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30 Mar

Fish smoker

Published by Simon Lindsay

One of the Christmas presents I got this year was a Jarvis Walker Fish Smoker.

I've been a bit slack, but we bought some Trout today to give it a try.

It worked quite well, but I think I left it in a little too long, so taste is not awesome.

I'm sure it will take a few more tries to get the technique down pat, but I'm looking forward to trying a few different combinations.

Topics 

Cooking
23 Jan

Outlook fail

Published by Simon Lindsay

Microsoft outlook has a facility to "recall a message".

However, despite what you may think it would do, all it does is send a message to all recipients stating that you'd like to recall the message.

Basically, outlook has a "I was a dumbass" function. It just tells everyone that you sent the message to that you DON'T want them to read the message you just sent.

WTF. So full of fail, only makes you go to read it more!

Topics 

Outlook
21 Jan

Silverlight and .net

Published by Simon Lindsay

Just doing some test work on a Windows 2008 server and (re-)discovering how awesome Microsoft isn't.

Try to watch video on their site, can't I need Silverlight. Is that available for Ubuntu? Not likely..

Ignore that and go to download/install mysql for windows, need to install .net 4.0 for the mysql server.

Its hard work doing work in windows land. I so miss being able to 'apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server'.

Topics 

Microsoft
11 Jan

Ugly fonts in Ubuntu ?

Published by Simon Lindsay

For some time, the fonts in my Ubuntu have not really been nice. In fact, in some places, they've been downright ugly, the www.newrelic.com website in particular, was virtually unreadable.

However, earlier today I had a message come up when I started sublime text from the command line and got a warning message like this:

Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.

A little investigation reveals that this file on my system looks like this:

Topics 

Ubuntu
06 Jan

Michelin tubeless mountain bike tires on the beast.

Published by Simon Lindsay

Finally got the tubeless tires on the mountain bike and took it for a spin this morning. Its only taken about 3 months for me to get around to it, sigh.

Can already see one spot where the puncture juice has self healed, awesome.

Now to start riding a bit further every day, to get my fitness back up.

I put on 2.1 profile tyres, and the are quite a bit larger than what was on before, and I think the ride is a little smoother because of that. Traction wasn't really tested out, but the tread is chunky while not being to rough that it will slow things down on the road.

Images: 

Topics 

Mountain bike
29 Dec

killowatts

Published by Simon Lindsay

Just took a look at our solar energy production, and we are on 9999 kw produced. Given its sunny today, we will tick over into 10,000 kw of solar produced since we installed the system in 2009. Beauty!

Topics 

Solar
06 Jul

We recommend installing XXX toolbar - Just say no.

Published by Simon Lindsay

I was just in the process of downloading Java on a Windows VM and noted that during the process you explicitly have to remove the checkbox or it will install the "Ask" toolbar.

Now i've no doubt that Ask have either paid for this privilege, but people, in general, if something you are installing EVER gives you the choice to install a toolbar, just say no.

Leave that previous browsing space for actual web browsing!

Toolbars typically add next to nothing to your experience, but they do provide a good way for the toolbar provider to get more information about you.

22 Jun

Rustic woodbox

Published by Simon Lindsay

Smashed some brick pallettes to bits last weekend and built this rustic woodbox to go at the back door and free up our wheelbarrow for real work.

Images: 

Topics 

House
10 May

Thunderbird check all imap folders

Published by Simon Lindsay

With the latest thunderbird, the string to search for in the config editor to set it to check all folders for new email has changed from:

mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new

to

mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new

As detailed here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/How_do_I_check_for_new_messages_in_other_folders

Which caught me out for a while as I was looking for the old one in the config editor.

Topics 

Thunderbird, Email
07 Feb

Remove "Click to activate" in Mac OSX

Published by Simon Lindsay

Sick of having to click on a window, then click on the button you think you already clicked on?

Paste this into a terminal:

defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

Bingo - fixed.

Thanks to Mac OS X Configuration tips
http://mactips.dwhoard.com/mactips/x11-and-terminal/x11-click-through

Topics 

OSX

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