22 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Plastic Beer

This evening I picked up an “XXL” pack of Perlenbacher Gold beer from Lidl. It was only on getting it home and deciding to try one that I realised the bottles were plastic rather than glass. I would imagine that is quite a weight saving, leading to a shipping cost saving and thence contributing to low cost. I paid £9.99 for 9 bottles, so not much over a quid for 500ml of beer.

It must be one of the cheapest beers on the UK market but what is it like? Although it claims to have been brewed according to German beer purity laws, I did find it had a bit of artificial taste. It reminded me of cheap canned lager, so I don’t think it is the result of the plastic bottle but just mass produced beer produced to hit a low cost point. It isn’t quite down to the level of beer that I’ve bought in the past specifically to make slug traps but it would do best served cold on a hot day and I think I prefer their (even cheaper) Perlenbacher Zero (6 x 330ml cans for £2.99).

I’ll have to try both side by side but not this evening.

21 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Two Toads in Two Holes?

This evening, I decided to try toad in the hole (sausages cooked in batter) in the air fryer. In theory, I could have cooked it directly in the basket but it would potentially be hard to lift out and clean up without scratching the surface and the hot air would only be coming from on top. Instead, I decided to use a couple of oval ceramic dishes although that meant I had to use both drawers.

Overall it was pretty quick and easy – about 7 minutes in total to get the sausages (chopped into sections) browned and then another 12 minutes to cook the batter. The sausages could probably have done with a few minutes on a lower heat to start rendering the fat and then a couple more minutes on a higher setting to finish off. Likewise the batter stage might have benefited from either a lower start or being covered with foil for the first stage. At the end, the top was a bit overdone while lower down was cooked but the sausages looked a bit anaemic in parts. However, the speed was good, it was quicker than using an oven and the results were amply tasty.

The other challenge was that our trays, which allow air to circulate all round the cooking food, have raised bits in the middle. That makes them easier to lift out but is a pain to balance hard bottomed cooking vessels on. I wonder if I ought to try and find something like some silicone disks to act as non-slip feet and raise them up the small distance needed? Unfortunately that isn’t a job for my 3D printer as I can’t work with materials that have enough heat resistance for the inside of an air fryer but it does look like there are some options available to purchase. I’ll keep my eyes open for a few days first though in case I’ve got anything already in my possession which might do the job.

20 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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That Sucks?

A little while ago, I purchased a handheld airblower. It is the kind of thing often used for dusting electronics and I preferred the idea of a rechargeable one as opposed to the aerosol type. I think it will be more sustainable and the aerosol models can sometimes spit condensed liquid onto your devices!

It has been great but then I recently discovered another use for it. It blows air out of the nozzle at the front but that means it sucks air in from the inlet at the back. There is a model on Printables that creates an additional nozzle so you can get a reasonable vacuum seal on things like filament storage bags. It won’t be as good as a dedicated vacuum pump but it works pretty well.

I also want to use it in the kitchen so I’ve designed and printed my own extension piece. This makes the nozzle about twice as long and also adds a mesh at the end. That allows it to be poked into bags more easily and gives some protection against sucking up unwanted contaminants into the blower. I haven’t decided whether to publish my design yet in case it does cause problems but I’ll consider it after more testing.

The new design trick for me was using a part set to have no top or bottom surfaces, which I added in the slicer rather than in building the base model. That means I didn’t have to design a fine mesh and hope it printed okay but, instead, I’m simply exposing the infill (for which I selected a simple grid).

19 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Feeling the Heat

We like to keep a few sweets in the car for long journeys – normally fruit pastilles but occasionally we’ll have something like jelly babies in our second (long-reused) boiled sweets tin. That was okay for our trip to Keswick but I think the extreme temperatures at the end of last week were too much and several of them had melted together when I checked the tin over the weekend.

I don’t know how hot it got in the glove compartment last Thursday and Friday but I’ll have to remember to go back to less melty sweets, like mint imperials, next time we get a burst of heat.

18 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Pictures First

My general web design methodology has been to develop my ideas with a bit of scribbling on paper, then to build a functional (but probably fairly ugly version) with clean HTML and then to add the styling later to make it pretty as well. I’ve been reconsidering that recently for some of the work projects I’ve been doing. There are several large sites, each with a strong visual identity and I’m working remotely from my colleagues rather than having them in the same building.

The solution I’ve been trying is what I’ve been calling wire-framing although what I’m building is more like facades or “studio flats”. With web developer tools I can manipulate a loaded web page, replacing whole blocks at a time. If I work out the area I need to change, I can pull copies of that code into one or more text files and copy and paste it back in to create the illusion of what I’m after. It helps me develop the ideas within the existing design concept of the site and I can then produce a series of screenshots to share with colleagues.

In turn, that becomes material for further discussions. My colleagues can see what I have in mind and might suggest changes. Sometimes I even find things myself (“aha! I need a button to add a new entry to that table”). Those changes can be quickly implemented to produce another set of mock-ups but, at no point, is there any risk of me breaking the actual website.

I’ve got a couple of such projects that are now almost ready to turn into actual code. It’s possible I might be able to feed the images directly to Cursor, the AI assistant I am using. Even if it can’t grok those, I’ll certainly have a head start on writing detailed and clear prompts so that the system can suggest the necessary updates and, after review, be set to implement them.

So, for some cases, pictures first or perhaps even “fake it until you make it”!

17 August 2026
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A Few Drops

I was quite excited earlier when a few heavy drops of water (what we were once familiar with as “rain”) started to fall from the sky. It was enough to have me rushing out to grab in the washing, which was bone-dry after a few hours on the line.

Sadly, the precipitation didn’t persist. Hopefully the promise of 90% chance of decently heavy overnight rain will prove good and then tomorrow morning’s allotment trip can be focused on harvesting (raspberries, blackberries, french beans and courgettes all ready) rather than watering.

16 August 2026
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Size Limits

There are definitely limits to what can be cooked in an air fryer drawer. One consequence of getting near the limit is that cooking seems to go slower. Today I tried another Jamie Oliver recipe, for stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in puff pastry. The result was delicious but I needed to give them another five minutes (+25%) on the time as well as turning them. Together they pretty much filled the space across the bottom of the drawer and I think that probably increased the cooking time. With the extra time, my temperature probe showed that they were done and so I could move onto dishing up, along with the roast carrots from the other drawer (delicious, no problems and vaguely adapted from an accompaniment to another dish in the same book).

Perhaps I should have weighed them to see how they compared to the specified size. Once solution would have been to trim them down to make smaller but more even parcels. I could easily have used the trimmings elsewhere and that would also have produced a neater pair of packages for the plates. They still tasted good though and, perhaps benefiting from their pastry wrapping and the filling, were wonderfully succulent. That’s a few more points in favour of the easy air fryer book even if the cooking always involves a fair degree of judgement.

15 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Hard Labour

Last week got pretty hot with furnace like temperatures outside on Thursday and Friday. Today was cooler, so I spent a fair while working at the allotment and then in the back garden.

At the allotment, I’ve broken down another 1.5 sides of the old shed, including creating a splash guard for the back of the new shed from some of the material. I think watering plants close to the old shed was one of the key things that contributed to some of the wood becoming very decayed.

At home, I’ve stripped out all the nails I could from the wood I bought back and tested my idea of running the unusable bits (without nails) through my shredder to create chippings to use on paths. I’ve processed both some of the old shed and some of the bits of garden fence that I originally intended to use for shed repair and most of those will get taken back to the allotment where the wood chippings I put on 2-3 years ago are starting to wear thin in some places.

There’s more to be done but that was enough for one day and I think I’ll be sleeping well tonight, not just because it is pleasantly cooler.

14 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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They couldn’t even be bothered to use the bin…

Election results are always worth looking at carefully. The Clacton by-election ones are in and, based on Parliamentary figures, Nigel Farage got 22,239 votes. That is a substantial majority and more votes than he got in 2024 so I suppose we should say “well done Nigel” and “the people of Clacton have entirely vindicated all your choices”.

Not so fast though. It was a very skewed election because none of the main parties stood (unless you count Reform as part of the political establishment). In the end there were a lot of independents and representatives of small parties with no Westminster representation, including three from the Monster Raving Loonies. Potentially that diluted the absurdist vote but not enough to swing it to a Binface victory. Despite the constituency having grown by about 1,500 people, overall turnout was down by about 15%. Fewer than half the people in the area bothered to vote at all: they threw their right to vote in the bin rather than putting it towards Binface or elsewhere. Meanwhile, Binface went from being one of the candidates who regularly looses their deposit to getting the kind of share that could potentially win a more evenly contested election.

I would love to have seen Binface put to the test of actually winning and wish more people had bothered to get out and vote. I am strongly in favour of the idea that voting should be mandatory for everyone with the franchise, at least if there is always a “none of the above” option. In this case, that might have claimed the day, if the non-voters really couldn’t bring themselves to put a tick in the box of either of the main candidates or any of the 31 who stood very little chance of being first past the post. Meanwhile, Farage has won pyrrhic victory, with the investigation into his finances already restarted (not something a by election has any scope to test) and, in my eyes, his reputation is further sullied by his failure to show his face in Clacton despite the “police security advice” excuse having being refuted by Essex Police.

I also notice that the constituency was only given its present boundaries in 2023. I wonder how that might have skewed things although it was always either Conservative or UKIP since the previous change in 2010.

13 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Stuffed Mushrooms

Yesterday afternoon I got down to the library and picked up Jamie Oliver’s Easy Air Fryer book. Oliver has come in for a lot of criticism over the years but he is on good form here. So far I’ve tried two recipes and both have hit the “big, bold and delicious” tagline.

Above is the one I had for lunch, a pair of stuffed mushrooms. The stuffing is cheese and mashed potato with a bit of rosemary, lemon zest and the mushroom stems but the key part of the result was the mix of breadcrumbs, oil and the rest of the rosemary that tops them. 15 minutes at 180°C (conveniently the time and temperature defaults on my machine), leaving plenty of time to assemble and dress the salad. Bish, bash, bosh, job done (as Oliver might say if he is still playing the Essex lad game).

I particularly lie the way the recipes indicate both how long they take to cook and how much hands on time is needed as part of that. They are also robust enough to produce good results without being followed perfectly. I had the wrong cheese, fresh rather than tinned potatoes and one or two other alternatives but I still got a tasty lunch with minimum fuss. If I try a few more recipes and they work out as well, this one is probably going on my Christmas list.

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