May 17, 2012
They've let me order a Raspberry Pi
I finally got the email saying 'hey, you can buy a Raspberry Pi'. So I have done, together with the operating system and power supply. Now I just need to work out what I might do with it. Good thing I'm learning (a) circuits and (b) Python, right? Jonathan has grabbed schematics for a case and logo and is aiming to persuade his technology teacher to let him make a case on the laser cutter at school; if he fails then my next stop will be Hackspace. Anyway, if you have any ideas for good uses for a tiny cheap computer, do let me know.
I finished unit 5 of Udacity CS212, now onto game theory, and loved every bit of it. Currently taking a break from learning about impedance and complex amplitude in MITx.
What have we been eating? Yesterday we had a spring vegetable and veal lasagne by Gordon Ramsey, chosen because Ocado had an offer on sustainably farmed veal mince. I obviously ignored the exhortations to use super-expensive baby veg and just used what we had, so fresh chicken stock, leek, carrot, courgette, flat beans, mushrooms, spinach, dried chervil, ordinary cooking cheddar not parmesan. Pasta bakes that don't have a roux-based sauce get a real boost from pouring egg over the top, and this looked beautiful and was much appreciated and served six (using at least twice as much veg as he recommended). My one concern was that the ricotta did not form a smooth sauce; nobody seemed to mind though.
The day before we had pizza. I've been going all technical with homemade pizza; purchasing pizza stones and baking sheets with holes in them. If you buy the toppings specifically for the pizza then it becomes very expensive; if you reckon to use whatever's around then it's not. In this case we had scraps of duck, chicken, a couple of tiny chorizos, black olives, red pepper and red onion. Whenever I'm making the sauce I think I should make this in big batches, but then I forget again until the next time.
Tonight we're going to have cheating chicken biryani, except slightly less cheating because I'll make the curry paste as I go. Later: The paste was a small onion, two cloves of garlic, a cube of ginger, and a couple of tablespoons of ground almonds, together with some ground cumin, coriander, turmeric and cayenne (what I think of as 'cheap curry spices') and some ketchup (famous cheat for all sorts of things where I don't want to use a whole can of tomatoes; this bottle has indian spices in it already and was a freebie from Heinz). I have slightly reduced the amount of chicken and added half a celeriac.
I also had two beetroots that needed eating up, and they couldn't go in this without making it a totally different sort of curry. So I've made Beet Pachadi, from Das Sreedharan of Rasa. I use the recipe from his brilliant cookbook Fresh Flavours of India
Posted by Alison Scott at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)
May 13, 2012
Love May or May not Tear Us Apart
Tomorrow you can go and buy an actual single release of "Love Will Tear Us Apart", by June Tabor and the Oysterband, and there's a video!
Filmed at the Union Chapel, probably the best venue in the world.
I'm just quickly finishing up the Week 9 deadline for MITx 6.002, so no time for an extended entry. But I feel like I'm finding it a lot easier than I did in the early weeks.
Dinner notes: We had Jamie Oliver's spring poached chicken on Friday night, with the vegetables substituted for 'whatever happened to be around at the time'. It is as delicious as advertised though I am not sure whether I'll be able to get a second stock out of the bones or whether I should just throw them away. I was out all day yesterday and the family had takeaway. Today Steven made us chilli, enlivened by the pepper grinder imploding and tipping several hundred peppercorns into the chilli. We fished them all out again but that pepper mill has lasted less than a year and I will be invoking the gods of 'Merchantable Quality' on the morrow. The other meal today was the duck liver pate, on toast.
Posted by Alison Scott at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2012
Kinnersley Castle
Kinnersley Castle is the first of the two 'Mazurkas' played by Mabon. I have it in the excellent Jamie Smith tunebook Tunesmith, which I'd recommend to anyone. Anyway, it's in the only partly melodeon friendly key Bm, but every note is playable on a standard 2 row D/G and most of the chords are at least approximatable. So that has amused me this evening. Target date for playing this out: perhaps July?
I thought I'd written a little this morning about dinner, too. We had Jonathan's parents' night tonight, so something cooked in advance was called for. Soup, then, given the duck stock. I also have fresh kaffir limes. First time ever, thank you Ocado, but they were very expensive (about £2.50 for two small limes) so I want to make sure I use them. Thai-influenced soup then, but without additional fat (the duck stock still had a little fat in it so I left that in rather than skimming it). I ended up making a lentil soup with the duck stock (perhaps four pints), a bag of red lentils (puy are more traditional with duck but I didn't have any), a couple of onions, several sticks of the Floppiest Celery in the World (thank you Walthamstow market for selling me celery suitable only for stew), and a couple of pounds of halved cherry tomatoes (also from the market). Flavoured with some indifferent red curry paste and the zest of one of the limes. This turned out very tasty indeed; the original plan was to add sliced peppers, fennel and courgettes when I returned from the parents' night, and perhaps some peanut butter, but the soup was splendid without it.
Posted by Alison Scott at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
Missionaries and Cannibals
I'm currently studying two courses. They're both MOOCs; massive open online courses. The Wikipedia article on MOOCs is rotten and very out of date. They're exciting at the moment because some famous universities, and extremely interesting lecturers, are getting involved in them. This form of study is good for me because it's free, and it's very convenient, and because abilities like google-fu and forum participation are very handy.
It feels extremely disruptive. People keep saying 'oh, but it won't take the place of traditional undergraduate residential study'. And it might well not, if you're a first rate university. But it seems clear that lectures delivered this way have the potential to be far better than the more mediocre sort of university teaching. Credentialing will come; perhaps not for a year or two, but it will come. And at that point, people are going to start wondering what exactly they get for their money with full time residential study.
I'm studying the pilot MITx course from MIT, 6.002x Circuits and Electronics. It's a largely unamended MIT sophomore course; prerequisites are some calculus (I'm rusty but I've found the maths very soothing and easy), and electricity and magnetism, which in theory I did at Cambridge but I didn't exactly pay attention. Anyway, whenever I get stuck I stop, read around the issue, and Google. Try doing that with a real lecturer.
The other course is CS212 from Udacity. I know amazingly little about programming. I think it's mostly an accident of fate, but anyway. Time to sort it out. Unlike MITx, Udacity isn't an established university; it's a for-profit startup. That allows it quite a lot of flexibility in what it delivers and how; and it's doing bite-sized eight week courses (hexamesters, they call them). The introductory course, CS101, was straightforward (though I did get a bit stuck on the bonus hard questions in the final exam). I had a choice of followup courses, but I have chosen to do 'Design of Computer programmes'. The lecturer is Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research, and the course is jolly good but I'm finding it quite dense; and last week's unit was just a bit too hard for me.
Anyway, all of that was just preamble to what I was planning to say, which is that I'm going to put some course jottings on the blog. I finished unit 4 of CS212 yesterday. Unlike unit 3, it felt like it followed on tidily from what had gone before. Starting with puzzles such as 'I have a 9 pint and a 4 pint container, and a barrel of beer. How can I measure exactly 6 pints', and 'there are 3 missionaries and 3 cannibals, who need to get across a river in a boat...', we developed code to solve first those specific puzzles, and then general puzzles requiring an effective search.
Today: week 9 of MITx.
Posted by Alison Scott at 07:40 AM | Comments (3)
May 09, 2012
Rendering a Duck
Ducks were half price at Ocado last week, so we had roast duck instead of roast chicken. And this one had giblets (quite a lot of my chickens don't these days). I roasted it on a rack, with loads of veg underneath (potatoes, celeriac, fennel, carrots, red onions, butternut squash, red pepper, garlic); I poured off the excess fat several times during the cooking, so I think I have enough fat for about four more lots of roasties. The skin was crispy but not quite crispy enough, and the meat was fantastic. I'd planned on there being leftover vegetables but I turned my back and they'd all been eaten; that's how much duck fat and juice had soaked into them. Oops. Next time ducks are half price, I'll roast in an empty pan and cook the veg separately with just the regular amount of fat.
We had red cabbage with it; the benefit/catch with organic boxes is that you have to cook what you get. Red cabbage keeps for ages, and this time I'd had one sitting at the bottom of the fridge until the next one came along. My children don't like it, but it's one of my favourite things, and the slightly sharp taste really goes well with fatty meat like duck.
Duck isn't like chicken; a good sized duck famously feeds three, though it's enough for 'just the family' for four; you don't actually need that much roast meat. When the kids clamoured for seconds, I pointed them at the carcass, figuring they'd do as good a job as I would of stripping it.
I was wrong. I threw the remaining duck in the stockpot without a second glance, expecting that when it came out I would have no more meat than would enhance the inevitable soup. But there was loads; silly me. Enough for a stir-fry and the topping for a pizza. I used to discard the vegetables from the stockpot, believing the chefs who say that all their power is used up. But then Allegra McEvedy set me straight, in a recipe for ham hock soup where she purees the stock vegetables and adds half of them to the soup and saves the other half for another soup.
I love giblets; I think of them as a sort of magic meaty lucky dip because they're always a bit random. No sign of a gizzard or kidneys this time, but instead at least two livers and what might have been a third liver or alternatively perhaps lungs; it was attached to the heart. The heart and neck went in the stockpot, but I turned the rest into awesome pate. If you've ever stared at a giblets pack wondering what you've been sent, I recommend Chicken Giblets: an illustrated guide.
I'd never made pate before. When you buy duck liver pate from the supermarket, it's often a bit insipid. I realise now that that is because actual duck livers or other duck offal are very thin on the ground (typically 20-30%), the excess being made up by duck fat, skin, random bits of duck, chicken livers, and who knows what all else. I used Delia's recipe, chosen mostly because it didn't involve chopping and frying an onion or shallot and so is very quick. I didn't use as much butter as Delia does so my pate was about 70% duck meat; the balance being butter, cheap cooking brandy, and spices. This made enough to fill one largish ramekin to the brim; it felt about as much as a small supermarket tub. It's amazingly delicious but actually, just the fried duck liver was amazingly delicious and another time I might just fry that up with butter for my lunch and forget about pate making.
Finally, the pate required clarified butter, and one website said 'don't throw away the curds! They're great on popcorn'. I will try and report back.
None of that will feed us tonight; we're having a fish pie. The fish was planned for a much posher fish stew, but a couple of ingredients didn't turn up, and besides, I couldn't be bothered. So. Fish pie; I put the peas right into the pie these days because that way people eat them. In terms of pie wars, this is of course not a pie; the topping is mashed potato and dishes of this kind are sometimes called fisherman's pie by analogy to cottage pie and shepherd's pie. This used up a couple of random pots of stuff; some leftover white sauce because I made too much for something the other day, and a bit of what I thought was mash but I think was actually gnocchi dough. If the mash ends up tasting like dumplings we'll know why.
Posted by Alison Scott at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
Is anyone still reading?
I am sort of back. Or rather, I kept thinking that it would be nice to have somewhere where I could document things -- you know, stuff I'm doing, stuff I'm cooking, plans, things I haven't tried yet but would like to, places I've been, places I'm going. If only there were some way to do that on the Internet.
I feel like there's been a massive splitting of my online experience. Many of my friends are on FB, which prioritises the trivial over the profound. No, really, it does; it gives greater weight to photos, so all those stupid memes that go round turn up on everyone's front page. More critically, it gives lower weight to status updates. But the status updates are the stuff I care about -- the posts where my friends tell me what they're doing. We're not the kind to post updates like 'I'm eating cereal Right Now'. Anyway, I too am on Facebook, and you can find me there if you like.
I've been cooking, and storing all my recipes in a lovely program called Paprika, which syncs in the cloud and is available for Mac (find and store recipes), iPhone (handy when shopping) and critically, iPad. I keep my iPad on a rack in the kitchen and cook from it all the time. I want to take notes of what I cook and when, but Paprika doesn't have a good interface for that at all.
I don't feel like I'm unemployed. But I have left my old job, and don't have a new one yet. Instead, I'm studying. For free and online, and that feels like a major thing to write about. Plus the inevitable lifestyle things. The Oatmeal is instructive here.
I still want to write about music, probably with Spotify or last.fm links. My old page of mp3 links feels very old-fashioned now that you can stream all sorts of stuff all the time.
Looking at the sidebar, I haven't been putting much on Flickr but I should do more of that; I'm still scrobbling the music I listen to, I stopped using delicious because it looked like it was circling the drain but didn't find anything much to replace it. The 1001 days ran out but I hadn't done all the 101 things.
I do stuff. I might write about it sometimes. Comment if you like.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:55 AM | Comments (4)
June 19, 2009
Grazing and Plugging
I didn't have time to plug Dengue Fever before yesterday's show at the Scala, but what you need to know is this: Andy Kiang of Proper has been telling me how good they are for a while, and finally persuaded me to go to a free record shop gig on Wednesday. Since when I have downloaded three of their albums from eMusic and have been listening to Dengue Fever pretty much solidly. So yup, they rocked and I felt enormously lucky and privileged to be seeing them at the very front of a crowd of about 80 or so. No Spotify for Dengue Fever but you can download a lossless live version of their song Tiger Phone Card from the also awesome B&W Society of Sound.
The record shop in question was Pure Groove in Farringdon. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what a record shop was like; Pure Groove is not like that at all. It consists of an shop-sized open space (they put a few cafe tables in it during the day) with a stage at one end, some comfy chairs, magazines and so on, and a counter down one side behind which is a small selection of interesting rarities, vinyl, signed CDs, t-shirts and so on, a coffee machine and some beer. It reminded me strongly of I Knit London, though the space in the middle is optomised for listening to live music rather than for knitting. They have a in-store gig every evening (and many lunchtimes), they sell nice bottled beer and some snacks, and they're clearly a fantastic place to just chill.
I couldn't get to the Scala because I was off seeing the Greek Theatre Players, slightly displaced this year from the Greek Theatre. This was The Comedy of Errors, marvellously played. My heart sank when I saw that nobody else had brought kids; but Marianne enjoyed it all and even Jonathan enjoyed the second half, once we'd said "Right. There are *two* sets of twins." If you're taking kids, even teenagers, to The Comedy of Errors I would recommend explaining Egeon's initial speech to them in advance because it's long and hard for kids to follow and without the set up the entire play is incomprehensible. Once again I benefitted from my appalling ignorance of Shakespeare; most of the ending is telegraphed long in advance, but I got to enjoy one delightful reveal. Another benefit of advancing years is that Shakespeare's language, which I remember struggling with in school, seems to me pellucid now. You can catch The Comedy of Errors tonight or tomorrow at the Holy Family College in Church Hill Road, Walthamstow, or on Sunday at the Capel Manor Gardens.
Finally, I must mention Graze, who send little boxes of tasty treats to your home or workplace. Each box has three things to graze on, a mixture of fresh and dried fruit, nuts, seeds, little yoghurt coated things, and so on. There's loads of different possibilities, you can rate items to get them more or less often or not at all, and the presentation is lovely. The boxes are £2.99 each, which is pretty comparable to what the same sort of thing would cost you from, say, Marks and Sparks or Pret. I'm in two minds about Graze. On the one hand this is fantastic stuff to get you through the work day, far better than crisps and choccy bars, and I love getting the boxes through the door. On the other hand this is a lot more expensive than, say, peeling and chopping fresh pineapple yourself, so if you're committed to the cult of Cheap then it's clearly not for you. I have a code -- 3GH2D5JE -- if you enter that on the website you can get a first box free to try, and a second box half-price.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2009
Two adult games and a tantalising preview
When GTA: Chinatown Wars
I was intrigued by the reviews so I got a copy, despite a longstanding hate of both driving games and crime simulations (I'm very law-abiding). It is fantastic fun and well worth a tenner. It is possibly a bit immoral; you certainly find yourself gunning down people with abandon, and although the drug-dealing sub-game is 'optional', you will quickly find yourself unarmed and penniless if you don't join in. There's a good range of missions and some of the plotting is genuinely funny. GTA is famed for its sandboxes and there are lots of fun things you can do in this game that have nothing to do with the main plot. For example, all the service vehicles can be stolen and then used, so you can drive a cab and pick up fares, drive a police car and respond to crimes, drive a fire engine and put out fires, and so on. And the pacing is fantastic for a DS game; you can pick it up and have fun in just a few minutes. The graphics beat anything I've previously seen on the DS by some margin too; Liberty City is huge, and it's all distinctive, and I don't know how they have done it.
GTA: Chinatown Wars is an adult game that says 'here, come and play at doing things you'd never dream of doing in real life, in a ludicrous fantasy world where you are much tougher than a pack of hardened goons, your car automatically drives in a straight line and nobody fires straight.' One of the reasons that people criticise GTA is that it 'glamorises' crime but I think it is just doing the same thing as any simulation game; making a hard thing (making crime pay) seem much easier, just like Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis.
In other adult gaming news, I'm playing the new Mac version of Braid, the thinky, philosophical puzzle game disguised as a platformer. The premise is that of Super Mario; Tim (I do not know whether Tim is a plumber by trade) has lost his princess and is searching for her. He has to collect jigsaw pieces which are cashed in for the ending, and like in Prince of Persia, he can rewind time to avoid getting killed by monsters. That description misses out three key things. The first is that rewinding time is not merely a death-avoidance gimmick. In practice you have to rewind time, in many and variously tricky ways, to solve the puzzles, nearly all of which are fiendish. The second is that this game is exceptionally beautiful, and I am a sucker for pretty games. And the third, of course, is that Tim is not an uncomplicated little plumber. The game is framed with his ruminations on time, loss, princesses, and the general weight of living. The game has an ending, which I have been somewhat spoilt for by randomly wambling round the internet; so you will want to be careful about that.
I downloaded the demo and was hooked; it does not feel to me particularly pricey at $14.99 but perhaps I am an easy target. I understand it crashes on many Macs; fortunately not on mine. Most of the puzzles (but not all) are self-contained and lend themself to prolongued thought; this is a game where setting it down, going away for a while and returning often renders an impossible scene straightforward. There is a puzzle early in Braid which is widely decried as unfair; I solved it without help and was enchanted when I did it. I think I've collected about half the puzzle pieces now. These puzzles are difficult, and the learning curve is quite brutal. The designer, rather arrogantly, has released a 'walkthrough' that says, roughly, all the puzzles are fair, figure it out and don't use a walkthrough.
Braid then, is an adult game about the nature of gaming, and about life. It is saying 'games can tell us about our life' and a deliberately artificial situation can nevertheless teach us profound lessons that are similar to those acquired from a movie or book. I do not doubt that this is true of games in general; I am not yet sure it is true of Braid.
And finally, the gameplay trailer for The Beatles: RockBand is jolly great and I'm sure the game will be fine. But the opening cinematic is just extraordinary. I'm only a moderate fan of the Beatles and I'm seriously excited.
Posted by Alison Scott at 03:13 PM | Comments (2)
June 02, 2009
Two of those big yellow taxi moments
eMusic has finally hooked a major label, and will shortly have Sony back catalogue. In return, they are 'adjusting' their prices in two directions; plan costs rise, and tracks per plan reduce. There's no sign that existing users will be grandfathered. Like many longstanding emusic regulars, I have the October 2006 email that guarantees to honour my existing plan as long as my account is in good standing -- US members have been told that these plans are now being 'retired' which is an interesting use of the word 'guarantee' that m'learned friends are now considering. People with grandfathered plans like mine are facing typically a doubling of per-price track. Guess what, chaps? If I download 45 tracks instead of 90, you do not make any more money. If I download 0 tracks instead of 90, which is not impossible, you make less. The good news is that there will, finally, be a per album price for some albums with many tracks. So, we shall see. It seems very strange given Spotify, too; but yes, I have a workaround where I can listen to albums on Spotify and then choose whether or not to buy them.
Meanwhile, I learn that Birdsong Radio has gone off the air. Since getting a radio that could have multiple alarms tuned to different stations, we used this as our weekend 'alarm'; instead of being woken suddenly by music we were woken gently by birdsong. Apparently some radios do it themselves now, and this radio can use music on an SD card as an alarm. But still.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:12 AM | Comments (1)
May 31, 2009
May Music
UK handspun folk label Talking Elephant have a load of new releases out. Mostly rarities, repackages and so on I think. I have picked up Hard Works
But my main haul from Talking Elephant was various Morris stuff. Now, they've been repackaging some of the Morris material, and so some of the stuff on Sweeps
Simon Care, one of the leading lights of Moulton Morris, has released a second anthology album, Oh What a Caper
showcasing all the fantastic work he does with other people. Tracks here from Whapweasel, various incarnations of Albions, Edward II, Tickled Pink and so on; mostly demonstrating how Care, as well as being a thoroughly nice bloke, is the undisputed master of the driving melodeon beat.
No relation to Talking Elephant is acid croft live favourites Elephant Talk I discovered that they have a newish album out, Natty Loon, that I didn't know about, so I bought it. But really, their brand of somewhat-celtic trance is best experienced late at night at a festival.
My 'back catalogue special' this month was John Renbourn's Sir John Alot
Giles Lewin is a fiddler and piper with the Carnival Band, and for a while with Bellowhead, and one of Maddy Prior's band (no, not that band). The Armchair Orienteer
Steve Knightley has re-recorded his 1999 solo album "Track of Words" to produce Track of Words: Retraced
The Handsome Family have a new album out, Honey Moon
Walthamstow Folk Club continues to inspire my listening. I saw the fine interpreter of ballads Chris Foster there, and picked up his new album Outsiders
I totally failed to buy any CDs by Bill Caddick when I saw him at the Cellar Upstairs; he didn't have any for sale. Not on his website either; I do think this is an almighty mistake for a singer/songwriter. We did spend the entire evening going 'gosh, did he write that one', though, so you'll know his songs.
Another great friend of the folk club is Anne Lister. I won her most recent album in the folk club raffle, and set about picking up the rest. So this month I have got Singing On The Wind
Finally, the nice people at Proper sent me a copy of the 2009 Folk Awards compilation album
Examples of many of the musicians and songwriters mentioned in this post are included in my May Music Spotify playlist.
Posted by Alison Scott at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
