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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 May 17, 2012 03:57 PM
Comments
If you don't already have a device plugged into your TV for doing this, then
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/571
is pretty awesome.
Posted by: Andrew Ducker ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 17, 2012 07:49 PM
As it happens, I do already have a box of tricks at home to do USB video and network streaming, but I love the portability of the raspberry pi; it will fit in the tiny bag of tricks I carry around with my laptop, for example. And we have had numerous occasions when we want to watch a video of some kind on a telly in some ghastly self-catering accommodation or hotel, so this will work for that providing there's an HDMI socket. Might also need some audio cables (Surely I have some of the right sort...?)
Posted by: Alison Scott at May 17, 2012 09:17 PM