Skittles Vodka

Cross-posted with I’m glad it burnt

As a poor student, I’m always on the lookout for ways of making cheap alcohol more appealing to the palate. With a house party approaching, and wallets thin as usual, my housemates and myself decided to experiment with Tesco Value Vodka and Skittles. The recipe (as one would imagine) is ridiculously simple – you stick a load of Skittles into the vodka, let them dissolve, and then drink it.

To get the best flavour, we found that there were enough of each colour Skittles in 5 large bags. To begin with, simply separate the Skittles into the different colours (trying not to eat too many!), and drop them into a bottle of vodka (we used the 90cl Tesco Value). Shake vigorously, and then leave overnight to dissolve – the result should look something like this:

Filtering the sediment from the bottom of the bottle is a rather tedious process – made much easier if you have spare bottles and funnels lying around the house. I have it on good authority that a folded piece of kitchen paper makes a good filter, however we splashed out and a used a mixture of coffee filters, and proper chemical filters ‘acquired’ from the university chemistry labs.

The filtering process took us several hours, since each funnel would only hold a small amount of the mixture at a time. It’s important not to rush this stage, as getting sediment into the final drink does not look particularly attractive! That said – the end product will never be completely clear, however it is worth filtering 2 or 3 times until the worst has been removed.

Your Skittles vodka is ready to consume! Be warned – it is very easy to drink this stuff neat without tasting the vodka. Enjoy at your own peril, or mix with lemonade to save on the hangover.

Windmills

As part of my Software Applications module this year, I have a sub-module called Digital Imaging. Basically, we learned how to use Java3D to model things and then animate them.

The assignment set for this term was to create a wind turbine…

Above is what I created! Obviously you cannot see here, but the blades move round the appropriate axis, and the entire head of the turbine rotates around the Y-axis when you click on the mast. Pretty impressive – huh?! I didn’t think so either! If, for whatever reason, you do think it’s impressive – you may download the .jar file here. It will need Java3D and possibly some other stuff installed to run.

The main thing I learnt doing this was how much of a pain J3D really is – it’s a completely obsolete extension of Java that doesn’t really have much use, apart from for making simple animations such as this one. I can’t think of anyone who would use Java to make a serious 3D game, the processing power just isn’t there to allow decent use of physics, lighting or anything else essential to make an immersive environment. For example, when I was trying to make the turbine cast a shadow on its environment, I found it wasn’t just as simple as allowing the light source to throw a shadow onto the grass object – oh no – I had to calculate the exact shape that the shadow would be, based on the position of the light relative to the turbine, then draw it manually to the floor. As you can imagine, this would be a huge task – and lets not even get started on running this 40+ times a second to get the moving blades, or even considering the opacity of the shadow in different places, or the fact that multiple light sources exist, or that the turbine would shadow itself in parts…

I’ve used programs before (GameMaker stirs a memory?) that will do all that for you in 2 or 3 lines of code, however in J3D I was looking at separate classes, and 2 or 3 times the existing code I had to make the turbine work. No thanks, I’ll just pretend it was a very bright day!

I’m quite glad I’m rid of J3D now – I’ll be even happier when I’m rid of Java completely. I’d be really happy if I never had to see a wind turbine ever again… but they had to go and drop that into our Software Engineering project as well. More to follow on that…

The never ending list

Or more specifically – the never ending list of things to do that seems to dictate my life more than I do.

Over the last 3 months, I’ve watched said list grow and grow as my department shoved more and more assignment deadlines towards me, and watched the things I really want to do get moved gradually towards the bottom. This term has been a rather bumpy ride in terms of deadlines, assignments and exams – and I’m told it’s downhill from here! I’ll write some follow up posts soon showing off what I’ve achieved in creating recently (I’m actually proud of some of it!).

The happiest moment of my life occurred last week, when said list of ‘essentials’ finally reached zero, when the final assignment had been sent to the abyss that is known as ‘DUO’, and the end of term benchtest was over. I’m told that after spending a night out marking this occasion, I was heard celebrating in my room… Which involves me yelling a lot, before your minds jumped elsewhere!

Anyway – I get home, having promised myself a fortnight to enjoy Christmas before getting stuck down to work, and I find myself unable to even get started on that list of ‘want to do’ items. Congratulations to the CompSci department – they’ve killed my work ethic even for things that I enjoy!

Off to Italy…

… back in 3 weeks!

Heading out tomorrow morning (at the airport for 5am :’-[) to fly to Pisa, couple of days getting used to the weather then travelling down the coast to Rome by whatever means possible, hopefully achieving our Explorer Belt!

I’m going to try and keep a diary of what we do each day, then post on here when I get back. However we may end up too lost/drunk/dead to actually bother writing!

Anyway – see you all in 3 weeks!

P.S. Twit2MSN V1.3 now released – should appear in the database some time whilst I’m away!

Twit2MSN Version 1.3a

I’m pleased to announce that work on the next iteration of Twit2MSN is well under way, with a couple of the major issues already addressed, and hopefully all of the high/critical priority issues being sorted for the final version.

For a preview (alpha status), you can download the appropriate files from http://code.google.com/p/twit2msn/source/browse/#svn/branches/1-3 and then compile into a .plsc file as described in the Messenger+ scripting API.

I’m looking for a dedicated bunch of beta testers – drop me a email if you’re interested!

What would Baden-Powell say?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1199191/Beer-cross-dressing-racy-dating-games-Scouts-trip-What-Baden-Powell-say.html

This article, headlining on the Daily Mail tomorrow I believe, has particularly annoyed me this evening.

From my experience, this kind of event happens pretty much every night on university campuses up and down the country without making headline news – just because this happened to be an official gathering of Scout Network members makes it wrong? Everyone at the event had to be over 18, all licensing laws were adhered to, no-one started smashing up a kebab shop afterwards. The only damage caused was a few dead brain cells!

I don’t have a particularly strong view on posting such photos on Facebook – but I presume they were posted with some privacy, which the Daily Mail has now breached by publishing them in a national newspaper. Those people did not ask to have their photo plastered on Facebook, nor was permission sought (a grey area), but using these as published material attributing the source to ‘Facebook’ is very very dodgy practice.

A comment from a parent cited in the article also pissed me off

The father of one of the revellers said: 'It's really let their image down so badly, the fact there's a seedy side to scouting. I can't believe HQ didn't put a stop to this whole sorry mess.'

I think that is put into perspective by one of the comments left on the article

Looks like a great party. I never knew Scouts were so "with it!" Where can I join?

18-25 year olds don’t necessarily want to spend every night “gathering round the campfire and singing Ging Gang Goolie” – Scout Network wouldn’t exist if that’s all we did! That said though – the Mail didn’t notice the photos published on the MAD UK website of people – wait for it – gathering around the campfire and singing Ging Gang Goolie!! Do your research!

The best comment so far sums up my argument completely…

They are young people enjoying themselves. What is wrong with that?

I await a response from Gilwell with bated breath – I hope they don’t cower down under media pressure, and instead defend what Scouting is all about – letting us “take acceptable risks and think for themselves” (Official Scout Association description)

My take on the iPhone 3GS

First of all, this is not a particularly informed review. I do not own one of these devices currently, I’m basing my opinion on third party reviews and Apples’ keynote address on the 3GS.

The one thing that strikes me about this whole launch is the amount of hype Apple are creating about the 3.0 software – but overlapping this with the launch of the 3GS. For instance, things like Spotlight search and the new Messages app feature center-stage on the Apple website promoting the 3GS, but these are available on 3G and even 2G iPhones!! That said, the features 3.0 brought to my phone have been sadly disappointing. The vast increases in SDK capabilities haven’t been taken up by developers at all (may do another post on this some time) for whatever reason, and I’m yet to use Spotlight in a ‘non-test’ capacity. The messages app is all well and good – but when I tried to send a contact to a friend of mine, it came out as rubbish. I know there’s not a standard for such messages across phones, but that sort of invalidates the point of having such capabilities!

Voice control is all well and good, I’ve not seen many reviews of this feature out in the wild, so I can’t really pass judgement on that. The addition of a magnetometer within the 3GS will be a huge feature. I personally try to get out and about doing some Geocaching, and hopefully the Groundspeak iPhone application will be updated to allow use of this compass to make seeking caches even easier with an iPhone.

However, the simple addition of video recording (and increase in camera quality) is just about enough to sell me on the 3GS. I’ve whinged about the quality of the existing camera until I’m blue in the mouth – but still I use it for all my day-to-day shooting! People are much more likely to be carrying a mobile phone than a full camera when they need it most. Apple have pulled some really good moves in this hardware update, and I for one am on the end of the hook – I want it!