chadsayshello.com | chad durham 's blog about design, web, london and stuff

Plot Watch #10 Apples

chad — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:01:34 +0000

Our three cooking Apple trees are heavily laden in fruit, so what better to do over an August bank holiday than pick apples and make delicious recipes. Mrs D picked some blackberries from the front garden and together with the apples baked a wonderful crumble, as well as stewing the rest for the freezer.

Plot Watch #9 Tomato overload

chad — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:27:55 +0000

It’s tomato fortnight, they have all turned red and we have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. Time to take a Hugh F-W idea and bake them down to a rich tomato base for the freezer ready for any future bolognese or chilli dishes. On that note, the chills are also following the tomatoes lead and also ripping in colour whilst on the plant.

Quidco makes your money work harder for you!

chad — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:04:54 +0000

I’m a great advocate of this little site Quidco. Simply search for your shop on Quidco, click through to the shop using their link and make the purchase as normal. Within hours your transaction is tracked and a few weeks later it’s paid directly into your bank account. There are some great deals on there – I’ve recently cashed in on £70 when I signed up to O2 broadband for a year and £15 for LOVEFilm to send Free DVDs to me for a month.

In two years of online shopping we’re approaching £1000 cashback. Not bad for clicking a few links!

Plot Watch #8 Carrots

chad — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:34:48 +0000

The first Carrot has been pulled and it’s not much of a feast yet.
I’ll give it a couple more weeks – watch this space!

Adobe CS4 and it’s annoying trackpad Photoshop compass thing :: UPDATED

chad — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:05:42 +0000

I’ve recently upgraded my Macs to Adobe Creative Suite 4. It’s a great update to the workhorse package. (Apart from a troublesome upgrade where my serial number was invalid, then valid, then invalid again which left me reinstalling CS3 then CS4 three times!)

One thing that was annoying me in Photoshop CS4 is the compass that appears when using a MacBook trackpad. It’s actually a “Canvas Rotation Tool”.

Thankfully Adobe had created a Photoshop Plug-In to disable this. Go here to download and simply drag into the Photoshop Plug-Ins folder.

UPDATE :::::::

Disable Canvas Rotation in Adobe CS5 too with it’s annoying trackpad Photoshop compass thing

In Photoshop CS5, deselect the Enable Gestures preference.

1. Choose Photoshop > Preferences > Interface.

2. Deselect Enable Gestures.

Plot Watch #7 Potatoes

chad — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:41:07 +0000

The first flowers have dropped from the potato plants so we decided to dig up two of our twelve plants. I liken the feeling to winning at a summer raffle! In the fork goes and up comes half a dozen spuds.

I planted twelve Estima tubers in late May so they’ve had just over two months growing time. I picked a few courgettes and a few handfuls of french beans too – both of which were grilled on the BBQ later in the day.

Plot Watch #6 Tomatoes

chad — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:10:36 +0000

I have picked our first red tomato – great! It’s been a steep learning curve on my first year as they have required a lot of attention, here are the things I’ve picked up.

The tomato seeds took the longest to propagate from all my seeds – about 1 month, I then transferred them to a 3″ pots to gather strength and after another 3 weeks I moved them to their final home in three grow bags. It was required to loosely tie them to the canes at several points up the main stem to keep the plant straight. The fruits are now ready to pick 3 months on.

The primary maintenance job is is pick off sideshoots as you see them – the sideshoots appear between the main stem and the main leaf. I missed a couple of sideshoots and now two of my nine plants have double main stems and consequently are not producing as plentiful fruit as the other plants.

The last job is to remove the main stem head once you have four trusses off your stem (a truss is a branch with buds/flowers – these will be your tomatoes). This encourages the plant to stop growing skyward and put it’s energy to ripen it’s fruit. Water with a liquid fertiliser at least once a week, and consistently during the week while being careful not to over water.

Plot Watch #5 Early courgettes

chad — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:54:00 +0000

The benefit of picking the courgettes early is you’re still able to have the flowers attached, which in turn allows them to be stuffed full and made into a rather tasty meal.

Pick the baby courgettes at 2 – 3 inchs with flowers attached.

This is a Jamie Oliver filling we picked up a while back. Stuff the flowers with a crumbly Ricotta cheese, lemon zest, mint and red chilli filling.

Batter in a flour and wine mix, and deep-fry gently for 2 minutes, once they’re turning golden, remove and drain on kitchen paper.

Serve with a squeeze of lemon. Delicious.

iPhone going slow since iOS4? Downgrade to iOS3.1.3 and take your iPhone back

chad — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:24:00 +0000

So – you’ve downloaded the latest iOS for your iPhone and noticed that it’s almost impossible to do anything as it’s so slow – then you need to restore to a previous system Apple OS. It takes 20 clicks and worked perfectly for me.

Step 1: Download iPhone OS 3.1.3 - choose which model you have.

iPhone 2G - iPhone 3G - iPhone 3GS

Step 2: Once you’ve downloaded one of the above, place OS 3.1.3 on your desktop, now put your iPhone in DFU mode with following instructions.

• Connect your iPhone to your computer.

• Turn iPhone off.

• Hold power and home together for 10 seconds (exactly).

• Release power but keep holding home until the computers beeps (observed on a PC) as a USB device is recognized.

• A few seconds later iTunes should detect your iPhone.

• If the Restore Logo is present on the screen, you are in Recovery Mode, not DFU.

Step 3: Once your iPhone is in DFU mode following message will be appeared in iTunes.

Click on “OK” , Now hold Option key (Mac) and Shift Key (Windows) while clicking Restore in iTunes and browse the OS 3..1.3 / 3/.1.2 firmware for your iPhone 3G or 3GS. Now the restore process will take 10 –5 minutes.

Step 4: After restore process if you encountered an error message like 1011, 1013, 1015, just ignore them(Actually the firmware is already successfully installed). To exit recovery mode download Recboot, once you finishes your download launch Recboot app and hit the “exit recovery mode” button.

Download Recboot for Mac : http://bit.ly/bBelW2

Plot Watch #4 Pumpkins

chad — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:00:26 +0000

I grew 9 of these from seed and tossed 8 aside in favour for keeping the strongest. The plant kept was given 1 metre square of veg plot but ever since I planted it outside he’s stopped growing, been eaten alive and is now quite tatty. I almost gave up on him living but it looks like the pumpkin fighting back is going to try producing some fruit. Take all your time little plant – you’ve got until the end of October!