Seriously off topic again, but long time readers know that I’m interested in food and wine as well as technology, gadgets and that very interesting thing called the internet. We just installed a new kitchen, so I’ve made some good food lately. The story about the kitchen from HTH is another one. At this point I’ll share something else.
I just made a new batch of one of my favourite ingredients. It keeps in the freezer for years, so I don’t do that too often. And the ingredient is as simple as it is useful. It consists of water and chili. But, it has to be the right chili.
The strength of a chili is measuded along the scoville scale. A bell pepper (no strength) is zero. A standard Jalapeno clocks in at up to 8000. That’s a chili that many people consider hot. The small “birds eye” thai chilis are stronger. They measures up to 100 000 at the scoville scale.
But the stuff I prepared the other day is special. It’s the Habanero.
At up to 580 000 on the scoville scale it was long regarded as the hottest chili on this planet. But about eight years ago the Naga Jolokia was properly measured and is supposed to close in on 1 000 000 on the scoville scale. That chili could be regarded as something close to a weapon. Standard US grade pepper spray starts at 2 000 000.
But let’s get back to the Habanero. Still the strongest of the widely available chilis. The hot stuff in the chilis is called capsaicin. And one could think that you’d get the same taste in a sauce if you add a small amount of Habanero or a larger amount of the not-as-strong thai chili. As long as you get the same amount of capsaicin. But it doesn’t work like that. The different chilis have characteristical tastes. And the Habanero gives a very pleasant warmth and full bodied heat. But you don’t need much of it, and you probably won’t use it often. So what do you do if you want some Habanero available at all times?
You buy a couple of them, throw them in a blender with some water and freeze the sauce you get. When you need some pleasant heat in a sauce you use a knife to scrape off a bit of the frozen Habanero into the sauce. Yummy.
This is what you put in the freezer. And how much do you need? It depends on your taste and on how strong the Habaneros you got are. But for a faint background of heat you don’t need much. Something like the amount I have in the image below in a sauce for two persons.
And a very important detail: don’t get the raw habanero on your fingers. Unless you like pain. It will stay there for hours and you’ll realize that when you touch your eyes (or other sensitive parts of your body).
I’m using Feedburner to insert occational ads to my feed and to the end of some of my blog posts. It’s mainly part of the experimenting I do here on eirikso.com. I want experience with adsense, feedburner, affiliate programs and so on. And sometimes it adds a bit of fun that I don’t have complete control of the ads that show up.
My last article asked the question “Where’s the big money?”
One of my readers sends me a screenshot where the ad has answered the question.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but with my last redesign I removed the adsense ads. Maybe it’s time to remove the feedburned ads as well. Actually I have no problem covering the $39 pr. month of hosting costs that I have on my virtual private server by running ads on this site. But my main income is knowledge from my readers, valuable contacts and secondary income in form of invitations to speaking gigs. Adding up to much more than the 2-3 dollars a day I can make with a very moderate amount of ads on the site.
What do you think? Should I remove all ads or are they non intrusive enough to stay?
Regular readers have noticed that I have had way too much to do lately. How would you know? Because this blog has been updated about once a week this spring. I don’t like that because I love the community of people reading this publication and all the interesting people I meet because of my blog. I have absolutely no plan of discontinuing eirikso.com, so hang in there. I will keep on posting interesting stuff here.
Still, I can recommend subscribing to the feed or email update. As you understand you won’t be overloaded…
Right now I popped by to give you a link. To an article that I find very interesting. And yes, that’s where the headline for this post was stolen: Web TV is a hit. So where’s the big money?
Recently I asked my twitter friends if they had any favourite places for finding music that can be used in podcasts and productions on the internet. Here’s the result:
Jamendo
About 10 000 albums. Lots of creative commons licensed. Modern design. Pretty good search and useful tag cloud.
Owlmm
Fantastic search engine that you can feed with some of your own music to let it find similar music. And narrow your search to give Creative Commons licensed music.
Podsafeaudio
Lots of creative commons licensed music.
You can find more resources through Podsafe on wikipedia. And please feel free to add your favourite sites in the comments.
Thanks, @forteller, @mvcoile, @viskar, and @Ingwii. All of them people that I highly recommend you to follow on twitter! In addition to the fact that you follow me of course…
An actor once told me that it’s only one thing that’s worse than being nervous on stage. And that’s sitting in the audience watching a nervous person on the stage. Knowing that sounds scary. But it’s not. It means that the audience want you to feel fine. They feel sorry for you and want to do everything they can to help you.
So, I want to add something to that last part. The thing that’s worse than being nervous on stage is sitting in the audience watching a person that tries to hide the fact that he or she is nervous. It’s the hiding and pretending that’s bad for the audience. Be honest. Be yourself.
Through the last 10 years I’ve done a lot of presentations. Experience will make you less nervous. But from time to time you’ll encounter a situation where you feel nervous. You’re experienced, but this is the first time you speak to 2500 people. This is the first time you present in another language than your own. This is the first time you present for a small room filled with 10 important executives. The stage felt bad and the lights hit you right in the face. And so on.
First of all, you should know that the audience won’t see it if you’re slightly nervous. I’ve had presentations where I felt uncomfortable, but judging the response the audience didn’t notice anything.
Then, if you suddenly start feeling really nervous. Struggeling to find your words. Getting too hot. Feeling really uncomfortable. Then simply tell the audience.
“Wow, you’re a highly competent audience and suddely I started feeling nervous.”
You won’t believe how much tension that removes. Both from you and from the audience. And if you manage to be even slightly funny when stating that you’re nervous it will work even better.
“I’m sorry. I’ve gone thorugh this presentation a hundred times at home, but unfortunately I don’t have a huge stage with 2000 kilowatts of light in my living room. This made me more nervous than I expected.”
Some more presentation advice from earlier articles:
I am currently trying out a video aggregation service called Medioh. And I have a couple of invites for the people that would like to try it out. The only thing I ask for is that after you get the invite you test the service and give me some feedback on what you think. I must admit that I am not really impressed yet, but have only given the site a couple of minutes.
And how do you get the invite? Post a comment here asking for one. Use the email you want the invite sent to when posting the comment. Emails are not published and I will never spam you.
Medioh gives you a possibility of searching for and subscribing to videos across the web. Not tied to only one site. You find more information about Medioh here.
So, I’ve been patient and waited for the Canon HF10 Solid State AVCHD camera. It arrived about a week ago and unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to test it in detail yet. So far it looks very good. Small, but more sturdy and solid than the Panasonic. No noise on the audio and a very nice progressive recording mode. Way better performance in low light and a built in 16 GB of memory in addition to the SD-slot.
It works very well with both iMovie and Final Cut Express.
I have published some very short test videos and will add more later.
25p-960×540.mov 18-May-2008 01:22 43M
= recorded in 25p and scaled down to half size
25p-testclip-canon-h..> 18-May-2008 02:21 177M
= original recording in 25p, Apple intermediate file
50i-testclip-canon-h..> 18-May-2008 02:11 126M
= original recording in 50i, Apple intermediate file
50p-960×540.mov 18-May-2008 01:52 55M
= recording in 50i and converted to 960×540 50p
For the converting from 50i full size to 50p half size I’ve used the free and excellent JES Deinterlacer. I set it up with the following parameters under “Project”: Standards Conversion Custom Minimal Blend Settings: Height: 540 Width: 960 Frame rate: 50.000 Movie speed: 1.000
Here’s another quick clip. Something I did to demonstrate Shazam ID on my phone. The video is slightly edited in iMovie, transcoded and uploaded to Brightcove. The recording was done in 25p, saving the hassle of deinterlacing. If you’re reading this in an email update or RSS reader you might want to click through to the article on eirikso.com to view the video.
And here are two stills from the same camera. It’s snapping decent 3 megapixel stills as well.
I’ve tried to explain twitter to a lot of people lately and I think this video does a good job. And while you’re at it. Commoncraft have a very nice explanation of this strange thing called RSS as well. When thinking of it. Everything from the commoncraft show is pretty fantastic!
I often get questions about how I get the time to blog and maintain all my online activity in addition to regular work, family life and all those other important things we all have to do. My answer is: I don’t watch television and I know my tools.
A while ago Clay Shirky did some math and figured that Americans could produce one complete wikipedia project every weekend if they stopped watching commercials on TV.
And he’s not only showing you how wikipedia is a tiny project. He has some thoughts on gaming as well:
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list.
This is Eirik Solheim's prize winning experiment. I use this page to share information about media, marketing, technology, photography and stuff I find important. I have been running this page since 2003. And since I started using Statcounter in 2005 more than 1.7 million people have visited my site.
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