My present expensive food fads include:
Japanese White Pearl Tea – A very light tea that comes as little jasmine flavoured balls that unfurl in hot water. Cute.
Sauternes – Stupendously lovely, honey sweet desert wine from Bordeaux. The sweetness comes from the fact the grapes are rotten when harvested. Lovely with chocoloate and rotten cheese.
A few of the more unusual search strings that have brought people here:
The last one features quite highly in Google it seems, hurrah for the lawyers!
A swift update to this problem of any form of uploading from wireless clients of the Belkin Pre-N router / wireless access point.
In summary:
I have reported this issue to Belkin, but as yet have had no reply. A swift Google reveals others with similar issues.
The strange behaviour with file sizes >1kB lead me to think it might be an MTU problem. Anyway, on my two problematic laptops, I used the Dr. TCP program to set the MTU to 1100 for the wireless NICs and that’s sorted it.
Well, it’s a workaround – I don’t consider the issue resolved fully until Belkin publish some working firmware that’s able to cope with the proper MTU of 1500. After all, that’s the ethernet standard.
For now, avoid Belkin router and wireless products until this issue is sorted.
Windows Longhorn has been in development for, well, a while. Things are now starting to progress, but only at the expense of dropping all the good bits out of it like WinFS.
On top of that, they’ve decided to reveal its launch name today – Windows Vista.
Dreadful. It’s supposed to convery "clarity". I think I’ll just call it "WinVi" or something. And here’s the logo look:
The release schedule has also been published, but I wouldn’t pin my hopes on in too much:
As well as having a crazy chute style system instead of your normal tap tube, these taps from Hansa glow somewhere between red and blue depending on the temperature. No more burnt handies then…
This is the first part of my review of the Belkin Pre-N Wireless Router.
It’s not going to go into too much detail – there are plenty of indepth technical reviews of this product floating around, this is going to be more of a real world example.
First up, getting it up and running was very straightforward. Being an über geek, I dispensed with the automatic setup software and just decided to plug my laptop in and connect to the router’s web interface. As all I needed it to do was be a wireless access point (or bridge), I simply chose the option "access point only" and the Belkin disabled all the routing/NAT/firewall features automatically. I assigned it an IP address for the LAN address on my fixed network, then plugged it into my switch. Now it was just a matter of setting the SSID, WEP keys and MAC address filtering and I was away. Probably 10 minutes at most.
One of my laptops refused point blank to see the network, but it’s been a bit dodgy of late anyway. Amazingly I told Windows XP to "repair" the wireless connection and it sprang into life! My Netgear MP101 music player was also a bit funny – in the end I did a factory reset on it and it too started working.
The reason I dispensed with my old Buffalo APs was their shoddy range. The Belkin is absolutely awesome in this regard. Before, I would get no signal in my bedroom (furthest point away from the AP), or worse still, some signal that would drop out every minute. Now, I get at least 3 out of 5 bars’ strength and the full 11Mbps on my 802.11b wireless card. After I installed a Belkin Pre-N PC Card into my laptop, I got the full speed of 108Mbps and full strength in there – absolutely amazing!
So, from the point of view of easy-of-setup and range it scores pretty highly. However, today (48 hours after installation) I’ve discovered a problem: when attempting to use the 802.11b cards you cannot upload any files via FTP or SMB. With the Belkin PC card in place, it works a charm. Having tried a plethora of different settings and laptops and firmwares, it seems to be an issue with the AP itself. I’ve contacted Belkin technical support in Europe, so fingers crossed they can tell me what the problem is.
Hopefully good news for part 2 of the review then!
I’m selling some of my old wireless access points on ebay at present:
http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZalexlomas
I’ve got a new Belkin Pre-N AP, review to follow!
Maybe or maybe you haven’t noticed the Google ads appearing on the right hand side and at the top of individual archive pages.
It’s just an incentive for me to try and keep this thing updated, and perhaps make the odd cent or two. Go, click if you like. Or not.
I thought it might be nice to give you a recipe I did this evening, but it’s mostly an aide-memoire.
You will need:
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For the lamb:
Pre-heat the oven to 200°C.
Ensure you have a nice piece of french trimmed lamb, with the bones at the end cleaned so that it will be easy to slice into individual portions later. Also, remove any fat on the outside of the lamb.
Start by browning off the lamb in the roasting tin on the hob, once this is done, brush the outside with the mustard and sprinkle on the chopped herbs – mint & rosemary are a good combination.
Now put it into the hot oven – around 20 minutes will give you a medium pink middle, 30 minutes will be more well done. Ensure it rests out of the oven for 10 minutes once it’s done.
For the pea pancakes:
Whilst the lamb is cooking, take the fresh or thawed frozen peas and blend together in a liquidizer with the egg and the egg yolk, the flour and the cream. In a griddle, melt the butter until it is nut brown in colour and add that to the blender. Season to taste and blend until smooth.
Drop a small ladle’s worth of the mixture onto a hot griddle brushed with some oil or butter. This quantity will do you around 6-8 pancakes of 80mm in diameter – remember they will spead out on the griddle.
Once done, set onto a wire rack and top off with some small thumb sized floretts of cauliflower that have been quickly blanched in salted boiling water.
Add some of the grated chedder (you could use red lecicester instead) on top.
For the tomato salsa dressing:
Take the skinned and seeded plum tomatoes, and chop into small pieces. Combine with a little white wine vinegar, chopped corriander and optionally some finely chopped red onion.
To assemble:
Quickly flash the pancakes under a hot grill to melt the cheese.
Cut the lamb into individual portions (they’ll look like lamb chops now!).
Plate up the lamb and pancakes and dress with the tomato salsa.
You may or may not know that this blog runs under Movable Type. It’s great, because it’s easy to use, powerful and runs on a Perl backend :)
The one thing that it lacks though is a decent HTML CMS editor. Never fear though, because there’s an awesome, free and open source product called FCKEditor that will do the fluffy entry editing for you!
A guy at the University of Leiden has written a guide for integrating them both. Go do!