In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
In which I start a new fitness/health plan...
So I've decided to get fit and lose some weight (again, more on that below). Partly because it is a good idea to do so and also as work towards Project 0 - which I haven't forgotten about, honest!
In which I bake another, more ambitious, MRI scanner cake...
The ISBE annual BBQ was on Friday so I had to once again attempt to bake an MRI scanner cake. I decided to go for a more realistic one than previously.
The basic cake is made using Delia's All-in-one Sponge recipe and then things get a little crazy as I make 4 of them.
In which I give my thoughts on what tea to drink when throughout the day...
So as a British person (66% of Britons drink tea daily) I feel the need to consume a good quantity of tea everyday. The average Briton drinks 3½ cups a day - you'll find me at the top of the bell curve dong my best to keep the average up. I normally have around 6 cups a day.
In which I start making some healthy food...
When following the Slow-Carb diet, or generally trying to be healthy I often find myself getting very bored of beans as my only option for carbs. There's also a lack of good healthy snack choices. From now on I will occasionally post healthy recipe ideas under 'Sponge' :)
In which I blog about the last two weeks, gain another year and try some green tea...
It's been a busy few weeks so I'm afraid the blog has suffered slightly. I had a hectic week filled with work and rehearsing and just about managed to make a rather ridiculous cake. This was followed by a pretty stellar concert by CAOS which filled out the church and enjoyable festivities thereafter. I plan to update more regularly in the future.
Other than that I have turned another year older and received many gifts of tea, cake and board games. The tea will be reviewed shortly. As for the board games I now have Ticket to Ride: Europe, Alhambra & Hare and Tortoise. I probably won't review these as they've been around long enough to be well reviewed online but I've enjoyed playing them already :D
In which I make my own take on the Turducken of desserts...
So for those of you that aren't aware a Turducken is a duck-inside-a-chicken-inside-a-turkey. Otherwise known as meatception! Following along this line of crazy ridiculous food Charles Phoenix invented the Cherpumple cake which is three different pies (cherry, pumpkin and apple) baked inside three different cakes (yellow, white, spiced). I decided to make my take on this crazy dessert as my final CAOS cake before stepping down as Social Sec. I didn't have access to pumpkin so I decided to make a Cherbluple - cherry, blueberry and apple pies baked into a chocolate sponge, a plain sponge and a spiced sponge.
In which I make flapjacks because they are tasty and I haven't made them in years...
I haven't made flapjacks in at least 5 years. Which is crazy considering how much I love flapjacks. I've taken a recipe that serves 12 and scaled it up to make at least 60 to satiate the needs of hungry musicians. I've also tinkered with the flavours, enjoy!
In which I explain the new plan for my tea blog and a lovely trip to Leamington...
In Leamington Spa meeting up with old friends I found myself in possession of a hangover and thus the need for a recovery breakfast. The Leaf tea rooms and piano bar were suggested as the place to go and go we did. It was a lovely experience - I think we walked in to Paparazzi by Lady Gaga being played on the piano. The tea room has a nice relaxed atmosphere and the soothing piano playing is the perfect backdrop when you have a bit of a headache. Although I wasn't there at tea time I am informed that not only do they do a very filling afternoon tea that they also have a wide selection of delectable cakes.
In which I improve a pretty awesome recipe for biscuits...
And by improve I mean - add more cinnamon!
The original recipe: http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/506/cinnamon-biscuits.aspx
Tom Out!
In which I review another tea from the outlet...
The only other white tea I've tried before this was an Earl Grey variant which overpowered the tea a little. So this is my first time properly trying white tea.
It's a delicate tea and so only needs a quick brew of 2-3 minutes. This tea tastes as if it falls between green tea and black tea. It's very enjoyable :)
It's nice to have something to break up my green tea-black tea-green tea rotation I have at work :)
http://www.whittard.co.uk/tea/teabags_1/white_tea_50_teabags.htm
I might start putting interesting links at the bottom of the reviews :) Here's the first one courtesy of Alex:
In which I restock my work tea...
I was down to my last few tea bags at work and so decided to head the the Lowry Outlet Mall where there is a Whittard's outlet shop with a few friends.
There were some good discounts available:
And now I have a large stock of new tea for work and for reviewing!
I will endeavour to review other tea brands in between all these Whittard ones too!
"Stop what you are doing and savour!"
Regular readers will now I am a big fan of Earl Grey. With the aforementioned offers I just had to risk it and get hold of some green Earl Grey. This tea is essentially just green tea with bergamot added.
It's a lovely brew and means I can enjoy Earl Grey at work without the need for milk or lemon*. It's lighter than the black tea equivalent and very refreshing. I would heartily recommend it!
*Yes I drink Earl Grey with milk - I like it that way!
Lowry Outlet Mall: http://www.lowryoutlet.co.uk
Tea: http://www.whittard.co.uk/tea/green/green_earl_grey/green_earl_grey_50_teabags.htm
Tom Out!
In which Chrome causes some problems for once...
So my work computer has been playing up a lot recently. It's been so slow that I've even had to hard reset several times. I've tried the usual tips and tricks:
None of this worked. Starting up Task Manager I found that Chrome was using about 60% of my CPU even when I wasn't actively using it. This was odd so I had a quick Google...
Chrome runs plugins as separate processes (which is why there are so many processes in Task Manager called chrome.exe). If one of these has a high CPU usage you can end the process and chrome will give you an error that the plugin has crashed. You can then disable that plugin.
Annoyingly it was Adobe Flash Player causing the problems. Since I use this all the time I couldn't just uninstall it. The problem was luckily easy to solve - I had enabled hardware acceleration to fix a YouTube bug a few weeks back. Turning that off sped the computer up significantly.
Sorting out Flash did reduce the load Chrome was putting on the CPU but didn't remove all of it. It turns out that Chrome has a real time anti-malware protection feature which can use a lot of processing power. You can disable it in Settings>Privacy>Enable phishing and malware protection. This didn't have as much of an effect as the Flash problem but has helped speed up my computer. *
*If you're worried about not having the protection I've found Lavasoft Adaware to be more than ample against malware.
Tom Out!
In which I review a newly released game...
Here's a new game I backed on KickStarter about half a year ago. The multiplayer is now available on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/219340/) with the single player campaign on it's way. It's also free-to-play!
In which I review a ginger flavoured tea...
While at a conference (a little while ago) I had the opportunity to visit Cambridge's lovely market. There I purchased a ginger flavoured black tea to try.
This is a lovely cup of tea with or without milk. There is a hint of ginger in the aroma but you can definitely taste it. I love ginger and this is a very pleasant tea experience. With milk in the tea it would be the perfect accompaniment to dessert. Perhaps some gingerbread :) Without milk the black tea flavour is stronger and I might even consider having it as a regular tea.
Lovely gingery black tea. Perfect with milk!
Tom Out!
P.S. Once I find a link for the tea seller I'll update this post with it.
P.P.S. I hope people are enjoying the slightly different review style :)
In which I install Steam on Linux...
Steam is now officially supported on Linux! I decided to try it out.
Firstly - there are only 78 games supported* at the moment. So just be aware some of your faves might not be there yet.
Secondly - if you are running an Nvidia card you need to have x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers version 304.4 or higher installed. Steam will install but it won't get past login if you don't do this. You can solve this on Gentoo quite simply:
In which I setup an IDE for my coding...
As with most of my Tinker posts to do with computers this is a guide to something I might need to do again in the future. You can probably find out how to do it online but I struggled with bits and am putting it here for my own and other's reference.
I am currently demonstrating a C++ lab at the University and it's good to be able to run the example code myself ahead of time. Also I am continuing to teach myself C++ as part of Project Euler.
