Sous Vide Cooking

I love a good steak. What’s more, I love a good rare steak. The problem with loving good rare steak is that it’s rare to get, if you pardon the pun. Overcooking steak is a common problem – even in reasonably pricey restaurants. The challenge for chefs is to sear the outside of the steak to caramelize the outer surface of the steak and to allow enough heat to penetrate to start breaking down the proteins of the steak without allowing it to overcook. Then I discovered there is way around this problem. It’s sous vide cooking.

Sous vide cooking is process involving cooking vacuum-packed meat in a controlled temperature water bath. The key here is strict temperature control. Because the cooking process is all about temperature, if you cook a steak at a particular temperature (no hotter or colder) you can precisely cook the meat. And here’s the amazing thing, you can keep that steak in that water bath for hours and it will not overcook. For us layman, it seems counter-intuitive. But think about it. Cooking is all about temperature. If you cook a steak in this bath at the temperature raw steak turns into rare steak, as long as you don’t exceed that temperature you will never cook it beyond this. So, if you want slightly more well-done steak then crank the temperature up – you don’t need to cook it any longer.

Here’s a great article about sous vide cooking. It’s a revelation for this steak lover. Now, if only I could get some vacuum-packed meat and a sous vide bath!

Linux for Dummies

My laptop finally got invaded by some fairly nasty viruses.  Every major system seemed infected and all the tools, including my anti-virus software, were affected.  Daunted by the prospect of relaying an expensive version of Windows, I decided to wipe everything and start again with Linux.  Wow.

Let me just say, that Linux is hard.  I had to work for hours – literally hours – just to get my new Linux system to detect my wireless card and then to connect to my wireless network.  The system is still amiss because it cannot access the online updating repositories.  Still, with a few hours of slog I have managed to get Linux working and connected to the Internet.  Because the repos are disabled, I have limited functionality. I cannot watch YouTube, for example, because it relies on a software update.

It’s been fun but hard work.  I am fairly tech literate and I have found this process extremely challenging.  Linux will remain a small segment of the market if it continues to be so darned hard.

By the way, this was typed into WordPress using my spanky new Fedora distribution.  It’s kind of cool.  I only wish it was a bit more up-market.

iPad, iPossible

Apple has finally announced its new tablet computer, the iPad.  This device is sort of like a scaled-up iPod Touch with a bit of netbook thrown in for good measure.  On paper, its stats look reasonable enough and its price at around US$500 for the base model, seems quite reasonable. Price sensitivity from Apple?  Who would have thunk it?!

Unlike the iPod Touch or iPhone, the iPad comes with a shiny set of apps akin (but not quite the same) as Apple’s desktop models.

Given 90% of my computing is basic browsing and email, the iPad actually seems quite useful.  Apple has gambled that people will take to the large high-resolution screen to watch movies (HD movies) and read books, the latter coming as a new focus for the company. I think there’s a reasonable chance that this gap in the market between mobile devices and desktop devices might actually be pay-off for Apple.

Will I get one? I seriously don’t know.  Like I said earlier, for 90% of my online life, the iPad might actually be a good fit.  It’s that last 10% where I will continue to need my desktop computer.

Wow, a scam…sort of…

I received a very official and urgent letter in my PO Box the other day from “Domain Renewal Group”. The letter seemed pretty urgent and insistent that I update my domain registration no later than January 25.  The letter was convincing.  It looks like an invoice and has the whole rigmarole of a serrated section to include with my urgent payment. But wait, is it really domain registration time again?  Well, no.

This is a bit of scam.  My domains (I have several) are registered with a reputable NZ company.  I updated my registration for the name this outfit was claiming in the middle of last year.  So, I have months and months before I need to re-register. And when I do re-register I will do so with my existing provider.  So, what’s going on here?

Domain registration is an open market.  Any old company can “host” your domain name for you.  Like I said earlier, my domains are registered with a reputable NZ company.  However, I could ask any other company to “host” my domain name and simply transfer the registration over.  It’s a simple as that. It’s similar to  the reviled practice of Telephone Slamming. And like Telephone Slamming, while it’s not downright fraudulent, it’s a cynical play on ambiguity and a bit of bluff and bluster.

This company sends these “bills” to millions of unsuspecting registrants and invites them to urgently update their registration.  If you do this, you unwittingly drop your own hosting arrangements and shift the registration over to this mob.  What makes this worse  is that the fees charged by this firm is higher than normal.  There are a bunch of other little nasty fish-hooks listed in a densely packed miniscule Terms and conditions section on the back of the letter.

I can imagine a lot of people falling prey to this ploy.  The letter is legit and it slyly conveys the idea that you need to make this transaction urgently. It probably doesn’t misrepresent things, so in that sense it’s not fraudulent.  But it’s designed to look and feel like something you need to do and do now. It took me a minute or two to work out what was going on.

I am sure the letter arriving over January was no coincidence either.  It’s a time when a lot of managers of small businesses return to work while their admin people might still be on holiday.  Well, it didn’t get me but I don’t like underhand sales techniques.

Fiendish bastards

Well, I’ve spent a good deal of my spare time over the last few days trying to stamp out hackers from mis-using my family website.  Apparently, they’ve got in and are merrily misusing it for their own nefarious purposes.  The difficulty is, to try and shut them down, I have to delete anything which they might use to gain access. So, gone are the PHP or HTML files.  Basically, I have had to complete take-down this site to try and clamp off their misuse.  What a waste of my time and an appalling abuse of someone’s property.  Because it’s electronic, I guess the pricks responsible feel it’s harmless.  But it does harm.  I’ve lost time and a bit of worry about this.  I also feel guilty that my site has been misused in this way.  Despite having worked in criminal justice for most of my adult life, I still don’t understand this kind of malevolent anti-social behaviour.  I am close to thwarting them, I hope.  But the cost has been significant.

Terrabyte madness

I recently ran out of space on my Mac’s Time Machine drive.  Time Machine is the efficient little helper that quietly archives everything on your Mac at any time so that, if for some reason you lose your data, you can go “back in time” using Time Machine to find the thing.  It’s nifty and done with the usual Apple style.  The only problem is that it sucks vast amounts of data off your computer and, as I found out rather rudely, last week, it fills a 250Gb drive in a matter of months.  So, I’ve upgraded my external drive to a Terrabyte disc.  1000 Gigabytes, it’s an unfathomable amount of storage but one I know I will probably use up in maybe a year or so.

I first started using PCs back in the late eighties and remember writing my essays at University on a Mac with no hard drive.  Just a 1.4Mb floppy disc with the system folder on it and a copy of Word.  If you were the cautious, worrying type, you might opt for two discs to be safe and store your applications and documents on the second, non-system disc.

Then I got paid for a year and had enough money to buy a Mac for myself. It had a 40Mb hard drive.  I remember thinking how vast that was.  How times have changed.