Spreadsheets

There are a few out there
My favourite is one posted by diktaf at reddit.com/r/icecreamery
Amazingly I can't find any discussion about it but I have learnt a lot from it and always use it.
I find most recipes produce something far too sweet and once you get an understanding of POD and PAC you can develop mixtures that suit your own taste.

I've developed the sheet further:

• all ingredients are selectable through drop downs
• mixture total weight may be customised easily
• warning if not enough eggs
• automatic prediction of serving temp PAC
• calculation of sugar %
• calculation of costs - work in progress

It's available here 

My nice new printer

It's an Epson ET-2550 which prints, scans, copies and makes tea.
These things use bottles of ink rather than cartridges, are supposed to save 70% of running costs and can print up to 4,000 pages in black and 6,500 pages in colour which apparently saves me thinking about ink for two years. So it was a bit of a surprise to read

Ink life

For best results, use up ink within 6 months of removing the seal from an ink bottle

in the ET-2550 User's Guide (CPD-42914R1), however, this is from "Epson America, Inc." and the manual (NPD5248=00 EN) that comes with this one doesn't say that so maybe we have better ink.

Anyway, you transfer the inks from the bottles into the tanks on the printer and, as you remove the seals, lickle drops of ink stick to your fingers.

Delicate folk might like to try pliers or wear gloves.

After that, you switch on, press some buttons and wait while the system primes itself. In the meantime, you can install the software, there's a cd in the box but I used the weblink. It all went well until it tried to update the firmware. You turn the printer off which takes a while then turn it back on. The software couldn't find the printer so I pressed the OK button, tried again and it worked.

Test print was fine so I ran the head alignment check, although this was not mentioned, and it needed a bit of adjustment; the nozzle check for clogged nozzles was perfect.

Scanning A4 goes as follows:

Printing an A4 photo' on glossy paper with maximum quality took about six minutes. First go with no colour correction was a bit drab, second attempt used the PhotoEnhance/ Landscape option and was very good given that this is not a photo' printer and only has CMBBk inks. Paper was Fujifilm Multijet that I've had for several years.

Original

Scan of the print

Hmm, that's a bit blue, I suppose that I need to calibrate it.

First go with a Passport

black and white points set

better but still not green enough

Cleaning windows - logs

Generally you can delete them after a successful hardware or software installation but they are littered all over the place. Puran Utilities is good for finding lots of them but it doesn't find these in C:\Windows\inf.

Here we're going to look at these on three notebooks all running windows 7 Home Premium.
This is a screenshot from Red.

Blue shows the last two files at 14,158,258 & 952,217  which is nuts as there's nothing much on it. What is even nutser is that Black only has setupapi.app.log and it's 159 bytes.

There is an interesting article at https://support.microsoft.com/en-ph/help/958909/it-takes-a-long-time-to-log-on-to-a-windows-vista-based-computer-that which states that anything over 5Mb is very large and suggests that the reason is verbose reporting and mainly caused by anti-virus software continually opening and closing the log file.

Well I dunno about that but changing the value of
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\LogLevel

certainly has an effect, to whit:

The verbosity of the log report is set by that registry key, in the old days it was 20000FFFF, the article above suggests using 20. I have no idea how Black ended up with 101 but it works and boots in 45s so it's staying as it is.

Blue now boots in 2¼  minutes rather than 15 or so and is usable again. Same spec as Black, a pretty basic AMD C-60, 1000 MHz, 4Gb RAM.

Red's much the same as before, it's an old i7 but still pretty quick.

If you're not comfortable with editing the registry then don't; the adventurous might like to rename 

setupapi.app.log & setupapi.dev.log 

to

setupapi.app.logOLD & setupapi.dev.logOLD

reboot and see what happens.

The file size reductions above are after the first reboot, whether they grow remains to be seen.

All machines are using AVG Anti-virus, the free version.
Stop press: changing the Blue verbosity to 101 reduces startup to 2 minutes and the log file is now 10,831

I don't know why setupapi.app.20170521_151423.log and setupapi.dev.20150729_121527.log are in blue. They seem to be snapshots from the past but they're gone and not missed.

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Puran Utilities  - I'm using v 3.0.0.0 from 2013, the latest version may do a bit more. If you install it check the folder for oddities. I've just noticed this massive Temp file

now that's gone too.

Digging a bit deeper, there's a file called AppList which works with Delete History

So that can be edited to add stuff or hide what you never use. Clever or what?

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Happy Cleaning

Cleaning windows - PED and WER

The first bit's about Power Efficiency Diagnostics, Windows Error Reporting is but a click away
Disclaimer

Power Efficiency Diagnostics is a program run by Task Scheduler. It may be useful in helping you set up a laptop but other than that it justs wastes disc space.
In any case you have to check the results yourself, there is no automation.
In any case² you have to know it exists.

Below I cleaned out a million or so .xml files but left the energy-report-latest.xml file after reading dire warnings on the web. I renamed the energy-ntkl.etl then manually started Power Efficiency Diagnostics.

So it still works ok but let's kill it

Do

Start Menu - Programs - Accessories - System Tools

and run

Task Scheduler

Find \Microsoft\Windows\Power Efficiency Diagnostics

Right click and choose Disable

Now you can clean out the detritus in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Power Efficiency Diagnostics

Windows Error Reporting is something to do with sending crash logs to you-know-who after programs have failed.

Go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER and see something like this

Open those folders delete all the files, then use Task Scheduler to disable the program

Tada........

Disclaimation - It works for me on Windows 7, better make sure you know how to do a Windows Restore first.
Be sure to read the next instalment

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Dehydrating fruit - part 6 - using a tray liner

A glut of tomatoes in the Southern Annex

2018 and a very hot summer has produced an enormous crop which is too much to eat  fresh so I decided to dry some.
Preparation was wash, slice about ¹/₂" (12.7 mm) thick, remove the hard cores.
Various sources on the www recommend using a tray liner to avoid dripping onto the tray below and sticking.
The options:

• Excalibur sheets at £7 a pop
• 9 Chuzy Chef sheets for £10.99 + 4.49 p&p
• 5 NUTRIDRY mesh sheets for £16.95 + 3.95 p&p
• Plastic Canvas from the local craft shop £3 each, probably not food safe
• Teflon baking sheet from the cupboard £0.

So the last one won and you can see the result in the graph below.

The absence of airflow on the lower surface reduced the rate of drying dramatically so out it came and that tray went on to more or less catch up with the others.
In the final analysis, sticking wasn't a problem and the tomatoes came off easily.

The dehydrator ran overnight on cheap juice so they were moon dried - a world first. Some were drier than others so they all went into a sealed container overnight to balance out the moisture then they were wrapped in cling film and frozen in batches.
I tasted one and it was almost a sultana.
Initial weight  3168g.

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Biltong and other stuff

28 day aged topside not posh rump
Sharpen knife.
Cut out any membranes and nasties
Slice ³/₈" thick
Desicate with salt in layers for an hour then wash off
Into cider vinegar bath for a few minutes
Coat with toasted coriander, white pepper, mustard, allspice

Put the dried meat into a container with lid and shake to remove most of the excess spices

Started at 967g, ended at 394, cost £8.00 ≡ £19.6/kg biltong. Shop bought is currently £33-45/kg

Grapefruit and orange, sliced and segmented

Err, the very thin orange slices were like orange crisps and very good. The segments didn't dry homogeneously and the middle was still moist whilst the edges were crisp; likewise the thicker grapefruit slices. Not one to repeat.

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Depith the peel, slice into ¹/₄" thick strips, chop into ¹/₂" lengths

Into saucepan and cover with cold water
Bring to boil and simmer for 5 minutes
Drain and repeat
Drain
Add enough water to pan to cover peel and remove peel
Add equal weight of sugar and bring to boil stirring continually
Add peel and strong simmer for 1 hour
Allow to cool
Remove peel onto a drying tray with very small holes

otherwise use a Teflon™ sheet
It made 108g which would cost a quid in the shops so the the saving isn't much but it's preservative free and tastes great.

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Dehydrating food - part 5

This time it's turkey with a couple of bananas
Slice the turkey into, err, slices about ³/₈" thick
Cover with salt and leave for an hourish

Wash off and put the turkey into a pan with vinegar/ lemon juice for a couple of minutes

Grind the coriander seeds, add nutmeg, allspice or similar. You can toast the coriander if you wish but it doesn't make much difference to the flavour so it's not worth the trouble

Coat the turkey

and load up the dryer trays

A few hours later and it'll look like this

1kg turkey currently costs £8.65 and this shrunk to 375g ≡ £23.07/kg biltong which compares rather nicely with a shop price of £50+ even ignoring the few coppers for the spices and electricity