Blog

Thanks to the largesse of a friend dbe.cc is on new (free) hosting, and it beats the crap out of my old hosting, too. It's a good thing.

I'm not going to bother moving anything over from the old site since a) it's been nuked and b) there was bugger all there anyway.

In terms of news, spent the entirety of last night cooking which was kinda cool. The other day I got a craving for the sweet chilli jam that Sam had when he was living with me. Upon searching this hear innerweb I found a recipe, and also turned up one for sweet chilli sauce. I figured they both needed to be made.

The jam turned out really well, which is great since this was my first foray into jam making. The sweet chilli sauce seemed okay, but it's not the sort of thing you can really sample on it's own. I'll need to make some fish cakes or something and try it then.

Peep the recipes in the pages section.

I got this recipe from here, however I've fleshed it out a bit and added a bit of advice.

This stuff is absolutely incredible with eggs. It goes with a bunch of other stuff too, but once you've had an omlette with chilli jam on the side you'll be a different person.

Ingredients:

1 kg tomatoes, blanched skinned and chopped 500 g sugar 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1/3 cup white wine vinegar 6-10 red chilies 2 teaspoons salt 2 tablespoons fish sauce (nam pla)

1. To peel tomatoes, put in large bowl and cover with boiling water for 10 minutes.This helps the skin to peel much more easily. Roughly chop the tomatoes and mix with the sugar. Keep them kind of chunky to give the jam a great texture. This must stand for several hours or overnight.
2. Pop a small plate or saucer in the freezer. You'll need it later.
3. You may be worried about leaving the seeds in the chillis, but it's not that hot once it's done. The sugar really steals a lot of the heat.
4. When the tomatos are settled, add all ingredients to a large saucepan and simmer until thick. This can vary from 40 minutes to 1.5 hours depending on juice in tomatoes etc. A good jam making trick is to grab your plate out of the freezer and dribble a little of the juice onto it. If it immediately turns to a jelly-like consistency, you're done. Be careful not to burn the jam, but you're better off being a little overdone that being under and having un-set, runny jam.
5. Sterilise some jars with boiling water and pour in the jam while they're still warm. Should keep for at least 6 months.

When Gutsy came out recently I decided to make the switch from Gnome to KDE. Overall I like it, but there are some things that are driving me nuts. One of them is that there seems to be no way to change the default action of the power button on my laptop. This was easy to change in Gnome, but requires more trickery in KDE.

After a while of searching around in control panels and on Google, it became apparent that the answer I sought did not lay in a GUI. Thankfully, the acpi config files are very easy to edit.

All you need to do is go to /etc/acpi/events and find the file named powerbtn. It's good practice to make a backup at this point. Copy the file to something like powerbtn.bak. Now click the handy "edit as root" button in Dolphin.

Alternately, if you're comfortable in a terminal, it's much simpler to just issue the following command: > sudo cp /etc/acpi/events/powerbtn /etc/acpi/events/powerbtn.bak && sudo kate /etc/acpi/events/powerbtn Once in there, find the line action=/etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh and change it to the following: > action=/etc/acpi/hibernate.sh Save it and you're done. You'll need to restard acpid (or just reboot the whole os) before the change will take effect.

What this change does is, instead of telling the system to run the "ask the user what they want to do" script when the power button is pressed, it tells the system to run the "hibernate now" script when the button is pressed.