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Cacio E Pepe

Cacio E Pepe is Italian for “pepper and cheese” and this recipe – while it sounds incredibly simple – is exactly that. And despite how simple it is, it is very, very tasty.

Ingredients:
Kosher Salt
6 oz. Pasta (I bought 9 ounces, so I multiplied everything by 1.5 – also long pasta like fettuccine works best)
3 Tbsp unsalted butter (springing for French butter is well worth it)
1 Tbsp freshly cracked black pepper (I was generous, I love pepper so used almost 2 Tbsp)
3/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese

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Boef Bourguinon (Beef Burgundy)

Boef Bourguinon – what a fantastic meal this was! It takes some patience, but I will MOST DEFINITELY be cooking this again, and probably soon. Something that doesn’t happen often happened Sunday night – there were no leftovers. I was uncomfortably but definitely not regrettably full.

I cooked the main dish in a cast iron dutch oven on the stove (and in the oven for part of it) and used a regular frying pan and saucepan to prepare mushrooms and onions.

Ingredients

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The SSL Nightmare is Over!

SSL is fixed. Check this out:

Came home from work today, took a nap, woke up late and decided I was ready to finish beating my head against a wall for this. It took me a good hour or so to get a working virtual host using the certificates I bought in December. Finally got that working, then changed the virtual host to match the same root directory as the site is under. Then I ran into some real problems…problems logging on, getting kicked out of the WordPress admin panel, etc. Turns out it was caused by three things:
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turngren.net has a much more robust home now.

I finally decided to break the bank at $10/month to get a Linode with 1GiB of RAM and a Xeon core. Now I don’t have to hide behind obscurity. Installed a LAMP stack, got ssh working with rsa keys…now I just have to work on installing an SSL certificate and I’m good to go!

I don’t know if my current SSL cert is tied to just the domain name or the server itself…I guess we will have to find out. I really don’t want to pay for a new cert, it wasn’t spectacularly cheap. But, for now this will work. I have my site up on a remote host, it isn’t violating the terms of my ISP, and it can handle a ton more traffic. More to follow later…

UPDATE AS OF 6/21/16:

Linode continues to impress. I have had practically zero downtime as the result of maintenance on their part. I have broken a few things myself…but that’s on me. I added daily backup snapshots for another $2.50 per month. If you don’t mind taking the time to install a LAMP stack or something similar, I can’t recommend Linode enough. It is also easy to access your virtual machine remotely. Even without SSH – just through the Linode login portal.

Goodbye to Windows – And Other Bits of Info

Goodbye to Windows

Made the move to put Fedora on the desktop machine too. Seeing how many games were available for Linux on Steam made it a pretty easy switch. Goodbye to Windows!

Fedora_vertical

Installing the proprietary NVidia drivers were a little tricky at first, but I got it up and running smoothly. Other than that, no problems to speak of.

Still having intermittent wireless connectivity issues with the X1C3, but everything I read says that there are just some bugs in the iwlwifi firmware for the Intel 7265 card. I’m hoping that when Fedora 22 comes out in May that the 4.0 kernel will have that fixed. We will see. Excited about trying the plasma 5 desktop in KDE.

Lastly I got Tor up and running and thought I would check out the dark web. Went to the dark web wiki and it’s pretty scary. You can hire contract killers, buy drugs, and there were a surpringly high number of sites where you could buy things like compromised PayPal and prepaid debit accounts. It’s actually pretty scary. I’m guessing that if you get your identity stolen, that’s where it ends up. Got off the website and I’m really hoping it never happens to me!

Getting Fedora 21 Running Well on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015)

It works! It really does.

So after several days, I finally have this all set up and running optimally. Well, about 98% optimally. There is only one nagging issue I’m having, but it’s really not a big deal…certainly not enough for me to really care about. But when I turn the keyboard backlighting on, it turns off after reboot or suspend. It would really be nice if I could make it persistent. But that’s small potatoes.

But if you’re interested in how to get this all set up, read on.

One note: this notebook features a “fn-lock.” If the lock is not on, the F keys are mapped to their intended uses, i.e. volume changing, brightness, etc. Press fn + esc to lock them to regular F-keys. In Linux you will likely use them much more than their other purpose. This means you have to now press fn along with the key to do something like change the volume, whereas before you would have to press fn just to get the regular use of the f-key.

Backing Up the Pre-Installed Image

I didn’t want to mess with having to be on the phone with Microsoft or Lenovo in the event that I wanted to put Windows back on this machine, trying to get a product key or God forbid having to pay for installation media. Luckily, Windows 8 has a nice feature that allows you to build your own USB restore media. All you need is a USB drive that is 16GB or larger. Move your mouse to the top or bottom of the right side of the screen, and “charms” will appear. Go to settings, and type “restore” in the search box. You’ll find an option to create bootable recovery media. It takes about 8-10 minutes. Now you have a backup if you want to go back to Windows.

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New Thinkpad! Fedora 21! Manual Settings!

Been a while since I had a computer related post! Got a new Thinkpad today!

Got a brand new ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd Gen.) and this thing is awesome! It came with Windows 8.1 but I blew that away to install Fedora Linux 21. I opted for the i7 processor and 8GB of RAM with a 128GB solid state drive, along with the 14″ WQHD 2560×1440 display. It’s super light, doesn’t make a sound, is super thin, and with Intel’s new revision of chips uses very little power…even with linux the battery life is pushing about 8 hours. They claim 10 with Windows…I never had it on enough to tell with Windows.

Here’s a few pictures I took of it while I was still at work…note the key fob to my car for scale:

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This Beef Stroganoff Was…Off.

I tried this Beef Stroganoff recipe.

It really wasn’t good. IT didn’t even taste like beef stroganoff. We were in a little bit of a rush and I didn’t have time to make some tender, slow cooked beef tips so I tried the ground beef recipe…well…basically it meant we ended up paying about $20 for ingredients to make something that was similar to, but not as good as hamburger helper. It didn’t even look appetizing. 1/10 do not want.

Random Eats

Here’s a few of the random eats I’ve made recently. Most turned out really well.

Spinach and kale omelet. (with cheese) Normally I run the other way when I hear the “k word” but I was really hungry and there wasn’t much in the fridge this day. Put a tablespoon of butter in the omelet pan and set it at medium. Came out pretty well. Would’ve been better with bacon.

Pork chops from Omaha Steaks. More of what the girlfriend’s mother got us. Flavor was good, but they were surprisingly thin. Cooked a little too quickly. Nothing except butter, salt and pepper, and rosemary. My new go-to method for pork chops. Next time I’ll get thicker ones.

Chicken curry. This stuff is awesome. I put two frozen chicken breasts in the pressure cooker and set it to high pressure for 30 minutes. In the meantime, I cut up a tomato and an onion and sauteed in a pan with some oil. I added a few generous heaps of Patak’s Mild Curry Paste. Simmer it! Add the chicken when it’s done…it will already be starting to fall apart. Let it stew for a little longer (and finish falling apart) and it goes great over rice from the rice cooker. Curry paste can be found in the international section of the store. For extra spice I sometimes add some Sriracha Chili and Garlic (slightly different from their normal sauce – comes in a small jar with a green lid – a little dab’ll do ya).

FAT!

FAT! I wanted to leave a little blurb about this book I’ve been reading…it’s very interesting and also comes with a ton of recipes I can’t wait to try. I would say it is half cookbook and half informational reading. You can find it here on amazon.

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(Image from Amazon)

One of the most interesting things I’ve read in it so far involves how fats really work, and how animal fats in particular have really gotten a bad rap…there actually isn’t any link between saturated fats and heart disease. Proponents will say that heart disease-related deaths have decreased since a low-fat diet has become encouraged, and they’re right…but interestingly enough, the rate of disease hasn’t decreased, only the number of deaths attributed to them…which means it’s improvements in healthcare that have really decreased the deaths.

It is also interesting to me that many of the problems we have now with obesity and heart problems are made worse by hydrogenated fats – which means things like margarine and crisco, the “healthier” alternatives to things like lard or tallow. The hudrogenation process makes a fat solid at room temperature and makes the fat able to keep longer before spoiling or going rancid…this is how we get things like margarine, made from vegetable oil (liquid at room temperature, but solid in margarine because of hydrogenation) which are actually – as it turns out – arguably worse for us.

It’s not only interesting, it’s validation.