First Class…¶
655 words
... Meal I tried making fried tofu again on Sunday, using the recipe 知帆 sent me a while ago. This time I cooked it slower, at lower heat. And the additional patience payed – it was really nice. I made a miso soup to go along with it and think I am slowly getting everybody used to its taste.Even better – these dishes are quite cheap. While individual ingredients such as the mirin or the miso are quite expensive, you only need small quantities of them and a pack will last forever. The tofu, which I needed a whole block of, is dead cheap on the other hand. There are only so many things costing less than a Euro. Claus came by and after eating we re-watched About a Boy which was nice.
... Citizen you are allegedly as a Mac user in a Windows environment. That, of course, is a blatant lie, as I may have made clear before. And yesterday there was another episode of it. Simple story – my Powerbook with OSX here, network, Björn's Windows computer with a printer upstairs. Now first-class citizen sounds to me like "Open PrintCenter, select printer, print". Reality was "Open PrintCenter, don't see anything, not even with 'Advanced' options, need to download GIMP Print, and two more things, including a third copy of ghostscript on my computer, enter strange URL, hope, finally print.
That worked fine for simple documents. CUPS seems to be quite good there. As is its integration with PrintCenter: Changes in one of the two are almost immediately reflected in the other. I then utterly failed for the large bitmap that I originally wanted to print. First the whole background printing processes hogged up the whole computer for a while, writing to the hard drive like mad (and OSX embarassingly quite likes to lock up during intense hard drive access), and then the printer printed a very distorted version of what I had sent there. This sucks.
... Invitiations
will be given to the guests of our party on the 23rd of May. We decided on a design and I printed it on different kinds of paper on Saturday. My favourite is a silverish-semi-transparent paper I got. It looks very cool. It's quite expensive as well, costing about 60 Cents per sheet. So I decided everybody can use the paper they think their friends are worth.
... Services I finally filed a few bugs with Apple considering OSX's Services menu: It always uses the language of the current app rather than your preferred language, you can't invoke it with a keyboard shortcut if you haven't opened it using the menu before, it's different in Carbon (actually not working at all on my computer), it's cluttered with rubbish.
There is a function NSSetShowsServicesMenuItem to deal with the latter problem that seems to have been around since OpenStep days, but it doesn' work as documented.
I hoped I could quickly figure out how to 'manually' strip the unwanted items out of the Services menu using the APE interface but that turned out to be too confusing and hard for me. Any takers?
... Lectures can be watched at the Clay Institute, including one on the Poincaré Conjecture (obviously as it is on the list of their prizeworthy problems. While the quality of the films isn't brilliant, it's a great opportunity for reviewing certain topics by watching a lecture on it. Perhaps we'll see more of this 'e-Learning'. Just be sure it'll always be an addition to proper lectures and seminars rather than replacing them.
... Physics were taught to us by Gandalf on Sunday. He was kind enough to walk us through the basics of the main ideas in Quantum Mechanics. Something that should be very helpful in our quest of entering the world of physics. I've come up with a lot of additional questions since, though...
