Poly and Facebook

I just found a way to make people who are more than 'facebook friends' to appear more significantly on your profile.

It's a relatively new feature that I wasn't aware of, called "Featured Relationships"

Hit Edit my profile, then Relationships.

Create a new list, I called mine Anchors (Thanks cunningminx! http://polyweekly.com/2010/11/poly-weekly-260-replacing-primary-and-secondary/ ), and added my partners to that list, and made sure that list appears first on my profile, followed by family, then friends

It's not the same as being "in a relationship with" someone on facebook, but I thought it was a nice thing to do.

Igorrr english translations

Poisson Soluble : Soluble Fish
1 Petit Prélude Périmé : Dated (past use-by date, off) little prelude
2 Mastication Numérique : Digital Mastication
3 Tartine De Contrebasse : Bass Sandwich
4 Pizza Aux Narines : Nostril Pizza
5 Dixit Dominus : latin: The Lord Said
6 Sueur De Caniche : Caniche (Poodle) Sweat
7 Dieu Est-Il Un Etre?: Is God a Being
8 Sorbet Aux Ongles : Fingernail Sorbet

Moisissure : Mold
1 Valse En Décomposition : Decomposing Waltz
2 Oesophage De Tourterelle : Oesophagus of a Turtledove (Samples Chopin Etudes, Op.10 No.2 in A minor (Chromatique))
3 Putrefiunt : Putrefiunt
4 Extro : Extro
5 Liquid Requiem : Liquid Requiem
6 Brutal Swing : Brutal Swing (Violent Swing sometimes)
7 Phasme Obèse : Obese Stick Insect
8 Huile Molle : Soft Oil
9 Croute : Crust
10 Moelleux : Spongy, like a light and fluffy spongecake
11 Moisissure : Mold


Nostril:
It's mostly english, but here goes!

1. Double Monk
2. Tendon
3. Excessive Funeral
4. Very Long Chicken
5. Melting Nails
6. Pavor Nocturnus : Night Terror (Latin)
7. Caros : Dear (Latin), Expensive (Spanish)
8. Cruciform Dachshund
9. Half a Pony
10. Unpleasant Sonata
11. Dentist
12. Fryzura Konika : Horse Hair (Polish)
13. Veins
14. Moldy Eye

Updated, Thanks Klara!

Removing unwanted android apps

Thanks Firerat :)

adb remount
adb shell
apk=ADWLauncher.apk
rm /system/app/$apk
pm uninstall `awk -F \" '/'$apk'/ { print $2 }' /data/system/packages.xml`
exit
adb push Launcher.apk /system/app/
adb shell fix_permissions -f Launcher.apk

Android goodness

We're now fully up with the android! Both of us have an Android handset, I've got the old school HTC Magic, and Jen has the HTC Legend.

I've written a GPS Speedo app for android, works well and was good fun to code up. Go find it at

http://code.google.com/p/gpspeedo

Gluten Free Cake recipe!

Basically a pound cake,

1 Cup Gluten Free Flour (see: http://pawarren.blogspot.com/2010/06/useful-gf-flour-mix.html )
1 Cup Butter, approx 250g
1 Cup Sugar, raw or caster
1 Cup Milk
1 Tbs Baking Powder
1 Egg

- Cream butter and sugar
- Add flour, Baking Powder and Egg
- Mix up a bit
- add Milk while mixing
- Beat until fluffy, doesn't take too long.
- Batter is quite thick!
- Spoon/scrape into a lined or oiled tin
- bake at 150 C for around 40 minutes, until the outside is golden.

The cake will be very floppy and flimsy. I leave it out overnight which lets the Xanthan gum set nicely and give a firm cake.

Useful GF flour mix

2/3 cup Rice flour
1/3 cup Potato Flour
1 Tsp Xanthan gum

I'll experiment with a bit of Tapioca starch in my next attempt, but the above works really well for just about everything. Needs a touch more raising agent than wheat flower.

Simple Gluten Free Bread Take 1

1 cup rice flour
1 ½ table spoons sugar
1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
½ cup milk
1/8 cup vegetable oil

Mix dry ingredients, beat egg, add wet ingredients to dry. Mix thoroughly by hand. Pour mixture into a lightly greased loaf tin, let it rise for 30 minutes or so, bake for around 30 minutes at 180C, until the top is lightly browned and it's baked all the way through.

It comes out really crumbly, but very tasty. I'll have to research what to use to make it less crumbly before I can really use this bread as toast or sandwich bread, but it's quite good to crumble into soups.

openssl invocation for self signed certs.


openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt


Something I can never seem to remember

Gluten Free Ale recipe

Roast Buckwheat at 190 C for 1 hour. Leave lightly covered in tray overnight.

Heat 10L of water to 80 C, put buckwheat into a steeping bag, and into water for half an hour.

Remove grain bag from water. I managed to keep a stable 78C, made the wort a nice dark colour, I don't think it's going to be a dark beer tho, need to roast until the smoke pouring out of the kitchen is too much, not just the smoke out of the oven ;)

Bring water to boil, add 2Kg of sorghum syrup, wait for hot break (which isn't big with sorghum!)

Add 10g SuperPride (15% AA) hops start timer

At 45 Minutes, add 15g of Kent Goldings

At 45 Minutes, add 1Kg Sorghum Syrup, 500g Dextrose, 1 Whirlfloc tablet.

At flameout, add 15g of Kent Goldings

Place in tub of iced water, setting up a vigorous whirlpool, and let stand for half an hour.

Pour into fermenter, aerating vigorously. cool to pitching temperature by filling to 23L with cold water.

Add S-04 yeast.

Fermented for 15 days, then racked to bottling bucket with 3/4 cups dextrose in 2 cups boiled water. At bottling, tastes very sweet, nice light hoppy aroma.

OG: 1045
FG: 1012

This ended up being a very mild beer, a little sweet, but eminantly drinkable with subtle flavour and aroma from the hops. A little more of a stronger hops taste for the enxt one I think!

Solaris Express samba vs sharesmb

I've found that Solaris Express CE has been particularly crap at keeping my ZFS bucket shared out via smb. using


zfs set sharesmb=on bucket/Media


worked for a while, but every now and again I wouldn't be able to mount it from any machines on the network, and logging in to the solaris box and doing


sharemgr list


would hang, as would any zfs set things, a reboot would fix that for a while.

So I got sick of that and decided to use SAMBA instead. The tricks with this were to create the config file at


/etc/sfw/samba/smb.conf

stop the zfs sharing:


zfs set sharesmb=off bucket/Media
svcadm disable smb/server


add a password for the relevant user:


smbpasswd -a strageattractor
blah blah


and finally, start the samba server:


svcadm enable samba


Done, and it's been up like this for months now without trouble!

Making Yoghurt

Terribly easy!

Scald some full cream milk, which means heat it up until you get tiny bubbles on the surface and a skin starting to form. I do 2L batches, but any size should work.

Stick it in a container and stir in a spoon of live culture yoghurt, this is the starter, keep between 37 and 45 degrees C for 8 hours to ferment, strain with cheesecloth, or an old sheet in a colander, for 1.5 hours, cool in the fridge and serve.

I have a funky old swing top coffee jar, and another metal jar that I use for the fermenting. To keep it hot, I stick the jars in an old styrofoam 6 pack esky and add hot water from the tap every few hours, draining and filling the esky when it gets too full.

After straining, I get about 1L of yoghurt and 1L of whey. I tried to make ricotta out of the whey, by boiling for 15 minutes, I got some lovely tasty ricotta out of it, only a half a spoon tho!

The yoghurt that comes out at the end is the tastiest creamiest yoghurt I've ever tasted! Better even than the Jalna stuff. It's full cream yoghurt, so lots of the yummy fats. I add a spoon of honey to take the bite off the tanginess, you can add whatever you prefer to it, but it's quite good by itself too.

And for your next batch, put a spoon or two of the yoghurt into a smaller container, you then use that as your live culture starter, instead of the store bought stuff :)

Fig Jam recipe

My giant fig tree of doom has finally started providing figs, only got a kilo over the weekend, but that's enough to start the Jam!

- Equal weights of top and tailed figs and white sugar.
- 1Tbs each of Cinnamon and Allspice.

It helps if you have a handful of quite green figs, that adds some pectin to the mix.

Add all of that to a pot a good bit bigger than necessary, slowly bring to boil, stirring every 5 minutes or so to prevent burning the sugar.

Let it boil for an hour or so.

Mash or blend to your preferred chunkiness, I like it really smooth so I blend it.

Bottle, Cool, Serve!