November 18, 2006 Archives

Made an affogato just fifteen minutes ago. Never heard of it before two weeks ago (I still keep calling it afrogado, adofrago, etc), but is like the infamous ice cream ball in a coffee (which I've been familiar with since early childhood... or was it ice cream in hot choco?), it's another arranged marriage of dairy fats and coffee. We have an espresso machine, and after having this afternoon's cappuccino, I remembered about Astrael's affogato post, and vaguely planned to buy ice cream. So, got myself some Quebon/Breyers vanilla sort (apparently, Breyers splits its branding image with Quebon for the vanilla flavour - I'm sure it just means Quebon has a license to make Breyers ice cream in Quebec).

For an affogato, first prepare some of the darkest possible espresso coffee and put it in the refrigerator for an hour or two in advance - freezer is ok, but better keep an eye on it. When the coffee has chilled, scoop out some ice cream in a plate with sides. Using a small spoon, try to coat the ice cream with coffee, and watch. At first, it may seem like it all drips down on the plate surface, but actually, what remains on the ice cream solidifies and gives a more of less thick crust to it. Coffee ice cream is miles ahead my favourite kind, so this recipe is a treat to me (my mother thought it tasted like bad ice cream you left in the freezer for too long). Other foodpics: 1 | 2 | 3.

I'm a crafty guy, so I've decided to make my own laptop cover. It's temporary, b/c this one is just made out of a random piece of flannel ($1.02, taxes included) from Fabricville. I'll see how it fares in the next few days. Already, the flannel gathers dust.

Did this one by hand, first sewing both sides, three times each, and then sowing a four-layered piece of fabric at the bottom. I made it to protect the laptop from dirt and scratch-potent objects in my usual sleeve bag (where I plan to carry my laptop in), but is not strong enough to be held by itself. What'd be nice is a piece of minimalistic cotton one would use for making table cloth (but thicker). Thick synthetic textiles or some padded fabric could be nice - but I could use a sewing machine, which my grandmother has.

Like, seriously, it's this sort of thing that make me want to spend 2.5 times more for a PS3 than a Wii (considering that we don't have a PS2 or can't get one easily). I'm also hoping that someday, if I don't throw money off the windows for a PS3, that someone, somewhere will want to sell his PS2 at rebate such that I can play some... FFX. To think that it came out in '01. Sigh.

Basically, on the course of three days, I reinstalled Ubuntu 4 or 5 times, because I broke my installation from manual installs and installs from third-parties... In the end, I did the following:

- Let Ubuntu handle the wireless network adapter. Formerly, the driver (ipw3945) was previously said to be missing from Ubuntu, but it is now in linux-restricted-modules (which isn't installed by default either).
- Install the nvidia display taken from the Nvidia website. Followed these instructions (while getting the build-essential package, as well as the linux-source). There's a bunch of things I can do with my graphics card, like TwinView. See README. Here is the xorg.conf file I used. (The version from packages doesn't seem to support Beryl)
- Install Beryl + Emerald from the Ubuntu Beryl Project repository (deb https://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main-edgy). More details.

And then, I'd like a virtual machine, and a couple of network services, and also an easy way to access my network resources. Phew! Sleep now - something I haven't had for the past week... Oh yeah, and Windows games. :P

This is the output of my df -Th:

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext3 20G 2.8G 16G 15% /
/dev/sda1 ext2 96M 8.4M 83M 10% /boot
/dev/sda3 ntfs 50G 7.9G 43G 16% /media/sda3
/dev/sda7 vfat 4.7G 312K 4.7G 1% /media/sda7
/dev/sda6 vfat 35G 142M 34G 1% /windows


I always prefer to install the Windows partition before the Linux one, because Windows will overwrite your MBR and call the Windows boot loader that doesn't detect any non-Windows OS present. Besides, the Linux one (GRUB) is superior, per its flexibility and customizability.

But before starting installing the OSes, one must partition. What I did was first to boot with my Ubuntu CD (6.10 Egdy Eft), and use gparted to partition my disks. Perhaps I could've done it otherwise, but I had time and still went through the whole installation (which took perhaps 10 minutes. sda1 to 4 are primary partitions, while the three others were logical ones (with swap memory somewhere in there).

Out of a total space of 120Gb, I chose to give Ubuntu only 20Gb, and Windows, 50Gb. The remaining space is of fat32 filesystem and used as storage space accessible in read and write by both OS (35Gb - sda6) and for built-in "media center" features. Before partitioning, on top of the main preinstalled Windows Media Center, there were two smaller partitions of 2 and 4Gb respectively. One was seemingly for Dell's Media Center implementation, and the other is some sort of backup WinXP.

After partitioning, I rebooted with the Windows Media Center CD that came with it.