Away for a few days

I started a conversation today on f-mktg-list, but now I’m away for a few days (back on Thursday) so won’t be able to respond to anything sent until then! Sorry, but I promise to pick things up where I left them when I get

That aside, I hope people will wish for good weather for me as I’m going camping!

Ginger Beer!

photo credit: vieux bandit

Ah, the holidays are a great time to try out new stuff

I love ginger beer, by itself and it goes very nicely with whiskey too. Anyway, I decided it would be fun to try and make some ginger beer from scratch, so I googled around and found a recipe (actually the first result for “ginger beer recipes”), bought the ingredients and mixed it all together. Right now I have a two litre bottle of the mix sat next to my radiator, where I’m hoping it won’t explode while the yeast ferments over the next few days!

The recipe is below, but I’m linking back to the original post too because they deserve the credit – and are an ORG supporter too!

Ingredients:

• 2 litres of water, and a two litre plastic bottle (I hear plastic is a good choice rather than glass, because if plastic explodes it’s a mess; if glass explodes it’s dangerous!)
• 1/4 teaspoon of dried yeast
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 lemon
• 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of grated ginger root

The Method:

• If you want, peel the ginger, and then grate the root until you have approx. 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of grated ginger – depending on taste
• Juice the lemon
• Mix the ginger and lemon together
• Pour the sugar into the bottle
• Add the yeast to the bottle
• Add the ginger and lemon mix to the bottle
• Add water until it is approx 3/4 full, at which point put the lid on tight and shake until all the sugar is dissolved
• Fill with the remaining water, leaving about an inch at the top to stop it exploding while the yeast ferments!
• Place in a warm location until the bottle is hard, should take about 24-48 hours
• When this is done, put it in the fridge over night to stop the action of the yeast
• Done

Hmm…2 days and I should have some nice ginger beer! Maybe I could use this recipe to work on my technical documentation skills :p

All in all, it’s been a really great easter weekend and I’ve enjoyed it very much. What’s nice is that I have another 4 weeks of holiday left!! Of course, all that time isn’t for relaxing, I need to write essays/revise and possibly find a job to earn a bit of money for the summer.

Fedora 8 to Rawhide via Yum

Today I installed Fedora 8 from the KDE live CD, which incredibly can only have taken 20 minutes including time for it to boot, and then switched my repositories to development and ran yum update. It worked wondefully All I had to do was remove kde-compiz before I started to fix a dependency problem, and then wait around while yum downloaded and installed everything – this bit took longer than I’d anticipated!

Any how, I’m impressed with things so far, and am contemplating upgrading my main machine – but it’s maybe a little bit too early for that…we’ll see how I feel over the next few days. If I do, I’ll try and yum upgrade again and see how that goes for a machine that’s seen a lot of package installing and removing.

e-mail

All, please use jonrob AT fedoraproject dot org for contacting me from now on.

My current e-mail set-up is a mess, and following on from conversations about setting up a free web apps co-operative a while ago, it’s possible that my address might flip flop around a bit in the next few weeks. I’ll ensure that the above address is always pointing at the best place to contact me however, so that will always get through to me! I’ve updated all my mailing list subscriptions to reflect this too … I never thought an alias like this could be so useful

Hello and Goodbye Interview

We all know Max has stood down as Fedora Project Leader and that Paul has taken over. Despite them both having hugely busy schedules they sat down and answered a few questions I’d sent them. They talk about all sorts of cool stuff like their personal impressions of being FPL and the past, present and future of the project. Like always, read it here and digg it here

Thanks to both of you for your time

Some Random Stuff

photo credit: cotaro70s

1) A funny penguin related story:

Turns out that while a friend of mine was at school he went on a trip to a zoo. There was a penguin enclosure, and somebody in his class reached over and took one of the penguins! Apparently it got stowed away in this boy’s bag until it eventually reappeared on the bus ride home. Seems crazy to me, but my friend assures me this is real and that the boy who took the penguin got in a lot of trouble for it. So a quick warning to anybody feeling a touch too enthusiastic about Tux: don’t steal penguins.

2) Re: Ubuntu Brainstorm = Fedora 9

I don’t know if I created the wrong impression with that post, but just to clarify: I was not taking a swipe at Ubuntu; I was simply praising the fact that Fedora’s developers are working on some cool, in demand stuff Sorry if I confused or annoyed anybody with that.

3) It’s easter soon and I’m excited about going home for the holidays!

4) My back seems like it’s better (again) and hopefully this will be the final time I ever need to mention anything like this in a blog.

5) Not sure that this is a lot, relatively speaking, but… this domain has now had over 1,000,000 hits! ‘eh, a million is a big number.