trackpad is responsive and large and has both mouse buttons. There’s zero config needed for Linux (at least in Arch Linux). The range is good. There’s no useless extra media buttons that no-one uses. In short, it’s perfect.
Because I’m lucky enough to work from home 90% of the time, I spent almost all my life here:
When it’s not work, it’s catching up with the news, checking my calendar, writing my journal, playing games, shopping, writing my todo lists, looking at photos, watching youtube, etc, etc.
The good news is that being tied to a computer is now changing – I’m finding the more casual surfing tasks which are usually leisure based rather than productivity based are now more pleasant to do on the iPad on the sofa or in bed.
Do you live to work or work to live? Luckily the question is moot for me because my work is programming and programming (or more accurately, problem solving) is my calling. From “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt (which I haven’t read):
Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.
If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work.
If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.
If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.
If I suddenly became very wealthy, I would definitely continue to program.
I bought a new CPU cooler (“Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 LP Low Profile CPU Cooler“) for our media center PC but unfortunately it didn’t fit on the motherboard (ASUS P5N7A-VM) even though it is the correct CPU socket type (“Intel socket 775“).
It wouldn’t sit on the CPU properly because some capacitors on the motherboard got in the way of the cooling fins. It was also very hard to to install the motherboard anchors that the fan screws into. Be sure to avoid this fan on this motherboard.
High quality, fun game.
There was a short space scene which I think they pulled off quite well, if just to show-case the incredible space-scene graphics.
I don’t like the continuing trend of sad endings .
We tried growing a few pieces of veg this year. We tried carrots, potatoes, beans, salad, mushrooms and strawberries. We failed to get anything decent except perhaps the potatoes (we got about 10kgs).
I was most excited about the carrots but we ended up with vegetarian veal:
If you use RSS and you have grouped your Facebook friends into lists, you can subscribe to all activity in a given Friend List using the following URL:
your_facebook_id – To find this, go to your facebook notifications page and copy the link called “Via RSS“. The URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=668921524&viewer=668921524&key=1c9c72f322&format=rss20 and “668921524″ is the id you need.
your_friends_list_key – To find this, go to your facebook Friends List page and click on the list. The URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/?sk=fl_447510731524 and “447510731524″ is the key you need.
This is useful if you want to make sure you don’t miss any activity of a particular group of friends – I don’t go to Facebook every day but I do go to a RSS reader every day. It is also useful if you want to filter out and ignore a particular group.
I don’t know how people manage Facebook without using this feature!
If you have a interest in art, you may enjoy this genius music video called “70 Million” by Hold Your Horses. See how many renditions you can recognise:
There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act.
Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to this law is that it gives corporations the power to ban a entire household from the internet and I feel very strongly that everyone should have the right to be online. I would go so far as to say, for me, life without the internet wouldn’t be worth living. Just because someone in the household has broken some licensing agreements shouldn’t mean they are stopped from all the useful online stuff such as paying for road tax, campaigning for freedom, conducting research, enjoying art, planning travel, etc etc.
Other reason this Act seems unfair to me:
The Act uses a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
The Act will add extra costs on wi-fi providers – meaning less public wi-fi. I had hoped the whole country would be blanketed in wi-fi by now.
The Act is a threat to sites that permit user-generated content. This is because it has web blocking provisions that let copyright holders get a site taken down for inadvertently hosting a small amount of copyrighted content.
A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.
Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!
PeoplePerHour (my primary employers) have a new trailer. It’s fun watching webpages I have helped build woosh past a’la star wars. It’s bold and upbeat, I love not doing things by halves:
This gadget should be really good because it is nice and small, works in Linux out of the box and it is super convenient having a mini combined mouse and keyboard at hand. However, unfortunately, the mouse isn’t sensitive or responsive, the key-presses have unpredictable delays, the range isn’t good enough and it completely stopped working after a couple of months. I do not recommend buying one.
Three whole days without even a single scrap of food entering our bodies, only having water to keep us going.
I’m joining in – it started at 11am:
I ate the following a few minutes before 11am:
Massive plate of home-made lentil curry.
Massive bowl of nut based cereal.
Massive energy drink.
Some vitamins that were lying around from years ago.
I’m totally stuffed now – let’s see how I am in 72 hours, cold turkey! I’ll probably miss coffee a fair bit too.
Friday, 26th March Update.
Proof! Wii Fit can't lie!
I managed it. The first 30 hours were the hardest then it plateaued and I coped fine. I wasn’t even all that hungry by the end. I was very busy with work so I had a lot to take my mind off being hungry. After the first 24 hours, I had lost 4lbs, then 6lbs, then 4lbs – so I lost 1 stone in total – not that it means anything because I’m sure it’ll just go back on (but I’ll try not to let it).
I expected to feel drained and have trouble sleeping or getting up early, perhaps even stomach cramps but none of that happened, my energy levels were ok, physically.
Apart from feeling hungry, there were some other negative side effects:
Mild headache started on day 2 and lasted into day 3.
My brain stopped firing on all cylinders part way through day 2
Upset stomach started on day 3.
Aching carve muscles started on day 3.
Felt a bit “away with the fairys” from day 3 – not dizzy but not quite right.
This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with alien cultures and alien artefacts. I didn’t find the story all that engaging but I did find the planet the story is based on well worth reading about. Banks calls it a “Shellworld”, a ancient alien construction built up from several separate layers, each effectively a world in itself, with its own planetary conditions, civilizations and even artificial suns. The tech level of the story builds and builds and the ending is true action Sci-fi.
My favourite bit of all the culture novels is reading about the ship minds and AI. Banks really captures my imagination and hits the Sci-fi sweet spot.
Ubuntu will be switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo in the next release (v10.04) because they have struck a deal where they will get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks on a advert after doing a search. The only reason that this is interesting is that Yahoo search is powered by Microsofts Bing search engine which brings up some interesting questions: On the positive side, Microsoft will be paying for free software development, but on the negative side, Ubuntu users will be making money for Microsoft.
Tuxradar did a open ballot to gather peoples thoughts on the subject. They discussed it on episode 1 of season 2 of their podcast and they even mentioned me at 35:23. I was making the point that the default search engine of Firefox is moot because many people are switching to Google’s Chrome browser.
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