Daily Archives: Tuesday, March 4, 2014

  • How to make pancakes, 16th century style

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

    The Good Huswifes Jewell was an English recipe book written by Thomas Dawson which appeared in the late 16th century, of which the British Library has helpfully provided a transcript of the page covering pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known in secular Britain as Pancake Day.

    pancake

    The transcript of the pancake recipe is as follows:

    To make Pancakes

    Take new thicke Creame a pine, foure or five yolks of egs, a good handful of flower and two or three spoonefuls of ale, strain them together into a faire platter, and season it with a good handfull of sugar, a spooneful of synamon, and a little Ginger: then take a friing pan, and put in a litle peece of Butter, as big as your thumbe, and when it is molten brown, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan …, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all the pan as thin as may be: then set it to the fire, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turn the other, and bake them as dry as ye can without burning.

    This is the first time I’ve ever come across a pancake recipe featuring ale. 🙂

    As regards the author, Thomas Dawson wrote a number of popular and influential recipe books including The Good Huswifes Jewell (1585), The good Hus-wifes handmaid for the kitchen (1594) and The Booke of Carving and Sewing (1597). These books covered a broad range of subjects, including general cookery, sweet waters, preserves, animal husbandry, carving, sewing and the duties of servants.

  • Upgrading Debian from stable to testing

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoI’ve been using Debian GNU/Linux for many years and have been very pleased with its stability, reliability and security.

    Yesterday I decided to do something I’ve never done before: upgrade a production machine from Debian stable (codename ‘wheezy’) to Debian testing (codename ‘jessie’). See this guide for an explanation of Debian versions and releases.

    Anyway, after installing the apt-listbugs package which a Bristol Wireless colleague recommended, I then proceeded with the upgrade via the command line.

    The sequence of commands to perform the upgrade itself is very easy.

    # cp /etc/apt/sources.list{,.bak}
    # sed -i -e ‘s/ \(stable\|wheezy\)/ testing/ig’ /etc/apt/sources.list
    # apt-get update
    # apt-get –download-only dist-upgrade
    # apt-get dist-upgrade

    The first command backs up the software sources list, whilst the second edits the sources list to replace release versions. After that, the actual fun begins, downloading updated package information, downloading the packages themselves and then installing them.

    All told, it went very smoothly. The laptop rebooted normally after the upgrade and brought up the GUI. The only major problem was that I lost the functionality of the Broadcom wireless network card; this was resolved by reinstalling the card’s firmware – a 2 minute job. The upgrade also resulted in 2 packages being broken. The command (as root) for fixing this problem is apt-get -f install.

    In total, the upgrade took about 2 hours and I now have a machine running a more modern version of Debian on the same machine and have kept all my previous personal settings, which is a definite plus compared with a clean install where one has to spend hours reinstalling software packages not included in the ISO disc image and tweaking.

  • LibreUmbria taking free software into schools

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    LibreUmbria free software in schools promotional flyerThe first of three free seminars organised by LibreUmbria – the organisation promoting free and open source software in Italy’s Umbria region – aimed at parents and teachers is being organised at the Giovanni Cena primary school in Perugia at 3.30 pm on Monday 10th March, the LibreUmbria blog reports.

    For some months the LibreUmbria working group has been making contact with a number of Umbrian schools in order to take free software into classrooms. They wish to start with primary schools where it is easy to raise children on open source (and there’s some great free and open source education software available at primary level. Ed). LibreUmbria’s wave of training is being heralded in with the arrival of spring thanks to collaboration with Perugia’s Terzo Circolo Didattico, which helped get this LibreUmbria experiment off the ground.

    The LibreUmbria@Scuola programme will include three seminars on the subjects of awareness, freedom and security. Each word will address one aspect of new technology and open up a debate with attendees.

    The seminars will be followed by two courses on the LibreOffice productivity suite in multimedia classrooms: one aimed at parents and another at teachers, who will in turn act as mentors and recommend them to colleagues and then to children in accordance with the cascade training approach.

    Just to emphasize the need for a digital culture that generates awareness, the title of the events being arranged by LibreUmbria is “Digital natives do not exist”. That awareness is currently lacking and there are as yet no “natives”.