It’s an amazing year for soft fruit this year in the UK. The dose of heat early on kicked started the raspberries, red currents, blackcurrents, white currents and even the cherries, and the damp patch we’re having has filled them out beutifully. Thus the problem of a glut. We’ve had so much soft fruit our [...]
This afternoon I started my training for Septembers charity swim. Whilst working up in Scotland on a job I’m taking a few hours every afternoon to walk, kyak or swim. Today we kyaked round form the beach round an island (dropping off prawn traps on the way) and then half a mile out to sea [...]
I’ve no pictures for this, because I was doing it as part of a dinner party, so you’ll have to just imagine. I should just the nod to Beer Reviews for pointing me in the direction of cider gammon. Take a 1kg ham, or gammon joint. I used an unsmoked one, wanting to bring the [...]
A couple of years ago I bought myself a breadmaker, and I’ve never looked back. I love bread, I love making bread by hand, and take great therapy in kneading and resting, working to find that beautiful silky texture of the dough. However, time is my master at the moment, and being able to wake [...]
That last post was because I could hardly contain myself. Messing about with hardware, scripting and growing things all on the same project was right u my street and I couldn’t resist. I’m working my way up to producing a much bigger and high-res time-lapse project later this year, and this was something of a [...]
I love jerk chicken. In fact, I love Jamaican food. Jerk chicken, curry goat, popperpot stew, Saturday soup, I love it all. There’s something ever refreshing about cooking without cream or thickened sauces, avoiding thick and sticky glazes and having hot food without it being nose-pinchingly spiced. Ideally jerk should be cooked on a half oil drum barbecue, [...]
I’ve wanting to play with Redis, a super speedy key-value pair store, for a while, but there wasn’t readily available way for me to bolt it into my PHP framework of choice CodeIgniter. There was however a good PHP client for Redis in the form of Rediska through, so I decided it was time to roll my [...]
I love popcorn, but I’ve never been a big fan of sweet popcorn, and I do like spicy food. So tonight a new TV dish was born.. Manly Salt and Vinegar and Chilli Popcorn Handful of unpopped popcorn Teaspoon of sunflower oil Half teaspoon salt Half teaspoon of whole black pepper corns Half a dried [...]
[updated] 30th June 2010 MushroomCam is now off line, the still below is the last image it took I’ll explain more about this over the next few weeks, until then, there’s a live (well, updates every 15 minutes) feed from my spare room. Also, the camera is only on from 6am until 8pm, because otherwise [...]
I’m a huge fancy of nibbly things, salty things, crunchy things and antipasto, but the big problem is the price. Good olives, grilled peppers and the like are often £3 for a little tub. I’m not complaining if they’re great quality (I used to run a market stall selling great olives from Sicily and Greece) [...]
My finest ever one liner curl -q -o – ”http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=fish&format=xml&from-date=2010-01-01&to-date-2010-01-02&order=newest&page-size=50″ |xpath “/response/results/content/@section-name” | sed ‘s/section-name=\”//g’ | tr ‘”‘ ‘\n’ | sort |uniq -c | sort -r Or … In which sections of the guardian does the word “fish” appear, and how often in the first month of 2010 By stagings… curl -q -o – ”http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=penguin&format=xml&from-date=2010-01-01&to-date-2010-01-02&order=newest&page-size=50″ [...]
A few years ago I went out to Texas to a festival ( No, not SXSWI), Austin City Limits, and had an amazing time. One of the things I completely fell in love with was the TexMex and Southern food, and this week I’ve been getting craving. Step in youtube, to teach me the joys [...]
Im on the train, after a long and tiring day. I’m writing this offline because the wifi seems a bit flaky, but I can live with it. What I cant live with is the whinging and whining of the 2 fat man who’ve just grumbled at the bloke pulling the tea trolley thing. The first [...]
Years ago I used to get an amazing soup from a little cafe. When I left I asked for the recipe, and the owner actually gave it to me (I didn’t think they would). After years of sitting on it, it seemed like a good time to go public with it. This is for making an [...]
I’m being haunted, by the bosses I’ve had over the last ten years or so. I can’t help it, and it’s not really their fault either, neither of us can help it. Every time things get a bit stressful, I find myself talking through whatever it is with my old bosses, in my head. Worrying [...]
Don’t worry dearest readers, the radio silence is just a by product of being a bit freakin’ busy. I’ve joined a new company, moved city (Monday through Friday), and started eating porridge, walking to work and coding day to day again. Good times! Possibly Related Posts: A twitter inspired wedding cake A year in books [...]
I’ve been eatting fajitas all week. As per normal when I become facinated with some sort of food, I’ll eat it all week (sometimes all month) until I get bored and latch on to something else. This week fahitas, last week baked red cabbage, the month before that juices made in the blender, last year clear [...]
A rant I’ve been queuing up for a good couple of years, but haven’t yet got round to committing to ink (or pixels) is the strange phenomenon of e-things. It started reasonably enough with e-mail. Its like normal mail, but sent electronically. Fair enough. I’d argue that the UK should be talking about “I’ll drop you an [...]
I saw this at the weekend in the window of a wedding cake shop. To me it clearly looks twitter inspired, I wonder what the story behind it is? Possibly Related Posts: Radio silence A year in books A little routine Sometime your realise… This week I shall mostly be…
I’ve no idea exactly what this stuff it, it’s not crazily hot, but it is crunchy and has that slightly soapy taste of Chinese pepper and is amazing on top of noodle, soup noodles and grilled meats. Go to your local Chinese supermarket and hunt it down. Possibly Related Posts: Homemade flavoured spirits Slow baked [...]
Most of my readers can ignore this, or just roll their eyes. I’ve just seen a tweet by Suw that made me thing of a post I half wrote about a year ago and never got round to publishing. I keep hearing people mixing up their nouns for “nu-media”, so here’s a handy guide for [...]
Finally, I’m up and running with Virgin Media broadband at home. They give you a free wireless router, but all the setup instructions and the setup cd’s are for Windows. The bloke who installed the cabling suggested I rung the £80,000 a minute phone line. Panic not people, follow these instructions… With everything turned off… [...]
I received a very wierd email today. Somebody has signed up to the Barbie website, and given my email address as their parent (which I hopefully am not, or at least nobody got round to telling me). The site has then email me, giving their username. They’ve also included lots of helpful links which I [...]
A few years ago I wrote a post at some ungodly hour of the morning about food. I love food. I eat a strange mix of fast-as-I-can-get-it-out-of-a-pan fast food, and strange and sometimes complex things I slave over. I dream about food at night, playing ideas over in my head and ruminating. I wrote it [...]
I do enjoy poking through the books I’ve read each year, its a good indicator of what sort of year it has been. Thanks for the magic power of LibraryThing, it’s easy to find them all too. So in reverse order, and with the odd note *d… A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect [...]
Whilst I was down in London a few weeks ago, I drunkenly set about re-skinning coldclimate. Since I moved to WordPress a few years ago I’d used the Ocadia theme, and very nice it was too. However, lots of people use it, so it was time to make something of my own. I’m no designer. [...]
I’m sitting this evening, watching TV, something I normally pour scorn on. Call me elitist, called me a snob, call me posh (if your vocabulary only gets that far) but most of the stuff on TV is just drivel. Thats why I’m watching a stack load of divx files, not whatever it being beamed into [...]
Last night I finally got my Ubuntu 9.1 box up and running properly. It talks to my wireless, it talks to my telly, it connects to my NAS box and it even has blue teeth! How? I plugged in all of my peripherals, and reinstalled from the latest download. I’d twatted about trying to get [...]
I love computers. I really seriously love technology. I have no other tangable skill set (other than talking and maybe a few other things). I love making file systems work, getting databases to do backflips, to root my way through a problem and determine that it’s actual X not Y that is causing problem. However, [...]
Two things I’ve discovered this evening… 1) The best milkshake includes no milk. It’s expensive organic vanilla icecream you left out overnight (yeah yeah ignore the fact that this is made with milk), and something called Rice Dream, which might be a poor milk substitue most of the time, but is very very tasty. 2)The [...]
if you happen to be on the coldclimate domain, ad things look screwy, it’s not because somethings wrong, just that I’m slightly drunkenly trying to bolt together Blueprint CSS and the sandbox wordpress theme. Stay calm! Carry on! If it fails it’s back to the original theme! Possibly Related Posts: Cold Water Swimming Trailing : [...]
Flickr continues to blow my mind – it really does. This article about their code management and versioning actually blew me away. I know continuous integration can work (I imagine it can completely fail too unless your dev staff have their heads screwed on) I’ve done some really easy go-lives (of simple things) and some [...]
If you run a bunch of Linux boxes, or even just the one to be honest, there are a few tools which you probably know about by now, but will help you keep on top of your system. Linux has a lovely habit of just pploughing along quite happily for years (whilst not Linux I’ve [...]
One of the things that has bugged me for ages is how to track how many people are subscribing to my RSS feeds. Short of using Feedburner or other such tracking systems, there was no way I could do it on my own.. Then, in the shower this week (where I have many of my [...]
I just can’t sleep tonight, I can’t make it happen. It’s 4 hours since I went to bed and this must be the third time I’ve turned on the light to do somethign because I’m bored. It’s also ages since I posted, time to write again. Donald Rumsfelt, the eejit who seemed to be very [...]
So, the blog here had been terminally quiet of late, mostly because I’m run off my feet with work, and have limited internet access (Orange Mobile is gash where signal is patchy). Fear not – many half writen drafts to be published. Possibly Related Posts: Cold Water Swimming Trailing : One Forget the deli, find [...]