Cooking for Engineers does Truffles

Well, Chocolate truffles to be exact, so not the real deal at all. However with the oncoming (like a freight train!) Christmas season, I’m very tempted to have a go at these – especially since it looks like a good recipe to have your children help out on.

Cooking For Engineers – Recipe File: Chocolate Truffles

Dutch Leading the Way in opening politics

An online voting guide was set up by a politically independent group that has influenced half of the voters in the recent national election!

The website operates by asking you a series of questions based on statements taken from the election documents of political parties in the election.

Once you’ve done the survey (along the agree, disagree or neutral lines) the site then ranks the parties according to how well they match your own preferences.

English version / StemWijzer online – StemWijzer

Wow! This is a great step forwards in the opening up of the process! I have long said that it is very difficult for the average person to really have any idea at all of who they are voting for and what the candidates represent. A tool like this would really help to point you in the right direction come election time.

Trolling for Replies

I am working out my Grouchy-ness and starting to get into the MacHeist.com.

Having folded origami to finish heist 2, we get a very cool sounding password manager (although it is 10.4 only … I’ll have to upgrade soon.)

Password Manager + AutoFill for Mac OS X

Anyway, it seems we can get A Friendly Ape to visit our blogs if we give a little link love, so here it is.

[Edited to remove the name of the Ape from the macheist.com in case that helps this part of the heist]

Electricity from heat – on a chip?

Using thermionic energy conversion Eneco are working on a solid-state (no moving parts) chip that can convert (waste) heat into electricity at efficiencies between 20 and 30 percent. That is pretty impressive.

Green Business News – an IT Week blog: Eneco details revolutionary power chip

Watch out for this technology, in a business sense this could be quite disruptive (i.e. a good investment if the development pans out!)

Our first solar oven

Today the kids and I built our first solar oven, inspired by the good peoples at solarcooking.org and their (many many) plans for solar cookers. In particular we made an attempt at The “Minimum” Solar Box Cooker.

By the time it was made we had a little over two hours of sun left in the day, so no cooking was going to happen. In testing, however, the oven did quickly get to 48 degrees celcius – sometime between ten and fifteen minutes. I hold high hopes that tomorrow we’ll be able to do a test run of biscuits, perhaps even some photos.