Archive for May, 2008

26
May

phil’s cajun chicken alfredo.

By Phil 0 Comments Categories: food
Tags: , , ,

Finally, I’ve decided that the recipe can be released. I made this last night for my family. In fact, I’ve promised Jake and his room mates that I’d cook this for them sometime. Besides them I’ve had a few other requests to share this recipe. Make sure if you’re trying this you have about an hour and a half to kill.

Ingredients:

  • Cajun spice [oregano and paprika will do, or use some cayenne sparingly]
  • 1/2 Green bell pepper
  • 1/2 Red bell pepper
  • 1 Stalk of celery
  • 1/4 Red onion [or your favourite onion]
  • 1 Bunch of green onion
  • 4 White Mushrooms [optional]
  • 4 Chicken breasts
  • Enough of your favourite pasta for 4 people
  • Enough oil to coat the bottom of a frying pan
  • 2 packages of alfredo sauce mix or your favourite alfredo sauce mix
    • 1 package calls for:
    • 3/4 Cup of milk
    • 2 Tablespoons of butter
    • The alfredo powder

Directions

  1. Set your chicken out about 3 hours before you’re going to begin preparing the meal
  2. Wash off your vegetables
  3. De-stem your mushrooms, if you’re using them
  4. Cut your vegetables into long, thin strips [the thinner the better!]
  5. Coat the bottom of a frying pan with your oil and let it get warm
  6. Fry your chicken until its cooked all the way through
  7. Before your chicken turns brown, add your vegetables in
  8. Mix for a few minutes, then turn on low stirring occasionally
  9. Start boiling a pot of water for your noodles
  10. Follow the instructions for the alfredo sauce
  11. Add your noodles when the water boils
  12. When the sauce is done, mix it with your chicken and vegetables
  13. When your noodles are done, strain
  14. Serve sauce over your noodles

Serves 4.

20
May

sebastiAn - motor ep goodness.

By Phil 2 Comments Categories: music
Tags: , , ,

I’ve noticed after some searching on Wikipedia and the Hype Machine, that there is something deeply wrong in the world of music blogs; for some reason, there have not been any blogs posting up the new b-sides from SebastiAn’s Motor EP!

For your entertainment, I’ve tracked down some high quality versions of the songs. The interesting thing is that both of the b-sides sound better than Motor, or at least I think so.

The first track is Momy, a somewhat ghostly sounding song with some of Seb’s classic electro sounds. It gives that same vibe as some of the creepier sound songs from Kavinsky’s albums, with the eerie synths in the background. But fear not, it’s still loud enough to bounce to on a dance floor.

Secondly is Army, a pretty regular Ed Banger affair. Its fairly good, but a bit repetitive. The song is short however, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome. That said, it does end rather abruptly.

I also got a copy of Motor up there too, just for the sake of completeness. Hit the links for some Ed Banger greatness.

SebastiAn - Motor (ysi) (zshare)

SebastiAn - Momy (ysi) (zshare)

SebastiAn - Army (ysi) (zshare)

20
May

rock revolution & gh4 are hogging the stage

By Phil 2 Comments Categories: games and music
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Well, maybe not the stage so much as the precious floor space in your living room. With Konami launching Rock Revolution, and Guitar Hero 4 including a drum kit, there is going to be less and less room in your living room unless you decide to pick a franchise and stick it out.

At least when it came to Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the guitars worked across games on the same console. However, since the new comers to the multi-instrument scene are bringing in peripherals with different numbers of drum pads, the question of compatibility across games looks to be leaning towards a no. The Guitar Hero 4 drum will feature three drum pads, as well as two cymbal pads, and a kick pedal, while Rock Revolution will be sporting a bevy of pads. Konami’s drum set busts in with one large circle pad, two smaller circle pads, and three triangular shaped pads [and don't forget the kick pedal on top of that].

Harmonix is all about there being a standard for their peripherals, so who knows what kind of tricks the three companies could have up their sleeves - it is possible that the two new games will map certain pads to match the Rock Band drums for back-compat. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely that the developers will go to the extra work for something that integrates with their competitor’s product.

Either way, it’s going to be bad enough with these new peripherals, but if the rumored/hinted at Rock Band 2 features any revamped instruments, you might have to buy a new house just to get your fix of instrument-based rhythm games.

14
May

indulge your food craving with cookthink.

By Phil 0 Comments Categories: food
Tags: , , ,

I was reading up on Adam Schwabe’s blog [who is a friend of a friend of mine] and found a link to the site cookthink. It basically takes keywords of things you’re craving and provides you with recipes that might be to your fancy. After throwing in “cajun chicken” I was greeted with some interesting gumbo and jambalaya recipes.

Its a very interesting idea, and as Adam points out - it uses a tag cloud to present options to the user incase they can’t quite but their finger tongue on what they’re craving. Its already got my mouth watering even more for some cajun, alas I’m lacking with ingredients.

A powerful use I see this site being used for is to find recipes when you’ve got a few ingredients floating in the fridge. Combining leftovers has provided me with greatness before, but using real recipes is usually a safer bet.

Original Post: What Are You Craving

Cookthink beta

14
May

virtual desktops on vista.

By Phil 0 Comments Categories: tech
Tags: ,

Need virtual desktops on vista? I posted over on Bus error some solutions I found for this.

I found two solutions, neither of which really did what I wanted to - but they’re useful none the less: VirtuaWin and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager. Both are open source, the former on sourceforge, the later on codeplex.

Check them out, and follow the jump for the full article + download links.
Original Post: Virtual desktop solutions for Vista

14
May

where should i get new music?

By Phil 2 Comments Categories: music and tech
Tags: , ,

This post discusses tools that can, but are not designed to, aid copyright infringement. Leaving aside potential legal issues, this post is intended to serve an educational purpose and merely describes already available services and software.

A few days back my friend Jake posted an article about the state of downloading music in a post-LimeWire age. Over the years, there have been a few ways that people have gone about getting music from the internet, the most popular being:

  • Napster
  • Morpheus
  • Kazaa
  • LimeWire
  • BitTorrent
  • The iTunes Store [and its ilk]

Jake mentions another alternative - newsgroups. Its a viable option, but most people don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee for content. Another up and coming site, especially for electronic music is Beatport. Lots of artists are putting their songs up on this site, and the prices aren’t too bad.

A big question now is, where do you find new music? Thanks to the explosion in social networking sites like Facebook and sharing sites like Youtube, there are new methods of finding your music. There are a few websites that allow you to stream audio at any time, but you can’t download it. The bonus is these sites are not like LAUNCHcast or even Last.FM radio - you still get to choose what you listen to.

Some of the best sites for this are:

The Hype Machine: “The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.”1 It also provides links to the iTunes Store and AmazonMP3 to purchase the music. The Hype Machine is unique when compared to the other services listed here because it indexes new music much faster than the others, and if you’re looking for a brand new track, you’re most likely to find it on the Hype Machine.

Imeem: I don ‘t use the service, but it seems like users are allowed to post MP3’s, videos, make playlists, and all other sorts of goodies. This site seems to focus on a lot of the social aspect of sharing.

Skreemr: Like Google for .mp3 files. It scours the web for MP3s and then provides an interface to listen to them, a link to the site that hosts the files, as well as a link to Amazon for the song.

iLike: The most commercial of the listings here, this site looks at your existing tastes and recommends artists to you, much like Last.fm. However, I’ve noticed there seems to be a much higher quantity of full songs on iLike than Last.fm. iLike also focuses a lot on the social aspect of sharing.

The best part about all of these services, in my opinion, is the ability to listen to your music right away. No downloading required [unless you want to, in some cases], you just press play and you’re good. I actually use the Hype Machine more often than I use iTunes now, because there’s no hastle and I can listen to it on any computer, not just on my personal machine.

Have you tried any of these services out? Let me know in the comments.

From http://hypem.com/about1

13
May

coming soon.

By Phil 1 Comment Categories: tech
Tags: ,

And how!

I’m back in business on the blogging front, with big thanks to Jake Billo for the technical support. This time around I’ve got a pretty whorish theme going out that I pimped out in order to make it support WordPress 2.5’s tagging feature, and a few other things that I liked.

This post is really just to get something on the main page and set up a few tags. I’ll post something more later.