To construct the artefact you need

• Eggs (obviously).
• A handful of black olives,
• A handful of diced salami,
• A few thinly sliced sun-dried tomatoes.

I seasoned with a sprinkle of garam masala, paprika a dash of balsamic vinegar and a little (very little!) salt. Salt might be completely unnecessary given the salami.

Now do roughly this

1. Whisk the eggs till they’re a consistent color (not much effort needed), sling in the other bits, and cook on a medium heat (not hot!) till it’s pretty firm.
2. Turn it using a plate inversion technique and cook for a minute or so more (don’t use a spatula or you have to clean up the kitchen like I now have to).
3. Eat it. I would upload a picture but I already ate it. (the omelette, not the picture) Maybe next time.

I started by followed the instructions from the Kanban plugin website, however, it requires a few extra steps to get it working at all:

• Install the gem block_helpers (gem install block_helpers)
• Read the README.rdoc that comes with the project – to save you some time here it is in short – you need to go to the administration page in Redmine, then configure the kanban plugin. There, you need to configure the pane settings – any panes you want to use must link to a status within your own redmine – there’s a list of recommendations in the readme but it’s just common sense.

Now, how does it fare in use? It unfortunately has a showstopper bug – moving something twice on the kanban logs you out. In addition to that, some users were unable to see the kanban. This means that the kanban plugin as it stands, is unusable for anything but an ‘overview’ of the projects (and an non-interactive overview at that).

Seeing as development seems to have ended a while ago, this plugin isn’t worth installing, and we have removed it from our Redmine setup. If it resumes active development, I will do a more full review of the plugin.

But that excuse only really stood for the first couple of months here, since then I’ve just been getting all wound up and been unsure what to write if I were to write here. Which is odd since it’s been a very busy few months, with tons of new experiences that you might even find moderately interesting.

So I will start from near the beginning – moving here. It was a fraught experience and I learned a few important lessons. We shipped our stuff with UPS and travelled ourselves by RyanAir, and we learned some hard lessons with the UPS shipping. If you do the same thing, remember:

1. Plan early. Call any companies you need and check they can do what they say. We originally planned to use UPS directly, but in the end found they couldn’t ship for ‘non business users’. Thankfully we found Mailboxes Etc, or our plans would have been ruined!
2. Backup data on your computers and bring the data safely with you in hand luggage, and buy transport insurance – we lost one of our computers to mishandling when it was being shipped, and we were very glad to have all the important files backed up. We were even gladder to have bought insurance on it. It  was mangled beyond repair and we couldn’t afford new computers!
3. Don’t trust any delivery company. Take valuables in your hand luggage. Two glass items were broken, unfortunately one had a lot of sentimental value. You may have the idea that our packages were badly handled, and this is absolutely true. The ‘cheap packages’ which were done by us contained mostly none valuable stuff and stuff that couldn’t be broken. These boxes were all shipped perfect squares, and arrived in some cases spherical, so badly beaten that they had no corners left! And then the ‘good boxes’, packed professionally, containing our computers and so on, also showed serious wear, and in the case of the broken computer, an inverted corner. And then the ‘don’t trust’ part – UPS denied responsibility for the broken computer, much to our dismay. Take pictures before shipping to be safe! (Thanks to Mailboxes Etc who sorted everything out for us in the end)
4. Have more money than you think you need. This sort of thing is expensive. With everything costing a bit more than expected, we’ve been eating pasta here for a while! I would say a good amount would be €2000, though €3000 would be more comfy. The more the merrier – also, with Finland in particular, the prices are way higher than in the UK, so I’ve found my money going faster than I’d like!

The moving of ourselves was pretty easy. We flew ryanair and both took the biggest possible baggage allowance. It was relatively cheap, on time, and got us where we needed to be. Having done the trip a few times before we knew what to expect as well!

Next time I’ll discuss summer holidays in Finland… Till then, enjoy what remains of your weekend!

And in amazing addition, Valve just went and took a bold, moderately scary, but awesome step. They took one of their greatest games, and made it free to play – free, forever, no catch. I’ll bet this is where they’ve aimed ever since they launched the cash store, probably as a better business model for them and a great way to encourage more new players. I can hardly believe it, as it’s one of a few games which I would still pay ‘full retail’ price for even now.

In every way, Team Fortress 2 seems like an inspirational game. It ticks so many boxes it… runs on a 5-year-old laptop, looks amazing on a brand new desktop, is artistic, tells a story (really well) of the characters in a typically storyless genre, is balanced, is about more than just you, involves the community, funds community developers, requires next to no money from you (absolutely none now!), receives regular (awesome) (free) updates, servers are well populated, and probably most importantly, is great fun.

As long as they keep up the balanced and quality update work, I can only see this being a good thing. By balanced, I mean, a person who pays gains no real advantage over a person who works to craft and collect items. They might get items faster, and they might get unique looking items, but the free player will always be able to match the item buying player. I doubt it will be anything other than this, as updates and new weapons are always balanced – or aim to be, and are polished up later.

If you’re new to the game, don’t worry. The team is what matters, so you can just do your best to help meet the objective – no one will hate you for being new. (if anyone does, hit them with a baseball bat (or a fish!))

Anyway what are you waiting for, stop reading this post right now and go download the game!

Only one new weapon this time, “The Detonator”. Seems like a good name for it too, seeing as it’s a flare gun that detonates. Nice and simple! Details are scarce – “Alt fire detonates explosive flare” – but let’s take a guess – we shoot the flare, detonate it, and set nearby targets on fire. As benefits are rarely without drawbacks, I’ll take a guess at slightly lower damage, a slower moving flare, or increased reload time, though that’s pure speculation.

Sounds like a great weapon for setting distant enemy groups on fire, and a great addition for spy checking at a distance. Anyway, once again it’s exciting to find another secret. Makes me wonder if there’s a missed secret on page 1 – has anyone found one?

Awesome artwork as ever, courtesy of Valve.

“The Soda Popper” looks like another weapon rewarding you for killing effectively, like the Bazaar Bargain, building up ‘hype’ ready for a rain of minicrits. A smaller clip size is your downside, much like the Force-A-nature. A rain of minicrits from behind could cause total disarray to an unsuspecting team.

Next up is a bat – “The Atomizer”, which looks like an ‘access’ weapon – useful for getting behind enemy lines, grabbing a health pack, then wreaking havoc on the enemy team (or their teleporters). I imagine that third jump will also give an interesting edge in combat during the first few weeks when no one is expecting it! Combined with the force-a-nature, will this give the scout a quadruple jump… One can only imagine so, and the prospect is awesome.

The last new weapon, “The Winger” seems like a standard but nonetheless useful pistol replacement. The extra damage, presumably without scatter, looks like a great opportunity to sneak behind enemy lines and snipe their sentries/medics/etc when they least expect it.

Hidden updates somehow always excite me more than the obviously stated updates, it’s somewhat like a treasure trail…

Searching the web I couldn’t find any messages saying ‘do this!’, in fact all the messages were saying ‘this feature is not yet available’. Well, it turns out that it is now available and really easy to do. Just add the property to your image like this:

<Image name="myImage" RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="NearestNeighbor"/>

This did exactly what I wanted. There’s a  range of other sampling modes available too, if you know what you want.

The aim of communicating emotions is surely socialization, and we can’t discuss something that is meaningless. For example ‘Dailymood’ purports to help us understand and share our feelings with statuses such as ’40% happy’ and ’80% happy’. 40% of what I found myself asking? Is 40% of happy almost sad, or are we still ‘not sad’ when 10% happy? This measure is useless, as it’s trying to measure something that isn’t quantifiable. Emotions are typically expressed relatively – with a few keywords for describing the ‘gist of the feeling’. ‘happier than normal’ makes sense, as does ‘Sad but feeling happier than yesterday’, but ’60% sad’ makes no sense at all. Dailymood doesn’t understand change either, so it repeats statuses even when they haven’t changed, making the update both meaningless and redundant!

So how can we share our feelings in a meaningful way? Using descriptions like ‘Exuberant’ and ‘Excited and happy!’ are much more human and interesting. But this is still this is missing the context and the subject of the person’s ‘status’.

Does this look like 40% happy to you? It should according to Dailymood.

By context  I mean the person’s base state, and by subject I mean why they are feeling something. For one person, the context might be chronic depression and the subject of happiness might be a walk with friends. For another person, context might be a steady married life with the subject a newborn child. The average for these people is different, and while both subjects describe ‘happier than average’ the context is vital. Throwing a party for the birth would be appropriate, but just smiling and talking with the depressed friend would be far more sensible.

We get a person’s context by knowing them – it’s something we build up over time as we learn about them. The subject must be specified, however. Without it, a status update is not very interesting – even vague subjects like ‘having a great day’ give meaning, though we might not understand exactly why. It is almost an invitation to ask ‘why are you having a great day?’.

People are complex, and can feel an array of different emotions at any time – including opposites. You experience sadness and happiness at the same time (the word bittersweet describes this feeling; the warmth of a smile stretching your cheeks as cold rain mixes with your tears; a confusing feeling that nevertheless makes you feel alive). Expressing this complexity is inherently difficult, and deserves more of your time than it takes to fill in  questionnaire. This is time well spent. Instead of giving me another boring thing to skim over, tell me something interesting that I will actually care about.

• Disable mouse acceleration. With acceleration disabled, moving the mouse 5 cm should move x pixels on-screen – regardless of how fast you move it those 5 cm. There are situations where acceleration is useful, so you might want to disable this in separate application settings
• Use a better mouse mat/surface. I recently got myself a Razer pro solutions mousepad, and it’s far more pleasant than using the desk surface. It wasn’t expensive either.  After using desk surfaces for years, the upgrade is amazing. When looking for a pad try to combine a ‘glidey’ surface with a texture good for your mouse sensor.
• Disentangle wires – you don’t want to run out of mouse cable mid stroke or while tracking your target. Prioritise the mouse cable over static cables like the keyboard, simply unplugging the mouse, moving it out of your current desk setup, and plugging it in again could gain you a good 10cm of cable. Wireless is an option if cables just won’t reach, but I prefer a cable (cheaper, less batteries).
• Use a better mouse – Your mouse should fit comfortably in your hand, move smoothly across the surface it’s on, click easily but not too easily, and be reasonably durable. I personally ignore DPI figures, as long as they’re not depressingly low. Use a USB mouse. The old Ps2 connection isn’t as good. I use a Logitech Mx518 everywhere I use a mouse.
• Get a mouse with variable sensitivity. This can take some getting used to, but switching sensitivity is great for changing from sweeping strokes to fine detail, or from 360° coverage to precise sniping.
• Use a different style device (tablet/space navigator/gamepad). Mice are great general purpose tools, but they aren’t perfect for everything. Tablets offer pen control mapped to the display, mirroring your gestures exactly on the screen. A decent tablet can radically improve your digital art  quality. Space navigators are a great alternative for navigating through 3D space. Gamepads are great for driving and flying thanks to their continuous style input (you can continue to turn left infinitely without repositioning).

If you have any other tips or getting more out of your pointer, let us know in the comments!

Thanks to Jetpack we now have a few new features. Editors can now embed a few extra content types, including LaTeX, more video embeds, Flickr, polls, etc. Shortlinks are now also possible!

Gravatar pop ups now work, so you can find out more about our authors, and we can find out more about our commenters.

All those trendy social network options are now present, so you can tweet and share and divulge information to your comrades.

And, finally, ultimately, and possibly most insignificantly we have a favicon at last :D (anyone willing to make a better one, please, let me know!)