Yum.

It would appear that I'm at the risk of becoming a food blog and not being able to cook or prepare many things! But what I had for lunch today was really tasty so I had to stick it on here. Warburton's sandwich thins with red onion, green pepper, grated mozzarella, sliced chorizo and of course some sweet chili sauce. Might sound a little crazy and over the top but that's what you get when you go to a restaurant! Good thing is that it was pretty healthy especially as we grilled the chorizo which released a lot of the fat in it. If you are hungry and reading this, I advise you to skip over the picture!

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I've mentioned that I had fished out my old laptop, and it does what I wanted to do which was play Minecraft with some mods added on. The only thing is that it was slow, bearable but slow. I thought that it was something to do with allocated memory but it turns out I already had mine to the max. Luckily I came across a video about altering the game code itself to make it run faster. It got me thinking about something I saw on YouTube about something that barely any schools teach. Computer coding. The stat was 90% of schools in America didn't teach it and I don't know of any schools which teach it in my local area. The video covers the stories of many people who have made their money thanks to coding including the creator of Facebook. I was a little confused when Will.I.Am appeared at the end saying he was taking coding classes but I guess it's another famous face. Turns out that some university lecturers are even putting their classes up on YouTube and other sites for free. The Internet is our oyster!

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I am afraid I haven't got my pen to paper recently, the mood hasn't taken me so no more update on the drawing. I am planning to take a stage by stage of the drawing and then posting them as a single blog when it's all done. People seem to like it when I let them know about my art work so I think you'll like it and I hope you do!

Thanks for reading, sorry it was a bit shorter today but I don't want to force things into the blog. It wouldn't be my best stuff and you wouldn't like it any where near as much! Blog ya tomorrow.

Changes and some old tech

First things first, I was running two blogs. This one and another about gaming but I decided that I would consolidate them both into one which is what all the posts from the other blog are now on this page. I just thought it would be easier for me to keep track and for anyone that wants to read them as they are all now in one place!

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It's safe to say I felt like I woke up in a different country today. The weather is perfect for me, not too hot with a nice breeze. It seems to have put everyone in a good mood today and I can definitely say the same for myself.

Started off as a normal Tuesday heading to the shops to get magazines for people as it is magazine day. Had an amazing lunch prepared by my wonderful girlfriend - pixelamy - toasted ciabatta bread with diced tomatoes and onions with sweet chili sauce. That went down a treat and I even managed her left overs so I was feeling rather greedy. I know it doesn't look like the most amazing thing in the world but it tastes so good. It's basically our own twist of bruschetta just with less olive oil and sweet chili instead of vinegar.

Ant and Dec's Saturday night take away has returned but we missed it this weekend as we were at a friends house which I will talk about further down or in a gaming post.. Whichever seems more appropriate. We thought we would have a look at the undercover as it looked amazing from the preview the week before. Even if you don't watch the show, you've got to watch this as it's just brilliant!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd2EUcq3rX4

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I first started posting to blogger on my netbook which I bought during sixth form for school work. It runs well and does what I want it to do but for my 14th birthday I decided to by myself my first laptop. I am posting from this laptop right now after giving it a good sorting out last night. I spent about an hour uninstalling programs that were useless, deleting old files and pictures I didn't need and tweaking with settings to make it run faster. Now it seems to be working pretty well which I am very pleased with. It lets me run Minecraft (very slowly) which I bought in 2010 and have never been able to use properly. I'm hoping that it will have enough computer power to run a capture device for when I start a YouTube channel. I remember the day I bought it because my brother kept telling me to make sure I didn't get the bad version of Windows Vista loaded on to whatever I bought. My Mum and Dad took me to PC World and I bought this laptop for about £350 down from £500. It's not too powerful in terms of what £350 could get you today but it has always served me well. You can see in the picture that I was actually typing this post at the time. It feels massive at the moment because I am so used to a 10" screen and this has a 17" screen. The battery life is only 2 hours which sucks a bit, I blame the screen.

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I would like to quickly touch on the Blogger App which I have found to be a great help. It's very simple and allows you to post from anywhere with an internet connection. I mainly use it for adding pictures in as you can literally just add a picture and it will upload it to the web. I can then easily edit the pictures size and placement on a laptop to create the finished product. For anyone planning on blogging, I would definitely give the app a go as it helped convince me.

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http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=16

If you haven't guessed already, I'm quite interested in space. Upon visiting the BBC News science page today, the space telescope Herschel is expected to go blind sometime this month. The telescope has been taking pictures of far off stars and galaxies since 2009 and has helped scientists to learn about star birth. The equipment on board needs to be super cooled to work effectively and the helium coolant on board is expected to run out this month which will stop the telescope working. It's a great shame that this vital piece of equipment will be going out of service, especially as the launch of another isn't likely with Herschel costing a hefty 2 billion Euros. Despite this, the telescope has already taken thousands and thousands of pictures which will keep those looking up very busy for now.

BBC News article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21668712

ESA

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=16

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed. Please share in any way you can!

Strozzapreti and some other things

On Valentines  Day I decided to try and cook some lovely food for my girlfriend. We quite like Italian food whenever we eat out, we usually go to a Zizzi's or a Frankie and Benny's. When we are at Zizzi's, my other halfs favourite meal to have is strozzapreti so I thought I would give that a go. I'm not the best cook in the world, usually I am adventurous as sticking something in the oven for half an hour but I thought I would just go for it. The recipe didn't seem to hard - but then nothing ever does when you are reading it.

Here is the recipe I used along with the link the website. The recipe on the site is for 4, I only cooked for 2 so I have changed the values to make this meal for 2.

http://www.paul-ainsworth.co.uk/recipes/strozzapreti-chicken/

200 grams of pasta - I used casarecce

Half of a red onion finely sliced

2 spring onions finely sliced

2 chicken breasts cut into strips

2 tablespoons of sweet chilli sauce

3 tablespoons of creme fraiche

2 tablespoons of red pesto

1/2 tablespoon of garlic (I replaced this with garlic salt as I had some of that already)

40 ml of vegetable stock (I didn't add this in as I wasn't really sure how to 'reduce' it but it still tasted good all the same)

For people who know what they are doing in the kitchen, this'll be pretty straight forward. I was feeling a bit nervous as I didn't want to mess up so I cut all the vegetables up and the chicken; I also had spoons ready where ever I needed them so I could just grab rather than faff around. Start cooking the pasta first. Then you add olive oil to the pan to fry the chicken off, then add the veg in until it starts to go soft. Here is where the original recipe says to add the vegetable stock here but I left that so.. If that's something you want to do then have a look there! Once the veg is soft, add all the other ingredients in and bring to the simmer. Check if the pasta is done, drain and then add the chicken mix in with the pasta and toss it all around to get it all covered and then serve! I added some basil on top just to make it look fancy. The picture above is from the same page as the recipe to show what it should look like.. Mine came out a lot more pale but I'm still alive so it must have been fine.

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I think it's safe for me to assume that most people will see Google at least once a day, today Google's art work is celebrating St David's Day. I don't really know a lot about St David's Day so I thought I would find out some more about it and share it with you. It always falls on the 1st March and is to commemorate the death of St David in the year 589 AD, he was a religious leader and teacher. Wales celebrates this day as a national holiday every year, 65% of the population were even willing to give up another bank holiday to get this one! Every year there are parades and school plays and probably many other things in his memory.

If you want to read up on it, here is the link  from the Google home page:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=St+David's+Day&oi=ddle&ct=st_davids_day_2013-1060005-hp

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I was having a look on the science and environment page on the BBC website and I came across this article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21615280

It's an article suggesting that if harvesting rhino horns was made legal then the species would no longer be endangered. It's an interesting idea which has already been applied to crocodiles with success. They suggest that the trade being illegal has allowed rhino species to bounce back somewhat but all this has done is drive the price of rhino horns up making them a more viable target. About 2 rhinos a day are killed by poachers.

Rhinos grow about 0.9kg of horn material a year and if we humanely shaved their horns, global demand could be met with no harm to the rhino population. The risks that would come with them not having their horns would be minimal.

Conservationists art obviously disagreeing with the idea saying the countries with rhino populations haven't got the infrastructures to run such schemes. I'm not really sure which side I'm on because it would stop the illegal trading, but the poachers that are out there now would still need to make money somehow. What they have been doing is still illegal so would they still face charges for what they had done? We shall have to see what happens.

Thanks for reading!

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Please share this in anyway you can, it would be a great help!