Archive for December 15th, 2005
The “Your Sinclair” Rock n Roll Years 1985 now available
Posted on December 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal.
Unless the name Matthew Smith means something to you and you get a wee tingle when the words “Manic Miner” are uttered, then you are probably not interested in the rest of this post.
But, YSNRY 1985 is finally with us just in time for christmas. This is the latest in a very very special (to Speccy fanatics like myself) series of animated “movies” about the hey-day years of ‘Your Sinclair/Your Spectrum’ magazine, an esteemed journal which published two games by yours truly back in 1985/1986!
It really is worth checking out all of the episodes if you ever had a Speccy or even a (spit) Commodore 64, Vic-20, Jupiter Ace, Oric-1, BBC Micro, Electron, ZX81, ZX80 or Enterprise/Elan/Flan. Do the author a favour tho and use bittorrent to download.
Some kind soul with an enormous amount of spare time has scanned in all the issues of Your Sinclair and Your Spectrum. Conor’s works of genius (being “The Grid” and “The Cherry Run”) in pure Z80 assembler can be viewed in all their JPEG glory below.
The Grid: Your Spectrum, Final Issue, December 1985
The Cherry Run: Your Sinclair, Issue 4, April 1986
If you are nostalgic for games that had graphics designed by a blind person, then you can actually play these games on your PC. Grab either ZXSpin or EmuZWin. Then download one of The Grid, Cent The Pete or Cherry Run and check out what a sad puberty I really had.
[tags] ZX, ZX Spectrum, ysrnry, Your Sinclair, Your Spectrum, ZXSpin, EmuZWin, emulation, 8-bit, nostalgia[/tags]
4 Comments
Boom Bang a Bang Banger
Posted on December 15, 2005, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Family, Food.
Sadly, attempt #2 at sausage making was not a big success. Not quite Null Points but definitely at the Norwegian end of the Eurovision chipolta contest.
I actually did it a few weeks ago for the parents coming over for brunch but I’m only getting around to blogging it now.
I defrosted the meat that I had not used the last time and spent a hell of a long time on preparation. In anticipation of the Kenwood making me cry like a small girl, I diced up all the meat ultra fine (along with the top of my thumb).
Pretty much the same mix as the last time with more pepper and more herbs. This time I decided to go for the smaller chipolata-style sheep casing. I ran the mix through the Kenwood mincer attachment twice on the roughest setting but the bastarding thing still jammed once. I am nearly ready to bin that P.O.S. It also didn’t fill the casing as well as the last time either.
To just make it perfect, I could not find my nice cotton string and ended up unravelling a piece of orange washing line and using that to string them up. I’m sure all the best deli’s will be switching over to day-glo polypropylene as soon as they read this.
As my lovely wife and kids were in the house, the shower was out of the question as a curing area. So I hung them in the shed, in the full expectation that some rat would run off with them during the night.
Luckily they were unmolested the following morning and I set them over a very gentle heat to cook up for a late brunch. Several of them burst but I wasn’t that bothered as I find that most of Martin Carey’s competition winning sossies do the same.
And they were fine but nothing to write a blog about 
I thought they were too dry, which my Da agreed with. I think I need to crank up the fat content in a big way and get proper pork shoulder instead of generic diced pork to go with the pork belly. Maybe less breadcrumbs too. But the spicing was better than the last time and I liked the white pepper kick off them.
I’m not giving up yet but I really need advice on what the problem with the Kenwood mincer attachment is. Do I have a bad un or am I missing something obvious.
I just received a fabulous book called “Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing“. If you have any interest in sausages, smoked foods, salamis, dried ham or any preserved meats, buy this book. It is a masterpiece. Hell, even if you never intend trying to make anything, it is just a great read. I’ll do a full review soon but what kills me about the book is that they made 90% of the things in it using a standard mincer attachment on a KitchenAid. Are they really that much better than a Kenwood?
I’ve just been checking the flickr pictures and it looks like I took none of the completed sausages. Grrrr.
[tags]sausages, charcuterie, kenwood, kitchenaid, eurovision, lulu[/tags]
4 Comments
