Jun6

Another day, another salad

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Another day, another salad
Salad with flowers.

Today I made another salad from balcony-greens. I’ve lost track of what greens exactly, though I know I had cut-and-come-again lettuce, some chard, some purslane (I think), and some herbs. It also had a surprising nice amount of fennel in it, which gave the salad a fresher taste. I added some cherry tomatoes(SB(StoreBought)), some chives (HG(HomeGrown)), some salad-cheese(SB(StoreBought)) and a hardboiled egg. Added a blob of slasaus (best described as Dutch salad-mayonnaise) and a few dried herbs, pepper and salt.

As an extra I added a few of the rucola flowers that started growing on the balcony. They made it look pretty and tasted good too.

Can’t wait for the Indian Cress and violas to flower so I can start add them too!

Jun3

A drawing to end a day of hard work.

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A drawing to end a day of hard work.
Blue cocktail.

Today I had a good day and I decided to hoover — yes, ‘hoover’, I actually have a Hoover — the sofa. This always takes a bit of work with all the pillows to move around. I figured that as long as I had to move them, I might as well wash the pillow-cases. It took me all day, but I aired out the pillows on the balcony, washed the pillow-cases, hoovered the entire sofa and the floor under and around, mopped the floor and put everything back together. I took lots of breaks and drank a lot and ate in between too, but I managed it.

At the end of the day, I decided to make myself a nice cocktail, and for extra kicks I added some blue food-colouring to it. Sometimes you just need a little extra colour!

I then decided to draw it; it turned out wonky, as all my cocktail drawings do, but still. Bad drawing beats no drawing.

Jun1

Aspiration

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Aspiration
Beanies

I’ve followed Michael Nobbs’ for quite some time and really enjoy his work. The one thing that attracts me in his work, is that like me, he also deals with illness. Sometimes I’ll stumble on a blog of someone who does great work and they’ll have a job, go to college and do that great work all at once. It makes me tired just thinking about that.

Michael, however, frequently blogs (and draws!) about how he copes with his illness and others things life tosses at him. He makes his own books and sells them. The last issue of The Beany came out as an ebook today. Despite his illness he takes on (little) projects and makes stuff happen. He seems to have found a way to make it work despite being ill, something I still aspire to.

I have not yet figure it all out, and I have not yet made it all work. Thanks to Michael however, I know I’ll get there, eventually.

Some other inspiring artists:
* scott c
* Irisz Agocs
* Eric Orchard
* E*phi
* jess (borkedplanet)
* Kurt Halsey
* Mattias Ink
* marc johns
All worth checking out.

May26

Cooking with sprouts

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Cooking with sprouts
Lentil + bok choy dish

I sprouted some lentils and realised I didn’t like the raw taste of them much. I figured I had nothing to lose and heated them up a bit (cooked very briefly in my ricecooker). They got a wonderful nutty flavour from the cooking. I added a bit of ketchup, olive oil, salt and pepper and curry powder, which made it really tasty.

On top of that I roasted the bok choy from my balcony — the weird kind that bolted suddenly — with some sesame oil, ginger and garlic.

I mixed it all together and it tasted wonderful!

I ate it all.

May26

Geeking out with procmail

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Geeking out with procmail

I love procmail, not sure why I prefer it over other options, but I do. Recently I've found / figured out a few nice rules to help automate filtering a bit.

The following rule checks for the existence of various headers usually used by mailing-list and filters the mail into a mailbox with the list's name: :0 * ^((List-Id|X-(Mailing-)?List):(.[< ]\/[^>])) { LISTID=$MATCH

:0
* LISTID ?? ^\/[^@\.]*
.$MATCH/

}

Some mailing-lists don't have a 'List-Id' and such, but they do have a 'Sender'. For these I use: :0 * ^X-BeenThere:.* * ! ^(List-Id|X-(Mailing-)?List):.* * ^Sender: \/[^@-]+ .$MATCH/

For a lot of webforms I use an address with a '+' in (a completely valid symbol in an e-mailaddress btw). If I'd need to use an address for say, google.com, I'd fill in 'tannie+google@tanniespace' (and .com ofcourse). To filter out these addresses to their own folder I use the following rule: :0 * ^TO.+\/([a-z].)\@(mydomain|otherdomain) { EXTENSION=$MATCH :0 * EXTENSION ?? ^\/[^@.]* .$MATCH/ }

May23

More geekery with twitter and flickr stuff

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More geekery with twitter and flickr stuff

A couple of weeks ago I found and edited a php script to help me post photos to flickr from Tweetie for iPhone (now Twitter for iPhone -- do keep up...). After using it for a while I realised the title of the photos got a bit too long for my taste and I spend a little time tweaking. I've now changed it so that the first sentence (up to the first . or ! or ?) becomes the title. The rest becomes the description of the photo. For me this works out pretty well.

I added the following lines (changing the last line of my previous tweak to prevent confusion): $string = preg_replace("/#\w+/i", '', $title); //previously the above line said: $title = preg_replace("/#\w+/i", '', $title);

if (preg_match("/^.*(\.|\!|\?)/U", $string, $matches)) {
  $title = $matches[0];
  $description = preg_replace("/^.*(\.|\!|\?)/U", '', $string);
}
else {
    $title = $string;
    $description = "";
}

right before: $parameters = array( 'api_key' => API_KEY, 'auth_token' => API_TOKEN, 'tags' => $tags, 'title' => $title, 'description' => $description, );

Note that I also added that last field in there ('description'). I haven't completely tested it, however, my limited tests seemed to work fine. I don't really know much about php, so I probably used more lines than I needed. This way I could keep track of what I did though, and I think I'll still understand my changes a couple of months from now.

May14

Camera stuff

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Camera stuff
sx20is_586x225.jpg

My camera has started to break down. I currently have a Canon Powershot A620 and it served me well for nearly four years. Currently, the memory-card bit doesn’t work properly. The card doesn’t click in and if I take it out the camera doesn’t recognise the card half the time I put it back. I’ve dug up the cable and now get the photos from the camera by the cable (a nuisance).

I looked into other cameras and now have my eye on the Canon Powershot SX20 IS. I like Canon, and have had a few in the past and like the menu and the way it works. This model seemed a good step up from the A620 but not yet as massive as a DSLR. I don’t have anything with DSLRs in general. And knowing me I’ll get sand on the sensor on the first day and ruin the camera because it scratches.

I won’t buy it just yet, probably in June.

May7

The dangers of nature

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The dangers of nature
Little bastard.

This morning I woke up with a bit of an itch on my torso, right by the lowest rib. I scratched, it felt funny; I scratched under my shirt and felt a little lump that I hadn’t felt before. Immediately, I checked it out and noticed this little tick, moving legs and all, stuck in me.

The idea of this creature having dug its head into my skin freaked me out a little. Last Tuesday, however, I found the tick-remover I wanted for a while and purchased that. After a minute of slightly freaked out searching for it I found the set, and tried out the small one. It wouldn’t fit, so I used the bigger one.

It worked as expected and much easier than the other tick-removers I have. It did hurt when I twisted the little bugger out (a bit of a burning sensation) and he insisted on trying to keep digging back in, but I won and flushed him down the toilet. I suspect it hitched a ride on Nano and then landed on the sofa where it secretly attacked me.

I’ll have a blood-test to check for Lyme’s disease in a month or two, as it doesn’t always give that specific rash (should I get a rash or any other weird complaints, I’ll go to my GP immediately of course). The spot feels a bit sore, like a bruise, which I hope goes away soon.

Now, if only I could shake that itchy feeling I’ve had all day. Brr.

May6

Salads

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Salads
Partially homegrown salad

Today I made another salad, a great way to let of some steam creativity wise. I read somewhere salads look (and taste) better if they have more colours, so I added some yellow and red and brown to my greens.

I’ve grown some lettuce (cut-and-come-again variety), and today I started eating it. I cut off about 15 grams of it, and added some arugula and garden cress for flavour. I also tossed in a sprout mixture of fenugreek, mustard, daikon and horseradish (last three all fairly spicy). I found some leftover sweet bell pepper (yellow) in the fridge, along with a few cherry tomatoes. After I added those I still felt it needed some more. I chopped up some shiitake mushrooms and grilled them with a sauce of soy sauce, rice vinegar and sesame oil (very tasty by itself btw).

When the mushrooms cooled down a bit, I plopped them on the salad and used the small oven-dish to mix up some more soy sauce, sesame oil and rice vinegar. I used this as a dressing over the salad, preparing it in the used oven-dish gave it a bit more of a grilled taste, very nice!

I have sown plenty of salad-greens and decided I could use a challenge (oh yes, another challenge!). I want to try my best at not buying any salad greens in the store until at leas way into autumn. This excludes eating out, but includes all salads at home :D

I should get my box of shiitake mushrooms started soon too. It will take a while before I can use my own tomatoes and peppers in my salads, however, I have a lot of greens already. I like salads, I should manage to pull this one off :)

–p.s. recipes for salads and dressing very welcome–

May2

Geeking out with twitter and flickr stuff

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Geeking out with twitter and flickr stuff

Recently I found a php script by Chris Morrel which allows you to post photos to flickr (and get the correct flic.kr short url back) from Tweetie 2. I tweaked it a little to get used hashtags as flickr-tags and to have them removed from the title (the script uses the message as the title).

Right after: $tags = FLICKR_TAGS; if (TAG_WITH_HANDLE) { $tags .= ' @' . $_POST['username']; }

I added: preg_match_all('/#(\w+)/', $title, $matches); foreach ($matches1 as &$tag) { $tags .= ' ' . $tag; } $title = preg_replace("/#\w+/i", '', $title);

It worked as I wanted, so yay!