A.C. Flory's Blog, page 128
April 8, 2016
#recipe: Purple carrot cake
I owe this recipe to my sister-in-law, Victoria. Thank you!
The cake was delicious as Victoria first baked it, but I think my small changes have made it a fraction healthier. But then, who cares about healthy?
Where I have strayed slightly from the ingredients or quantities, I have given the original ingredients or quantities in brackets afterwards.
Let’s do it!
Ingredients
3 eggs
1 cup raw or caster sugar
½ cup oil* – peanut or olive is fine [1 cup]
1 cup self raising flour plus 1/3 cup almond meal [1/3 cup wholemeal flour]
1/2 teaspoon Bi-carbonate of soda [1 1/3 teaspoons]
1 tablespoon plain yoghurt [optional in the original recipe]
1 1/3 teaspoons cinnamon – i.e. LOTS!
2 cups peeled and grated purple carrots – about 3 big ones [approx. 2 big orange carrots]
[optional] ½ cup sultanas tossed in flour
[optional] 1 cup chopped walnuts
* 1/2 a cup of oil will result in a lighter, drier, fluffier carrot cake. If you like yours more traditional, experiment with the amount of oil you add, bearing in mind that 1 cup is probably the maximum, while 1/2 a cup is the minimum.
Method
Preheat oven to 150 C [Fanbake] or 300 – 325 F
Lightly grease and flour a 19 cm ringform cake tin
Break whole eggs into the mixing bowl and beat until frothy
Continue beating as you add 1 cup of sugar to the eggs, a bit at a time. Beat well between each addition. The egg mixture should become light in colour, thick and fluffy.
Continue beating as you add the oil.
Remove the bowl from the mixer and sift the flour, bi-carb and cinnamon onto the egg mix.
Fold in.
Peel and grate the carrots just before adding them to the cake to stop them from going ‘greenish’ during cooking.
Fold in the grated carrots
Fold in the yoghurt
Pour the cake mix into the prepared tin and sprinkle with almond flakes.
Place in the centre of the preheated oven and bake for approx.. 1 hour.
At the end of the hour [and not before!] test the cake with a skewer. The skewer should be a little greasy but not wet or sticky.
Remove the cake from the oven and allow it to stand in the tin for about 5 minutes.
Turn the cake out onto a wire cooling rack.
Serve at room temperature with cream, ice cream or just plain. Or if you’re like us, eat as soon as it comes out of the pan to enjoy the sweet, slightly toffee-like crunch of the outer ‘skin’. Once the cake cools, the skin loses it’s crunch.
The Offspring and I found no difference in taste using purple vs orange carrots, and as you can see from the photo, the purple carrots do not turn the whole cake purple so you can serve it without your guests ever knowing it’s a ‘healthy’ option.
April 6, 2016
Sci-fi now with Holo Lens and Actiongram
In a previous post I talked about holograms as a thing of the near future. I was wrong, they’re here now. Watch the video below to see how Microsoft’s Holo Lens is being teamed with Actiongram to create sci-fi right now:
If that video clip is anything to go by, the interface is still in its infancy, but given the speed with which things like 3D printers have become mainstream, I expect real life holograms to become an everyday reality within five years…and that may be a conservative estimate.
One thing I am sure of is that hologram technology will change how we work, rest and play. I wonder how much money I have in my piggy bank….
Meeks
Filed under: digital devices, Sci-fi, Technology Tagged: Actiongram, Holo-Lens, holograms, Microsoft, sci-fi, technology
April 1, 2016
The healthy purple … eater
Remember those purple carrots featured in my previous post? The ones that are purple all the way through [like the picture on the left]?
Well, apparently they’re chock full of a compound called anthocyanin [it’s what gives them that deep purple colour].
More importantly, real, no hand-waving type research has shown that anthocyanins are very good for you:
‘In Toowoomba at the University of Southern Queensland, Lindsay Brown researches the medicinal power of natural foods to counteract obesity and reverse its inflammatory effects, or more specifically fruit and vegetables of a certain colour – the colour purple.
Anthocyanin is a natural pigment, one of a range of compounds in plants that keep their systems healthy and potentially ours too.’
Catalyst, Why Am I Still Fat?, Tuesday, 13 October 2015
You can watch the entire video here :
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4327346.htm
[the purple connection starts at 17:13]
The Catalyst program looked specifically at obesity and some of the harmful effects associated with the condition – such as a low grade inflammation that can damage every organ in the body. But obesity is not the only condition linked to inflammation. Arthritis and ulcerative collitis, are also associated with inflammation, and in fact it was an arthritic toe that first led me to look into the anti-inflammatory effects of Morello cherries [also known as tart or sour cherries]. They too are full of anthocyanin.
So purple is good, and it’s not just the health food fanatics touting a new ‘super food’. In the link below, purple is also linked to anti-cancer properties:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1082894/
Apart from purple carrots and Morello cherries, Queen Garnet plums also contain significant amounts of anthocyanin, but I strongly recommend NOT going crazy with the Queen Garnet plum juice. As with any processed and concentrated food, more is not always better. The juice will not have the fibre in the skin, for examply, but it will probably have a higher sugar content simply from being more concentrated. So beware.
My personal view is that the best way of taking in the good things in all these foods is via a healthy diet. We love carrots in our family so eating purple carrots instead of orange carrots is no biggie. I also love Morello cherries so eating them is also easy, but again, they are just part of a healthy diet. All things in moderation, right?
In my next blog post I’ll write up the recipe for the carrot cake featured in the original purple post.
Until then, have a great weekend.[image error]
Meeks
Filed under: Food glorious food Tagged: anthocyanin, arthritis, carrots, cherries, health, inflammation, Morello, purple, Queen-Garnet-plums
March 31, 2016
Purple carrots and cake
No, this first pic is not an artistic rendition of turds – those are purple carrots!
And this is one of the things you can do with purple carrots – carrot cake!
Apologies for the lack of posts recently but Easter, the Offspring’s birthday and being on a roll with Innerscape have left me with little spare energy. Next week will be better.[image error]
cheers
Meeks
Filed under: Food glorious food Tagged: cake, carrots, purple, used in
March 28, 2016
Abbott’s continuity and change…
This was just so good I had to reblog it. For non-Aussies, the ape with the big ears and red bathing trunks is our esteemed former Prime Minister. The wrecking ball is what he did before…during….
Filed under: Uncategorized
March 24, 2016
Sea Walls in my hometown
A glorious and thought provoking post arrived from New Zealand this morning.
Perhaps if we had a Pangea Foundation here in Australia our Great Barrier Reef would not be fighting for it’s life right now.
We may not be able to fight Climate Change from just one spot on earth, but we really could stop the local toxins from flooding into the reef now couldn’t we?
PangeaSeed Foundation came to my hometown last week. Twenty-five international artists spent the week transforming the walls of the inner city and Ahuriri (the inner harbour). There’s no escaping the message. And who would want to? They call it artivism—a combination of art and activism.
The project has captured the imagination of our community. Every mural I visited (I haven’t seen them all, yet) was surrounded by groups of admirers. Each mural tells a story, sends a message, and they do it a beautiful way.
We started out at Perfume Point. When I was kid I avoided going there. It got its name from the sewer outfall that used to spill waste not far from the beach. Thank goodness that no longer happens here. The beacon guiding the yachts and fishing trawlers to safe harbour has been transformed, and the only smell is fresh sea air.
The beacon at Perfume…
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Outrageous scam! Don’t be fooled.
I received this ‘subpoena’ from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] in my inbox this evening.
Can’t believe the blatant hutzpah of this person, or the bad English, OR THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS!
Since when did the AFP get so broke they had to outsource their emails to a private address…in Turkey?
Well, atleast Satinalma from Turkey gave me a good giggle for the evening.
Night, night all!
Meeks
Filed under: Community Service Tagged: AFP, Australia, from-Turkey, phishing, scam, what-to-look-for
March 21, 2016
A Day Made of Glass – #sci-fi vision
One of my blogger friends, Trinh Manh Do has this amazing music playing on his blog. I asked what it was and it led me to this concept video by a glass manufacturer. It’s called A Day Made of Glass and I wish I could have imagined such a user interface:
Seriously, whoever came up with this concept should be writing science fiction. I just hope I’m still around by the time this vision of the future comes true. Amazing stuff.
p.s. This is a sort of behind the scenes look at the ‘vision’. Fascinating:
cheers
Meeks
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Corning, future, music, science-fiction, user-interface, video
March 17, 2016
#howto delete – Adobe Flash Player 20 NPAPI
Before I tell you how to delete Adobe Flash Player 20 NPAPI, there are a few important things you need to know:
What does Flash Player do?
“Adobe Flash Player is a plugin that allows browsers such as Firefox to display Flash media on web pages. Flash is often used for animations, videos and games. This article explains how to install Flash.
When you visit a webpage that uses Flash and the plugin is missing, you will see the message “A plugin is needed to display this content” for parts of the page that require Flash (if at all)..”
That’s a quote taken directly from the Mozilla website. But what does it mean in practical terms? It means that animations created in Flash need Flash Player to work. This often means parts of certain websites that use Flash for bling won’t work…but only ‘parts’. It also means that browser games created with Flash need Flash Player to work. Get rid of Flash Player entirely and those things will no longer work. As far as I know, many of the browser games available via Facebook [?] use Flash. So if you play them, be warned [of course you don’t have to use this version of Flash Player!]
But…having just completely deleted Flash Player from my computer I can tell you that nothing I use on a daily basis has been affected. And by nothing I mean:
Youtube works fine [for music videos, haven’t tried anything else]
Jigsaws work
WordPress works [obviously]
Soundcloud works
My internet banking works [Bendigo Bank]
And my MMOs work
In fact, everything seems to be loading faster, not just Firefox, but that could just be a weird kind of digital placebo effect.
Why delete Adobe Flash Player 20 NPAPI in the first place?
In a nutshell, the latest version of Mozilla Firefox uses this version of Flash Player, but the Flash Player is crap. Mozilla Firefox whined until I updated Flash Player and I’ve regretted it ever since. Despite being a supposedly agile little browser, Firefox became slower and I noticed that crashes increased in frequency. These crashes were preceded by a sudden massive slowdown – as if I were typing each letter of a word with a sip of coffee in-between. And then, instead of getting better, it would completely freeze to the point where I would have to do:
CTRL ALT DEL to open Task Manager and then manually END PROCESS on Firefox and Flash Player.
The reason is that this version of Flash Player gobbles up RAM [short term memory for your computer]. I suspect there is a memory ‘leak’ responsible, but Adobe isn’t admitting to it, yet.
Anyway, when your computer runs out of ‘memory’, it’s like a car that runs out of petrol – it stops. The latest version of Firefox isn’t that great on memory either, but I might save that for a future post. For now, if you use Firefox [which uses Flash Player] and you experience ‘freezes’ then check your Task Manager to see if Flash Player is using oodles of memory.
[Note: as knowing how to use Task Manager is a great computer survival skill, I’m including it below]
How to open Task Manager in Windows 7
On your keyboard, press the CTRL ALT DEL keys all at the same time.
You will see a pale blue screen with just a few options on it.
Click ‘Start Task Manager’.
[Note: it’s not possible to take a screenshot of the blue screen as it seems to be ‘outside’ the Windows environment]
After you select ‘Start Task Manager’, the following screen will be displayed:
The default tab [Applications] only shows which programmes are currently open. You can close programmes from this window but it’s easier to do it from the Processes tab where you can also see how much memory they are using.
Click the Processes tab to open it.
I can’t show you the Flash Player memory usage because I didn’t think to take a screenshot before I deleted it completely. Mea culpa. Anyway, this is the current list of processes on my computer and will do in order to show you what to do next. So you should now be looking at your version of the Processes tab:
In order to see which programmes [i.e. processes] are using the most memory [RAM]:
click the column heading for ‘Memory [Private Working Set]’. This will sort everything in that column. If you don’t get the largest usage up the top, click the heading a second time.
Now a word of warning – unless you know what you’re doing, don’t go shutting down processes willy nilly. Some of them use a lot of memory BUT THEY’RE MEANT TO! All you want to shut down at this point is the process for Flash Player and the one for Firefox.
[Note: As a rule of thumb, only shutdown processes which bear the user name – ‘user’. NEVER shutdown anything belonging to ‘SYSTEM’]
Click the line that holds information about firefox.exe *32 so it’s highlighted,
and then click the button down the bottom that says ‘End Process’.
In the example shown below, I’m ending the process for MSPaint instead of Firefox so I can keep working on this post – because, of course, WordPress only works within my browser. But you knew that, right? :)
Now do exactly the same thing for Flash Player and then exit from the Task Manager.
How to uninstall Flash Player for Windows XP, Vista and 7 only
If you’ve used Windows a lot you’ll know that uninstalling programmes via Control Panel doesn’t always get rid of all those pesky bits and pieces that end up as programming debris. Unfortunately, that programming debris can keep having an effect on whatever you install afterwards, so this is how to get rid of absolutely EVERYTHING belonging to Flash Player.
First, you will need to go to the Adobe page below and download the uninstaller.
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html
The page looks like this:
Click ‘Uninstaller’ as shown in the screenshot above.
You will be asked to either run or save the uninstaller. I suggest saving it to somewhere that you’ll be able to find it again. On my computer, I have a special folder called ‘Software downloads’ and everything I download off the internet goes there first. Then I scan it with my anti virus software before I actually install it.
Next, find the uninstaller – the file is called ‘uninstall flash player.exe‘ – and double click to make it run. If you get a message asking if you really want to do this, click yes.
All done? Okay, we have now uninstalled Flash Player from the main areas of the computer, but there are still some leftovers to get rid of. This is not hard, but if you have not done anything like this before, it can feel a little scary. Just take it slow, check each step and generally do NOT go messing with anything else. At least not until you know what you’re doing. :D [I learned that the hard way]
How to find the leftovers
Now you will navigate to 3 different locations on your computer, deleting Flash files and folders in all three.
Click on the Start button and
type the word ‘run’ into the search box as shown above:
Windows displays the closest matches to your search word and displays the Run command at the top of the list.
Click the Run command as shown.
With the Run dialogue box displayed:
Click inside the box as shown and type the following EXACTLY:
C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash
The colon is a colon, not a semi-colon. The slash is a backslash [found under the Backspace button on most keyboards] and THERE ARE NO SPACES.
When you are sure you have typed the address in correctly [it’s an address on your computer rather than the internet],
click the OK button.
At this point you’re just driving to your destination. Nothing will happen if you take a wrong turn! If all went well, you should now be looking at a screen similar to this:
Essentially, the Run command we used simply acts as a shortcut to the folder we want to delete – i.e. Flash.
How to delete a folder
Now that we’ve arrived, we’re going to delete the whole Flash folder, including whatever is still inside.
Make sure the Flash folder is selected – i.e. click on it to highlight the folder like so:
Next, RIGHT click on the Flash folder. This will cause the context sensitive menu to be displayed. One of the options on this menu is Delete. Click the Delete option to delete the Flash folder:
Just two more folders to delete and we’re done!
**Go back to the Start button and type Run into the search box as before. But this time when the little dialogue box opens,
type in the following:
%appdata%\Adobe\Flash Player
% does mean the percent sign on your keyboard! And don’t forget to use the backslash under the Backspace key. Your Run dialogue box should now look like this:
Click OK.
Again, the Run command will take you directly to the folder we need to delete. In this case it’s called ‘Flash Player’. Click on it to make sure it’s highlighted, then RIGHT click on it to display the context sensitive menu. Select the Delete option to delete the Flash Player folder.
Lucky last!
Repeat all the steps from ** above but this time, the Run dialogue box should contain this :
%appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player
The Run dialogue box should look like this:
Click OK.
When you are looking at the Macromedia\Flash Player folder, RIGHT click on Flash Player and select Delete from the context sensitive menu.
And that’s it. Flash Player is completely gone from your computer. At this point, you are ready to install an earlier, less buggy version of Flash Player, safe in the knowledge that there are no leftovers to screw things up. Or, you can do what I’m going to do, which is to leave Flash Player off entirely.
If anyone is truly desperate to put a version of Flash Player back on, please let me know in comments and I’ll put together a separate how-to for that.
Phew.
Cheers
Meeks
Filed under: How-to guides Tagged: Adobe, context-sensitive-menu, crash, delete, End-process, Firefox, Flash-Player, how-to, memory-leak, RAM, right-click, Run, Task-Manager, uninstall-completely, Windows-7
March 16, 2016
The Magic of Writing Fiction about Magic
As most of you know, Laurie Boris is one of my favourite authors and in this post she talks about where some of the ideas of ‘A Sudden Gust of Gravity’ came from.
If you’ve ever wanted a sneak peak behind the scenes, this is a very interesting one. :)
I’ve loved magic since I was a kid. I eagerly watched magicians on television, especially Doug Henning, Harry Anderson, and David Copperfield. It looked so cool that they could appear to cut a person in half, make something vanish, or perform some other jaw-dropping feat. In my head, I knew that the illusions performed were not physically possible. Harry Anderson wasn’t “really” sticking a giant hatpin right through his arm on Saturday Night Live. David Copperfield wasn’t “really” making a 747 disappear. Doug Henning didn’t just…do that, did he? But I still was enthralled. The craft of illusion fascinated me, and even though I was able to suspend my disbelief, I admired the work and practice it must have taken to make the performances look so smooth.
Then I had a chance to peek behind the curtain. I lived with a magician for a few years, and he…
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