Jalapeno Ice Cream… Wow. I want some.
Jalapeno Ice Cream
Wonder if it is real? hmm.. a Google search tells me that it is quite real. Even found a recipe for it:
1 medium jalapeño or serrano chile
1 cup water
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
9 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon framboise or vanilla extract
Quarter the chile lengthwise and remove the seeds, veins, and any remnants of stem. Chop it into 1/4−inch pieces. Place the chopped chile in a small saucepan. Add water and 1 cup of the sugar. Bring to a gentle boil over medium−low heat. Cook for 10 minutes, then remove from the heat and let stand for at least 4 hours.
In a medium−size heavy−bottomed saucepan, combine milk, cream and 1 tablespoon of the sugar. Bring to a scald.
Meanwhile, put remaining sugar (1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons), egg yolks and framboise or vanilla extract in a large bowl and whisk just to blend. While gently whisking the yolks, drizzle the hot cream mixture into them so that they are gradually warmed up. Return the mixture to the saucepan and set over medium−low heat. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon and constantly scraping the bottom of the pan, until the custard has thickened slightly and coats the back of the spoon.
Strain the custard through a fine sieve into a bowl and nestle it in a larger bowl of ice. Let cool, stirring occasionally, then transfer to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Drain the chile and add to the soft ice cream. Transfer to a storage container and freeze until firm.
Found this while surfing on: www.foundshit.com.
Recipe Source: freecookingrecipes.net
- Suramya
An American architect Bryan Berg has created a replica of the Venetian Macau using 218,792 playing cards from 4,051 decks of cards. It took him 44 days to create the model which measures 33 feet by just under 10 feet.
Bryan Berg with the world’s largest house of cards
All I can say when I see this is: Wow! It takes skill to do something like this and its just wow. If you are in Macau then do check it out. Its located in the Macau’s Cotai Strip.
Source: American architect beats his own record after creating the world’s largest house of cards | Mail Online.
- Suramya
Being unique is not always a good thing. Which is something best shown by this ‘Motivational’ poster. The same applies to being online. If you are unique then people can identify you based on your setup.
What am I talking about? Basically EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) did a bit of research and found out it is possible to finger-print someone’s browser based on their settings and plugins by the information each browser shares with the sites it visits even when you have turned off cookies. This can theoretically be used to track the sites you visit on the web. So if you use some plugin’s that not everyone uses or you use a rare browser then that makes you unique and thus identifiable on the web.
In my case my browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 215,353 users tested so far so I guess my visits can be accurately tracked.
The following information sent by the browser is used to fingerprint it: User Agent, HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, Browser Plugin Details, System Time Zone, Screen Size & Color Depth and System Fonts installed. More information on the methodology used to identify the browser is available here.
Check out how unique you are on the Panopticlick site run by EFF. They also have some hints on how to prevent browser finger printing which you definitely should check out.
- Suramya
Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas used 15,000 hand painted Easter eggs to create a mosaic depicting the Virgin Mary on a wall of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev. Now that is some amazing artwork. The traditional Easter eggs are made of wood and painted in the traditional Ukrainian style.
Source: ZuZu Top.
- Suramya
The site TinyOgg.com which was launched recently allows you watch, listen and download Flash-based videos without the need to use Flash technology. What this means is that you can use the site to convert videos from sites like YouTube to .ogg files and download them to your local computer.
Now you might be asking what the problem is using Flash to view the video directly, instead of converting it to ogg. Here’s what the site FAQ has to say about this:
What’s the advantages of choosing Ogg over Flash?
Choosing Ogg over Flash is both an ethical and technical question. We all want our computers to do better, so here is how our computers are better with Free Formats:
1. You will be able to enjoy the media “natively”; there is no need to install any plug-in or add-on to your standard-friendly browser.
2. You will not need to load heavy and possibly unsafe scripts, which helps with speed and stability.
3. You will support a free, open Web where no corporation monopolizes an important technology, such as video.
4. You will enjoy more control over your digital life with Free Formats and Open Standards because no corporation decides what you can and cannot do with the files you have.
Personally I think that flash is a very resource intensive way to view videos. I tried it on a couple of videos and it worked great. Plus using this site lets me download the video to my local system without hassle. One of the other things I liked is that you can have the script download the highest available quality of the video automatically. So if a HD version of the video is available it will download it instead of the regular version.
The whole site is built on top of Free Software. Currently the site only supports YouTube but support for other service is under development.
Check it out. You might like it 
- Suramya
- Suramya
As some of you know, I am not a big fan of modern art. To me most Modern art looks like a five year old’s experiment with paints. To me that’s not art. Painting a blue line on a white canvas and calling it art is just plain silly in my opinion. A lot of people have tried to convince me otherwise but I stand by my statement.
The painting below on the other hand is art. It takes skill to paint like this and this is what I consider art not some random squiggles on canvas. Yes, you read it correctly the image below is actually a painting. Cool right? The artist’s name is Alyssa Monks, check out her site for more paintings by her.
Shower Scene
Visit TheToyZone.com for more images that are actually paintings .
- Suramya
This is a site that I have been meaning to write about for a while as its been sitting in my Drafts for a couple of months now. So I finally decided that it was about time I blogged about it.
Basically what this site does is that it uses your browser history to figure out the probability of you being male or female based on the kind of sites you visit. The script basically polls the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited by the user and then applies the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determines a guestimate of your gender.
Seems to work quite well too. I have checked it on a couple of systems and it does seem to get the percentages right. According to this system’s history I have a 98% probability of being a guy.
Check it out: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender
- Suramya
While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.
For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome
Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.
The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.
The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.
Source: blogoscoped.com
- Suramya
How do you know that giving books away for free increases sales? When most major publishers start giving for free samples on their site. Yesterday while going through an author’s site I found a link to Suvudu Free Book Library which is Del Rey’s free book library.
I have told you earlier about Baen Books that has the Baen Free Library for free downloads of books. Even Tor books has its own mailing list where they send out free books once in a while.
So it seems pretty clear to me that book publishers are realizing that making free copies of books available doesn’t necessarily mean lost sales. I think the music industry and the movie industry should take a good look at these sites and try to understand that people who download most are usually people who are huge fans and usually people who end up buying the most.
It takes me about 3 hours to finish a book and I read a lot. The way I discover books and new authors to try is by downloading a book by the author and seeing if I like it. If I do I usually end up buying most of the books by that author. e.g. Mercedes Lackey and David Weber are my favorite authors but the first books I read by them were ebooks I downloaded from the Baen free library. Now I have pretty much every book written by either of them in Hardcopy.
You have to realize that there is a small percentage of people out there who will not buy the book and would rather steal a copy to read, but then again these are mostly people who would not have bought a copy anyway. The advantages and the free publicity you get is phenomenal.
If an author is good people will go out of their way to help out. For example David Freer is moving to Australia from Africa and due to the exchange rate dropping he doesn’t have enough money to pay for the quarantine of his pets. So he put up a story jar where he will to put up a chapter a week of his latest book “Save the Dragons” assuming that he received enough donations to pay for that chapter. Each chapter costs $400 (US) and so far fans have put in $4855. That’s a lot of money put in in a few weeks.
If you like his books and want to help out make sure you visit: Save The Dragons
What I am trying to say is that we are not all thieves out here. So stop treating us like criminals. For a more detailed analysis/discussion of the problem you should read the Introducing the Baen Free Library by Eric Flint. He is an author with a huge list of published books and he does a great job of explaining why people downloading books doesn’t hurt the authors in the long term.
- Suramya
As most of you know, once anything is posted on the web its literally impossible to get rid of. Lets say you post a picture on your blog, it will get archived by any number of sites like the Way Back machine, Google Cache etc etc or anyone can copy it to their system and repost it. So even if you remove it from the blog someone with time and patience can find it again.
To counteract this University of Washington has developed a system called Vanish, which will (according to them) will allow users to create a self-destruct system for information posted online. According to the site:
The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,” on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.
Ok, so according to them the data at the original source will get deleted. What I don’t get is how they are planning on getting rid of data copies that were made by caching services (Google etc) and archive sites (Wayback machine etc).
Lets say I have encrypted the data and a little later the archive spider runs and creates an image of the post. Now if I access the site image I will see the encrypted data which should expire correct? Nope. These spiders usually function like a normal webbrowser i.e. they will do a normal http call to get the information. So if the creator of the spider adds the code to decrypt the data using whatever logic Vanish uses (keep in mind that this info will be available so as to allow people to create plugin’s etc for regular browsers) they will have a snapshot of the clear text message/image/whatever as long as the spider runs before the message degrades to much.
In all its a pretty cool concept but I wouldn’t be using it for any really secure communications.
Source: A tool to make online personal data vanish
Vanish Details and Paper: http://vanish.cs.washington.edu
- Suramya
