January 2003 Archives

why do I always leave it so late - thanks for online submission of tax returns

Fine phone, nice and small and light. It was the only phone that can do the Address Book synchronization via iSync. It also comes bundled with a clip on camera and does GRPS. You can now get other phones that offer this, but they are all Sony Ericsson However it has a few flaws that make it a pain to use as a day to day phone. First of all it is slow, moving from screen to screen takes 1-2 seconds, so to go from voicemail to locking the phone takes a noticeable amount of time. The screen isn't terribly colour accurate and a bit grainy, but the camera takes reasonable pictures.

Having a clip on camera is okay, but you have to remember to bring it and to then get it out, not the most spontaneous thing to do.

So on the whole not too bad, the iSync feature is really useful, as you can have one address book. However there are much better phones around now, it is a 2 year old design.

How can i remember the connected paths I've taken on the web, you find an article and then follow some links to other pages I suppose the best term is trace. more in a while

start with onions, as if you couldn't guess
this serves two hungry people
one onion
2 cloves of garlic
4-5 strips of bacon or some pancetta
some mushrooms
olive oil
mature cheddar cheese
salt / pepper
take one onion, about than 3" across and chop it to small bits maybe a centimeter long and about 2-3 mm across. Slowly cook this in olive oil in a heavy frying pan, with a bit of salt and pepper. This bit is the most important, as what you want to do is cook the onions gently so that they release their sugar and caramelise. When the onions start to soften then add some garlic, about two nice fat cloves, trim the root base off and cut out the bitter beginnings of the shoot, if it has started to turn green at all.
When the onions are nicely going, you can add a slosh of red wine, this will give off a great smell, but make sure that the onions are pretty softened, the idea here is to get the colour and flavour of the wine mixed into the onions.
While this is simmering you can start on the bacon or pancetta if you have any. Depending on how healthy you feel you can either grill the bacon or cut it in to smaller bits and fry it with the bacon. Either is fine, grilled it is crispier and fried makes everything warm and tasty.
You can add some roughly sliced mushrooms now if you want, but make sure that you cook them for long enough to drive out their water and then let the flesh of the mushrooms fry in the fat til it starts to take on some colour.
By now you will be ravenous, you'll have nicely cooked caramelised onions and garlic, some bacon and mushrooms. All you need to do now is grate some cheese and sort out the eggs.
Turn on your grill so that it is warm for when you want to sizzle the cheese, you can put the plates in to heat too. Crack about 3 medium free range eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk, you are aiming for the consistency to be smooth, but not frothy. Grate some cheese, nice old salty mature cheddar is perfect. Spread out the things in the frying pan to an even layer and pour on the egg, turn up the heat under the eggs and give the pan a quick swirl to even everything out.
When the eggs have had about 1-2 minutes and you can see them starting too cook, put the cheese in a layer over the top. I like to ensure the whole top of the egg is covered and then put it under the grill. Wait until is is nicely toasted and put half in each plate and pour the coffee.

lots of interesting stuff about community networking in the UK, Locust World have launched a 300 quid mesh networking access point. this allows you to configure multiple access point to provide seamless coverage over a area like a village. The hardware is for sale, but the software is open source. For more detailed coverage see the article on Guy Kewney's wireless news site.
For lots more information have a look at Community Wireless.
uk commercial map and free ones via Consume the Net.

I saw dirty pretty things, which is a great, sad thoughtful film. Essentially the underside of immigrant London, full of cash in hand temporary work and a feeling of desperation and some hope. I think that this is one of my films of the year, so far. It also made me realise how little what I impacts people who share the same streets as me, as one of the film's characters says "you have never seen us before because we are invisible, we clean your toilets and drive your cabs."
It made me think of several other films like "Timeout" or properly L'emploi du temps, a film about a frenchman who loses his job and pretends not to, it follows his gradual drift away from reality, he becomes hooked on the travelling aspect of his job, not wanting to get off.
Also the film set in Margate called Last Resort from a few years ago, following the life of a recent Russian arrival who claims asylum and gets sent to Margate with her son, when her English boyfriend fails to show up.
All these films show the edge of consumer society or look up at it from the position of no job or no places in society.
Buy Dirty Pretty Things, Last Resort or Time-out from amazon.

as I hunt around i discover that the guy from patagonia, Alselm Hook is actually implementing my lazyweb idea, so an interest in patagonia ties together everything in a slightly bizarre small world event. I clicked on geourl's map and found him, then discover he is trying to implement the idea I've had in response
person to person mapping project the blog is a super resource.
He has created a fantastic java based map server.

While looking at GeoURL (thanks, Euan I found a website based 600 miles south of Santiago, on the way to Patagonia. www.hook.org/anselm/pix, lots of pictures
The map pages at GeoURL are fascinating to see how they are populating, not that they tell you anything other than the fact that populous places have lots of people writing blogs.
See separate post for related lazyweb idea on tracking this.

Found this list of differences between Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express, Apple's new cheaper version of FCP. It was on the message boards at 2-pop and apparently was posted by an Apple staff member. Essentially DV only and no timecode, no media management and the keyframe and scripting are weakened, still looks like value for money for 250.
Final Cut Express is the perfect solution for DV enthusiasts that are looking for a powerful, affordable DV editing application. Final Cut Pro is the solution for professional editors and advanced videographers/filmmakers.

I bought a new TiBook recently and ordered a bag for it from WillowField Designs. I bought two sleeve cases and gear pouches, one for Lucy's iBook and one for my Powerbook.
The bags are great, well made, protective and have enhanced my life immensely - why ? the slipcase is open-ended, with just a velcro strap over the end of the laptop, so to get out my bag, I just reach into my rucksack and pull it out, with MacOS X and instant on, it means that even 5-10 minutes can be productive time.
Really friendly customer service too, got a personal e-mail a few days after I ordered asking about how I found out, bags also came from SF to London in 5 days or so. See rest of entry for longer review

I don't like bananas, so I can happily relate the news that the normal supermarket banana is to disappear in 10 years or so, research is to be concentrated on the regular african food staple to save that. see the delightfully entitled article at BBC news website.

google on cafe allonge

why can't london coffee shops get it right ?

uk2.net are deeply irritating, I decided not to stick with them on the old takeoneonion.com address I bought a while back, so bought takeoneonion.org, as you obviously know. Turns out they have auto renewed it for themselves for a year - not nice business practice.
So I'm glad I've left them...

In an attempt to get myself rid of my only classic application (Outlook) I use on a regular basis I have just rediscovered applescript, sort of always knew it was here, but kind of forgot about it. Apple have taken it to new heights and it seems really ace again. Head to Apple's dev site (you need to sign up, though it is free and get the developer downloads for the Script Editor betas, then head to script central and scriptweb to get some interesting stuff to play with.
I'm trying to get Mail to understand emailed vcalendar invites, in the manner that outlook sends, so I can integrate my work and real life together, in a seemless manner.
I used to use AppleScript in the publishing company I used to work for a few years ago (www.dk.com). Nice automation driving Quark Photoshop and Debab to create the pages, and output our custom authoring language.
Thanks to Matt at interconnected.org for the initial prompts via the cool article on using script to populate the blog sidebar list of link in a suitable lazyweb manner see Matt's Script article, part 1.

Good analysis article on how wireless internet might grow in future, paints a picture of rapid consumer growth, largely driven by built-in wireless on the motherboard, from Intel via Centrino/Banias ( already do this) and the increasing public awareness of the technology. Misses out on the recently announced raft of 802.11g products and concentrates on a vs b.
Nick Hunn article from Guy Kewney's wireless news site.

Interesting new browser from Apple, launched on the 7th January, it is based on khtml, the basis for the Linux browser Konqueror. Apparently the fastest browser available for the mac, it is currently in beta download the beta, this post is written from within it.
It is missing a few features from current browsers, tabbed windows, autofill, being two of them. Another useful feature it could support is synchronised bookmarks, using iSync to keep two machines synchronized would be handy for people, just like it is for addresses etc.
It has some new features, snapback is a means of returning to a waypoint in your navigation of a website, by default it is set up for google, but you can set a snapback point anywhere in a site manually and return to it.
The strongest new feature of Safari is its handling of bookmarks, it feels very natural and fluid., sort of like iTunes for browsers.

We had two to three inches of snow last night and we had a snowball fight, the guy in the jacket with the orange / yellow is me
Some pictures of london in snow, more, from BBC news and some to come from lucy.

Hi, welcome to this new blog. I guess I'll write about a variety of things on here, from photography, macos, internet development, to cookery.
About the name, it comes from nice old cookery books, where most of the good recipes start "Take one onion..." and that seems too reflect where I'm coming from.
Hope you like it