• Red onion, diced
• A soft apple (Braeburn or alike), diced
• Carrots
• Pork steak
• Rosemary (fresh)
• Pork Stock
• New Potatoes

There are two options with cooking method, eat now (well, in a few hours) or eat later … for the former, I’d do the whole thing in a La Creuset-esque casserole dish and stick it in the oven but this time I’m doing it the night before to put in our slow cooker tomorrow morning so I’ve just used a deep, wide pan with a lid.

Fry the onion to get that going (5 minutes on medium heat) then add the rosemary, apple and carrots and fry for a few more minutes.

Place the steaks in the dish and cover with stock and top up with water so everything is (mostly) covered.

Cook for a few more minutes on the hob either transfer to the oven (at a guess, 180C for 60-90 minutes) or to the slow cooker for as long as you like

I plan to serve with new potatoes but it could go equally well with rice or plain cous-cous.

Will hopefully be able to update tomorrow with some idea of how it turned out……….

As it’s rather old (2001) and doesn’t have much memory in it (128M) and is only a 450MHz G4 (slow!) I thought I’d try the “alternate” XUbuntu. After some effort, I got this installed (trying off a USB stick cos the 9.10 installer is just over 700M and wouldn’t fit on my CD-Rs just didn’t work) so I went for the 9.04 xUbuntu installer which was only 650M… much nicer.

This installed ok, but then I couldn’t log in. Bummer.

Broke into the system (init=/bin/bash saves the day once more) and tried resetting root’s password… failed.

Turned out (after a lot of anger and two reinstalls with various extra flags to the installer) that PAM doesn’t like having a date set before the epoch … 1904. It looks like the PowerPC had reset the system clock before to time began.

Then X … needed some extra hand-holding as I was just getting a blank black screen… http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=772808 worked for me.

Having forced the time to be correct (2010 — over a hundred years in the future!) it all worked fine.

Dist-upgrading to 9.10 then “just worked”. Well, I say, “just worked” — it thought I was using ATI rather than the Rage 128 driver for X.

So now I have a reasonably nice looking (it’s Apple, after all) system, albeit old, but still useful

Woo!

There’s a rather interesting report on the content of the data on the BBC news site but the only way to download the data is as a PDF from VOSA or as a Excel spreadsheet from the BBC. Both of these are not very parseable so I’ve converted them into a CSV and a MySQL dump file.

These files are not small… it’s over 12,600 rows in the following format:

• make varchar
• model varchar
• year int
• passes int
• failures int
• failrate float
• body int
• brakes int
• driverview int
• emissions int
• lights int
• identity int
• wheels int
• belts int
• steering int
• suspension int
• tyres int
• othercycles int
• controls int
• nottested int

The data is public, and the following files are released under the Creative Commons licence (see below for more info).

The two files available are:

• MySQL
• CSV dump (suitable for Excel)

I would be interested to hear of any interesting uses for this data, please feel free to comment below or let me know via Twitter (@fooflington)

Reworking of VOSA FoI data about MOT Test failures by Matthew Slowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.vosa.gov.uk.

Sent to my MP today:

Dear Julian Brazier,

My apologies for taking up yet more of your time, however our
Government seem to be leaving me little choice but to do so. I wish to
draw your attention to a story breaking in the Daily Telegraph today
(Saturday 14th March, 2009) regarding so called “e-borders”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4987415/All-travel-plans-to-be-tracked-by-Government.html

This would seem to be, if accurate (and I can find no cited references
to active or pending legislation), a HUGE step into the surveillance
culture which campaigns such as NO2ID are opposing and trying to publicise.

I don’t know if it is “too late” to do anything about this but, even if
it is, I would ask why this is necessary (to fight international
terrorism?!) and how it will help… surely the checking of persons on
“watch lists” can be done without the need for such a tracking database
of the general public at point of entry/exit.

What will be next? Will travelling outside your county (or perhaps into
London on a “sensitive” day) require written permission from a
bureaucrat before you’re allowed on a train?

This yet another appalling regime being apparently pushed in sideways
hoping law abiding citizens will roll-over and take it without any
question. I don’t have anything to hide about my whereabouts, but I
find the whole idea of registering my movements with an agency and
having that retained for a decade disgusting.

Once again, I’m sorry to have taken up your time but this is an issue
which is often overlooked and needs more attention.

Yours sincerely,
Me

He’s usually quite good about replying to emails so I will await the response…

Ingredients:

• 3 Lamb’s Hearts
• ~1 glass of White Wine
• 2 cloves of Garlic (chopped)
• Olive Oil (infused with garlic?)
• 1 Lamb Stock Cube made up with 8fl oz of water
• Rosemary to taste
• Black Pepper to taste
• 1 tsp Lemon Juice

I started by trimming off the top of the hearts as they tend to be quite fatty and the arteries/veins are quite chewy, then diced the remainder.

Warm the oil in a frying pan (medium heat) with the garlic until the garlic starts to turn brown then drop in the heart and allow that to brown for 5-10 minutes.

Add the wine and lamb stock and allow to reduce for about 15 minutes — the juice should start to thicken slightly. About 5 minutes before serving, add the lemon juice.

Serve with mashed potato and vegetables.

The week went, more or less, thus:

1. Friday night: Drive from the Deep South to Inverness via Tebey and Stirling — the A9 is a fantastic road at 2am
2. Arrive at Inverness at about 0700 Saturday after a nap near Dalwhinney and catch a train to the Kyle of Lochalsh (because we can).
3. Conclude drive to cottage and unpack
4. Go for an extremely soggy walk around Inverewe Gardens (nearby National Trust for Scotland property with lovely trees etc).
5. Sarah and her Dad went to attempt a walk over the hills behind our cottage to Rubha Reidh lighthouse … but were forced to abandon this due to encountering a 4″ deep river which the buggy was thwarted by… so, instead, we drove Once there, we found the old supply jetty for the lighthouse complete with former railway for whinching the supplies up the steep incline (with kart and whinch in the gorge below).
6. A trip out to the other side of Loch Ewe to see a tiny distillery and while going there found a small NATO navy base… which initially dates from when the loch was using extensively during WW2 by the Navy with a lot of the old emplacements still evident.
7. We left after lunch on Friday having seen the surrounding hills covered in snow overnight to drive back during the day to see the landscape.

On the Sunday, we received a phone call to say that Mum had been taken into hospital suffering with what turned out to be a stroke hense leaving a bit earlier than we would otherwise have done.

She’s doing really well, having been transferred to Addenbrookes (Cambridge) a few days after it happend near Enfield. Having intially been unable to move her left side or talk at all, she’s now making reasonable sentences (while still struggling with remembering some words) and, although having issues with sensation, able to mostly move but is still quite weak and gets very tired easlily.

We’re taking Benji in to see her as much as possible

I’ve set up a webalbum for you to oggle

Famous Victorian engineer Robert Stephenson will be at the Museum of Canterbury this Saturday (10 May) to chat to visitors and enlist their help in a series of fun experiments.

Well, who’d have thought it… a man who died in 1859 will be receiving guests next weekend at a museum

See xkcd for more time wastings

I may be in a minority, but although my screen may be 1024×768, that
is not the resolution at which my applications run. I often (nee all
the time) have many applications open at once and the most efficient
way to know what’s going on in all of them is to have them layered and
*not* filling the whole screen.

The old 600 wide layout was perfect for this and was a design concept
I would reccomend to others too. The new design, however, doesn’t
actually provide any more space for actual content but, instead, makes
the navigation bars around the edge much “bigger” (that is wider and
fatter). This means I need to scroll off the side to see some of the
sidebar content (which annoys me greatly on any page — sideways
scrolling should never be required).

Furthermore, what were considered headings further down the page under
“AROUND THE UK NOW”, the section headings used to be bold and are no
longer. This makes it much harder to skim down for what you’re looking
for.

I am aware that people far cleverer than I have had a hand in creating
this new design, however it is, in my opinion, a step too far into the
“Web 2.0″ idiom. The site was, previously, clean, concise and easy to
navigate for all. That is no longer the case, I fear.