nick.recoil.org

A quick recipe for my Mum's special Cashew Nut sauce that we have for Christmas dinner. Yum!

Ingredients

• 100g (4oz) Cashew Nuts
• 570-900ml (1 - 1½ pints) Water
• 30ml (2tbsp) Oil
• 20g (¾ oz) Flour
• 10ml (2tsp) Soy sauce
• Salt & Pepper

Steps

1. Toast the cashew nuts for 3-4 mins under the grill until golden brown
2. Grind to a fine powder in a blender. Pour in 570ml (1 pint) water and blend until the mixture resembles a very thin milk.
3. Heat the oil in a small saucepan, add the flour and cook over a low heat for three minutes. Gradually pour on the cashew milk and bring to the boil, stirring constantly.
4. Add soy sauce and seasoning. Cook gently for a further 10 mins. Stir occasionally and add more water if necessary.

Tips

• Keep an eye on the cashews as they toast - They burn easily
• Use Sunflower oil - Olive oil is too strong a flavour
• Make sure the low heat is low - Burnt flour tastes awful!
• This is just the same as making a white sauce except you are using "cashew milk" instead of ordinary milk. Keep stirring and don't let it burn at the bottom

Thanks Mum! I'll be whipping this up on Christmas day like a pro.

I've installed the breveCreatures screensaver at work, which has been entertaining my co-workers whenever I'm not at my desk.

It sets up a simulation that evolves a walking creature based on a simple genetic algorithm. The state of the simulation is saved each time the screensaver is interrupted, the state is saved, and will pick up again the next time it starts. Very entertaining eye-candy.

I've also got so used to certain aspects of Firefox extension functionality, I've installed SafariStand to enable my typical browser session state to be saved and loaded with ease. Not quite as nice as having it saved when you quit, but it'll do.

In trying to install rb-fxruby from Darwinports, I ran up against a problem with the linker when trying to build fxscintilla, which reported:

ld: flag: -undefined dynamic_lookup can't be used with
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable set to: 10.1
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed
make[1]: *** [libfxscintilla.la] Error 1
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

and it turns out the solution is to set up your shell environment to include MACOSX\DEPLOYMENT\TARGET set to 10.4, so for all you bash users,

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.4"

and then the build works like a charm. This is related to the concept of weak linking under Mac OS X, which allows code that was built and linked on 10.4 to still work on 10.3, providing the libraries export the same symbols. There is more in this Apple Tech Note.

Things I have been enjoying:

• Samorost 2 - The followup to the original, which was released back in 2003 (via BoingBoing)
• Google Earth for Mac OS X - Reasonably snappy on my 1.67GHz AlBook (via Haddock)
• This new theme, called Origami, from a talented chap called Leevi Graham - Winner of the Typogarden theme competition
• The new V-Sag section of hybridized.org - More good music sets to work to

And I should also mention that the explosion at the Buncefield Fuel Depot managed to wake me up this morning. I was just dozing back to sleep after feeding the cats at 5:30am or so, and I suddenly heard a boom, and felt all the windows shake at the front of the house, and a car alarm started to go off somewhere in the distance. Very peculiar, I thought, and only put two and two together as I watched the news later on. There are some spectacular pictures on Flickr

I've uploaded a picture to Flickr demonstrating the artifacts you get from Flickr when submitting a photo that requires resizing to fit their maximum horizontal resolution of 1024 pixels.

I think they're definitely applying a second-stage sharpen process, rather than the sharpening being inherent in the choice of spacial filter used. This discussion came about because of a discussion on Haddock on the ways in which Flickr can mess with your originals.

It also seems that Flickr will strip some of the image metadata in the JFIF headers that relate to the way in which the image should be displayed (such as white point), thus causing differences in rendering between an image which has been uploaded and downloaded via Flickr, and the original, untouched picture.