BREAD

Sultana And Cinnamon Sourdough Bread

This is a loaf made fairly quickly as a gift. It’s the standard sourdough recipe with added sultanas and cinnamon and it smells incredible. Ingredients Leaven 15g Sourdough starter 120g Cool water 105g Wholemeal bread flour Dough 375g White bread flour 200g Warm water @ 28°C 12g Salt 100g

BREAD

French Sourdough Country Loaf

I work in Solihull and every so often a market is hosted there. Sometimes it’s local farmers, sometimes further reaching. This week just gone was a French market. I saw a stall selling bread so, obviously, I took a look. There was a variety of tarts and small cakes

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6 Brewing Methods in 75seconds!

A little animation I found.

BLOG

The Inventor of Motion Pictures

I came across this the other day, it’s a short video telling the story of Edward Muybridge who is considered as being the first person to create moving pictures. The film is narrated from the perspective of Eadweard’s abandoned son, Floddie, and the entire tale is seen through

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Dangerous Visions

The BBC will be soon broadcasting a new sci-fi series on radio called Dangerous Visions. Dramas that explore contemporary takes on future dystopias. You will be disturbed, as you see the present reflected in the glass of an uneasy future. There’s 10 episodes in all, starting with Aldous Huxley’

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iBook Aftermath

After deciding that this project was at an end, I was with an iBook that that didn’t do anything. I decided the only right thing to do is reverse my work and install OS X back on there. I had to create an image of the DVD of course,

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Graphic Grief

The iBook did begin to load Lubuntu and actually got reasonably far. The splash page came up, the screen went blank and loaded a load of drivers, all seemed correct. Screen flashed back and then…. Nothing. I looked into it and it seems there is a page for addressing PPC

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Getting There - The Summary

Ok, it seemed like at last I was getting somewhere and had successfully managed to image the iBook. I meant to add another bookmark, that I found useful from the Ubuntu website directly. Here’s the actual list of commands I ran after ensuring the target disk (the iBook) was

BREAD

Corn Bread

This is my first American bread and it’s a corn bread made with coarse cornmeal or polenta that I bought from Raja Brothers in Birmingham. The recipe itself has come from a blog I found called Breadcetera written by a self learnt fella called Steve. This recipe makes 2-3

BREAD

Naan

I’ve always fancied making naan. For me, a good naan is the perfect partner to a curry and somehow the meal isn’t complete without one with a slightly crispy crust and soft doughy inside. This recipe is mostly from Jamie Oliver, but I took the liberty of halving

carrot

Carrot & Orange Muffins

I do love a good muffin, but oddly, I’ve struggled making my own. They never seem as moist and delectable as some of the bought ones. However, I thnk I cracked it with this recipe, which is a hybrid between a Jamie Oliver one and a Waitrose one. Ingredients

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Blog / Journaling

You may have noticed a barrage of blog entries lately to this and my other blogs. I think this has been mostly triggered by some specific learning experiences that I’ve been embarking on lately. Whether it’s been the iBook or making yogurt, I’ve decided the best way

Yogurt

Icelandic Skyr

Filtering the whey Sadly my previous yogurt developed a mould a week after making so I landed up buying some for the interim. However, on my shopping trip, I discovered Skyr (pronounced skeer). I’d had some Icelandic yogurt before but it turned out, it wasn’t actually from Iceland.

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A New Day, A New Drive

The USB flash drive was a bit of a non-starter so, I decided to use a USB drive I had. As an aside, G-Technology make some good external drives, so if you’re ever in the market, they’re well worth a look. They cost a little more, but they

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Time To Target Disk

Until now, the original Mac OS X system was still on the iBook’s internal drive and I had been using external drives to image and then use to boot and install on to the iBook. Unfortunately, for ever reason, it wouldn’t work. Sometimes, the external drive would power

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Breaking The Rules With Booting

With my new find about booting from USB, I imaged my titanium USB stick with Lubuntu and hoped for the best. You have to be a little careful with USB sticks and their drawing power. Some work on any USB port and some need slightly higher powered ones. So, the

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Here’s A Question

How do you get a 14 year old computer to boot into an operating system installer when it’ll only boot from Firewire or CD and your optical drive doesn’t work and the only firewire you have has just failed? You have to change the rules! Ok, there is

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Booting From External Drives

So why didn’t the external drive boot up? It was a Firewire interface, it was partitioned with APM and the software on there should have booted, but when turning on the computer and holding the ‘ALT’ or ‘option’ key, the drive didn’t show. I concluded that perhaps the

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Discs, Disks and Imaging

With the Linux version decided upon, it would now need to be installed on the iBook. These Ubuntu based distros are designed to be burned to a CD or DVD as a ‘Live’ disc. This means the host computer boots from optical drive straight into the OS and can be

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Decisions, Decisions!

With the distros installed as virtual machines on my Mac mini, it was easy to test them and get a feel for them. Certainly, Mint felt the most polished and complete installation, but then I wonder if that’s just down to aesthetics rather than anything else. Mint did suffer

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Lubuntu

Lubuntu is the third distro I tried. Lubuntu (/lʊˈbʊntuː/ loo-buun-too) is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu but using the LXDE desktop environment in place of Ubuntu’s Unity shell and GNOME desktop. LXDE is touted as being “lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient” I like Lubuntu and

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Ubuntu MATE

Following up from Mint was MATE.  Ubuntu MATE is essentially Ubuntu but replacing the Unity graphical interface with an environment called MATE (pronounced Mar-Tey apparently). Ubuntu MATE is a free and open-source Linux distribution and an official derivative of Ubuntu. Its main differentiation from Ubuntu is that it uses the

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Mint Linux

The first distro of Linux I tried out was Mint Linux Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu that strives to be a “modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.” Linux Mint provides full out-of-the-box multimedia support by

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Testing (Virtual) Machines

After feeling happy that the iBook was back in working order, the next step was to install Linux, but which one? I was quite sure that whatever did get installed on the iBook, it had to be fairly user friendly and somehow familiar. My brother has used PCs and Macs,

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iBook Hardware Status

With the iBook now powering up successfully, it seemed like a good time to check the hardware out before embarking on going Linux. The machine powered up with a chime, which means that the processor and RAM are working. The iBook had a standard 128Mb which is soldered on the