Solitude

Dreamland

Lynn messing around on her horse in a very eery place

Taking a break with Alaric the Chick

Fawn Power

Notice the tiny green Fawn fearlessly staring down Tiamat

Tiamat in all her glory

Neverwinter Introduction

I've been playing the game since the day after it came out on 20 June 2013. My main character is a human Control Wizard called... lets say... Renren. His mother was an elf and his father is human. He underwent a race change to become a full blooded human for various reasons.

He has a human half sister called Lynn who can't take anything seriously including being a Wizard and an elven half sister called Lana who is a somewhat bumbling but very earnest Devoted Cleric who looks after the family's finances.

Apps Update 2012

Updated desktop apps loaded on my pc – ‘cause it’s time to upgrade, yay! It’s a mix of freeware, shareware and commercial applications.

… Major geek alert, skip with impunity!

Games

• Games I’m currently playing.

Graphics

• Anti-Twin (freeware) – File duplicate seeker and deleter. Searches on a byte-by-byte basis.
• Trimble Sketchup (freeware) – 3D modelling app for when I want to build something – difficult as all hell but satisfying when your brilliant concept is visualized.
• Polaroid (freeware) – Cool polaroideninizer effect for pics.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery (freeware) – Photo gallery viewer to attempt to sort through years of pics.
• Amp Font Viewer (freeware) — Font viewer and installer/unistaller.
• Faststone Image Viewer (freeware) — Image viewer with an excellent lossless image tilt feature amongst others.
• IrfanView (freeware) — I use it to view tiffs and quick play of MP3s.
• Freehand (commercial) — Raster image creation and page layout. No longer supported — way cheaper than Illustrator.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 (commercial) — Photoshop lite. Perfect for my amateur digital photo manipulation.

Internet

• Filezilla FTP Client (freeware) -– Finally an FTP client which works with server side proxy servers.
• Firefox (freeware) — I love add-ons.
• Thunderbird (freeware) – Email client, hooked up with Wunderlist and Google Calendar.
• Free Download Manager (freeware) — Downloader for those massive files which keep hanging half way through.
• Internet Explorer — Can’t get rid of the damn thing.
• Windows Live Writer (freeware) – Used to write blog entries to Blogger.

Media

• AudioGrabber (freeware) — Great CD ripper I use to create high-fidelity MP3s for serving on TVersity and play thru my D-Link 520 media server. Use the latest version of lame.
•  SPlayer (freeware) – Video viewer.
• MusicBee (freeware) – Audio organiser. Finally a replacement that works to replace the crappy bloatware that is Itunes.
• MP3Tag (freeware) – Cleans up MP3 tags.

Misc

• PDF-XChange (freeware) – Pdf reader, replaces Adobe Reader nicely.
• AVG 12 (freeware) — Antivirus.
• Bullzip (freeware) — Creates PDFs from any program’s print option.
• Everything (freeware) — Local file/folder search app to replace Windows’ poor search functionality.
•  Fences Pro (Shareware) – Creates virtual fences on the desktop to create zones for certain icons.
• Imaging Pro (shareware) — Imaging app. Ours is an ancient version — very handy for scanning faxes to be sent via email. Overkill at its current price.
• jZip (freeware) — Zip/Unzipper.
• Vista Switcher (freeware) – great replacement with additional functionality for the ALT-Tab windows function to switch between running apps.
• Eaton PSP (hardware) — UPS software interface.
• Roboform (shareware) — Username/Password and form filler inner. 
• MenuApp (freeware) — App launcher, great way to untie oneself from the start menu, also great for launching frequently used folders.
• TED Notepad (freeware) — Notepad replacement.
• tinySpell (freeware) — Memory resident spell checker, works in any app. Love it, gotten used to constant pinging as it bitches.
• TrueCrypt (freeware) — Data encryption app. Great way to hide your porn multimedia collection from prying eyes.
• UltraVNC (freeware) — Allows remote use of the server from my desktop. Handy to reboot the server with.
• VistaSwitcher (freeware) – Speed Up Windows Alt-Tab

Office

• Darkroom (freeware) – Simple writing application without any distractions (green screen).
• OpenOffice (freeware) — MS Office replacement.
• Lotus Smartsuite (commercial) — Desktop Database app .
• The Sage (freeware) — English Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Utilities

• Anti-Twin (freeware) – Search and action duplicate files.
• CDBurnerXP (freeware) — CD\DVD authoring.
• CCleaner (freeware) — Crap Cleaner, deletes unwanted files etc. Useful to cleanup the registry.
• Cobian Backup (freeware) — Backup app. Should use it more frequently.
• SyncBackFree (freeware) – Backup app. More updated than Cobian.
• Revo Uninstaller (freeware) — App uninstaller. Cleans out the registry after unistallation as well.
• GetDataBack (shareware) — Brilliant! Saved my butt when my harddrive crashed, despite being hooked to a UPS. Recovered almost all the files on a seriously stuffed harddrive.
• Winstep SMO (freeware) — Start menu organiser. Excellent app for keeping installed apps in the categorisation I’ve used above. Cannot get rid of its default categories though.
• PC-Wizard 2012 (freeware) – System/hardware info app, also used to test the performance of a PC.
• Ampps (freeware) – Linux like webserver for windows, used to develop websites using Joomla and OpenCart.
• FileSeek (freeware) – File searching by specific text strings within files, used for OpenCart searches.
• WinMerge (freeware) – Differencing and merging tool. Compare folders and files, shows differences between text files.
• MyPhoneExplorer (freeware) – backs up contacts and texts on cellphones.
• Partition Wizard (freeware) – disk and partition copying between harddrives.

Firefox Add-Ons

• Adblock Plus — Ads were yesterday!
• Add Bookmark Here 2 — Add a menuitem “Add Bookmark Here…” to Bookmarks Menu.
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox — Allows the use of Roboform in Firefox.
• Bookmark Duplicate Detector — Helps you find, move and remove duplicate bookmarks. It also notifies you when you are adding a duplicate bookmark.
• Bookmarks Menu – View toolbar bookmarks in a button drop-down menu.
• Brief — A RSS feed reading extension.
• CheckPlaces – Checks whether bookmarks still exists.
• CsFire – Prevents cros-domain requests
• deskCut — Create desktop shortcuts from the context-menu.
• Enter Selects — Press enter in the AwesomeBar to select the first result.
• Firebug – Web development tool.
• FireGestures — Executes various commands with mouse gestures.
• Flash Video Dowloader – Downloads videos.
• Fuzzy Time — Displays the time in a fuzzy way in the status-bar.
• Menu Editor — Customize application menus.
• Navigate Up – Navigates up one or more URL levels.
• NoSquint – Site specific resizing of pages for tired eyes.
• nURL Suffix — Change the suffixes which are used to complete a URL.
• Sort Places – Sorts bookmarks.
• Stop Youtube Autoplay – jip, that’s what it does.
• Tab Mix Plus — Tab browsing with an added boost.
• Text2Link – open URLs that aren’t in HTML format.
• TinyURL Generator – generates a TinyURL .
• Turn off the Lights – darkens page to hide all content except for video playing.
• UI Fixer – changes location of Menu button.

Thunderbird Add-Ons

• Clippings – Save frequently entered text for pasting later.
• Compact Menu 2 – Adds a compact menu button to the navigation toolbar.
• CompactHeader – Reduce the header size to two lines.
• FoxClocks – displays time in status bar.
• Lightning – Calendar app for Firefox.
• Provider for Google Calendar – provides hook-in for Google Calendar.
• WAT – Creates web tabs. Used to display the below mentioned apps:
• Wunderlist – To-Do list app which syncs across all devices.
• Evernote – Note creation app which syncs across all devices.

More Recipes

I finally got a bread right in the pizza oven. Here’s the recipe for Kitke bread, also known as Challah.

Kitke Bread

Loaf Ingredients

• 2 cups bread flour
• 2 cups cake flour
• 1 sachet instant yeast
• 1 tablespoon coarse salt
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 40 g butter
• 500 ml warm milk

Crust

• 2 egg yolk plus 10 ml milk
• poppy seeds
• sesame seeds

Process

• In the bowl of your heavy-duty mixer (like a Kenwood or KitchenAid), add all the loaf ingredients, turn up the speed and let the machine knead the dough for about 7 minutes; it is quite a runny dough, don’t worry – it will shape up fine!
• Cover bowl with dish cloth and place in a warm, draft-free area to rise; the dough should nearly double in size, which will take about 60 to 90 minutes.
• When dough is ready, lightly punch it down and knead it a bit. Divide the dough into 3 equal pieces; sprinkle flour on your hands and the work-surface –- it makes it easier to handle the dough.
• Roll the pieces of dough into equal length sausages, pinch them together on one side and plait them together. Pinch together at the other end.
• Place on a greased baking sheet and brush the egg and milk mixture over the loaf then sprinkle with poppy and sesame seeds.
• Bake in pizza oven for an hour. The heat must be around 200 degrees Celsius – that’s about 10 pieces of wood coal plus another one or two pieces of burning wood to keep the temperature constant. Turn the loaf occasionally to get even coverage. If the loaf shows burning marks, remove some coals.

He Cooks?

My culinary skills are limited… but, since I seem to have impressed some folks lately, here’s some dead easy recipes I’ve got tagged.

 

Fruit crumble

Dry Ingredients

• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup butter
• half cup ground almonds
• pinch salt

Spices

Half teaspoon each of ground ginger; allspice; cinnamon and nutmeg.

Fruit

Whatever you like really. Try apples, pears, nectarines, cherries, rhubarb etc. I like adding granadilla (passion fruit) for extra tartness.

All together now

Mix the dry ingredients in a mixer, keep in fridge till required. Half an hour before cooking place crumble in freezer. Butter up a cooking dish, slice the un-peeled fruit roughly into the dish — sprinkle with spices. Grate the frozen crumble over the fruit. Bake at 200 degrees celcius for 35 minutes.

 

Mielie Pap

Polenta — sort of. Essentially ground corn meal. A staple food of Africa done in the microwave with extra corniness.

Ingredients

• 2 cups Braai Pap
• Tin Sweetcorn
• Butter
• Pinch Salt

Process

• Place braai pap in a liddable dish, add salt. Add boiling water slowly to mix while stirring with a fork. You just want to coat all the meal with water.
• Cook in microwave for 5 minutes on High.
• Remove, stir vigorously with fork, add tad more water — if required.
• Cook in microwave for 3 minutes on Medium.
• Remove, add sweetcorn and lotsa butter.
• Cook for 4 minutes on Medium.

That’s it. The trick is not to add too much moisture — otherwise you end up with porridge. Using a fork gives a crumbly consistency which I like.

 

Pizza Dough

Ingredients

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 envelope active dry yeast
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 3 cups white bread flour, divided
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt

Process

• In the bowl of your heavy-duty mixer (like a Kenwood or KitchenAid), stir together the water, yeast and sugar; let sit until the mixture is foamy, which takes about 5 minutes.
• Add 1  1/2 cups of the flour, the oil and salt into the yeast mixture and, using the knead attachment combine until mixture is smooth.
• Add remaining flour, turn up the speed and let the machine knead the dough for about 3 minutes; it should be very smooth and perhaps a bit tacky.
• Feel free to add an extra minute or two of kneading if you wish; it won't hurt the dough at all. Add small quantities of water if the dough seems too dry.
• Rub the insides of a large mixing bowl with a little olive oil; remove dough from machine, form into a ball, and place into oiled bowl, turning dough over to make sure all sides are coated.
• Cover bowl with dish cloth and place in a warm, draft-free area to rise; the dough should nearly double in size, which will take about 60 to 90 minutes.
• When dough is ready, lightly punch it down and knead it a bit, leave in bowl until ready to start making pizzas. Divide into five equal balls, sprinkle a dusting of flour onto work surface and roll out the pizza base with a rolling pin.

T-shirt Ideas…

 

Server Side Apps

Full update of server applications running on a fairly old PC on Windows Server 2003.

… Major geek alert, skip with impunity!

• ActivePerl (freeware) – Required for local hosting of blosxom blogs via KFWS, the local webserver.
• AVG 8.5 (shareware) -- Antivirus, checks each incoming mail.
• Blosxom (freeware) -- Blogging software. Can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. Encourages fiddling with a host of plug-ins. I’ve found it a great way to learn HTML and CSS as well.
• CCProxy (shareware) – Internet proxy server. Also FTP and Socks. Serves the net to all the PCs and Notebooks while hiding behind the firewall.
• Cobian Backup (freeware) – Backup app. Scheduled server backups to the D-Link Network Harddrive.
• FileZilla Server (freeware) -- Local FTP server.
• Kerio Connect (shareware) – Mail Server. Fetches mail from various mailboxes and makes them available to both Outlook and its own web-based mail client interface.
• KFWS (freeware) – Local Web server. Great for testing local blogs before posting to the wide web.
• SoftPerfect Personal Firewall (freeware) – Firewall to hide the single point of entry/exit to the nasty nasty web that the server distributes to all the local PCs.
• TVersity Media Server (freeware) -- MP3 and video server. Serves our music collection to a D-Link 520 Media Server for playback of music thru our hi-fi.
• Ultra VNC Server (freeware) -- Allows remote use of the server from my desktop.
• What’s Next (freeware) -- Personal productivity application that supports David Allen's Getting Things Done system. Basically a To-do app, but focused on reducing the clutter of your daily tasks to just those that are essential.

Full Apps update

So here it is, all the desktop apps loaded on my pc. Its a mix of freeware, shareware and commercial applications. Server side apps to follow.

… Major geek alert, skip with impunity!

Games

• Games I’m currently playing.
• Proxycap (shareware) -- Tunnels thru server firewall via server proxy-server to enable games to reach their web destinations. Irritates me that these developers still think the average user wants to expose themselves to the wild wild web by bypassing firewalls & proxy-servers to play games.

Graphics

• Amp Font Viewer (freeware) — Font viewer and installer/unistaller.
• Faststone Image Viewer (freeware) — Image viewer with an excellent lossless image tilt feature amongst others.
• CuteHTML Pro (shareware) — Http editor (non wysiwyg) with loads of features yet an uncluttered interface. Used for posting to the blog and website creation.
• IrfanView (freeware) — I use it to view tiffs and quick play of MP3s.
• Freehand (commercial) — Raster image creation and page layout. No longer supported — way cheaper than Illustrator.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements (commercial) — Photoshop lite. Perfect for digital photo manipulation. Hate the organiser and viewer though, now also with fudge-ugly black skin.

Internet

• Filezilla FTP Client (freeware) -– Finally an FTP client which works with server side proxy servers.
• Firefox (freeware) — I love add-ons.
• Orbit (freeware) — Downloader for those massive files which keep hanging half way through.
• Internet Explorer — Can’t get rid of the damn thing.
• Windows Live Writer (freeware) – Used to write blog entries to Blogger. Not bad, so far.

Media

• Any Audio Converter (freeware) -– Converts videos (flv) to audio (mp3).
• AudioGrabber (freeware) — Here’s what I said last time “Great CD ripper I use to create high-fidelity MP3s for serving on TVersity and play thru my D-Link 520 media server”… In the meantime I’ve tried a slew of other rippers, they all suck! This doesn’t seem to be updated anymore, but by using the latest version of  lame it does a great job. Server’s filling up with music though.
• Itunes (freeware) -– Songbird just too damn buggy.

Misc

• Adobe Reader (freeware) — Pdf reader.
• Attribute Changer (freeware) V — Changes the attributes of files and folders, I use it mainly to change the create-date of posts for blosxom.
• AVG 9 (shareware) — Antivirus.
• Bullzip (freeware) — Creates PDFs from any program’s print option.
• Everything (freeware) — Local file/folder search app. I gave up on Windows’ search. Never could get it to work properly. I wish it would search networked files without the need to setup a search server.
• EZDetach (shareware) — Detaches attachments from emails. I use it to rip tiffs from Outlook for the faxes we receive as emails. Much easier to view faxes as images in Irfanview than opening each image in Outlook when you’re looking for a specific fax.
• GOM Player (freeware) — Multimedia viewer. Supports most formats. Might try ??? in the future.
• Imaging Pro (shareware) — Imaging app. Ours is an ancient version — very handy for scanning faxes to be sent via email. Overkill at its current price.
• jZip (freeware) — Zip/Unzipper.
• Kerio Outlook Connector (shareware) — Required to sync Kerio Mailserver with Outlook.
• Eaton PSP (hardware) — UPS software interface.
• Remove Empty Directories (freeware) — Yup, removes empty directories.
• Roboform (shareware) — Username/Password and form filler inner. I’ve gotten used to its quirky user interface.
• 7 Stacks (freeware) — App launcher, great way to untie oneself from the start menu, also great for launching frequently used folders.
• TED Notepad (freeware) — Notepad replacement.
• tinySpell (freeware) — Memory resident spell checker, works in any app. Love it, gotten used to constant pinging as it bitches.
• TrueCrypt (freeware) — Data encryption app. Great way to hide your porn multimedia collection from prying eyes.
• UltraVNC (freeware) — Allows remote use of the server from my desktop. Handy to reboot the server with.
• Xobni (freeware) — Outlook add-on. Another app which fixes Microsoft’s appalling search functionality. Finds keywords and more from your cluttered inbox.

Office

• Outlook (commercial) V2003 — Emails.
• OpenOffice (freeware) — Office replacement. Can be buggy/weird at times.
• FileMaker Pro (commercial) — Desktop Database app. Still enjoy a spot of programming. Quite pricy, but I’ve missed the boat on teaching myself web-db front-end/back-end programming.
• The Sage (freeware) — English Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Utilities

• burnatonce (freeware) — quick CD-burning. Minimalist interface. Out of production.
• CCleaner (freeware) — Crap Cleaner, deletes unwanted files etc. Useful to cleanup the registry.
• Cobian Backup (freeware) — Backup app. Should use it more frequently.
• Garmin (shareware) — App that came with my Garmin GPS. Detailed streetmaps of the whole of Southern Africa. Brilliant if your geography and sense of direction is as shockingly poor as mine.
• Revo Uninstaller (freeware) — App uninstaller. Cleans out the registry after unistallation as well.
• GetDataBack (shareware) — Brilliant! Saved my butt when my harddrive crashed, despite being hooked to a UPS. Recovered almost all the files on a seriously stuffed harddrive.
• Winstep SMO (freeware) — Start menu organiser. Excellent app for keeping installed apps in the categorisation I’ve used above. Cannot get rid of its default categories though.

Firefox Add-Ons

• Adblock Plus — Ads were yesterday!
• Add Bookmark Here 2 — Add a menuitem “Add Bookmark Here…” to Bookmarks Menu.
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox — Allows the use of Roboform in Firefox.
• Bookmark Duplicate Detector — Helps you find, move and remove duplicate bookmarks. It also notifies you when you are adding a duplicate bookmark.
• Bookmarks Menu – View toolbar bookmarks in a button drop-down menu.
• Bookmarks Menu Tool Button – Access bookmarks library from a button.
• Brief — A RSS feed reading extension.
• CheckPlaces – Checks whether bookmarks still exists.
• deskCut — Create desktop shortcuts from the context-menu.
• DownloadHelper — Download videos and images from many sites.
• DownThemAll – Another downloader.
• Enter Selects — Press enter in the AwesomeBar to select the first result.
• Extension List Dumper — Dumps a list of the installed extensions.
• FireGestures — Executes various commands with mouse gestures.
• Fuzzy Time — Displays the time in a fuzzy way in the status-bar.
• Menu Editor — Customize application menus.
• nURL Suffix — Change the suffixes which are used to complete a URL.
• SmoothWheel — Scrolls the document smoothly when scrolling the mouse wheel.
• Sort Places – Sorts bookmarks.
• SyncPlaces – Synchronizes bookmarks to your own FTP server.
• Tab Mix Plus — Tab browsing with an added boost.
• UrlbarExt — Extends the Location Bar with set of commands.

Testing

First Post. Testing etc. In cursus scelerisque aliquam. Vestibulum turpis nisl, feugiat ac pharetra sit amet, tincidunt vitae nisl. Nulla tincidunt nunc id augue pulvinar feugiat. In sit amet purus a tellus dapibus faucibus sed sit amet sapien. Vestibulum nibh nisi, luctus a tincidunt nec, imperdiet nec tellus. Integer nisl orci, pretium non venenatis eu, blandit sit amet tellus. Aliquam erat volutpat.

Pellentesque feugiat mattis fermentum. Phasellus orci mauris, sodales suscipit tempor quis, convallis non lacus. Ut ac odio eleifend mi auctor lobortis non vel magna. Aenean varius purus in sapien varius pretium ut non sapien. Sed cursus aliquam tempus. Quisque tortor libero, sodales id varius nec, tempor sed odio. Aliquam vitae velit eu erat tincidunt mattis. In mattis eleifend fermentum.