Year: 2011

June 24, 2011
Over the weekend, a blob appeared on my kindle screen. It is a small blob, and you can read around it, but it is annoying and distracting.

It appears to be E-Ink, as it is definitely under the screen, and is a small dot, with lines coming off it, looking a bit like a squashed spider.

June 22, 2011
The other day, I was in Asda in Peterborough. I don’t normally shop there, but I happened to be parked in their carpark. Anyway, they had some decent joints of pork shoulder. Whereas my local supermarket tends to only have rolled shoulder, these were the whole joint, with the bone still in – perfect for pulled pork.

It was dirt cheap, so I bought two, on the principle that while I had the Traeger going, I may as well fill the shelf.

June 11, 2011
June 11, 2011
Was planning to play board games today, but something cropped up and I had to stay in to wait for someone to call.

However, it meant that I did manage to spend about 6 hours in the garden today, and it is looking a lot tidier. After some very changeable weather, it was glorious sunshine today, and it was lovely out there.

June 9, 2011
June 8, 2011
As I said earlier, I planned to hook my little-used netbook up to the Arduino.

One reason for this was that I felt I hadn’t progressed as far with playing with the kit as I had plannned; spending the day in front of a desk and computer for work, I hardly want to do the same in the evenings! Having the netbook working meant I could experiment with it on the sofa downstairs, while watching TV.

June 4, 2011
Earlier, I posted about my plans to build a digital controller for my Traeger pellet grill using the Arduino open source microcontroller board.

I’m new to the Arduino (although not to programming), so my first step was to buy a simple Arduino experimenter’s kit and do some general non-BBQ projects, to familiarise myself with the kit and its capabilities. This is still ongoing. I made a point only to buy the Arduino kit, and not the add-ons I might later require, such as the WiFi and LCD Screen options – doing so means I will learn to walk before I run, and limits my spend, in case the project doesn’t fly.

May 28, 2011
Had 4 of my board gaming buddies around today for an all day session of Android. It’s a wonderful but complex game, set in a “Blade Runner” type world. I was providing lunch, but I wanted something that I could prepare in advance, and require a minimum of attention while we were playing.

I read a nice recipe for loin of pork, where it is cooked on a bed of cooking apples, which go to make the sauce. I liked the sound of this, so I looked for a loin yesterday, but they were all quite small. In the end I bought one that might feed a family of 4, so I also bought a tenderloin, which was on offer.

May 26, 2011
A couple of months back, I made a post about Santander. This will hopefully be the last post I ever make about them.

A recap – having been a happy customer with National Girobank for most of my working life, when it got privatised and sold to Alliance & Leicester, I considered changing to another bank. However A&L didn’t actually change much about the account, and served it well, so I stayed.

May 23, 2011
May 21, 2011
About the same time that I bought my Kindle, I noticed the Wii Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock full band kit was being sold by Amazon for a ridulously low price of 60 quid. I ordered a copy, on the principle that even if I decided I didn’t want it, I would easily sell it on at a profit.

I did open it up, to check everything was there, but then it sat in its box for over a month, because I was too busy to do anything with it.

May 15, 2011
Yesterday was the first time I used my pellet grill to cater for my board-game group. It was the regular “Second Saturday” meet, and we had 11 people attend.

I had planned to do just bangers and burgers, the usual fare, but instead of grilling, I was going to slow cook them on “smoke” setting. This would be a bit different from what I had served before from my Weber kettle, and should also mean that when we broke for lunch, the food would all be ready.