Book Review #29

Book #29 The Total Outdoorsman Manual
T. Edward Nickens et al

Published by Field and Stream, it is indeed an excellent book for outdoorsman. The book is filled with various tips for the outdoors, including hunting, fishing, camping, and survival. The hunting section is further divided into various animals. Dressings and cooking are explained as well. Priced at only $25 yet filled with almost 400 pages of picture-filled pages, this represent an excellent deal.

I'm really impressed with the wide variety of content. If there's anything I'd like to see more, it's camping. The camping section is rather minimal. Then again, Field & Stream denotes hunting and fishing. Camping is only enough to get you going and taken care of, but the priority is certainly in getting your animal bagged and back to camp. In that view, it succeeds admirably.

If you are a hunter, fisherman, or just someone who is contemplating whether or not to venture to the great outdoors, then this is a book worth a reading. Recommended.

Book Review #28

Learn to Play the Piano and Keyboard
Nick Freeth

Another book by Parragon Publishing, and hard to find author's name. Unfortunately, unlike the sushi book, this one is piano playing. Piano playing is somewhat a rather involved activity. Sure you have some good techniques explained there. Plenty of good pictures, too. But going from simple keyboarding to The Entertainer simply requires more practice than the pages provides. Worse, there's no chord chart at the end of the book the student can refer to. This book is not a tutorial book, or even an introductory one. It's a piano user guide. Here is the white key. Here is the black key, and here is the pedal. And not much after that. Not recommended.

Book Review #27

Home Buying for Dummies
Eric Tyson and Ray Brown

This book puts a clear vision for first time home buyer. Starting with, "which one is more expensive, rent or buy?" the authors give clear examples of advantages of renting vs. buying. Both views are fairly presented so that you can make a good decision. Of course, the book then proceeds on the assumption that you're buying your house.

A workbook is provided to tell you exactly what you can afford. Followed by mortages, insurance, and other headaches. In chapter 9, the book advises hiring an agent, even if you find the home yourself. Luckily for me, I did find a good agent. And so, I can recommend that you do so, as well. You still need to do your homework, and find out what the price range, neighborhood, and type of home you're looking for.

The last part of the book deals with forms. I can tell you that going through the process, there's quite a bit more paperwork than that. In the end, my agent got me a special loan processor, who is worth her fee, because the amount of work is equivalent to building up a big, thick, dictionary. I lost count of the number of signatures I had to sign.

If you ever wonder whether or not you should stop renting and buy a house for yourself, reading this book will get you ahead in your decision. Recommended.

Cooking Journal #29

Cooking #29 Breakfast Sushi

Well, well. This isn't how it's done! There's an art in making sushi omelette and obviously, this is not it. In fact, I simply fried the eggs while rolling the sushi. Notice, there's no wasabi involved. I use sriracha!

Next time I do this, I'll do scattered sushi. The nori can be cut up into little stripes and use as sprinkled garnish.

Book Review #26

Sushi with Style
Ellen Brown

I think I have too many sushi book when I start buying them even though they're written by non-Japanese. Then again, the as long as the information presented is good, that's good enough for me. I think there must be something alluring for what is essentially a piece of raw meat stacked on top of rice.

The simpleton in me rebelled at the list of ingredients. Rice, vinegar, soy sauce, hot sauce, and maybe pickled ginger, is what I use for my sushi. Actually, soy sauce and hot sauce are optional, since I just use Sriracha. Of course, mine is not "authentic" Japanese sushi. No sushi that does not use authentic Japanese ingredients can be called authentic. Still, that just means that sushi recipes are pretty easy to do. It's hard to make a mistake when there's only a few ingredients, most of them uncooked.

I got the book in a kit, with bamboo mat and chopstick. Since I mostly make scattered sushi (in a bowl), as opposed to rolled sushi, the bamboo mat is mostly unused. Still, the recipe here are well done. Even if the illustrations are sometimes lacking, there's enough recipes there to try, and experiment. Some of the recipes employ easily found ingredients, and that's a plus.

If you ever wanted to know about sushi, but don't know where to start. This book and a sushi kit should get you going just fine.

Raspberry Pi Journal #52

Spell Checker

Perhaps it may surprise you that the Raspberry Pi comes with a built-in spell checker. aspell and ispell.

The standard word list is located in /usr/share/dict/

However, aspell has its own directory: /usr/lib/aspell

The standard aspell mode is by checking the spelling interactively. There is a way to do it with non-interactive method. This will let you dump misspelled words all at once.

1. cat sample.txt | aspell list

list is a command that basically prints misspelled words coming in from standard input.

cooking journal #28

Cooking #28 Ice Cream Sandwich

Ha ha. What do you know? Ice cream and bread makes a nice pairing! Don't you just love chocolate mint ice cream on bread?

This brings back memories, as one of my childhood experience. Simple, yet pleasant. Who needs fruit jams when you can have ice cream?