Perfection with chunks !

Finest cookies

Makes ~16 chunky chocolate cookies

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 100g butter (margarine just won’t do)
• 100g brown sugar (light or dark)
• 50g white caster sugar
• 15ml (3 teaspoons) vanilla essence
• 230g plain flour
• 25 g baking powder (seems way too much, maybe use less than this to experiment next time?)
• 225 g Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate (English chocolate, sweet and milky)

Method

Turn on the oven. 190°C or gas mark 5.

our fan over takes about 10 mins to reach baking temperature

Cream the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl

working it together with the back of a wooden spoon

… until it looks like this:

sugar and butter creamed together

In goes the egg (white and yolk):

in goes the egg

… and the flour and baking powder:

plain flour measured out, with baking powder (same colour)

Mix it together. Set aside.

Take the chocolate… unwrap it (slowly). Sniff and enjoy the pleasure of a pristine family bar…

Put in a plastic bag (optional), hit unceremoniously with a hammer, rolling pin, or crow-bar (whatever is to hand). Aim to break each chunk into 2-4 pieces, depending on the chunkiness you prefer.

(Cue gratuitous pictures of the wonder-food we know and love)

My mouth is watering just looking at it!

Eat a chunk of chocolate. This is essential to the success of the recipe.

Bribe a child to grease two baking trays with butter/margarine (I wonder what with…), or do that bit yourself.

Pour choc chips into the mixture, and stir:

nice and firm

With (clean-ish) hands shape into about 16 spherical balls, placing on trays.

all ready

Into the oven… set the timer to beep in ten minutes.

Time for a cuppa

Prepare landing gear:

You should be able to tap a solid top without your finger going in:

Unload to cool down, and enjoy the smell…

See how long you can wait until you try one…

Hope you enjoy making them. I prefer the eating part which comes next

Credits: Mrs techcobweb for her excellent cookery and modeling.

Shirley the skeleton. Isn't she cool ?

Initial comments about this kit :

• This kit is large. A2 or bigger
• The pieces are pre-cut, and just pop out easily with your fingers
• It’s made of thick card, less bendy
• No glue involved. It uses split pins to fasten joints together
• Joints move once pinned, as they swivel around the pins
• Wall bracket included so you can hang him on a wall
• All the bones are clearly marked in English and Latin

This is a quick kit to make progress with.

(I put the bean tin there to give a sense of scale)

Comparison with Skeleton #1 (from Osborne):

• #2 is easier to build
• #2 provides a more impressive result
• #2 is slightly more expensive (£12-ish instead of £7-ish)

Overall: 10/10.

We call ours Shirley (the skeleton) and she likes to dress up in Christmas tinsel and sun glasses !

for old in *.JPG; do mv $old `basename $old .JPG`.jpg; done

I found two on the inter-web, and thought I’d get both to see which is the best…

First up is the subject of this post: “Make this life-size cut-out skeleton” by Osborne publishing.

Completed Skull

Here is the book cover:

I used simple tools, as it’s only card.

Cut out bits, stick them together… simples.

Looks like a great place to hide some electronics later ?

My own alteration to stop the jaw hanging down. Elastic band.

So far that’s about 4 hours of effort.

More soon as we go… spine is next…
… time passes …

… more time passes …

Ugh.

This is taking ages.

My other Skeleton kit arrived, which comes on much stiffer card, with pre-cut shapes, and uses split-pins to secure joints together… loads quicker than this cut-glue-the-tabs together, and each bone is labelled better too.

Knowing that the other kit is better, I doubt I’ll ever complete this model now. But maybe I’ll find a use for it… hmm.

It arrived today. Huraah !

Dutifully installed on my laptop case.

A very enjoyable weekend honing woodwork skills, helping to put up a windbreak/fence…

Time for some text-to-speech, like this

It turns out that Ubuntu has a really great text-to-speech engine called festival.

Install it :

sudo apt-get install festival

Now you can call it from the command line:

echo hello | festival --tts

… and it says “hello” through the speakers. Amazingly simple.

Events detected in the house are routed to my message broker, which allows scripts to subscribe to topics. The topics are organised into a hierarchy/onthology like this:

/house/study/temperature

or

/house/porch/doorbell

Now if I want these to be read out loud, we just have to discard the /house/ part, and any other “/” separators, and the events can be read-out by festival like “study temperature”.

The events each carry a value, like “18.5″, so when that gets read out we hear “study temperature eighteen point five”.

Of course, it gets on your nerves eventually, but I think for unusual events which are not logged frequently it would be good to hear them.

Even for my internet-enabled bell in the study it is proving useful. When the bell goes off, the server says “study bell ring from internet” because my PHP script publishes to event “/house/study/bell” a value of “ring from internet”, whereas normal bell rings from the front door just say something different.

Script which does this is here

It’s a bit fragile, doesn’t handle failures in the connection to the broker yet, and should really be using the –server option of festival, but it shows the idea I think.

Not this 14-watt monster that's for sure.

Curious, I measured other electronics gizmos I’ve built, and they were all taking 14 watts ! “That’s just wrong, way too high” I thought. My revo always-on dual-core-atom server only takes 35 watts. A tidly little aruino project should take next to nothing…

It just wasn’t making sense until I realized it was the power supply taking all the juice. Another power supply I had was showing 0.00 watts while powering the same geek-devices – it was just too small for my meter to measure. “Thats more like it” I thought.

I did the measuring with one of these:

Why do I care ? Well, I leave my arduino projects on all the time. 14watts = 14 pounds sterling per year = too much to bear.

Having said this, I use the switchable power supply to get different voltages, which is handy, as I don’t have a “lab bench power supply” like the pros in white coats do:

So now I’m out looking for a power supply in the UK…

Current front-running is this one from HobbyTronics: http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/mains-psu-9v?keyword=power%20supply

However, it’s an un-regulated supply, and I read somewhere that “switched mode” supplies are more efficient.

So what should I be looking for ?

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/WhatAdapter had some useful advice: “9 to 12V DC, 250mA or more, 2.1mm plug, centre pin positive”.

It sickens me to see that http://www.allelectronics.com sell these in the USA for $3.50, but i can’t see anything similar here in the UK for 3 times that !

For example:

http://www.awatronic.co.uk/acdc12v500ma/prod_20714.html is ~£10 plus postage.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003JFYXW4?ie=UTF8&tag=shopwiki-uk-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738 is £1000 ! Ok. I guess that’s a joke, and I’m not surprised they still have stock.

Suggestions welcome. Still searching…

Update: Well, the power block from HobbyTronics HobbyTronics: http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/mains-psu-9v?keyword=power%20supply works a treat. 300ma at 9v, reading 0.00 on my meter

Loads better than 14 wattts any day.

Time to order a few…

Here’s how my first attempt turned out :

Enclosure with electronics inside

The base card is double-thickness for stiffness. It has to lie flat against the wall.

The top card needs to be thin and flexible, and can be chosen to match your walls/curtains…etc.

I use wood glue, as it is stronger than normal PVA it seems.

Mount using a simple stick-pin in your plasterboard,  in a way where onlookers don’t see under the topsheet cover. I’m going to do one with magnets to attach to the side of the fridge soon.

Use your imagination, perhaps cover it in fur, artwork or bamboo…etc.

Enjoy…

As I use Ubuntu, I found this forum post helpful. For posterity, this is done using the excellent ImageMagick.

Install the tools :

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then use it on your jpg files…

mogrify -resize 10% *.jpg

A few seconds later I found my files shrank from nearly 6MBytes to roughly 6KBytes. i.e: It makes them 10% of the size they are initially.

My next batch of images are ready to upload…

The tool can do loads more than that it seems, and deserves some more time invested to familiarize myself with at some time…

Enjoy.