I’ve done it! Those shifty buggers from Hybrid have been sneaking in uber-stealthy hidden tracks onto their CDs! These tracks lurk in the negative time of track 1 and appear on their albums Morning Sci-Fi and I Choose Noise. I’ve been scratching my head for a couple of years about how the hell I’m going to rip them properly. No more of this rewinding and analog recording crap. I’ve finally figured out how to rip them digitally. Google and Exact Audio Copy to the rescue.
Archive for October, 2006
My dairy-free cabonara alternative. Serves about 4 depending on how much pasta you cook.
Ingredients
300g chicken fillets, diced
2 rashers bacon, diced
1 onion, diced
1-2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 a red capsicum, diced
2 cups (approx) mushrooms, peeled & sliced
1 cup tinned chick peas, thoroughly washed
Extra virgin olive oil
400ml can coconut milk
Breadcrumbs (optional)
Pasta of your choice
Method
- Fry the onion, garlic, capsicum, mushrooms and chick peas in oil then remove from pan.
- Fry chicken and bacon until browned. I like to add paprika at this step.
- Add coconut milk and the vegies you fried earlier. Simmer for 15 mins or more.
- Add breadcrumbs only if you want to thicken the sauce. It actually works quite well and is better than flour which screws the taste. About 2 TB is a good amount but be careful because it takes a few mins to thicken as they soak up the liquid.
- Oh yeah, cook and drain the pasta at some stage :-)
- Serve with lots of freshly ground black pepper (Chris Taylor style).
Notes
Chives would probably be good in this but I didn’t have any. Tuna instead of chicken might be a nice variation. I have it with chinotto but I’m just into it at the moment.
Three blokes go into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability…
We all know Bill Bailey is hilarious in Black Books, but I was almost on the floor watching the DVD of his live show “Part Troll” last night. Here’s how you too can lose all bladder control in three easy steps. Let go of that mouse. Stop fondling that keyboard. Go out and buy this DVD now! Now I just have to figure out a way of getting some tea and coffee making facilities for this site…
Have you ever wanted to own your own 3rd rate residential college at the University of Melbourne?
Well, four years ago on October 11 2004 Whitley College was put up for auction … on eBay. As residents, we all thought this was extremely hilarious. So I saved a copy of the page before it was taken down, as any self-respecting geek would do. If you follow the links in the item description, it’s fairly obvious who was responsible. It even made it to The Age’s online news site! Ahhh… I sure do miss those Uni shenanigans.
- View the original eBay Listing
- View the article in The Age which is still online!
I’ve been using a “catchall” address on frostnova.net for years now. For the non-geeks: Normally, email sent to a nonexistent address is rejected. With a catchall, any email sent to any address @frostnova.net is received. This behaviour is particularly useful for catching out spammers, e.g. I sign up to Company X using companyx@frostnova.net as my email address. If that address gets spammed, I know it was Company X. Credit to Josh for this genius idea :-)
The downside is that I get loads more spam from spambots guessing the addresses. Because anything they guess is a valid email address, in pours the spam. Pointing the catchall to Gmail helped a bit, but I still get heaps of spam, even if Gmail catches most of it. Interestingly, I was averaging about 30 spams per month before the site went live. Then spam levels started to increase. My guess is that the spambots went “Hey, look! A real domain with a real website!” and flagged it as a viable spam target. My spams-per-month now hovers between 1000 and 1500.
Today I decided to stop being a sitting duck. Now there’s only about 20 aliases that are legit and they get forwarded to Gmail. The rest go a mailbox I set up in case I forgot an alias. But eventually they will all just bounce and the spambots will move on. My hosting gets me unlimited email names so I can still use the companyx@ technique. It’s actually better this way because I can see all the fake email addresses I’ve created. Before they just existed in the massive sea of permutations (come on you maths geeks, how many?). The “experiment” is to see how Gmail spam levels behave in the next few days after the switch. When I’ve got some decent data I’ll have a chart below showing the results, so come back in about a few weeks.
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