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Making great filter coffee is simple
I came across this comment on a 2013 Guardian article, and after I stopped laughing I knew I just had to share it.Making great filter coffee is simple:
- Use only single-bush beans, preferably from the same branch.
- Burnish each individual coffee bean with a tiny loofah, until you can see your beard and square spectacles reflected back at you.
- Crush the beans using an industrial-revolution-era steam press. Any coffee shop worth its salt will have one; Gurner & Fuckpants of Soho use the traditional donkey attached to a capstan to power theirs. Some of the beans may turn into diamonds under the extreme pressure – remove these, as they impart an overpowering note of geranium.
- Brew at precisely 82.3 degrees celsius for 87 seconds. Sure, you can brew at 82.4 degrees – if you want your coffee to taste like complete shit.
- We recommend using a glass pipette to actually imbibe the coffee. Place a single drop on each of your tongue’s taste areas, before smearing the aforementioned organ on a flat, inert surface in order to mix the flavonoids and terpenes properly. Any coffee shop worth its salt will have vanadium-coated steel tablets for this purpose. If they don’t – what the fuck are you doing in starbucks??
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Snakes alive on Colley Hill!
We weren’t expecting to see snakes on our walk! I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a snake in the wild, and today we saw two adders, the only venomous snake native to Britain. My wife doesn’t like snakes.
The first picture is a panoramic view made up of five images stitched together. Taken from the top of Colley Hill, the view looks down towards the pleasant Surrey town of Reigate. The panda-like animal is a Belted Galloway cow. It was another surprise on our walk, though less scary than the adders.
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It’s my birthday!
The weirdest and the most colourful birthday cards. Thank you family for a lovely day. And, for the record, I ate east of Greece (Lebanese!).
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Bushy Park
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Never 10. Never again!
I came across a recently promoted utility called Never 10. It claims to easily and safely stop the regular reminders from Microsoft to upgrade to Windows 10. I checked out the reviews and all were positive. So I thought I’d give it a go.The utility works by modifying the Windows Registry. Before doing this one is always recommended to back up the Registry first. I didn’t.
I ran the utility from my non-administrator login on my Windows 7 laptop, supplying the administrator password when prompted, and the utility appeared to run without problems. However when I tried to login the following morning (having shutdown the PC the previous evening), I got the message
“The User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded”
It was just my login that was affected so I was able to login as the administrator and to follow Microsoft documentation for recovering the situation. Sadly this simply made all the other logins disappear (other than the administrator login)! Fortunately I was able to reverse this step, so I was back to the situation of just having my login inaccessible.
At this point I gave up and decided to abandon my inaccessible login and to create a new login for me to use. I have a small issue with accessing my files associated with the previous login, but I can work around this.
So there you go. My experience of the problems I encountered running Never 10, and which no one else on the web seems to have had.
For the record, Never 10 did switch off the regular prompts to upgrade to Windows 10!
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Nora Webster – Colm Tóibín
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín is a delightful and moving novel from the author of Brooklyn.
It’s the story of recently widowed Nora and her struggles dealing with her grief and depression, and bringing up her four children in a small town in Ireland in the early 1960s.
It’s a charming read and is highly recommended.
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A 2 year old visits
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Victoria
The really notable thing to know about the film Victoria is that it was shot in a single, unbroken, unedited, continuous take of 2¼ hours duration.Before seeing the film all I knew was that it has been described as a heist movie set in Berlin. I found the first hour somewhat slow, wondering where it was going, but gradually a story developed and reached a satisfactory conclusion.
An interesting and technically impressive film, overall I can say I enjoyed it and can recommend. Some may find it overlong. [Warning: At the beginning, the nightclub scene has extreme flashing and very loud music!]
There’s a short Wiki listing the few films that have been shot in a single take.
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Along the South Bank to Canary Wharf
It was a dull morning when I set off from Waterloo station along the South Bank, heading for Canary Wharf on the other side of the Thames. Eventually the weather improved and became sunny / cloudy and this time I managed to locate the pier where the short ferry embarks and crosses the Thames to Canary Wharf – you have to walk through the Hilton Hotel reception! Finally a bit more walking along the North Bank until my feet gave up at Wapping Station.
Disappointed with the pictures, I decided that I would artify the best ones. (artify – to apply artistic techniques – the Urban Dictionary)
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The Magic Garden at Hampton Court Palace
For little people aged 2-13. Fabulous!
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