How do you cook your green tea?

Oddly enough it can make a big difference to the antioxidant content of the final tea.

Roasting & drying the leaves with FIR (Far InfraRed) heat instead of conventional heat can boost the antioxidants, & can also curtail Vitamin C & caffiene levels.

Seung-Cheol Lee & his associates at Kyungnam University [South Korea] have been whittling away at the problem, making sure that they know exactly what effects the FIR has, & hopefully gaining a clear understanding of why the difference in heating methods has a significant effect. Their current theory is that polyphenol concentrations are elevated by the process.

The idea is to make a hot cup of tea ever more nutritious & flavoursome. The results should be available worldwide, so even backwoods delis scattered across the UK can provide better tea for the traditional British grandmothers. “We may not get your broadband right, but the tea while you’re waiting is wonderful.” (-:

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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