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Archives for 2010

Silchester

July 18th, 2010

Yesterday evening I went for a walk around the remains of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum at Silchester a few miles south of Reading. Silchester is rare in that it was abandoned after the end of the Roman empire, leaving the walls, an amphitheater, and various other archaeological bits largely undisturbed. It’s a very nice place to go walking, highly recommended! Here are some photos I took:

A tasty paprika stew

July 16th, 2010

Unusually for me, I here recommend a foodstuff! It’s a synthesis of a couple of different recipes I found, so probably not authentic Hungary-food, but quite tasty.

Things you will need:

  • Stewing beef
  • Onions
  • Potatoes
  • Bacon
  • Beef stock
  • Paprika
  • Caraway seeds
  • Garlic

Some of these ingredients seem a bit suspicious but they’re probably OK in moderation. Caraway seeds and paprika come in those little spice pots. Stewing beef is the cheaper, lower-quality sort of beef. You can substitute potatoes for dumplings if you like, and a wholesome vegetable like turnip or carrot could be added if you’re so inclined.

To make:

  1. Cut fat off bacon, fry in pan
  2. Chop up onions and garlic and fry in bacon fat – add lard if not enough fat
  3. Chop up bacon into little bits and fry
  4. Chop beef into bite-sized cubes and fry until brown
  5. Add paprika and stir in. You should add lots of this as it’s quite tasty. Apparently it’s important to remove pan from heat at this point to avoid burning
  6. Add beef stock
  7. Add salt, pepper, and some caraway seeds (not too many)
  8. Put lid on pan and bubble on low heat for about 50 minutes
  9. Chop potatoes up into cubes and add to pan
  10. Increase the heat a little bit and bubble for 20-30 minutes or until the potatoes are good. Might need to add a bit more water

Here’s one I made earlier:

I’ve made this a couple of times and good results seem easily reproducible. It’s also quite amenable to making in large batches and storing in a tub for later use.

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Kew to Battersea

July 4th, 2010

What interesting things exist between Kew and Battersea? I set off yesterday to answer this very question. It turns out there are quite a lot of bridges and some mud. Only about another 16 miles and I will have walked all the way from home to the Thames barrier!

Cowshell

July 2nd, 2010

Blodgett just reminded me of another useful tool we made a few years ago: cowshell! Cowshell provides a more user-friendly interface to the Linux shell by wrapping the output in multi-coloured cows. Here is an example session:

Cowshell is a Perl script that you can acquire here. You will need cowsay and maybe some Perl modules for it to work.

Oxford

June 20th, 2010

I went to Oxford today. I haven’t been since I was 18 when I had an interview there. Remember it being quite terrifying – was much nicer today! Oxford has several good museums: the History of Science museum was particularly good. I liked the temporary exhibit they have at the moment containing a poetic homage by Alain de Botton to the hobby of pylon spotting (among other things).

Photos!

My first WordPress plugin

June 15th, 2010

I’ve written a WordPress plugin to generate a browser for all the NextGEN Gallery albums that you have. You can see it in action on my photos page.

To install you must be using the NGG plugin (obviously) and then just place ngg-album-browse.php in your wp-content/plugins folder. Activate it, then you can use the following shortcode to insert it in a page or post (without the spaces):

[ albumbrowser ]

You can also display albums in a random order:

[ albumbrowser order="random" ]

Things in Maidenhead

June 13th, 2010

Contrary to popular opinion, there are several interesting things in Maidenhead. And here I have made some pictures of them!

This is the Brunel bridge which has been featured on this blog several times previously. The arches are incredibly wide and flat: such an awesome bit of engineering. Soon to be upgraded when the west coast mainline is CrossRail-ified, with overhead gantries and extra strengthening for super fast trains.

This tree has somehow managed to grow incredibly straight but in the wrong direction.

Here we return to the subject of bridges, but also of goose. This bridge is normally referred to as the Maidenhead bridge and carries traffic along the A4 from Slough. The bridges really are the best thing about Maidenhead…

I really like this derelict terrace near the football ground. I think it’s imminently to be demolished redeveloped into trendy flats, which is a pity as they would look much better renovated and left as houses.

That’s all for today. I will post more things as soon as I find them!

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TrainGame 0.2.1 released

June 6th, 2010

TrainGame 0.2.1 is now available! This version is functionally identical to 0.2 but the scenery and track rendering code has been almost completely rewritten to improve performance. You should see an increase in frame rate of around 2x with a low-end integrated graphics card (e.g. Intel GMA) or 3-4x with a GPU which performs hardware vertex processing. The downside is that a lot more memory is consumed, both system and GPU. However, the overall memory usage is still fairly low so I’ll implement a caching system when this becomes a problem.

A crash when saving a map in the editor has also been fixed.

Download the source code here: TrainGame-0.2.1.tar.gz

See the TrainGame page for instructions on compiling and playing.