Book Review #21

Japanese Cooking
Lulu Grimes

First of all, I'm not even sure "Lulu Grimes" is the author of the book. There's no name listed on the cover. The publisher is Parragon Publishing in UK. Printed in China. Produced by the Bridgewater Book Company, Ltd. With Home Economist Kate Moseley. I really don't know what to think of it. The photography, by David Jordan, seems good enough, but there's no blurbs or anything.

The recipe follows a simple procedure.
1. List the ingredients
2. Show one picture of the process
3. Show the text of the preparation process
4. Show a big picture of the finished product

In some cases, this shows the picture of a knife cutting meat, or ingredients being dumped into a pan. So, not much there. Regarding Japanese cooking, they're mostly pure ingredients. In some cases, one short ingredient list. One short preparation steps. Done.

That's my kind of cooking. It annoys me, though, that I can't find the name of the author of this book. Still, if simply prepared Japanese cooking is what you want, then this book is ideal.

By the way, if you haven't done so, try cutting meat in tiny little slices, and use chopstick to drop them into hot oil in a pan. Wait until cooked, and fish it out with the chopstick. Put it in plate. Simple. Quick. Convenient. Done.

Musing Journal #4

Plan, Do, Learn

For the longest time, I always work with Learn, Plan, Do. This is because I value my time and by properly learning the materials, I am able to properly plan the activity, so that when it comes to actually doing it, I will have no trouble at all.

This has served me well throughout the years, whether it's engaging in a project, or writing term papers, the proper outline has been essential in getting things done quickly.

Lately, though, I have a second thought about the process. Probably because I'm being overwhelmed right now. There's so much to do that if I have to fully learn everything, then a lot of things won't get done quickly. I suppose there's a good side about "do one thing at a time" philosophy, however, I wonder if that's a good thing when there's so much to do at one time. In essence, I wonder if there's a faster way to do things than one at a time.

So, I have been doing things around. Instead of Learn-Plan-Do cycle, I decided on Plan-Do-Learn cycle. Make plan, Do plan, and Adjust accordingly. So far, it has been working well. Things are getting done, and more importantly, I am able to manage various projects at once. I still limit myself to doing two or three big things per day. And I focus on the most important thing to do in that day. But as weeks go by, I am able to see improvements in all aspects of my life.

If you look at my blog, you see various things going on. That's because I have wide ranging interest, and the fact that had I focus on one thing at a time, there will be some holes on it. So, I have no choice. I have to spread my activities around, regardless how I feel about it.

And that's a good thing. The ability to learn from doing does have value. I keep changing things and well, I see definite improvements in each separate activities. Mind you, I'm still overwhelmed. However, I manage things much better now. I am now able to see progress on my schedule.

So, all I have to do now is keep improving, and I will catch up with the rest of the schedule eventually. It takes longer than expected, but steady progress is better than heroic actions, especially since I have a tendency to burn out after such heroic actions.

Raspberry Pi Journal #47

SD card capacity

So I was wondering why my dd command always fail with insufficient disk space message. Turns out that there are different sizes with different SD card brands. Here is my size of PNY 16 gig card:

1. sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

• Disk /dev/sda: 16.0 GB, 16012804096 bytes
• 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1946 cylinders, total 31275008 sectors
• Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
• Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
• I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
• Disk identifier: 0x00000000
• 
  
•    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
• /dev/sda1            8192    31275007    15633408    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

And here is my size of generic store brand 16 Gig card:

• sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
• Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5
• 
  
• Disk /dev/sda: 16.0 GB, 16009658368 bytes
• 4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 488576 cylinders, total 31268864 sectors
• Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
• Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
• I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
• Disk identifier: 0x00048a81
• 
  
•    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
• /dev/sda1            2048     2324218     1161085+   e  W95 FAT16 (LBA)
• /dev/sda2         2326528    31268863    14471168   85  Linux extended
• /dev/sda5         2334720     2449407       57344    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

As you can see, the PNY SD card has holds 16012804096 bytes, compared to 16009658368. So that's the difference of 3145728 bytes. No wonder the dd command always fails. Well, there are two ways about it:

1. Buy identical PNY SD cards
2. Migrate the whole thing to a smaller, generic SD card.

Option one is easy, but depends on availability of such card. Option two is, frankly, a pain at this point. I have too many stuff in there already.

Option 3, which is to built another card, and copy the files between them somehow does not work because the keyboard stopped working. No, I don't know why, but that is why it's off the table.

Cooking Journal #23

Frozen Pizza

So, I bought a few pizza from the local supermarket. Buying in batch of 5, they cost $2 each. Quite a good deal, if I may say so myself. $2 meal is nice, but the large pizza means that I eat only half. The other half goes to refrigerator for another meal time. So, the cost per meal is only $1.

I find it hard to believe that people will order a pizza delivery. I can understand if you're travelling and have no means to cook good food. I can also understand if you're having a party or maybe you want to have more than one pizza. If all you want is a pizza, frozen pizza is cooked in about 20 minutes at 400 degrees, or about the same as delivery.

Pizza quality, of course, is less than gourmet pizza. Pizza Hut is great. So is Papa John. However, the quality of frozen pizza is not bad. There's nothing wrong with stocking your freezer with them.

Take a simple Pepperoni pizza. Maybe you think it's rather bland. So? Just add more toppings as you like it. There's nothing wrong with customizing the toppings. You may need to experiment a little bit with the proper cooking time as to accomodate the opening of the oven, but I don't think that's too difficult to do.

Book Review #20

Chinese Cooking
Rose Cheng and Michelle Morris

I like this book because the book opens up with a short cultural lesson of Chinese cooking that is frequently missing in other cookbooks, and yet short enough as to concentrate on cooking, without being wordy or irrelevant. A philosophical overview maybe irrelevant to some, but I find that as I experiment with the recipe, these provide the guidance I need.

The tool section is short and to the point. Normally, a cook book would specify so many pots and pans, and so many utensil. This one specifies a few multi-purpose tools. I really appreciate that.

The problem comes when it comes to ingredients. Chinese ingredients are unique to chinese culture, and that's kind of hard to get in rural America. There's a big picture that helpfully shows the different kind of ingredients desired, but unless there's a good Asian store in your neighborhood, there's no getting them. I'd appreciate if the writer would write equivalent substitute to the ingredients. Alas, that information will not be found here.

The dishes are varied and good. My complain about them is the same complain about other recipes: They are all hard to make, requiring many different ingredients and spices, and frankly, a bother to do. I have no doubt that they are great tasting food. I find that I'm skimping all the different exotic ingredient, and substitute what is available locally. There's nothing to it. I appreciate the pictures of the food, and although mine is nowhere close to looking the same, it's good enough for me.

If you want a good survey of chinese food, and don't mind either going to Asian store and do a lot of work, or maybe converting it to using readily available local ingredient, then this is a good cook book to have.

Musing Journal #3

3 Priorities

I think that's me. For some reason, I always fixated to number 3. Or maybe number 4. In this case, I'm thinking about what I'm doing with my time, and there are 3 answers:

1. PTC: There will be GameJam this weekend, and I really, really want to go there. Basically, I'll spent the weekend doing one whole game using PTC. It should be fun. There is a lot of projects that has been held up due to my setbacks. I need to step up my productivity.

2. My home. It's kind of a mess right now. I just discovered that the previous owner cleaned the oven by using the "self-cleaning oven" setting. Which is to say, burn all grease to a crisp. Unfortunately, that's all he did. So, I'll be scraping all the fat that is currently sticking to it. Sigh. Where's Mr. Clean? I also need to work on my paperworks, speaking of which...

3. My books. I have 4 books nearly done. 2 needs editing, 2 needs a little more materials before editing. I also have some more materials for more books. So, I need to step up to that also.

It's kind of bad when bad health is causing havoc with the schedule. Then I have the tendency to make up for time lost, then I get sick due to overwork, and repeat. I'll have to figure something out to break the cycle.

So, I should ride my bicycle more often. That gets my heart rate up, and hopefully raised my stamina so I can get more work done.

Raspberry Pi Journal #46

Disable Screensaver

The last couple posts deals with pesky screensaver kept interfering with our display. We certainly want to have an easy way to disable the screen saver, and for that, we need to go to the source: X window session itself.

Most of the instructions I see on the internet specifies .xinitrc file modification. Although it should work, that makes the change permanent. If I can do it via user shell, I'd rather do it that way.

Fortunately, there is a set of xwindow utilities. The one we're interested in is called xset. Disabling DPMS (Energy Star) feature is as simple as

xset -dpms

Enabling it would be

xset +dpms

So, to disable screen blanking, we'd do this:

1. xset s noblank   #Disable blanking
2. xset s off       #Disable screensaver
3. xset -dpms       #Disable Energy Saving

And to enable them, we can do this:

1. xset s blank      #Enable blanking
2. xset s on         #Enable screensaver
3. xset +dpms        #Enable Energy Saving

So I created two scripts: unblank.sh and blank.sh respectively. Oh, I also put sudo command in front of them, just to make sure it takes.

Now, all I have to do in order to disable the screen saver is type

unblank.sh

on the command prompt. And to enable it, just type

blank.sh

And there you go. Note that xset does more than just dealing with screen savers. Check out its man page for details.