Monday, February 23, 2009

Bacon Weaving

My wife has been a busy bee blogging all of our exciting meals, my favorite of which has been our sexy bacon-wrapped food ball. In the process of making this meaty abomination, we employed a bacon-weaving technique that was popularized online through the 'bacon explosion.' For the benefit of the uninitiated, I thought I'd explain a little about the weaving technique in this quick post.

First off, we made our bacon easier to work with by freezing it. Just open the pack of bacon and lay the strips out on wax paper, then throw them in the freezer. This is the way restaurants often order their bacon, but us civilians are supposed to deal with it the hard way.

Once it's frozen, just lay the strips out and weave them together, over/under-style. Here are some pics of my manly hands working their magic.


And this is what you're left with. I want a shirt made out of it...

Once that's all done, pop it in the oven on an oiled baking sheet, but don't use too much oil because this bacon fabric is going to make plenty of grease on its own; you just want to keep it from sticking before it gets started.

When it's half-cooked, you can wrap it around other foods, or you can lay it over a mold--such as a metal bowl--to finish cooking and end up with an awesome all-bacon bowl.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

HandBrake Qt4-native GUI Updated

Update (5/15/09): the code has improved a lot lately and you can download updated binaries from my PPA repository. Directions for adding the repo to your package manager are available here.

Gonza, a developer from the HandBrake forums, added some updates to his native Qt4 HandBrake GUI, known as qtHB, to bring it a little closer to the current code state. I haven't had a chance to do any extensive testing with it, but I wanted to go ahead and post some deb binaries so any KDE/Kubuntu users can give it a shot.

32-bit qtHB (built on a Core2Quad Kentsfield)

These binaries are more up-to-date, but wouldn't package properly, so you'll have to download the qt4-core dependency (and maybe others) manually (sudo aptitude install qt4-core). Run it by double-clicking or by navigating to its directory and typing ./qtHB into a terminal.
32-bit qtHB binary
64-bit qtHB still to come

Leave me a comment if you run into any issues with any of it, or if you have any requests (rpm packages, etc).

If you're looking for CLI or GTK GUI builds of the latest code, check out my post here.

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