mykrocosm

Did you know the brush fence, the folding card table and the Meals on Wheels charity were all invented right here in South Australia?

National Trust of South Australia - Heritage Icons

An awesome site that gives the history behind many other local legends such as the Hills Hoist, Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee, the stump jump plough, and stobie poles.

And when you’ve finished with those, there’s links to visit the National Trusts in other States of Australia.

The Firefox extension CustomizeGoogle actually breaks Google’s new customisable home page, specifically the drag-and-drop feature and the ability to save changes. Disabling this extension fixes the problem.

WinXP/Firefox 1.0.4. Seen in CustomizeGoogle 0.21 and 0.23.

Got a buzz in my pocket today from Virgin mobile. Turns out they’re increasing their SMS costs from 20c to 25c. It’s been two years since I got my phone, so I decided to check out the current offerings for a person who makes no calls and uses SMS exclusively. I’m not the most prolific texter either so I need a reasonable period in which to use up my credit.

Virgin : 25c per SMS as of Sep 01. Still 5c for Virgin 2 Virgin messages, but I’m not going to ask everyone in my address book who they’re with and even if I did, it wouldn’t make any difference. If I need to message someone, I’ll message them whether it’s 5c or 50c.

Vodafone : 25c per SMS. They’re really pushing these pre-paid monthly packages at the moment, $49 for $230 worth of calls, that sort of thing. Only catch is, when the month ends, so does all your credit. It doesn’t roll over. And there’s no way I burn through $49 worth of SMS’s in a month, let alone $230 worth.

Telstra : Are you f’g kidding?!? I did check them out just to be fair, and I saw absolutely nothing worth writing about. Their plans just suck, as usual. I bet most of their revenue comes from corporate mobiles. To paraphrase that old saw… Nobody ever got fired for buying Telstra.

Optus : Well, they have 4 different plans, including their famous ones where you can talk/SMS for free with other Optus phones, however you do have to read the fine print. These plans have a 60 day expiry and non-Optus phones attract a 25c SMS. However… Optus do have a standard pre-paid plan with no free Optus-to-Optus capabilities, but the SMS’s are 18c across the board and it has a 6 month expiry period. So your $30 charge up can go a really long way. I reckon this will be the one for me.

Unless, which is very likely, there’s a plan out there I’ve missed

Got a bit wet at the footy last night. Here’s my old friend Dan down from Sydney for a few days, I believe it was his first Power match. As you can see it was the wettest home game we’ve had all year. It was pretty nice to see Port blow the gates open in the first quarter but as the rain came down so did their performance. They were like a bunch of wet noodles for the next two quarters! Richmond hit the front at the last break, but then Shaun Burgoyne kicked a confidence goal and somehow, to the amazement of their 27,000 despairing fans, the boys ground out the win. Not a convincing one by any means, but enough. Now they just have to win four out of the next five to play in the finals. They have the talent, but do they have the motivation?

The Kangaroos next week…

The second boneless lamb roast I picked up from Conroy’s met its end today. Weight 3kg. Cooked for 2 hours at 160′C, then 1 hour at 180′C. Big thumbs up from the family, though they were pretty hungry by then.

PS - I just LOVE mushroom gravy!!

Apparently, redheads need 20% more anesthetic than blonds or brunettes.

I couldn’t believe this, but the American Society of Anesthesiologists website confirms it.

Remember the Fijian Lovo Feast our family had a month ago? I finally got the page with photos up. Read all about it here!

Found this brilliant little puzzler last night : Planarity

Got as far as finishing Level 10, Score 99,500-odd before I had to drag myself away.

We’ve got the CD images for Fedora Core 4 at work, but I’d prefer to have the DVD. Unfortunately, HTTP downloads seem to choke on files greater than 2 gb, and FTP is firewalled.

I found a little-known way to recombine the CD images, thanks to a small utility called Jigdo, the template files FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo & FC4-i386-DVD.template and an obscure forum post here.

First I used WinRAR to extract all the CD images to a single directory (C:\fc4\), explicitly not overwriting any existing files.

Then I ran the jigdo command:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1855 of the 1856 files required by the template
Copied input files to temporary file `FC4-i386-DVD.iso.tmp' - repeat command and supply more files to continue


Uh oh. I repeated the command with the pm (print missing) parameter:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file pm -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/ linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/isolinux.bin


Now this already exists in C:\fc4\isolinux\ so it should have been picked up. A bug in jigdo-file or the template perhaps? I downloaded the file again from that URL just in case, and it turned out to be the exact same size and date. I placed it in the root of the search path (C:\fc4\), and ran jigdo-file again:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC
4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1 of the 1 files required by the template
Successfully created `FC4-i386-DVD.iso'


Mounted the ISO in a VM and it booted. Sweet!

The boneless lamb I picked up last week turned out a treat on Friday night. I always used to think roasts were the arcane result of grandmother magic but over the years I’ve found they’re not so hard. You just have to have a go in the first place, and you soon develop a feel for it.

Seasoned with the usual mix of rosemary, mixed herbs, garlic and pepper. Whole peppercorn if you have it works well too. Thyme too but I didn’t have any handy, d’oh. I hit upon a neat trick - slice the garlic into thick slivers and mix them with the other spices in a bowl. Stab the holes in your roast and push the garlic in, the other herbs stick to the garlic and go along for the ride. Drizzled the lot with extra-virgin olive oil and rubbed it in a bit.

I’m a big fan of slow roasting if you have the time. First I bunged it in the oven for 80 minutes at 160′C, then put in the larger potatoes. Fifteen minutes later the smaller potatoes and the rest of the veg. Another 15 minutes, then I nudged the temp up to 180′C for the last hour. So just under three hours for a 2.7kg roast.

Juicy and packed with flavour. Let me tell you, it took a lot less time than that for the four of us to demolish the thing. Everyone had seconds! And the raspberry chocolate pudding for desert? Scrumptious, Lorna! By the way, one of my favourite parts of cooking roast is that the leftover makes such great sandwiches too. None of this pre-processed ham crap, it’s the good old fashioned real thing.