This is raw Satay style butternut noodles and raw brownies:

It was delightful. The “noodles” were tasty and surprisingly filling. You would think it tasted like eating a salad, but the recipe cleverly makes it taste more like a real meal. And the brownies are very rich, probably richer than the real thing. They taste like nakd bars.

I don’t think it’s easy to make – I was on a two and a half hour phone call and she was still working away at it when I had finished! It uses a weird machine that looks like torture equipment (a spiralizer).

I highly recommend it as a remote control for a MythTV box. It’s a good small size (it’s smaller than it looks in the picture), the integrated trackpad is responsive and large and has both mouse buttons. There’s zero config needed for Linux (at least in Arch Linux). The range is good. There’s no useless extra media buttons that no-one uses. In short, it’s perfect.

Link to product on Logitech website.

When it’s not work, it’s catching up with the news, checking my calendar, writing my journal, playing games, shopping, writing my todo lists, looking at photos, watching youtube, etc, etc.

The good news is that being tied to a computer is now changing – I’m finding the more casual surfing tasks which are usually leisure based rather than productivity based are now more pleasant to do on the iPad on the sofa or in bed.

Do you live to work or work to live? Luckily the question is moot for me because my work is programming and programming (or more accurately, problem solving) is my calling. From “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt (which I haven’t read):

Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.

• If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work.
• If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.
• If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.

If I suddenly became very wealthy, I would definitely continue to program.

It wouldn’t sit on the CPU properly because some capacitors on the motherboard got in the way of the cooling fins. It was also very hard to to install the motherboard anchors that the fan screws into. Be sure to avoid this fan on this motherboard.

High quality, fun game.
There was a short space scene which I think they pulled off quite well, if just to show-case the incredible space-scene graphics.
I don’t like the continuing trend of sad endings .

I was most excited about the carrots but we ended up with vegetarian veal:

http://www.new.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=your_facebook_id&key=your_friends_list_key&format=rss20

Where

• your_facebook_id – To find this, go to your facebook notifications page and copy the link called “Via RSS“. The URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=668921524&viewer=668921524&key=1c9c72f322&format=rss20 and “668921524″ is the id you need.
• your_friends_list_key – To find this, go to your facebook Friends List page and click on the list. The URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/?sk=fl_447510731524 and “447510731524″ is the key you need.

This is useful if you want to make sure you don’t miss any activity of a particular group of friends – I don’t go to Facebook every day but I do go to a RSS reader every day. It is also useful if you want to filter out and ignore a particular group.

I don’t know how people manage Facebook without using this feature!

Answers are at flavorwire.com. My favourite renditions are The Scream (Eduard Munch), Portrait of Dora Maar (Pablo Picasso) and Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez). Thanks goes to Rodrigo for sharing this song with me.

Bonus music video for “best marching band”:

Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to this law is that it gives corporations the power to ban a entire household from the internet and I feel very strongly that everyone should have the right to be online. I would go so far as to say, for me, life without the internet wouldn’t be worth living. Just because someone in the household has broken some licensing agreements shouldn’t mean they are stopped from all the useful online stuff such as paying for road tax, campaigning for freedom, conducting research, enjoying art, planning travel, etc etc.

Other reason this Act seems unfair to me:

• The Act uses a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
• The Act will add extra costs on wi-fi providers – meaning less public wi-fi. I had hoped the whole country would be blanketed in wi-fi by now.
• The Act is a threat to sites that permit user-generated content. This is because it has web blocking provisions that let copyright holders get a site taken down for inadvertently hosting a small amount of copyrighted content.

Another fantastic government website is http://www.number10.gov.uk/.

A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.

Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!