geekery

Pop-up images

maki — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:51:09 +0100

If you visit this site using a browser (this won’t work if you’re using a newsreader), and click on an image, in most cases you’ll be able to see a larger version of the image in popup “window” (it won’t open a separate browser window, but pop up right in your current window.) For all recipe step-by-steps for example, you can click on the small image thumbnail to bring up a better view. Note, this only works for the more recent articles posted since early February , but I’ll be using this feature in all future posts.

(For the technically inclined, I’m doing this with the Drupal module version of Thickbox, which uses the jQuery JavaScript library. jQuery is built into Drupal as of version 5.x.)

Flying toasters!

maki — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:47:24 +0100

Not quite food related, but, uhm, it’s about toasters. And toast. This has been around for a few months but what the heck, I just found it today. Retro Toast is a free (Creative Commons) version of the classic early ’90s screensaver, Flying Toasters! Flying toasters, and other After Dark products like their awesome Star Trek themed desktops, were what converted young bratty “but everyone uses Peecees” spouting self permanently to the light (the world of Macs) forever. That was….7 Macs ago. I feel old now. Retro Toast is available for the dark..I mean, Windows, as well as OS X.

Easy unit conversions with Google

maki — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:43:45 +0100

I own a lot of cookbooks that are published in the world of pounds, ounces and farenheit (mostly the U.S....British cookbooks nowadays have metric or both metric and imperial) and the rest of the world, which uses metric. I also read various web sites and food blogs from all over the world. Converting units from one and the other can be a bit of a bother, so I try to include both in my recipes. I am guilty of using American cup measurements sometimes, but I try to limit that to recipes were the amount doesn't have to be totally exact, such as for bread. 1 American cup is about 240ml if you need to convert.

Most cookbooks and sites don't have both kinds of measurements though. I used to have a link to Online Conversion on my sidebar for doing conversions. This is a great site where you can convert just about any unit to anything else. But the past couple of years I've not had the need to go there, since most common conversions can be done with Google Calculator, typing easy queries into the Google search box.

For instance, if you enter "250 degrees c in f" in the Google search box, you'll get an instant answer: "250 degrees Celsius = 482 degrees Fahrenheit". "150 g in oz" yields "150 grams = 5.29109429 ounces". You can even enter something like "3.5 us cups in ml", and get back "3.5 US cups = 828.058831 ml", and so on. And if the calculator can't figure it out, you get the usual page of search results. (For international shoppers, it also does currency conversions. Very handy when I'm going on an Amazon jp/fr etc. spree)

It's really convenient if you use Firefox or Safari as your browser (or the new IE7), and just enter it in the Google searchbox in the browser bar. Give it a try next time you encounter a site with measurement units from the other side!

(I was recently showing something online to someone and was surprised that they didn't know about this great Google feature. So...here it is, in case it's new to you too.)

Using del.icio.us to track online recipes

maki — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 22:03:48 +0100

If you're not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a great, very easy way to keep track of bookmarks regardless of your location, and to share them with other people. I've been using del.icio.us to keep track of mostly geeky bookmarks (as in my working life I am a geek), but it just came to me that it's a great way to keep track of recipes too.

I try a lot of recipes that I've found online, but I often either forget to bookmark them, or if I do remember to bookmark them I don't remember if the recipe turned out well or not. And I don't really want to blog about each and every recipe. Bookmarking with del.icio.us allows me to add a short comment as to how well it went etc. so the next time I'm looking for that "lamb-tomato-curry that was on BBC2 Saturday Kitchen that wasn't called curry" I can just go to my del.icio.us recipes tag page and there it is. I've just started doing this but it's already working out very well. If you have trouble keeping track of online recipes too, give del.icio.us a try. (If enough people kept del.ico.us bookmarks tagged "recipes", it could be quite fun.)