Big Fat Ostrich

That’s right. BFO Fashion Notes. Your one stop shop for THE latest in gaming fashions as reported by the in-the-know folks at Big Fat Ostrich.

Do you like Metal Gear Solid? No? well how about Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker? Yeah, I thought so. Well if you liked Hideo Kojima‘s 2010 release of the ongoing flashback flash-forward stealth classic, you’ll be mowing down the enemy to get your hands on one of these. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’d rather get the military field pants. They do kind of look comfortable. Like Capri pants, in which case they might be better suited to wear on your beach vacation in the Barbados.

All that just to say that the MGS store has your Peace Walker collection so that you can look and feel just like Naked Snake aka Big Boss.

Really?

Big Boss? That’s his name? The Metal Gear franchise has like 10 releases in the series and the guy’s name is BIG BOSS?? Are you kidding me? That’s all they could come up with???

Suddenly I’m not so sure how I feel about Metal Gear when their men’s clothing line has better names than their main character dude.

So join us next week when BFO Fashion Notes talks about what colours you should and should not be wearing in your kitchenette.

Well, old Dobson has entered the 21st century and is trying his brittle arthritic hand at some good old fashioned card games on the Internet. Everything was quite muddy to these wise old eyes so I called up my nephew Royston for some advice.

After he hung up on me, I waded into this affair that one calls “Googling” and I’ll be honest with you. When I first heard about Googling, I thought it had something to do with cricket, that violent old game that left me with some permanently bruised privates. In fact, Googling open up a wide world of information! Now I have traveled the world far and wide, but this Internet has taken me to places that I never dreamed possible. Primarily my den, where my personal computer is located.

At any rate, a few months back, when Royston was still talking to me, he installed something called Linux on my personal computing device. He said it was for my own good as I had contracted a “virus” which he said was not unlike the clap, which I certainly have some amusing tales about, but which shall be stowed away until a later date. This “Linux” would act like a sort of digital prophylactic and keep my personal computing machine from having to visit the doctor (aka Royston).

Alright, now what was I here to talk about again?

Right. Gambling on the Internet. Well it seems that you could play poker and other casino style games on the computer without having to suffer the embarrassment of getting kicked out of one of those hoity toity establishments every single time you visit one. Royston programmed my computer to use Wine so that I can call up something called a Poker Stars Client which doesn’t normally run on this Linux, but now it does because of the Wine. Well let me tell you, that most things do run better with wine, namely yours truly (big deliberate wink).

I picked up a 40″ Samsung 550 Series LCD the other day. Initially, my plan was to stream digital video from USB storage through a media streamer like Apple TV, Boxee, or the Seagate Free agent GoFlex. Turns out this TV is pretty well equipped to just play video streamed from my Debian server, so it pretty much cuts out the middle man.

Samsung has an application called Allshare which you can install on Windows. Mediatomb is an alternative to Allshare if you’re running Linux.

It depends what you want, so if you want a real media center like Boxee or XBMC, use your PS3 or Xbox or something like that. I didn’t feel like buying yet another box/appliance so I installed Mediatomb on my Debian machine and was watching my shows in about an hour. It’s programmed in C++ and has a simple xml control file. It’s really easy to install, so here’s how.

Step1: Install Mediatomb:

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

Step 2: Configure Mediatomb:

Add the following to the server section of config.xml. The following DLNA code is the key:

<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming” />
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=01700000000000000000000000000000″ />
</custom-http-headers>

You’ll probably also want to configure your mime types like this in import/mappings/extension-mimetype

<map from=”avi” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>
<map from=”ts” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”divx” to=”video/mpeg”/>
<map from=”mp4″ to=”video/MP4V-ES”/>
<map from=”mkv” to=”video/x-msvideo”/>

Lastly, under section <server> change the following to ‘yes’:

<protocolInfo extend="yes"/>

Source

And that’s pretty much it. You’ll probably want to turn on the GUI initially and you can do that in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml under section <server>:
<ui enabled=”yes”

Now you can configure which folders you’ll want to share to your Samsung 550 series LCD TV by going to the following address. If you have usernames set to ‘on’, the default username/password is mediatomb/mediatomb.

http://localhost:49152/

Enjoy. I’ll be back with some cool mediatomb hacks.

Seriously. I searched Google News, Reddit and the whole Internet and there is a definite dry spell for cool Ostrich News. Sure there are reports about ostriches being culled due to bird flu, but nothing very interesting at all. So this is what you get. A crappy You Tube video of an ostrich running around on a ski slope in Iran. Great.

Yuri Gagarin, man! Has it been 50 years already since he orbited the earth in his Vostok spacecraft cannonball? Yes it has.

And speaking of sausages, just before Yuri Gagarin blasted off on his historic flight he had this conversation with the chief rocket designer:

“There in the flap you have dinner, supper and breakfast,” he said.
“Got it,” said Gagarin.
“You’ve got sausage, candy and jam to go with the tea,” Korolyov said. “Sixty-three pieces – you’ll get fat! When you get back today, eat everything right away.”
Gagarin replied: ‘The main thing is that there is sausage – to go with the moonshine.”

See, even then it was all about sausages. You just don’t get more hardcore than those 1960′s Soviet era space missions. Except maybe for 1960′s Soviet era open casket funerals for cosmonauts who didn’t make it back alive, namely Vladimir Komorov. But I digress.

So I guess this can be used as a 50th anniversary birthday tribute for Yuri’s earth orbit, even though it’s mostly about PJ Harvey’s infatuation with the moon.

Are you depressed? Well have a look at my frying pan and you’ll feel a little better. This is the last time I use this cheap frying pan, but I will say that it’s served me well over the years.

So what are we cooking today?

Well I had four small merguez sausages that had to be eaten today and I just didn’t want to just sit there slicing these wieners and dipping them in some nondescript sauce. I decided to experiment a bit and cook them in ouzo and try to wing out a homemade dijonnaise sauce on the fly. Why ouzo? Because we ran out of beer.

So here we go.

The Sausages: Use olive oil, slightly heated, then fry up the sausages until they’re golden.

The Ouzo: Once your sausages are golden, lower the heat to medium-low and pour in 2 cap fulls of ouzo. It’ll boil off pretty quick, and you’re going to be loving the sweet steam that rises up from the frying pan. Let it boil off while rotating your sausages. You can bounce them around the frying pan with the handle too, if you’d like.

The Homemade Dijonnaise: This was a total experiment, and wasn’t close at all to actual dijonnaise. Still, I got the consistency down, and it mostly worked:

2 tablespoons mayonnaise.
1 teaspoon of yellow mustard
1 teaspoon of olive oil
Season with ground pepper and oregano.

Go on. Laugh it up. Is it an insult to Dijonnaise? We don’t care, because it did the job. On its own, it might be better suited as a chip dip. But, when we put it all together, something magical happened!

Putting it all Together:  Warm up some pitas in the oven or the microwave. I went microwave this time so that the pitas would stay soft. Warming them up in the oven tends to make them crispy which kind of foils you when you try to wrap them.

Spread some of that chip-dip dijonnaise on your pitas, throw on some lettuce, dice a tomato, lay down your sausage, and wrap it up. Now shove it in your mouth and savor.

The Verdict: VERY flavourful. Remember when I said that something magical happened? Well, the creamy tang of the dijonnaise and the sweet aftertaste of the ouzo-merguez somehow came together to feel both heavy and light all at once. The dijonnaise became actual dijonnaise in the experience, making me forget what the actual ingredients were. I could not taste a hint of yellow mustard, which was how we want it.

Total prep and cooking time was about 20 minutes, which is pretty good on a tight schedule. I’ll be perfecting this one in the future.

We’re finally ready to install our brand new Grover tuners!

First of all, if you’re planning on installing your own guitar tuners AND you need to drill holes, you really shouldn’t be doing it without a drill press. If you’re like us and you don’t mind experimenting with an old, mostly worthless guitar, then go ahead. We wouldn’t recommend trying this on your $3000 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe.

The original holes were non-standard, so we had to widen it. To ream or not to ream? We decided not to ream and instead picked up a .391 drill bit to make the hole wider so that the tuning head would fit.

Here she is:

Next, we started drilling. I have a steady hand, but no amount of supernatural steadiness will prevent you from going off course. Plus, when you hit the other side, you could chip the finish. In fact, I guarantee you will chip the finish.

Like I did.

Ouch. Well, it’s not a big deal on a worthless guitar like this here Fiesta. However, I saved the chipped pieces for later use.

Looks pretty bad actually. The best about this picture is the purple glow. I’m not sure how that happened, but I like it!

Next step: Lining up the tuners and prepping for the drill holes. If you’re like us and you’re super impatient, you’ll do it all wrong and end up with very crooked tuners. They were so crooked that I couldn’t sleep thinking about them all crooked and everything. So I re-did them.

Here’s what I did to make sure they were aligned: The secret to doing this is masking tape. The easiest way to explain this is to show you. Just make sure the masking tape is in a straight line. Then, we tapped a nail in the guide hole to mark the spot where we would be drilling. Measure once, twice, twelve times. Just be extra careful. When you’re ready to drill, again, use a drill press. Or be like me and use your super slow very precise drilling technique. It’s not perfect, but in our case, it worked well enough.

It’s a dirty way to it, but effective. Don’t mind all the extra drill holes. They can be filled. Or not.
And…OMG what have I done!!!

I’m just kidding of course. Here we are with our newly installed guitar tuners. Pretty straight and 1000 times better than the old tuners. Notice how I put the chipped paint back. It’s not glued in this photo. That’ll come later. Next time…new pickups!

Hah, gotcha, we don’t have any April fools jokes.