Sri Lankan Style spicy Calamari Curry (Dallo Maaluwa)

Ingredients


Chilli powder : 3 Teaspoons
turmeric  : 1/4 Teaspoon
Roasted curry power : 1 1/2 teaspoon
black pepper : 3/4 teaspoons
chilli flakes - 1 teaspoons
 1 medium sized Onion
4 garlic cloves
1/4 inch piece of ginger
 small piece of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon fenugreek
1/4 teaspoon cumin seed.
2 pieces of goraka (gambooge)
few curry leaves
green chilli or belle peper (small piece)
2 pinches of sugar.

Method.

Cut calamari into half a inch size rings

season with salt and perper, turmeric, chilli powder and add the goraka

chop the onion,green chilli,ginger,garlic and curry leaves

keep a pan or a pot on the stove.
pour one tablespoon of oil.
when the oil gets hot put the cumin seeds and fry for few minutes.
add the chilli flakes and put in the chopped ingredients except the calamari

fry until the onions are translucent.

adjust the heat to low.
add the calamari mixture and leave for 10 minutes. make sure to turn the calamari so they cook evenly.

do not leave them for too long since calamari tends to harden if left for too long.

add the sugar after taking off the stove and give it a stir.

could be served with rice or naan.

Android app that shows your connected cell tower location and other available towers with signal levels

Ever wondered why your phone reception level jumps up and down? well the wondering is over because with this app you could see the available cell towers nearby on a map and the connected cell tower.

With this nifty android app you could know which network performs or has the best network coverage in your area.

Say if you are wondering around looking for the best signal, you could use this app to find out in which direction the signal is coming from ( it shows the connected towers direction) all you have to do is follow the compass red arrow till you get a good signal.

the location of all the towers is pretty impressive too. I know and I have tried in the past to get hold of the same sort of app for Apple IOS devices called "Signal" and now "Signal 2". but the problem is they all work on jailbroken devices.

 

you could find out about all the features and download the app from the android play store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.staircase3.opensignal&hl=en 

Orange CH Switzerland Delivery tracking number scam

I'm writing this blog post to have some opinions from want to be/existing customer of Orange, Switzerland who have ordered a product from them and never received a tracking / Delivery number although they have received an email confirming that they will be sending the tracking / delivery number right after.

Here is a excerpt from the email that I received

Having waited about a week, I rang them up in search of an answer to my problem, but all they give out to you is "Sir we are not authorized to give out a tracking number and we dont give one out usually" when I asked but I received an email and again I'm sorry sir is all they got to say.

Now for a comparison I ordered a phone (upgrade) from Sunrise four days ago and guess what I got my phone today. rite the next day they shipped it out and emailed me the tracking number.

Thats what I call service. I thought Orange networks as a reputed player in the worldwide communications business would be a good multinational company.

I have seen the same from many exapats from forums such as englishforum.ch so I'm not alone here.

If you would like to address them directly about this issue please let me know so we could setup an online petition or something in hope it will reach the marketing personal high up in their management.

Aging laptop taking ages to boot? Acer Aspire 5735 SATA II with SSD OCZ Vertex 4

Well theres a easy solution to bring back your laptop from the dead. If your laptop has SATA II (Thats like a 3 year old laptop or little more) the best is to get your self a Solid state hard drive. These drives doesnt have any mechanical components that spins, rattles or grinds as your laptop does its thing. All this mechanical  wizardry behind the scenes adds lot of times thus making us wait in misery.

So the solution, a SSD (Solid State Drive) does it magic using memory chips, high capacity memory chips a little bit like your system ram or memory. No problem at all, its silent, super fast since it has absolutely no moving parts.

OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA III 

My Acer Aspire 5735 (core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz SATA II) took ages to boot and if I had two three programs running it would takes ages to bring up what I wanted.

So I upgraded and believe me it only takes 35 seconds to boot windows with all start up apps. I know its little bit hard to believe but you got to believe it. I'll post a video later on to prove it.

Here is the Video as promised -

From 0:20 it starts to boot after the OS Selection and its full responsive after 0:45 so thats 25 Seconds to boot.

Windows index Before upgrading ( Notice the Hard drive index 5.4)

AS SSD Acer Aspire 5735 SATA II OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Windows Experience before after SSD

And after it transforms to 7.6 (average is from 7-8 for Disk Data Transfer rate)

AS SSD Acer Aspire 5735 SATA II OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Windows Experience Index after SSD

I'll just post a AS SSD Benchmark just for the techhies out there, the normal for a normal Hard Disk Drive HDD is about 70-80 MB/s ( My old Hitachi 250 GB Drive at least)

AS SSD Acer Aspire 5735 SATA II OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Benchmark

the SSD manages to a whopping eye watering 260 MB/s. Thats a substantial performance difference thats well worth the money. ( I had to spend about 120 USD for the OCZ Vertex 4 128GB Drive.) But its available from Amazon for much less. Buy it from the link below.

OCZ Technology 128GB Vertex 4 Series SATA 6.0 GB/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) With Industry's Highest 120K IOPS And 5-Year Warranty - VTX4-25SAT3-128G

so there you go, no heading back to noisy and irritating mechanical hard disk drives anymore. This is the new  way forward for performance in storage media.

City and Guilds 2330 Level 3 Certificate in Electrotechnical Technology

I've got a bunch of past papers and study material for City and Guilds  2330 Level 3 Certificate in Electrotechnical Technology unit. anyone interested leave a comment after this post.

Watch geo blocked content from streaming services like - Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, ITV Player, BBC Iplayer and many more

Watch all your favourite movie streaming services such as Netflix, vudu, hulu, ITV Player, BBC Iplayer just as you would see them in US or the UK with overplay's SMART DNS service.

the service automatically unblocks your connection so that you can watch the service. the smartdns technology converts your ip address to a US or UK address behind the scenes and achieves flawless video streaming transparently. 

Configuring the service to work on your device ( PC, MAC or a media player ) only takes few steps.

Change the DNS settings in your network setup. you could also select the country you want to watch the content at.

use this link HERE to access the service

Here what overplay.net got to say,

OverPlay smartdns is a groundbreaking innovation designed to provide the ultimate in high speed access to websites that are restricted from your location, without the need for a VPN tunnel!

Twitter and Facebook from China, Hulu or iPlayer from your office - anywhere your internet access is filtered, smartdns can help!

Using innovative technology, developed to complement OverPlay's range of high-speed VPN servers, access to smartdns is included free of charge in all our subscription packages. Once enabled, you'll never have to worry about enabling a VPN connection in order to access your favorite sites again, just access them as normal and smartdns will do the magic for you. Not only that, you'll often find a healthy speed increase too - facebook photos load faster, stream in HD where previously it wasn't possible, it all just works!

Setup is incredibly simple. Just enable the smartdns service, and then change the DNS server setting on your Computer. Reboot your computer and that's all!

Don't worry if you're not sure how to change your DNS server settings, we even provide a utility to perform this change for you!

• Windows users can access the tool here.
• The OSX version isn't too far away but we have detailed instructions for some of the many
  platforms available here.

*All trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective holders.

Facebook TimeLine - Check who has taken you off their list of friends secretly

Ever wondered why you dont get to hear from that person on your Facebook wall anymore ? And then you might wonder maybe they stopped using or didnt get on to Facebooking for a while?

Well here's a way to know if someone taken you off their friends list or in facebook vocab "Unfriend" you for some reason.

This neat trick involves in using the new facebook timeline which is soon to be live on everyones facebook profiles. But for now it remains as beta still you can add it as if you were developing an app with facebook developer network.

When you hear the words "app" and  "developer network" you might think oh no I know nothing about apps and developing but don't be put down by the big words. Its just going through some buttons named "next" and "finish" to complete the process and you are good to go. And after magically the Timeline tryout message will pop up in your facebook profile page automatically.

Check out the full guide on how to enable the TimeLine feature at Redmond Pie site and their other post on how to check who has un-friended you here

Cook yourself free breakfast rite in your hotel room with an iron and a coffee maker.

When you are sidetracked in a hotel room and you got cravings for a nice hot and a simple breakfast, fear no more an iron and a coffee maker can be there for your rescue.

Well any descent hotel should have those stuff available for their guests so guess how easy it is to cook them up in no time. Yummy bacon and half boiled (well sort of ) eggs or even fried eggs is not a problem.

check out the full video of Natalie Tran from Lonely Planet demonstrating this lifesaving and money-saving cooking hacks.

Note: Dont forget to remove all traces of your little cooking adventure off the desks, coffee maker, Iron and the wash room sink.

Fastest boot times I have seen. Windows 8 boots almost instantly

Well the first thing that comes to your mind about boot times and windows is that its slow. But in this competitive race of Operating systems wanting to be the best OS the companies are coming up with ways to beat each other in the game. Expect lots of gizmos in the up coming version of windows. Windows 8.

As explained in the video its almost amazing how it springs up to a usable state almost instantly.

It all has to do with a new technology. the devices that supports windows has come up with. something called UEFI. ( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). The new interface pre boots just before the OS ( windows or Linux) and prepares the previously needed data for the OS thus making it a faster bootup. Read more more about it on the wiki

Want to dump that WebOS and Run Android on your HP Touchpad?

The people at Cyanogenmod team and few other teams are racing to a final release of a stable android OS on the defunct Hp Touchpad. Well theres a US $2000 reward aswell to be won for the people who comes up with the final release.


Note: Amazon still has HP TouchPad 16 GB and HP TouchPad 32 GB in stock.
and the Cheaper Smartbuy Hp TouchPad 16GB 


Here is a video from the Cyanogenmod team below and the note from them.

Hey Internet--
Here is some (older) touchpad progress from Friday. The Cyanogenmod team wanted to share it with the public to bring attention to our need for a few more touchpads (for developers currently working without them).

As you can see from this quick demo, we've been working hard and have made progress. Since this video was created last week, the build has been more "tabletized" (tablet tweaks added, etc.), lvm support has been added.
The touchscreen driver issue is now the focus of our attention.
Our ultimate vision is to create a *multiboot* solution where the end user will be able to boot into WebOS, Cyanogenmod, and/or other OSes. This appears to be very possible, and we have discussed several potential implementations with our new friends in the WebOS development community to make it easy for an end-user to set up.
For the moment though, we need about 4 tablets, as we have talented and experienced developers who cannot contribute effectively due to a lack of hardware. If you have an extra touchpad and are willing to help the cause, please let us know in the comments below.
A BIG CAVEAT-- PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR ETAS. For the uninitiated, this is the #1 rule for Cyanogenmod. It will certainly be a long while before our goals become reality. Our goals incidentally are not connected with any bounty-- we are motivated to do it right, not do it fast.
And now the obligatory shout outs-- Thanks to rootzwiki and all the devs and everyone else who are collaborating and contributing to this project. You know who you are, you.
The CM team www.cyanogenmod.com

How an Internet browser works. As an easy to Understand Comic ;)

Ever wondered or wanted to refresh your knowledge bank on how an Internet browser works ? Here is a interesting illustration made by Vlad Studio that is equally interesting even for the young ones to look at :)

The user shown as the guy with the crown possibly a king orders his men to fetch a website. so the men goes out  after negotiating with all security measures in place ( firewalls etc) to the open world known as the internet.

He finds himself where he wants to go from the post which is the Domain Name Server. Gets to the place where the webpage is. This is the hosting server. The Wise owl gives the man what he wants and he returns to his king with the information.

This process happens over and over until the User shown as the king is satisfied.

voilà I guess I explained it well. So refer to this whenever you are kind of perplexed on how it all happens ;)

New Skype enabled Freetalk ATA Lets you use your old house phone with Skype without a PC

The people have been looking for a way to use Skype without a PC or an expensive Skype enabled Cordless phone for ages.


Even Companies with Pbx's can now take advantage of the FreeTalk Skype Adapter to make calls and receive calls to and from thousands of skype subscribers through out the world.


Many Skype enabled services that lets you use an ordinary desktop phone came out with flying colours and left without a note. Because most of them did not take a direct approach to using skypes proprietary signalling and codecs. They always had to go around it due to Skype not authorizing them to use their codecs and signalling methods.


But now FreeTalk has joined up with Skype and has come up with the solution everyone's waited for.