CodeC11b July 29th, 2008
Almond and Coconut Encrusted Fish
Tonight’s dinner was completely made up. It mostly started when I saw we had some almonds. Last week we got a slicer/shredder for our Kitchen Aid stand mixer. It said in it’s manual that you could slice up almonds so I thought I ‘d give it a try. Either it doesn’t work well or I’m doing something wrong, but it came out chopped. There was also a lot of almond dust, so I thought it would make a good breading. So I covered our haddock with flour, gave it an egg wash. I then covered it with a mixture of almonds, shredded coconut and some panko. I then baked it at 400 until it easily flaked with a fork. This was around the time the coconut started to brown. While the fish was baking I made a sauce with raspberry preserves, Marsala, and brown sugar.
I’d also like to point out the bread my girlfriend made earlier in the week; it tasted very good dipped in the sauce. But I do suppose that jam does taste good with toast.
CodeC11b July 28th, 2008
Shrimp Kabob
Very quick and easy to make. All we did was marinate some cooked shrimp in a reciepe we got from Hannaford’s “fresh Magazine.” We then put the shrimp on bamboo skewers with onions, green peppers, red peppers, and mushrooms. We then steamed the kabob’s in the marinade on a cast iron grill pan. The kabob’s did not make very good contact with the grill pan so that is why I poured the left over marinade on the pan to steam them.
Hmm, kabobs.
CodeC11b July 27th, 2008
Friday night me and my girlfriend made some chicken cordon bleu that turned out very good. I just made up the recipe as we went along.
First I butterflied large boneless chicken breasts; I cut them so they opened like books. I then wrapped Swiss cheese in thinly sliced ham, making sure the cheese was completely enclosed to prevent it from leaking out while it cooked. I then shut the cheese wraps in the chicken books (so to speak). Next I covered the chicken in flour and gave them an egg wash. We then mixed equal parts bread crumbs to panko (Japanese bread crumbs) and added in some Italian spices, ground pepper, and enough olive oil to make the mixture damp. We then covered the chicken in the bread crumb mixture and put them in a 400 degree oven for about 30min (or until the chicken is at about 170 degrees).
Chicken Cordon Bleu
CodeC11b July 25th, 2008
An outline/to-do-list of things to come , and of things once forgotten:
Robotics
- Capstone – Configurable Airborne Adhock Network of Sensors (CAANS*), aka Blimps
- Whiskerbot* – The wall following robot
- Spybot* – the RC car follower
- Hacking the Roomba
- Arduino – a fun way to kill time and automate the house
- Making a speaker – who says a Styrofoam plate can’t sound good?
- DC Motor – another experiment with magnetics
* I didn’t come up with the names Read more... (228 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)
Software
- Server overhaul – what it was suppose to be, what it has become, and what should it be
- Distro Tour – is Ubuntu still the right OS for me?
- Perl – Possibly the greatest scripting language
- Python – Possibly an even better scripting language, I don’t know, I’ve never tried it
- OpenGL – More math then I imagined, but fun
- C++ and Qt – GUI’s are your friend
Consumer Products
- VZ Navigator – the only reason I will probably stay with Verizon
CodeC11b July 17th, 2007
After a long day of taking photos with Topslakr and my girlfriend up at the Flume Gorge in New Hampshire, I decided that my proverbial unit was not big enough. With my pocket sized Canon PowerShot SD450, It was near impossible to take shots in the dark shadow of Topslakr’s telephoto lens. On a clear bright day the SD450 performed admirably, but under lighting I would consider adequate, the camera produced grainy and blurry images. From a camera that is marketed as a point and shoot, I found it too difficult to produce images that were of any reasonable quality in a variety of situations. At ISO 100, there was noticeable grain, and to me this was unacceptable. At the end of the day the SD450 was not the camera for me.
Camera Model: Canon PowerShot SD450
Shutter Speed 1/8 sec.
Aperture Value: f/4.5
ISO: 400
Flash Fired: No
Focal Length: 14.4 mm (35mm: 85.5mm)
Camera Mode: Auto
. Read more... (2206 words, 11 images, estimated 8:49 mins reading time)
CodeC11b April 23rd, 2007
Ubuntu’s released Feisty Fawn (7.04) a week ago, and I decided it was about time that Suse got the boot on my desktop media system. Having installed 6.10 on my laptop several weeks ago, I have been very very pleased with Ubuntu. I was quite excited to install Feisty Fawn, however I was met with a few surprises. The very first thing that happened was that the live cd did not properly detect my video card, and failed to load X. With the help of Topslakr, that was quickly resolved with a X -configure. I have had problems with my Nvidia video card in the past, but the latest Suse installs had no problem, so I was a bit disappointed. The second thing that happened which was no big deal, but still a bit surprising, was there was no install shortcut on my desktop. I did find it in the menus, but there is no reason I should have had to find it all. The last thing that kind of surprised me was that Gparted was no longer the partition utility used during the install. Gparted was on the live cd, and being that this is just a personal preference, once again really no big deal. The only major difference that I noticed right away was the new wireless utility, a very big plus. This was the easiest wireless setup I have done within Linux by far. It automatically detected the WPA encryption, and asked me for a password, without ever so much as opening up a config file — good bye wpa-supplicant. Read more... (401 words, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
CodeC11b April 12th, 2007
I now have on two separate systems resized the Windows XP partition and have dual booted with Ubuntu. This process was absolutely painless. The first step of course is making sure you have enough free space on your system to load Ubuntu. I believe at a minimum you need 2GB to install the base image however this not nearly sufficient. I believe for Ubuntu you should have at least 5GB. As always make sure to backup any important files, because although unlikely you may loose them all.
To get started you should download an Ubuntu Live CD (DVD is preferable for more packages), pop it in your computer and boot up with it. When Ubuntu loads up, on its desktop there is an install shortcut for you to click on. After a few steps it asks you if you want partitions to be handled automatically, or manually. Go ahead do it manually, it really is quite simple. This should load up a copy of GParted. Read more... (576 words, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)
CodeC11b April 10th, 2007
Last night I was playing with my iPod, and decided to try migrating away from iTunes, and try something native to Linux. Topslakr had once warned me the difficulty in doing so, but I thought I would try anyway. First I attempted gtkPod, and was very disappointed with its inability to handle Podcast subscriptions. However, gtkPod did seem to handle music content quite well. I then loaded up RhythmBox and thought I had a winner… after importing my whole music collection, and subscribing to all my Podcasts, I completely failed to notice that the program could not sync to an iPod but could only play from an iPod (Bakaw?). To make things worse, RhythmBox decided to stop downloading my Podcasts, and then hung. I then loaded up Banshee, but closed it quickly. It must of been bad since I can’t remember anything about it. Lastly, before running out of steam, I tried gPodder (a Podcast aggregator only). This program seemed to work very well for subscribing to Podcasts, and syncing them to the iPod. My only complaint is that I can’t run it in the background, and just have it sync whenever I plug the iPod in. When looking up packages, I did see a Podcast aggregator that was command line, so when I get I chance I’m going to give that a try. My idea is that I can have the command line aggregator update my Podcast folder in a cron job, then I can just use gtkPod to sync over everything. I do find it bizarre that the only thing holding me to Windows at the moment is Apple, go figure.-CodeC11b
CodeC11b April 8th, 2007
After a year of standing strong by Suse, this week may be the last I see of it on my dedicated Linux desktop media system. This computer was the first system of mine to see an open source OS, and Suse 10.0 was my first love. After a few weeks of being promiscuous with distros, such Mandriva and Fedora Core, Suse hit the spot with its 10.1 makeover. Mandriva was very clean and pretty, but turned out to be quite controlling. Time and time again I told Mandriva that my wireless card really wasn’t a scanner, but time and time again Mandriva tried to keep me from the internet. I broke it off clean with Mandriva, wondering what could have been… but then Fedora came around with a clean polish, and it was difficult to resist. From the start Fedora was not a good match for me. This distro was a bit too foreign for me, and I wasn’t willing to spend the time to learn the command vocabulary necessary to get our relationship off the ground. My major compliant was an apparent lack of central management skills; Fedora was far too bubbly for me. Fedora Core made me miss YAST and SAX, and eventually it was inevitable with a new release, that Suse was going to have a second chance. Suse 10.1 was fantastic through many months of college, supporting me in every aspect to learn Linux, and migrate from Windows. Suse served as a wireless router, a backup system, and as a media system. For the first time I had an easy to use, central computer, that liberated my IBM T43 from the confines of my campus wired internet. For the first time I had a system that could show me the world through the eyes of a 27inch television, and allowed me to hear the beautiful sounds of 5.1. Everything was going great, until I took it a bit too far. Read more... (695 words, estimated 2:47 mins reading time)
