Author Archives: jaypoc

Homemade Bacon Candies

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Bacon Candies

I don’t know exactly when this happened, but bacon has made its way from our breakfast plates to our post-dinner snack. Who would have thought that pork would be the next big dessert? A few months ago, it would have been my last choice but lately, I’ve found a place in my heart, and my stomach, for Candied Bacon.

My interest in candied Bacon was piqued with each installment of EpicMealTime, and I found my inspiration to make my own with a recent episode of Outrageous Food on the Food Network. The show went on site to The Sticky Pig, a shop that specializes in gourmet handmade candied bacon. The show featured the Pig in a Blanket, a candied bacon with a sweet, spicy and tropical twist according to The Sticky Pig website.

The Sticky Pig is located in California, and because the candies are made from Bacon, they need expedited shipping. A 4-Piece collection of Candied Bacon goes for $20 (at the time of this post), and has to be shipped overnight to guarantee quality and freshness. This gets expensive when you need to ship it across the country, so rather than shell out $10+ per piece of bacon candy, I decided to make my own. After watching Outrageous Food over and over, taking notes, shopping for the ingredients and setting up my web cam for my latest live cast, here’s what I came up with:

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Linux Connection Delays

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Upon connecting to one of my Ubuntu webservers over Secure Shell, I found the connection was taking a long time to establish. At least that was what I thought. It was easy for my to blame my ISP, but since Web and FTP processes were quick, I didn’t take much time to look into or track down the cause of the SSH delays. One evening while installing new packages and frequently re-connecting to the server, I got tired of the delays and found that the issue was not a bandwidth or connection issue at all, but hat upon connection the server was performing a reverse lookup which took approximately 10 seconds. Various sources on the net advised to disable the reverse DNS lookups and the OpenSSH FAQ agrees.

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April Fools Day 2011 on the Web

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April Fools Day 2011
In lieu of some recent saddening events, I had to take some time to celebrate my favorite holiday, April Fools day. Up early, I scoured the web for this year’s April Fools pranks,and I can’t say that I was disappointed.

I should begin by letting everyone know that all pranks must be approved by Groupon who now owns the rights to the holiday.

Hulu has taken it upon themselves to redesign the site using new technologies (back in 1999)!

Speaking of traveling back in time, Check out all the new silent films on YouTube. The new 1911 filter can be applied to any of their advertising-lacking videos.

RIM has announced their latest Backberry featuring a screenless design.

ThinkGeek has been busy coming up with new products. Check out the delicious Angry Bird Pork Rinds. Kids will enjoy the Playmobil Apple Store. Geeks everywhere will be snacking on Light-saber Popsicles (actually a good product idea). The immensely lazy will find use for the new Shirt Plate. Sneak more treats into the movie theater with a Gummy iPhone Case. Science has never been as much fun as it can be with the Arsenic-based Sea Monkeys. Lose yourself in your own Minecraft Nether Portal/ It’s USB powered after all.

Hey, While I’m posting, we need to help out our friends at Improv Everywhere. A recent mission went bad and they’re looking for individuals who attacked their agents. Lets see if we can help them out.

Google has been busy as well. They have made major improvements too their Gmail, Google Docs and Voice services.

Great news for layout artists and web developers. Comic Sans was just made better!

Funny or Die is featuring singer, songwriter Rebecca Black!

Grooveshark (No longer available) has adopted the latest 3D technologies

College Humor may have been hacked! Some accounts have access to the admin page.

Reddit has added a new feature allowing your friends to give you Reddit Mold opening all sorts of new features for you!

Trying to get rid of your ex? In photos, that is… Kodak is to the rescue with Relationshiffft.

Chevy has even announced a new vehicle.

and in closing, Even yahoo is participating in the holiday fun with a new animated logo at their web site.

NOTICE: These links may be irrelevant after April Fools Day.

Thing in a Jar

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Jaypoc's Thing In a JarIt’s Intriguing, yet creepy at the same time. Inspired by Drew Olbrich’s Thing In a Jar, I created my own oddity in a jar. Using Drew’s design I sculpted my own alien fetus. Here’s how I did it.

  1. The process begins with a design. Being my first attempt at this project, I based my design off the sketch done by Drew Olbrich, but I encourage you to come up with your own ideas, shapes and designs. There’s lots of great variants on the Thing in a Jar via Google.
  2. The design started with a block of Sculpey clay. Sculpey is great! It is a modeling clay that, when baked, hardens to a plastic-like consistency. It can then be painted making it ideal for this project. I formed the shape of the little critter, complete with ridges and bumps to give it more lifelike detail. Once completed, I baked it according to the directions on the Sculpey packaging and let it cool enough to touch.
  3. Once cool enough to touch, I gave it a few coats of flesh-colored paint. I painted the eyes black and let the paint dry.
  4. Next, I coated the entire creature with Rubber Cement. This gives the final product some texture and can be peeled/pulled to add a skin/mucus effect.
  5. I used a Jar I picked up at Michael’s crafts store, but you can use any jar you want. I placed the creature inside the jar.
  6. To get the dark color, I used a mixture of about 60% water to 40% cola, adjusted as necessary.
  7. Because I did not use good quality jars, the jars did not hold an airtight (or waterproof) seal. I used Rubber Cement and carefully went around the rubber stopper and the entire lid to ensure a complete seal. Using screw-on lids or heavy-duty jars would eliminate the need for this step.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. In addition to the creature, I created a human finger (a thumb, shaped similar to my own), though the digit didn’t come out as good as I had hoped, and therefore will not get a post on my blog. I also created a Specimen label in Photoshop, printed and cut out the label, and soaked it in a cup of coffee for about 2 minutes. Dried it off between 2 paper towels while crumpling it up and let it dry. It has a great aged look to it and looks great glued to the jar.

What’s an EVO without Swype?

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If you have an Android based phone and haven’t tried Swype yet, you’re missing out on one of the most innovative alternatives to the standard keyboard. Rather than pressing the keys to spell out a word, Swype lets you simply trace a path over the desired letters. Through pattern recognition, AI and a bit of magic, Swype is able to figure out what you’re trying to say with minimal errors making it way faster than thumb-typing. If your phone doesn’t come with Swype natively, you may be able to get in on their beta test at http://beta.swype.com.

My phone, the HTC EVO on Sprint, recently received an OTA (Over-The-Air) update that includes Swype among other enhancements. Because of this, the beta version of Swype will no longer authenticate on an HTC EVO. Unfortunately, I am running a non-standard ROM called MIUI on my phone which is not supported by Sprint. This also means that I can’t get the OTA update, and since Sprint is not offering an a-la-carte download of the Swype program, I was unable to reinstall Swype after updating to the latest version of MIUI.

It appears that the android modding community is keeping hush on the procedure to install Swype, but if you own an EVO, then you should be able to use the applications that Sprint has licensed for your device. I don’t recommend trying this on any phones that don’t natively come with Swype, but it will work for the EVO.

You’ll need to get a copy of the OTA update. The easiest way to do this is to download a ROM that includes the update.(I used Fresh-EVO-3.5.0.1, Google it.) which includes Swype, but any EVO ROM that has the application will work.

There’s 2 files you’ll need to extract from the ROM (usually just a ZIP file):

/system/app/Swype.apk
and
/system/lib/libswypecore.so

Transfer these files to your phone.

Swype.apk can go anywhere, but you’ll want to copy libswypecore.so to the /system/lib/ folder on your EVO. Yes, you’ll need root permissions. I used Root Explorer (File Manager) by Speed Software but you can use any file manager that gives you access to the system folders.

Finally, Install the program via Swype.apk from your SD card and you should be swyping in no time!

(NOTE: Rooting and/or installing aftermarket ROMs can damage your phone and may void the warranty. Do so at your own risk. Also, avoid piracy. Keep the android community alive by supporting the applications you find valuable).