How to Cook Oven Chips

This evening I was making the evening meal and was spreading some oven chips out on a baking tray when the following idea came to me. 

I always find it rather awkward to turn the chips over when they are half-done.  I usually manage to knock some on to the floor and forget which ones I have already turned over.  My idea involved using two identical baking trays:  Spread the chips out on one tray and then put this and the other empty tray into the oven so the empty tray gets hot while the chips cook.  At half-time, take the empty tray, turn it upside down and place it over the full tray, pick both trays up together, with the chips sandwiched between, and carefully turn them upside down.  Then take the top tray off, leaving the chips perfectly inverted in the previously empty tray (we did get one chip sticking to the top tray, but that was easily dislodged).  Then put the chips back in the oven for the second half.

I felt really pleased with myself for coming up with this idea, but Zoe, who was in the kitchen at the time, was not so impressed.  Still, the chips were nice, and Zoe ate all that I put on her plate.

Ubuntu 8.04 Runescape Problem

Following the upgrade of my laptop to Ubuntu 8.04, Zoe found that Runescape would no longer run on Firefox.

 This thread on Ubuntu Forums suggested that the problem was that  icedtea-gcjwebplugin  was being used to run Java applets instead of the  sun-java6-plugin.  I started the Synaptic package manager and completely removed the icedtea-gcjwebplugin package (the sun-java6-plugin was already installed). 

This fixed the problem; Zoe was able to get into Runescape again.

Ubuntu 8.04 Sound Problem

This morning I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04.  The whole process took almost exactly 4 hours.  The only significant problem was that sound was no longer working properly from within Firefox.  BBC Radio was silent on the BBC iPlayer, and when I selected to play it in RealPlayer, I got only garbled speech.  However, I could listen to it by starting RealPlayer10  outside Firefox and manually entering the URL of the .ram file.

A quick search on Google revealed  a post on Ubuntu Forums that suggested it might be a problem with the Totem plugin, and that the MPlayer plugin might be better.  I started Synaptic package manager and  completely removed the totem-mozilla package and installed mozilla-mplayer instead.  Now both the BBC iPlayer and RealPlayer work from within Firefox!

Saturday Morning

It is a warm sunny Saturday morning here in Reading.  The forecast is for it to be the warmest day of the year so far.  I have been up since 7:30 and it is now just past 10:00.  This is what I have done:

• Read blogs, sitting by an open window, with sunlight streaming in.
• Started upgrading a laptop to Ubuntu 8.04 (still in progress).
• Listened to Sound of the Sixties with Brian Matthew on BBC Radio 2.
• Started the weekly clothes wash (I have just hung the high-temp clothes out to dry and loaded the washing machine with the dark low-temp clothes).
• Made bread (using 1.5kg Hovis wholemeal flour).

Daughter Zoe has just got up.

Great Crested Grebe

A great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) on the large lake, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK. Photo taken on 2008-04-09.