Archive for 2010

Hungary Hungary Hippos

Seeing as though BBC News 24 have been ram­ming this story down my throat all day, I decided to do some­thing top­i­cal for a change. (In the cur­rent affairs sense of the word, I didn’t apply any­thing to my skin)

This was tech­ni­cally achieved by a print process in that I applied the ink to some paper using pres­sure alone, the pres­sure in this case pro­vided by the weight of my pen. I like to get a bit pedan­tic when it comes to print.

FFFFresh beetroot!

Well I’ve had a pro­duc­tive day. What started out as me hav­ing a nos­tal­gic trip across the wide expanses of youtube, resulted in a marathon pho­to­shop and illus­tra­tor ses­sion to pro­duce this:

Fresh beets

SNNNAP!!

Original photo used for com­po­si­tion  cred­ited to Darren Baker

Beets are cul­ti­vated for fod­der (e.g. man­gel­wurzel), for sugar (the sugar beet), as a leaf veg­etable (chard or “Bull’s Blood”), or as a root veg­etable (“beet­root”, “table beet”, or “gar­den beet”). Major root veg­etable cul­ti­vars include:

 

  • Albina Vereduna”, a white variety
  • Burpee’s Golden”, a beet with orange-red skin and yel­low flesh.
  • Chioggia”, an open-pollinated vari­ety orig­i­nally grown in Italy. The con­cen­tric rings of its red and white roots are visu­ally strik­ing when sliced. As a her­itage vari­ety, Chioggia is largely unim­proved and has rel­a­tively high con­cen­tra­tions of geosmin.
  • Detroit Dark Red”, with rel­a­tively low con­cen­tra­tions of geosmin, and is there­fore a pop­u­lar com­mer­cial cul­ti­var in the United States.
  • India Beet” is not as sweet as Western beet. However India beet is more nutri­tious than Western beet.
  • Lutz Greenleaf”, a vari­ety with a red root and green leaves, and a rep­u­ta­tion for main­tain­ing its qual­ity well in storage.
  • Red Ace”, the prin­ci­pal vari­ety of beet found in the United States, typ­i­cal for its bright red root and red-veined green foliage.
  • Blood Turnip” was once a com­mon name for beet root cul­ti­vars for the gar­den. Examples include: Bastian’s Blood Turnip, Dewing’s Early Blood Turnip, Edmand Blood Turnip, and Will’s Improved Blood Turnip.

    Check out the video after the break if you have no idea what I’m on about.

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    Panorama: Siena, Italy

    The qual­i­fy­ing round of the paleo that I was sup­posed to see got can­celled due to rain, which is a pity because I wanted to take some awe­some photos!

    I did man­age to stich a panorama of the town square however:

    Siena, Italy

    Panorama of Siena Town Square

    In other news:

    A sieve, or sifter, sep­a­rates wanted ele­ments from unwanted mate­r­ial using a fil­ter such as a mesh or net. However, in cook­ing, espe­cially with flour, a sifter is used to aer­ate the sub­stance, among other things. A strainer is a type of sieve typ­i­cally used to sep­a­rate a solid from aliq­uid. The word “sift” derives from sieve.

    Sieves, yeah!

    Zebraaaaa

    This has prob­a­bly been done before, but I don’t care.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica on Zebra:

    any of three species of strik­ingly black-and-white-striped mam­mals of the horse fam­ily Equidae (genus Equus): Burchell’s, or plains, zebra (E. burchel­lii), which is found in rich grass­lands over much of east­ern and south­ern Africa; Grevy’s zebra (E. grevyi), which lives in arid, sparsely wooded areas in Kenya and a few small areas in Ethiopia; and the moun­tain zebra (E. zebra), which inhab­its dry upland plains in Namibia and a few scat­tered areas in west­ern South Africa.

    Typographical Zebra

    My typo­graph­i­cal study of a zebra

     

     

    readme.txt

    Wikipedia on “README”:

    A readme (or read me) file con­tains infor­ma­tion about other files in a direc­tory or archive and is very com­monly dis­trib­uted with com­puter soft­ware. Such a file is usu­ally a text file­called README.TXTREADME.1STREAD.ME, or sim­ply README, although some Microsoft Windows soft­ware may occa­sion­ally include a README.WRIREADME.RTF, orREADME.DOC. The name is cho­sen so that users unaware of the exis­tence of this type of files would be drawn to read it. It is tra­di­tion­ally writ­ten in upper case so that on case-preserving envi­ron­ments using an ASCIIbetical order­ing, the name will appear near the begin­ning of a direc­tory list­ing (since upper-case let­ters sort before lower-case let­ters in ASCIIbetical ordering).

    This is my pic­ture of README.txt:

    readme.txt

    This is readme.txt

     

    Got the photo from this month’s Computer Arts free CD, I always like to do some­thing with the free stock pho­tos they put on there!

    DIY laptop stand using old monitor stand

    I recently wall-mounted my mon­i­tor. As I removed the assem­bly for the stand, I thought “this tilt­ing mech­a­nism could come in handy for some­thing”, so I put it to one side and for­got about it until today! As a designer, 2 screens often come in handy for me, but I’ve never both­ered to invest in a lap­top stand. Both my work­mates use one, and I’ve always thought they look kind of use­ful, but something’s always stopped me from actu­ally pay­ing money for one.

    Before

    Before.…

     

    After

    …after!

     

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    What Eve said to Adam…

    The other day my house was vis­ited by 2 Jehovah’s wit­nesses. They showed me a leaflet with an image on the front page of a dev­as­tated city (after a nat­ural dis­as­ter or ter­ror­ist attack) with a woman and child injured and weep­ing. Across the page in bold type was the ques­tion “HAS GOD LEFT US?”. They then asked me if this was a ques­tion I’d thought about, and I said “As an athe­ist, no!” They were quite nice peo­ple, and we had a lit­tle laugh before part­ing com­pany and they left their leaflet with me.

    I am an athe­ist, but attended church when I was younger and am acquainted with much of the bible , and after the Jehovah’s wit­nesses left I started to think about the fun­da­men­tals of the Christian faith and had a chuckle when I remem­bered about an idea I had for a sketch a while ago about Adam and Eve.

    Don't be ridiculous, Adam!

    Adam & Eve: The untold story.

     

    Another Panorama– Ischgl, Austria

    I went ski­ing a few weeks ago to Ischgl, Austria. Got stranded due to the vol­canic ash cloud but that’s another story. I was at this café at the top of a moun­tain and thought I’d take a panorama, and here it is:

    Panorama of Ischgl, Austria

    Panorama of Ischgl, Austria

     

    This is taken from 4 pho­tos, on a Panasonic Lumix of some descrip­tion, not sure what model, it’s my dad’s. I would have taken my DSLR, but I deemed it too risky in case I fell on it!

    All in all, I had a great time in Ischgl, I’d defi­nately rec­om­mend it for skiers/snowboarders of all skill lev­els, there’s some­thing there for every­one. Apré-ski atmos­phere is very lively there too!

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