Sleight of Mind – Book Review

Personal

Having devoured this book during my weekend away, here are my thoughts.

As is normally the case with these specialist titles with small print runs, there are plenty of typos; but that doesn’t actually detract from the book.

It has a good mix of background on mentalism in general plus a few "routines" to get you started. It’s well referenced so there’s plenty of scope for further reading. In fact, I’ve just bought Derren Brown’s book "Pure Effect" off the back of it.

For someone like me who is totally new to the scene of psychological illusion, this is a great book to start with. I have really no intention of performing any of this in front of an audience, but it does give you a great insight into people watching and the awesome talent and showmanship of people like Derren Brown.

Warsaw Roundup

Travels

wilanow lake
click for more

Having just spent a weekend baking in the heat of Warsaw, here are some ideas of what to do over there in the summer:

  • Lazienki Park
    • Vast park near the centre of Warsaw, very popular. Has lots of cafés an ice cream shops as well as red squirrels. Few toilets though!
  • Wilanów Park
    • The palace of Wilanów was built in the French style with lots of fussy gardens. It’s nice and cool in the summer and has rowing boats you can hire out to go out onto the river with. The best part is the branch of Wedel’s café outside the gates.
  • University Biblioteka
    • Why does Imperial not have a library with a roof garden as awesome as this? Go and enjoy then have lunch in their cheap, but excellent, cafeteria. Open to all.

Windows Vista – Initial thoughts on Beta 1

Tech

Yes, ok, it’s been out for a little while now, but I thought it would be nice to add my 2p’s worth.

The good

  •  Virtual folders
    • These are ace – they essentially display the contents of a search pattern you set, so "all pictures" for example. I haven’t yet worked out how to define my own criteria so I’m stuck with the defaults for now.
  • Searching
    • As it’s coupled with the above, you’d expect it to be pretty fast, and it is. When you click once on a file in Explorer, you get a sort of bar at the bottom for you to add metadata to files so that the search works better:
  • Group Policy
    • There appears to be a new group policy option called "pushed printers". Probably not relevant for the home user, but this is the first time us Windows SysAdmins have been given a decent tool for deploying printer settings.

 

The bad

  • Windows shortcut keys
    • Although they’ve not gone (Windows+E still opens explorer, Windows+R does the run menu), they’ve changed Windows+L to log out instead of lock computer/switch user. Put it back please!
  • Start menu search
    • At the bottom of the start menu is a search box, however it only searches for program names, not the entire computer. It’s confusing and annoying.

The ugly

  • The logon screen
    • Well, it’s radically different. I’d liken it to a KDE (Linux) desktop or Mac OS X. You don’t get any drop down box to pick a domain – you have to type [domain]\[username]. If you don’t specify a domain it assumes a local account.

      You also have to click a button to "switch user" – it shows you the account of the person who last logged on as per normal, however setting the policy "Do not display last user name" has no effect.
  • As Vista is built upon Windows Server 2003 SP1, you would have imagined that they’d finally allowed multiple logins – i.e. one on the console and up to two via remote desktop. Despite the fact that the group policy templates are in for that, and task manager shows the "users" tab in the same way as Server 2003, I’ve not been able to get that to work. It behaves in the same way as XP it seems.

Death Smoothie

Food

I’m very concerned – what I assumed to be an exceptionally healthy drink may actually cause me irreparable damage. Curses!

Also, I wasn’t aware that Bees made pollen?

64 bit wget for Windows

Tech

My build of wget is now woefully out of date. You’re encouraged to look at https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/ for a more up to date version.

Having laboured over this for the past day, I thought I’d post this here.

It’s the AMD64 port of wget – it should run on Windows x64 Professional (Intel or AMD architecture) as well as the Windows Server 2003 64 bit versions.

Be warned however, this doesn’t contain the SSL libraries so will not work against https sites.

Download file

Truffles

Food

This evening, my boyfriend had pasta with finely sliced black truffle. To me it smelt like petrol, but the texture was very odd as I risked life and limb in using the mandolin to slice it up.

This tiny pile cost the best part of £5, but apparently didn’t taste all that nice. Perhaps he should save up for the ludicrously tasty fresh variety…

Moroccan Lamb

Food

Another quick recipe for you, a rather splendid spiced Moroccan lamb – alter the quantity of harissa depending on how much of a sadist you are.

  • 300g diced lamb
  • 2tsp cumin seeds
  • Zest of an orange
  • Zest of a lemon
  • 50g finely chopped dried apricots
  • 50g finely chopped dates
  • Handful chopped mint
  • Harissa

Sauté off the lamb in a pan with a little olive oil. Dry roast the cumin seeds in a small skillet over a high flame.

Once the lamb has browned, add the apricots, dates, orange and lemon zest. Add a small quantity of water (50-100ml) along with the roasted cumin seeds.

Stir in the harissa – if you’re a pussy like me, you’ll need ¼tsp only; if you have no tastebuds like my boyfriend a whole teaspoon will do.

Let simmer for 10 minutes or so, stir in the chopped mint and serve with couscous.