Badge engineering

Not really Linux, but it’s fairly entertaining & I’m sure we’ve all seen equivalent digital labelling:

Mr Kipling
Exceedingly good cakes
6 Deep Filled
Mince Pies
butter enriched pastry
filled with mincemeat (48%)

Made in the UK, it says, South Yorkshire. “A generous dollop of my rich fruity mincemeat encased in crisp buttery pastry, delicious warm with cream.”

Oh, yes, & “SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS” plus warnings about nut traces, cherry stones, gluten, milk & sulphites.

Quite tasty little fruit pies, but really don’t have the substantial culinary impact that a big lump of finely-chopped moo or chook would bring them (-: especially after [reads carton] two months outside of the freezer :-)

Comments

noisymime (Josh Stewart) said…

I normally wouldn't comment on a stranger's blog, but my girlfriend works in a bakery and apparently gets asked this question at least once a day around Christmas :)

Apparently the use of the term mincemeat is not a labelling error but rather just a throwback to an older use of the term that is no longer really used. When this was recently raised in conversation at Christmas, my grandma actually confirmed that it used to be a common term for minced fruit as well as actual animal meat.

18 February, 2008 06:43

Leon RJ Brooks said…

Yah, well, old Greek uses “brosis” or “broma” for “food” but that often gets translated as “meat” instead.

Once a day? I’d be breeding a small FAQ poster for that. (-:

18 February, 2008 10:53

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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