Author Archives: lornajane

19 Feb
2007

Big Wool Bag

The good news is that I’m nearly at the end of my pink big wool stash, so there might be some less-matching items appearing here soon. However today I’d like to show off the bag that I’ve made to go with the mittens and the hat.

The pattern for this bag was taken from Emma King’s 25 Bags To Knit Book , here it is:

A closeup of one of the cables with a bead in the middle (I’d never cabled before so I am very proud of myself!)

As a finishing touch and to keep the bag in shape, I decided to add a lining. Thanks to Jess for “lending me her sewing machine” … actually she just sewed the lining for me :) Here’s a peep at the lining:

Now I have a dilemma. Can I reasonably wander around with bag, mittens and earflap hat which all match … ?

18 Feb
2007

Coldspring Mill

I haven’t lived in Leeds very long and I’m hearing about new places to go all the time. One of the girls from the “Leeds Knitterati” knitting group that meets in Starbucks in Leeds had told me about Coldspring Mill – its the other side of Bradford and has a camping and wool shop.

Well we went today and it was a lovely day out – it feels like spring today and the scenery is amazing, its hard to believe we’re so close to Leeds/Bradford when we’re there. The place itself was really nice – some good outdoor gear and camping basics. Its not huge but its fine. The wool shop is downstairs and it has lots of mysterious seconds of “designer wools”, they can’t advertise what it was supposed to be but you can guess some of the time.

There is also a tea room at which we had a very nice lunch – they do real meals as well as toasties, sandwiches and so on.

I got 350g of (I suspect Debbie Bliss) DK cashmere in a kind of mauve so I’m open to suggestions for what I might do with that!

18 Feb
2007

New Camera

We bought a new camera yesterday. Kevin has a good digital camera but its quite big and now quite old. He saw that Jessop’s was having a sale so we went and looked … we’ve now got a fujifilm finepix F650 [1]. Its quite small and quite powerful with simple enough interface for me to easily use it but enough override to keep Kevin happy too!

It has an internal lithium battery and takes XD cards as its memory. On the whole its got everything we wanted and has the biggest, nicest screen I’ve seen in a while. Its easy to set the flash settings and it has both macro and super-macro modes (useful for taking closeups of stitch patterns). There are also some presets for using it in different modes – like fireworks, sunset, flower, landscape and so on, including a museum mode where it turns off the keytones! There are also some presets for whitebalance which seem to really help with colour temperature when I photograph knitting without the flash.

The photographs that appear over the next few days were taken with the new toy, let me know what you reckon!

1 I know that link is to amazon but I can’t find either Jessop’s or the manufacturer’s page

16 Feb
2007

Crochet Slowpoke

I saw these slowpoke patterns linked from somewhere else a while back and I just had to buy them. Well the first one is finished – he’s a bit plain (think that was the rather primary colour choices) but he’s done and I think he’s cute:

I pre-recorded this entry a few days ago as he’s a present for a friend and I had to photograph him and then post him … but he should be there by now if you’re reading this.

I might have to make some for myself, or maybe one of these what do you reckon?

15 Feb
2007

Email Outage

Like the technical wizard that I am I’ve just spent 48 hours (almost) with all email to my lornajane.net domain getting lost in the ether somewhere. The story is one of those silly bureaucratic ones which I won’t repeat here because my hosting company, flump , have been all-round great for the six years I’ve been with them and their support people have got me sorted out politely and relatively quickly.

So, if you’ve been emailing me and I’ve been ignoring you, can you send it again please?

11 Feb
2007

CMS Promiscuity

This site is run by textpattern, I’ve used it a few times and I love it. In addition you may have read about my recent encounters with Joomla! .

This week I’m trying out Serendipity for another site and its quite a change. For a start I haven’t read a lot about it although there are a few places that I’ve notice it used (on Sara’s blog for example) and wondered about it. It turns out its templates use Smarty which is good for us as quite a few of our recent projects have (both woollyblanket, for its user management bit, and our recent experience creating playTAG.

First Impressions

Well the installation was a dream, which I kind of expected, but its great to see all the same and a nod to the team for that. Getting started with the admin side of things wasn’t too hard either – you install a plugin called “Spartacus” and then you are able to download and install any plugins and themes from their central respository. Its very convenient and perfect if you only have FTP access or just don’t want to mess about moving files from one place to another.

Getting a site running

The admin interface is quite simple – you add content items into categories in a way that will be familiar from other comparable CMS products. Getting some navigation to happen needed a selection of plugins but installing each one is pretty painless. The configuration screen shows the “sidebar” plugins in the location that they will appear followed by the “event” plugins which are the ones that modify the functionality.

What Next?

Well, I’m not posting the URL of the project I’m using Serendipity for just yet, because it’s not ready. I hope the suspense of wiating to find out what the site was and what I did to Serendipity in the process won’t be too much!

08 Feb
2007

Little Meals: Fasta Pasta

Pasta is a great store-cupboard staple and can be turned into a meal as complicated or as simple as you please. In this series of articles on “little meals”, the food that is fast and makes either a good lunch or a small dinner for one person, I’ve already written about eggs and today its pasta.

Fast and Fresh

Filled fresh pasta is the perfect fast meal. Boil the kettle, throw the pasta in the pan, add the boiling water and when the pasta looks done three minutes later, it is. Supermarkets have started doing individual portion sizes (around 150g) and personally I like mine with ketchup.

Pasta a la Mum

No, that’s not pasta with mum as part of the dish, that’s pasta as my mother would make it. It goes like this:

Cook some quick-cook pasta. Drain it and return it to the pan. Add some pesto (red, green, spicy, or whatever you like) and add any or all of:

  • chopped ham
  • peanuts
  • tinned pineapple
  • fried bacon
  • chopped up precooked chicken
  • frozen peas (pop these in with the pasta and they turn out perfect)
  • leftover veg

Stir and serve with grated cheese on top. Yum!

A variation is to use another sauce other than pesto – the little stir-in sauces are good, or you can work a variation of the weekday spaghetti carbonara recipe if you like.

Do let add a comment if you try these recipes or have variations of your own!

07 Feb
2007

Offer Accepted: Third Time Lucky?

We’ve had an offer accepted on the house I told you about. This is the third time we’ve had an offer accepted on a house and the other two have failed to end in a successful purchase, mostly because we seem to choose houses that turn out to be falling down (see the other epsiodes in the house saga ).

The solicitors are instructed, and we’re meeting the bank later in the week … everyone cross your fingers for us :)

07 Feb
2007

Feel the Freedom

I’ve just stumbled across Scott Carpenter’s site Moving to Freedom site and it reminded me something I meant to write about.

Some time ago, my little sister entered Further Education and needed her own computer. So I tarted up my desktop, reinstalled it, and dumped it in her bedroom with a wireless connection to the broadband. It wasn’t a new machine (bits were 8 years old!) and that was 18 months ago.

At Christmas I had to take the thing apart, dust some parts, drop other parts and coax it back into working… but it seemed OK. Last week it just died completely. So I went to my parents’ last weekend to try to breathe more life into it. But the hard drive was dead … I have another spare machine but I couldn’t lay my hands on a Windows license (not because I’m disorganised, I’ve been living out of boxes for a year).

Installing Linux

So I installed Linux. I downloaded a Kubuntu Live CD image and after half an hour of swearing at Windows managed to burn the image onto the CD correctly. I should point out at this stage that although I’m a very content Linux user, I don’t install or administrate it. So I put the live CD in, showed off a few odds and ends and asked my sister what she needed her PC to be able to do. Her wishlist is:

  1. Edit Office Documents. She knows about Open Office and says she will be able to work it
  2. Surf the internet.
  3. Use her ipod nano in an iTunes-a-like way
  4. Use Windows Messenger Live or equivalent

I had a quick google on the ipod front, I have an alternative gadget specifically because I use Linux, but apparently it can be done so I toddled off to install Kubuntu for the first time. I have no idea what I did on the first attempt but it froze part way through (possibly from the effort of reformatting the hard disk). The second time though it was quite successful and then the fun began.

Getting software

My Linux experience is quite patchy and also I’m a very command-line-happy user so I’ll get new stuff with an “apt-get” command and not worry about it. This isn’t going to work for my perfectly computer-literate but not geeky sister! After some grappling with the Adept Installer and realising I had to uncomment a config file to get the universe and multiverse repositories added, we were flying. She’s now got Firefox and a handful of games in addition to Kopete and the Open Office that Kubuntu installs with by default.

The wireless card

I had no idea (because I’ve never done it) that there was such contention with drivers for wireless cards. It took me two attempts and a couple of late-night phone calls to my sysadmin (thanks, Kevin!) to get it working. Apparently the key thing is to use pcils to see the card listed and grab its model number, then feed that into google along with the word ndiswrapper and hope you find some instructions on what to do next.

Moving forward.

Now its up and working I have to say I really hope she takes to the new set up. At the moment she’s without an iTunes-a-like (as she’s waiting for me to research it for her) unless she surprises me and sorts it out herself, and the monitor won’t go for a better resolution than 800 × 600 which is annoying. I’ve got The Linux Equivalent Project bookmarked and am trying to figure out which of the chat clients will give her the closest experience to what she is used to (the main requirement seems to be the emoticons!) and also what is going to be the easiest for her to use with the ipod nano.

I am enchanted with the idea that a normal person could just sit at a Linux machine and perform their usual functions without too much hassle. If she rises to the occasion then not only will she have saved a fortune in software costs, now and for the future, but I hope she’ll also embrace the idea that she is rewarding the community that worked so hard to create these products, rather than the corporate giants who would bring evil on the world.

Has anyone had any similar experiences of bringing their own software and beliefs to others? (Cait, do post and let us know how you are getting on!)