Cooking rice in a palm leaf pouch

For a while I stayed with Malay friends in the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean and learnt how to weave little baskets called ketupat from palm leaves for cooking rice. The end product was a lovely glutenous rice ball, cooked plump and compressed tight inside the rice basket or pouch. I've been minded to repeat the process over here in Ireland so I'll record the process for posterity.

Other pointers and references

Ketupat Si Jantung Hati

How To Make a Rice Pouch Filipino Style

How to weave a ketupat casing

Step by step menganyam ketupat satay

Puso Basket Weaving

Banh chung from Vietnam

Minecraft server layout

java -Xmx1024M  -Xms1024M -jar craftbukkit-1.7.9-R0.1-20140424.033947-16.jar -o true
PAUSE

Layout
craftbukkit-1.7.9-R0.1-20140424.033947-16.jar

[logs]
[crash-reports]
[world]
[world_nether]
[world_the_end]
[plugins]
BukkitExtras.jar
DMinigames_v0.3.6.jar
Easy_Warp.jar
Essentials.jar
EssentialsAntiBuild.jar
EssentialsChat.jar
EssentialsGeoIP.jar
EssentialsProtect.jar
EssentialsSpawn.jar
EssentialsXMPP.jar
Microblocks.jar
PlayerHeads.jar

Calculating the angle for DTV antenna from my place to Three Rock

Which basically wrt geographic (grid) North equates to 36 degs (NE) or 206 degs (SW).
But don't forget the magnetic correction you'll need to apply up in the attic!
The way I think of it is, the compass is in error by 6 degrees West.
So basically, if using a magnetic compass, the aerial should align 42 deg (NE) or 212 degs (SW).

Messy, but the diagram above uses a protractor compass. Actual maps and compasses mark North as zero degrees.

Video of another training row on the Liffey

Old Collegians training row Sunday 30th march 2014 River Liffey, Islandbridge.
From the bow: Gerry, Tom, Peter, Sean, Chris, John, Allen, James, Mike (cox).

Part I - warm-up

Part II - Downstream exercises

Part III - Back upstream

Part IV - Downstream run

Tags: masters rowing,ucd old collegians,ucd,river liffey,dublin,ireland

Simple Gravity in Scratch

Goal: 
I want to make objects fall realistically so that I can make a puzzle game.
What stuff do I know? 
The game could take place within a single large field, i.e. like Earth where we experience gravity acting in just one direction e.g. -y
An object will fall (accelerate) under its own weight, in a gravity field if it is unsupported.
Objects have mass, mass confers inertia.
Weight is the force of attraction between two objects with mass, usually a very large massive object (the Earth) and a much smaller object with little mass.
An objects spatial volume/area matters, i.e. objects don't interpenetrate (usually).

Part 1 - Simple version in space based on Newton's first law of motion

A body tends to remain at rest or continue to move in a straight line at constant velocity unless it is acted upon by an external force. This is the concept of inertia.

The simplest version of the first law we can make is classical 2-D particle kinematics, i.e. bodies in motion in zero gravity and sliding on a frictionless surface with lossless collisions and ignoring rotational dynamics.

We'll start with an object, a ball say... We'll make it a vector graphic, not a bitmap. Because we'll probably be using 'touching' from 'sensing'.

Zero the circle; go to x:0, y:0
Add a 'glide 1 secs to' a new position within the coordinate boundaries of the field (-240, 180; +240, +180).
Run it and demonstrate movement.

Note to self, review these Raspberry Pi introductory videos...

Get started with RaspberryPi.org (link) or with Raspberry Pi on e14's website (link).
Most recently used "NOOBS Offline and network install".


So starting with the SD card inserted and mounted... in MY CASE ONLY, from an xterm using the df -h command, the device name (and therefore the 'raw device name') is disk1 (or rdisk1 for its raw equivalent), i.e.

$ df -h

Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused  ifree %iused  Mounted on

/dev/disk0s2   112Gi  108Gi  3.6Gi    97% 28456655 955713   97%   /

devfs          184Ki  184Ki    0Bi   100%      636      0  100%   /dev

map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0      0  100%   /net

map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0      0  100%   /home

map -fstab       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0      0  100%   /Network/Servers

/dev/disk1s1   3.7Gi  832Ki  3.7Gi     1%        0      0  100%   /Volumes/XBMC

Next, unmount it using 'sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1' (my case only). The icon will also disappear from the desktop confirming this step was successful.

$ sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1

The last step is to wri the image file to the raw SD card device as identified above, replacing disk1s1 with rdisk1:

$ sudo dd bs=1m if=./raspbmc-2013-12-23.img of=/dev/rdisk1

After anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes the disk image write finishes. The xterm looked like this:

1300+0 records in

1300+0 records out

1363148800 bytes transferred in 243.253827 secs (5603812 bytes/sec)

And there's a shiny new disk labelled 'Untitled' on the desktop. At first impression it looks like your 4G or 8G sized disk has tragically shrunk to 60 or 70 MB. The reason is that the SD disk now has a Linux swap partition and a Linux filesystem partition occupying the available space. The good news is that most of the slack space can be recovered the first time you load this SD card on the Raspberry Pi via one of the Pi configurator (raspi-config) options to reallocate the space from the linux partition to the FAT32 partition.

Adding mods to minecraft 1.7.2?

So we want Biomes O' Plenty? (link) But need to install Forge first (link)