Using Roboto on Fedora

Using Android's Roboto font is pretty easy on Fedora (or any other Linux flavour). Just download the Roboto zip, open it up, copy the ttf files into your ~/.fonts dir, and refresh your font cache. From there, you can use the font in any program (though you may need to reload it first).

Here are the steps:

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/design/Roboto_Hinted_20111129.zip
unzip Roboto_Hinted_20111129.zip
mkdir ~/.fonts
mv Roboto_Hinted_20111129/*.ttf ~/.fonts
fc-cache

HOWTO Make Bacon

Side View: The side of a slab of pork

belly is  quite obviously delicious

bacon, only raw.

A few weeks ago I acquired a slab of pork belly from a local Nova Scotian farmer, with the intention of making Bacon from scratch. Plenty of different cuts of meat preserved in different ways can be qualified as bacon; I decided on typical North American pork belly, salt cured and smoked.

Making bacon is pretty easy, if a little time consuming. All you need is:

• A slab of pork belly
• Salt (table or kosher. sea salt is too coarse)
• A smoker
• Wood

Salt Curing

I salt cured the pork belly by covering it in salt and storing it in a glass container for 5 days (actually two containers, the belly was so big I had to cut it to fit into the containers I had available). I coated the pork belly in salt on both sides, then rubbed it in with my hands. Each day after first draining any excess liquid out of the container I repeated the salting.

The curing stage is a good time to add any additional seasonings to the bacon, like brown sugar or maple syrup. For my first batch of bacon I decided to pass.

After the bacon had cured for 5 days (and when I had enough time in the day to watch the smoker), I smoked the bacon. I used my home-made flower pot smoker and cherry wood chips that were soaked in water overnight. The bacon stayed on the smoker for about 8 hours, at 200°F. Since I'd be frying the bacon before eating it, I wasn't concerned about under-cooking it.

Smoking the bacon

After the bacon was smoked, I put it in the fridge for about half an hour to let the meat rest, and to let it firm up before cutting. I cut the bacon with my sharpest cutting knife. A deli slicer would have been nice here. And that's it! The pork belly was now bacon, and ready to be fried and eaten.

It was a good first attempt; the bacon is tender and has a great smoky flavour, but is a bit too salty. The salt and smoke flavour does make it great as an ingredient to other dishes though, like omeletts and soup. Next time I'll try to reduce the salt content, probably by wiping off any excess salt each day, when I drain off the juices.

Frying it up!

If you'd like to see more, you can view the complete photo set on flickr.

Glyphicons Styled Stack Overflow Icon

 Here is a Stack Overflow icon in the style of Glyphicons I did for my 'about me' sidebar section:

Feel free to use it however you want.

Using 960.gs, Haml, Sass, and Compass on Blogger

I tried to see how many cool toys I could use to create my own blogger template. So far I have:

• 960 Grid System for a nice 2 column layout.
• Haml for the unstyled template.
• Sass for style.
• Compass and Rake to tie it all together.

You can find the result on github, here.

Any readers who have noticed a similarity in chosen technology to those used by Katello get bonus points!

Retrofitting drop shadows into existing Android layouts

I had some UI elements in an Android application I'm working on that felt as if they should be above (pushing out of the screen, rather than to the top of it) the elements that followed them in the UI. A good way to indicate this is with a drop shadow, similar to those on Android title bars or Action Bars. An existing method didn't work for me, as my UI is relying heavily on weights to keep proper size ratios between the elements I wanted to add a drop shadow to, and the element they would be casting a shadow on.

Micro USB for Power Everywhere

One of the reasons I'm very excited for  Rasberry Pi is that it uses micro USB for power. This is also the standard may cell phone manufacturers are settling on for charging. I would love to see more every day devices use micro USB for charging and for power. Granted, not all devices can run off the 100mA from USB 2.0 (or charge at a reasonable rate), but I can eliminate just one more of those odd coaxial chargers, I'd be a happy fellow.

Essential Gnome Shell Extensions For Laggards

My ideal workstation

Image by ClickPick, used under the 

Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Gnome 3 introduced a lot of fundamental changes to how you interact with your computer. I don't want to hopelessly cling to the past, bemoaning the loss of my Lisp based window manager and yearning for the days when I could debate the merits of pure applets vs notification area icons, so I've moved on to gnome-shell.

That said, I've been using a few tweaks to bring Gnome 3 and gnome-shell closer to what I'm used to. Consider them training wheels; they can be disabled over time, easing the transition.