Chocolate ice cream with orange

I realize that I'm doing a lot more ice cream than cookies at the moment, but it is the season, and besides, I want to get some use out of the new ice cream machine.

This one is a chocolate ice cream, flavored with orange. It's never really been a favorite of mine, I made this by request from a friend at work, but I have to say, it does taste REALLY nice.

As you can see from previous posts, I've mostly made berry or fruit flavored ice cream until now. This is completely different, the texture is so much smoother and the taste so much richer.

Chocolate ice cream, flavored with orange

Ingredients
3 dl milk
2 dl whipping cream
1 dl sugar
5 egg yolks
130g dark chocolate
1/2 a vanilla pod
2 tbsp honey
1 orange
 

Ingredients

Sugar free Raspberry and blueberry ice cream

Since my grandmother is diabetic, I thought I would make some ice cream for her (apparently the ones in the shop are a little boring).

I use a fairly standard ice cream recipe, just replacing the sugar with artificial sweetener. I have to say, the results aren't bad. Artificial sweetener (at least the one I used, which is aspartame) don't really match proper sugar in terms of flavor, but that said, it isn't too far off when used for something like this.

The reason it turned out to be raspberry and blueberry flavored is simply that I had about half as much of each as I would have needed to make either raspberry or blueberry ice cream. Also, it is a very good combination.

Sugar free raspberry and blueberry ice cream

Ingredients
125g raspberries
125g blueberries
2 tsp lemon juice
4 egg yolks
200 ml milk
100 ml + 100 ml whipping cream
1/2 a vanilla pod
90 ml + 75 ml artificial sweetener (in a concentration that matches sugar by volume)

Ingredients

Games emulator on xbmc

During my vacation, which is rapidly approaching its end, I have been meaning to get a games emulator installed onto my HTPC. Mostly I wanted it for nostalgic reasons, I have fond memories from playing Nintendo as a boy. Now, finally, I have stopped procrastinating, and have done it.

I'm running Arch Linux with XBMC (Frodo), and I bought an XBOX 360 USB controller for this purpose. I was a little concerned if it would work or not, since I don't have any window manager installed, bit it seems that X is running with just XBMC, and that is enough.

I decided to start with the SNES emulator zsnes, since it's been around a while and seems to be at least somewhat stable. After I got it working I noticed two things. Number 1, I had forgotten how bad 8-bit graphics were. And number 2, I really suck at Super Mario Bros games.

Anyway, here is how I did it.

• Make sure that you are using a skin that supports the "Program" menu item
• Start by installing zsnes
• pacman -Su zsnes
• Then install Advanced Launcher
• I did it by installing the Angelscry's Repository from zip-file, then from there the program addon
• Restart the HTPC, WITH THE CONTROLLER CONNECTED
• I wasn't able to get the controller to be recognized until I did this.
• Now it's time to start the zsnes configuration tool
• If you have a GUI (other than XBMC) installed, use that to execute /usr/bin/zsnes, otherwise you will need to use the Advance Launcher for this as well
• Go to the Programs menu, Advanced Launcher, and click Default, then add a standalone type launcher for /usr/bin/zsnes. For the choices that follow, make sure to remove the default arguments, the others don't really matter
• Open the context menu for the new item and select Edit Launcher -> Advanced Modifications -> Toggle XBMC into Windowed Mode and set it to "On"
• Open zsnes (whichever method you use)
• Under Config -> Video, you can set the resolution
• I wasn't able to get 1080p working so I had to settle for 720p
• There are also a lot of teaks that you can do to the video settings, but I haven't touched them so far
• Under Config -> Input you can setup your controller. As long as it has been detected, once you clock "Set Keys" you just press whatever key it asks you to and it works
• We need some games to play as well of course.
• How you get them is none of my business, but once you do, place them in a folder somewhere on you drive
• Copy you game ROMs to the folder you created
• Create a sub-folder names "Images" or "Art", or really anything you like. This is where the thumbnails and fanart will be placed
• At this point you might want to make some configurations for Advanced Launcher, under Settings -> Addons, such as what scraper to use and so forth, since they are not enabled by default and changing them seems to remove the launcher for the games that we are about to add
• Create a new launcher in Advanced Launcher, this time a "File Launcher" type
• Name it whatever you want, in my case "SNES" (not much imagination, I know)
• Select the executable as /usr/bin/zsnes
• Set the path to the ROMs to wherever you placed them
• The file types are zip|smc|sfc, this was the default value for me
• The arguments should be -m -s -v 22 %rom%, again this was default for me
• Select the "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" as the type
• Select the "Images" folder (or whatever you chose to call it) for thumbnails and fanart
• For this launcher also, go to the context menu for the new item and select Edit Launcher -> Advanced Modifications -> Toggle XBMC into Windowed Mode and set it to "On"
• Now go to the context menu again, select Add Items -> Scan For New Items and it should find you games (do this again when you add new games)
• You may have some problems getting the audio to work (I did)
• Give the command aplay -l, and remember the card and device that you want to use.
• Check the home directory for whatever user runs XBMC (in my case the default xbmc user, which has home directory /var/lib/xbmc) for the file .asoundrc. If it exists, make a backup first. Them create/edit it to read (with the numbers on the line pcm "hw:0,3" being the card and device number from above):

pcm.dmixer {
   type dmix
   ipc_key 1024
   ipc_key_add_uid false
   ipc_perm 0660
   slave {
      pcm "hw:0,3"
      rate 48000
      channels 2
      format S32_LE
      period_time 0
      period_size 1024
      buffer_time 0
      buffer_size 4096
   }
}

pcm.!default {
   type plug
   slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

• Reboot the HTPC
• Start zsnes with the correct audio settings
• zsnes -ad sdl
• If you system is like mine, you will need to reboot again at this point, since the screen will go black.
• Now try playing a game, here's hoping it works. 

The whole "Toggle XBMC into Windowed Mode" feature seems to be a little bit buggy. If you start a game and the screen just stays black, try attaching a keyboard and pressing "\", that is the switch between windowed mode and full screen mode. The same advice applies if, after shutting down a game (done with "ESC") you get a non-fullscreen version of XBMC. For me, I made sure that I have both "ESC" and "\" mapped on my remote just in case.

Edit: If you get a black screen after playing for a little while, Follow this guide to fix it.

Raspberry Ice Cream

I had to try out my new ice cream machine, and this is the recipe that I decided to use first.

Unlike the orange ice cream I made the last time, this is not a "simplified" ice cream recipe, but the full-on, proper way of making ice cream. Don't despair though, while it is more complicated that the other one, that doesn't mean that it's difficult. Basically, the way this ice cream is made, is to make a custard, which you then flavour and freeze.

Anyway, I love raspberries, and this ice cream tastes of them, a lot. It isn't a very sweet ice cream, so it's a little more of an adult flavour. Don't get me wrong, it isn't sour, it just isn't overly sweet, which I think helps to showcase the flavour of the raspberries.

Raspberry ice cream

Ingredients
200 ml milk
200 ml whipping cream (100 + 100 ml)
4 egg yolks
75g + 5 tbsp sugar
250g raspberries
juice of 1/3 of an orange

Ingredients (minus the orange, sorry, I forgot)

Wilfa ICM-C15 Review

I just got a new ice cream machine! You can get it here.

To try it out, I made a raspberry ice cream, recipe is coming soon.

The old one was of the kind where you put a part of it into the freezer for at least 24 hours before using  it, which was a little annoying, since you needed to plan ahead and you couldn't make more than one batch per day. This one on the other hand, has a built in compressor that freezes the ice cream, so no need to pre-freeze anything and you can make as many batches as you want in a row.

It looks rather nice, with it's aluminium shell, and it feels like it is of good quality.

Wilfa ICM-C15

Included in the box is the machine itself, an instruction manual, a measuring cup, and a spatchula-like thing.

Disassembled

It has some pretty smart features. The container for the ice cream is fitted with a handle, to make it easy to remove, and the spatchula-like thing is just the right size for getting the ice cream out of the bowl. Once started, it has a timer, so it will stop automatically when it runs out, but it will continue to keep the ice cream frozen for 1 hour after that. That means that if you forget to check it, it won't melt immediately. The default timer setting is 1 hour, but when I tried it it only took about half of that.

While the machine is running, the display shows remaining time and the current temperature (of the machine, not the ice cream).

There are a few downsides to this device. The aluminium surface collect fingerprints really easily, the machine is big and heavy, and it's quite noisy.

The size is 402 × 335 × 281 mm, so it takes up a significant amount of space, and you probably won't want to move it every time you want to use it, since it's pretty heavy. It's "feet" seem to be designed to make it easy to slide on a surface though, which is quite nice.

The noise-level is significant, but not unbearable. I'm including a video of it working, so you can get some idea.

All in all, I have to say that I would recommend the Wilfa ICM-C15. It works as advertised, has some nice features, and the result is delicious.

Machine in action

Done

The spatchula is helpful

Installing a new HDD on Arch Linux

I decided to add some more storage to my HTPC, so I got a 2TB WD Green HDD, and this is what I did to install and configure it.

The hardware installation is the same as any hard drive, just mount it and add cables for power and SATA. In my case it's a little bit tight, I'd like to change out the power supply for a modular one, but I haven't been able to find one that is short enough to fit in the case yet.

Before

After

Anyway, now that the HDd is in place, it's time to set it up so that it is usable.

• First find the device name of the new HDD
• ls /dev
• In my case it is "sdb"
• Now the disk needs to be partitioned, I just need the one partition for the whole disk
• fdisk sdb
• o (creates a new, empty partition table)
• n (create a new partition, in my case the default options are fine so I just hit enter for all of them)
• p (shows the partition that has been created, just to make sure it looks ok)
• w (write the partition table to disk and exit)
• If we again check the devices with "ls /dev" we see that there is now a new device called sdb1, this is the new partition
• Now that the partition exists, we can format it, I'll use the ext4 filesystem
• mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1
• I also prefer to give it a name, in this case "storage"
• e2label /dev/sdb1 storage
• Next I want to add the new partition to fstab, so that it is automounted in future
• Create a directory to mount it to
• mkdir /media/storage
• Find the UUID of the partition
• blkid (Response as below)
• /dev/sda3: LABEL="home" UUID="d0e114fa-b428-4605-851d-504c86c0e7ac" TYPE="ext4"
  /dev/sda5: UUID="21ecefbb-1c9d-48fa-a5f3-c9ba9a09b547" TYPE="swap"
  /dev/sda6: LABEL="root" UUID="fb22b964-b38f-42df-bded-d9ac6df54ec5" TYPE="ext4"
  /dev/sdb1: LABEL="storage" UUID="5d003827-efca-4dfe-955d-bbec787a454a" TYPE="ext4"
• Now we just need to add it to fstab, so open /etc/fstab and add the line
• UUID=5d003827-efca-4dfe-955d-bbec787a454a       /media/storage    ext4            defaults        0 2

Now, unfortunately I didn't really set up the system for additional HDD's from the start. The partition of the 1st HDD that is used for storage is mounted as /home, which works quite well, but I can't mount additional ones in the same spot now can I.

Originally, I planned to solve this by mounting it in /media/storage, and then create a symlink to that from my home folder. This led to me finding out about a bug/feature of samba, which is how I usually access the media from my "normal" computer. Samba always reports the remaining space of the root drive so even though it is a separate drive, the file browser thinks of it as only one, and with the remaining space of the first one. So it seems that Samba does not agree with more than one partition on the same share. The only way around it, that I could find, was simply to create a second share.

Since I'm the only user, I set up samba in such a way as to get full permission, for all users, for the files. This is my share configuration in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[XBMC2]
    comment = XBMC media 2
    path = /media/storage
    public = yes
    browseable = yes
    force user = <username>
    force group = <groupname>
    force create mode = 777
    force directory mode = 777
    available = yes
    writable = yes

And that's it, the new HDD is up and running.