Baba Ghanoush and Hummus

Let’s stick with the food theme from my last post and get into some serious dips: specifically, the Middle Eastern classics baba ghanoush and hummus. Middle Eastern food tends to be strongly flavoured and able to be served as finger-food. These qualities make it a natural choice for casual parties, and I rarely throw a party without at-least one of these dips. Sadly, the commercial renditions tend to be timid things, often leaving out key ingredients, for fear of challenging people’s palates. Happily, however, they are easy to make at home.

A bowl of baba ghanoush, garnished unnecessarily with mint.

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Bread and Circuses

Sorry, the title is misleading, there’s nothing here about circuses – I’m crazy for good bread (okay, I’m crazy for good circuses too, but that will have to wait). So lets talk about bread, bread machines, and my bread recipe.

A loaf of bread.

The loaf of bread I just made.

I hear a lot of people with the same story: “I had a bread-machine once…made bread for a month, now it’s sitting in the garage…or maybe I gave it away…” The reasons vary, sometimes people just grow weary of operating the thing, but mostly people seem to not be hugely impressed with the quality of the end product – it’s “too light and fluffy”, “too dense”, “too crumbly”, or “too rubbery”. Continue reading

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My Grandfather’s Data

The urge to preserve the recorded artefacts from our ancestors is basic – the stories we tell to keep their memories alive are so much more vibrant, and more easily recalled and re-told when they’re anchored to a photo, a video or a letter. But how do we collect and preserve all that data: the photos, the letters, the videos, the documents and emails? My father’s father left behind precious little in the way of recorded information – to my knowledge there’s a handful of photos and a letter he wrote to my uncle, which I’ve seen but not read. No doubt there is more, but not substantially so. It’s a simple decision for those who possess these artefacts to preserve them all, to the greatest degree practical. No need to organise and catalogue the contents – there is just so little there to preserve. But things are changing. Continue reading

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Haiku composed for the woman ahead of me, boarding the train at Richmond station

From time to time everyone who regularly uses a metropolitan train system probably wonders if theirs is the worst the world has ever seen. Melbournians may not be any more justified in this than anyone else, but now at-least we know that for March 2009 we had about the worst service that this city has ever seen. Continue reading

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Enhancing highlight-areas in digital photos

This is a technique I use to eliminate the colour-banding that often occurs around highlights in digital photos. It requires that you are shooting RAW files, rather than JPEGs. The images below all link to larger versions, so if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, just open the first and last images in different browser windows/tabs and flip back and forth between them to see the effect of the technique described below. Continue reading

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Let’s pretend we’re adults

Can we all agree, from this point forward, never to use the phrase “the f-bomb” (or any variant where the f is replaced with a c, or an s, or any other letter you care to mention)? I should point out here, for those fortunate enough never to have heard such a phrase, that it is normally used to indicate that another has uttered a word, beginning with the specified letter, that is deemed too terrible to utter even in the context of quotation, i.e. “Jim dropped the f-bomb”. Continue reading

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Regarding Clive Hamilton’s Views on Censorship

It is difficult to know where to begin to respond Clive Hamilton’s piece for Crikey concerning Internet censorship. It is perhaps one of the more considered articles supporting the Australian government’s filter plan, yet it falls so short of actually addressing the concerns of the opponents that I fear such concerns will simply never be acknowledged by those attempting to implement this filter. Continue reading

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Push the Tempo

You’ve got a 50 minute commute to work and a 75 minute podcast to listen to. What do you do? You could stop two thirds of the way through and listen to the rest on the trip home, but that would mean losing the continuity of the show. Besides which, podcasts are slow compared to, say, reading. If only they could just speak as fast as you can read, they’d have the whole show done by the end of your morning commute. Continue reading

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Mobile Blogging

Through the wonders of technology I can take bad photos of inane crap and post them along with boring text straight to the Internet for all to see.

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