DorkMatter.net

I’m bored and waiting on the UPS guy to arrive with my new cable so I thought I’d post yesterday evening’s doodle. Can you guess what it is yet? Yeah it’s supposed to be an orchid. I was playing about with inkscape and needed a subject so I drew one of the orchid flowers from the pot on my desk.

I’m not especially happy with it but I can’t decide what needs done to make it better. That little knobbly bit needs some work and probably the lower petal is out of proportion. I think it’s not realistic enough to go for realism and it’s much too complicated to have a graphic or stylised look. I might experiment later in simplifying it.

Hope the UPS guy arrives soon. The danger of electrocution is slightly worrying.

When I bought my MacBook back in May ‘06 one of the nice extras that wowed me way more than was necessary was the power adapter with its magnetic attachment and colour changing LED (I know, it’s sad). The light comes on when it’s plugged in and lights red if the battery is charging and green when it’s fully charged. I’d been noticing since some time in June that the light wasn’t always coming on when I plugged in the “MagSafe” power adapter. It was slightly vexing but no big deal. It got worse and by the beginning of the month the battery wasn’t charging properly.

I did a bit of searching on the web and came across AppleDefects.com which mentioned a variety of problems with the MagSafe connector. None of those problems seemed to affect my cable until I took a closer look under the cord clip… eek a huge gash in the shielding, bare wire, my lap in close proximity! You can see that the tear is just below the outer sheath of insulation. (more…)

Well, I finally got round to printing out my decal onto the static cling film I bought a few weeks ago. The results are a little disappointing. Firstly I didn’t realise the “film” was of such a heavy grade. If it was paper it would be about 120 gsm or heavier. It’s about the thickness of cartridge paper. So although it clings statically, film is a bit of an exaggeration. As as result I couldn’t have it curve around the corner of my laptop towards the screen – it’s just not flexible enough. I used a product called “Print & Go Vision”. It was the only variety of static cling film I was able to get my hands on without buying in from abroad. If it had been half the weight it would have been much more successful.

As well as that I also forgot to flip the image before printing. No big deal but since the film isn’t quite what I was looking for I don’t think I’ll bother reprinting. It doesn’t help that the printer made my octopus a bit on the brown side.

Still, it looks quite nice sitting on the top of my MacBook and I like the depth created by having a coloured layer sitting on top of the white. Photos to follow.

I just thought I’d post a link to possibly the coolest piece of design ever seen. Pear Light. I think I found a link to it on makezine or one of the other feeds I subscribe to. The pears are detachable and continue to glow when not on the tree which brings me to this almost equally cool concept a wireless floating light bulb.

Pesky creative people… Why can’t I come up with cool stuff like that?!

“You’re a disgrace to your gingerness!”

Today must be a day for updates. I realised I had forgotten to post back about the chillis.

Well, the results aren’t as good as previous years’ crops. I now have 3 chillis and they’re all on the same plant. The chilli that was just a bud during my last post hasn’t grown as big as I had expected and is only about 1cm in length and less than 1 cm in girth. The two new chillis are almost the same size.

Despite being on a sunny windowsill they are still looking a bit anemic although there is slight purple colouring coming through. They just don’t look rip yet so they’ll stay on the plants for a few weeks longer.

The other 3 plants I have crammed in that pot (clearly this is the reason for the lack of juicy chillis) have yet to produce fruit. One hasn’t flowered yet and I’m hoping to overwinter that one. The other two have produced plenty of flowers but having left them alone for a weekend all the flowers and flower buds fell off despite keeping the plant out of the sun and well watered. New flowers are coming through so there’s still hope.

I think next year I will stick to some of the better known chilli varieties.

2 weeks have passed since the Vodka Challenge and the results have been tasty. I had been expecting something slightly stronger in flavour than the blackcurrant flavoured Absolut but nowhere near as delicious as Sloe Gin (the inspiration for the project). I was pleasantly surprised.

I was due to report a week back on the results but I got distracted sampling the goods. After one week of agitating the berry vodka mixture it had darkened to a deep cherry red. Tony and I had a shot each and were able to drink it with just ice where we would normally have a mixer. Considering this is cheapo vodka that was unpalatable pre-berries this was pretty good going. There was barely a hint of alcohol to the flavour and it tasted more of jam than booze. Yum!

We left it another week before draining it. Due to a lack of sieve we poured it through a fork into a jug, removed the fruit from the bottle and then put the vodka back into the bottle. Had I had more foresight I would have used the berries in a meringue or a trifle but instead the vast majority of them found their way down the sink.

We still have half a bottle of vodka ready for the next infusion. So far the plan is cranberry and orange but that will have to wait for cranberry season in a few weeks. I’ll show how that goes if/when we make it.

Challenge 1. – Can Jude distinguish between standard Grant’s/Glen’s vodka, Smirnoff (the standard triple distilled variety) and Glens DIY triple filtered?

I will need:

• A water filter, e.g. Brita (I used a cheapo Tesco brand filter)
• 1 70cl bottle of Glen’s Vodka
• A jug
• 1 measure of Smirnoff Red

Start by washing out the filter as per the instructions. I kept aside a measure of standard Glen’s and then put the rest through the water filter. When it’s been through once decant into the jug and pour back through the filter. Repeat. All in all this takes about half an hour.

Now, I just so happened to have the end of a bottle of Smirnoff lying around so we’re staging a blind taste test. Does the water filter make the cheaper Glens vodka taste as smooth as Smirnoff? I also kept some unfiltered Glens as the control.

Time for the taste test!
Sample 1. – Mild smell, smooth flavour, thin consistency, afterburn
Sample 2. – Stronger smell, harsh flavour
Sample 3. – Strongest smell, stingy on the lips, similar flavour to 2.

I guess Sample 1 is Smirnoff, 2 filtered Glen’s, 3 standard Glen’s. Tony reveals I guessed correctly. Back through the filter for you number 2!

Triple filtered ≠ Triple distilled

So why am I filtering vodka when I could spend £5 more and get Stolichnaya? Further experiments are to take place and there’s no way I want to waste a perfectly good bottle of Stoli on them.

Challenge 2: Fruit Infusion

Being a fan of Absolut in all it’s flavours (except for the pepper one, that’s just bad), I decided it was high time I tried a vodka infusion. Never one for half measures (ugh, sorry) I opted for a summer fruits selection as opposed to one type of fruit. I’m doing this on the cheap so I bought frozen berries. The fresh ones are twice the price for half the amount. The selection I bought contains raspberries, black currants, blackberries and red currants. When I see blackberries I think of horrible white worms. No doubt they’ll float to the top if there are any, it’ll give it a mezcal look. Nice.

So first I washed the berries, partly to finish defrosting them. I figured that as well as being cheap, the frozen type are much mushier so hopefully it will infuse faster. After jamming 500g of berries into a 70cl bottle I poured in my now 5 times filtered vodka. I used a little under half the bottle, I’d say 30cl of vodka this time around leaving a bit of room in the neck of the bottle for agitating the mixture. The rest of the vodka went into the old Smirnoff bottle which I can either use for top ups or to make a new infusion.
It should be ready to sample in about a week. One plan is to let the infusion get really strong, strain off the vodka and add it to the plain vodka to get a full bottle of the infused vodka. It depends how nice it tastes. I’ll report back in a week.

When will I learn my lesson about being in drunken charge of a camera?
My first mistake was drinking 6 glasses (I should really say plastic cups) of champagne while helping Gemma get ready for her wedding. The photographer wasn’t around much while she was getting ready so I got my camera to grab some pics of her before the ceremony. Then more champagne.
The ceremony went well and I got lots of nice pictures of them walking in, exchanging rings, signing the register etc. I also got plenty of photos of the drinks reception, some family shots, the speeches, cutting the cake, the first dance. During this time I managed another 2 glasses of wine and 2 (or was it 3) more of champagne. Oh dear. I didn’t notice I was drunk.
Then I had the bright idea to change the format from large jpg to raw. Oops, did I just press “Format”?! Nooooooooo! Everything gone, cleared off the card. I was so annoyed I actually cried. The shock had sobered me up by at least 2 glasses of wine and thankfully I had the presence of mind to swap cards before taking any photos.
I borrowed another CF card and got some more pictures of the reception.

After some research on the webbernet it was begining to look hopeful. We were able to copy the contents of the card onto Tony’s computer and pull pretty much all the images out from there. I think a few may have been missing but thankfully nothing important was lost. Tony’s computer runs Ubuntu and in case you’re interested he’s working on a write up at ten.ynottony.net
I didn’t try recovering it on the mac but I was interested to try out one of the many free recovery programs for Windows (that computer runs 2000). For that I used “Art Plus Digital Photography Recovery”. I found it on download.com. The results were pretty good. Not quite as good as on Tony’s computer. Some of the images came in with coloured bands and it was quite slow but it did find a few that were missed the first time round. I’d recommend if you’re using it to run it through a few times and choose a new folder each time and then compare them. It was very simple to use if the linux way seems too scary.

But anyway – what a relief!