Here is a recipe that I got from my Aunt Cindy.
Ingredients
- 1 3/4 pounds of carrots, peeled & chopped
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 2 teaspoons confectioners’ sugar
- 1 stick butter
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a large pot of boiling water, cook carrots until very tender. Drain and transfer to a large mixing bowl.
- While carrots are warm, use an electric mixer to beat with sugar, baking powder, and vanilla extract until smooth. Mix in the flour, eggs, and butter. Transfer to a 2-quart baking dish.
- Bake 1 hour in the preheated oven, or until top is golden brown.
- Sprinkle lightly with confectioners sugar before serving.
Images
The ingredients
Everything mixed in the bowl
The finished product
Notes
- The confectioner’s sugar is optional, I personally think that it is sweet enough without the sugar coating.
- When incorporating the butter into the mix, it works best to blend it in using small chunks instead of adding the entire stick at once. I use quarter-stick chunks.
- If you are going to be refrigerating this, use plastic wrap and press the wrap down into the casserole dish to contact the top of the food. This will help keep the moisture in the dish as well as prevent a skin from forming.
- When cooking this, resist the temptation to check it. Soufflés can deflate or fall when they are disturbed during cooking. As Alton would say Just set it and walk away.
The first time I made this I followed the instructions to a T, but this time I was making it with an eye towards someone who has a gluten allergy. In researching the flour substitution, I did find that some people take the time to mill their own gluten free flour, but this was beyond my particular skill set. What I ended up using was a gluten-free all purpose baking mix from Arrowhead Mills.
Like many people, I went out into the great choas known as Black Friday after a deal.
In my case I was focused on obtaining an Olevia 237T 37″ LCD television being sold at Target for the low, low price of $549.00.
After getting it home and plugging it all into my MythTV system, I ran into problems. First of all, since the tv had a vga input, I used the vga output of my video card instead of the svideo output. Initially I got no video, but then I realized I needed to undo some of my xorg.conf changes since I had changed the output.
After fixing the xorg.conf problem to not use the svideo port (thank you SSH!), I ran into other small problems.
Getting the resolution output right
The 237T has a native resolution of 1366×768, which according to an article at CNET.com is the most common resolution, yielding an output of 768p.
It turns out that I needed a particular video modeline in order to make the tv work properly. This required a great deal of research since manually calculating a modeline is not something that I really wanted to undertake. After finding a few online calculators, I found that I could not use them since the Dot Clock Frequency was not something that was included in the manual for the tv. So I diligently searched on the Internet to see if I could run across someone else who had this model tv (or the slightly improved 537 series) that had solved the problem. On the MythTV wiki, I ran across two entries for the 537h. I tried them both, but unfortunately the source display on the tv still reported a resolution of 1024×768. After trolling the xorg.conf logs, this turned out to be due to a failure of either modeline to be validated.
Digging ever deeper into the realms of HDTV screen resolutions and the xorg.conf options, I found that the binary, proprietary Nvidia drivers give you something that can help out a lot here, Appendix J. Programming Modes. This enables one to specify a series of validated modes and the driver will automatically validate them and use the correct output settings for the first mode that is found to be valid.
Here is what I ended up using in my xorg.conf file:
Section “Screen” Identifier “Screen0” Device “Videocard0” Monitor “OleviaHDTV” DefaultDepth 24 SubSection “Display” Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes “1360x768_60” “1280x720_60” EndSubSection
EndSection
Getting the right TV output
The next hurdle was to make sure that I got the right output of each of the MythTV applications.
Xine
In the configuration of the DVD player or the Video player, make sure that you launch xine with the following command:
xine -pfhq -D -r anamorphic
In theory xine should automatically display the video output exactly as is on the media, but using the command above will ensure that your get a fullscreen display. (Thanks to a posting in the Freevo-users list by John Molohan for this)
Mplayer
In the DVD or Video playback configuration you can use the following command to launch mplayer to use the correct aspect ratio (Thanks to Jarod Wilson for this tip):
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo xv %s
You can also set these same configuration options in your mplayer configuration file (~/.mplayer/config):
## Audio Output ao=”alsa”
ac=”hwac3,”
## Verbosity
really-quiet=”1″ ## Scaling fs=”yes” zoom=”yes” monitoraspect=”4:3″double=”yes”
Internal DVD player
The MythTV built-in dvd player should display the video correctly by default.
Live TV output
When watching live television, you have a few options:
- Leave the aspect ratio alone
- Change the aspect ratio to be 4:3 or 16:9
- To set the aspect ration to be Fill
- To set the aspect ratio to be 4:3 with zoom or 16:9 with zoom
Each of these has it’s own drawbacks, but I have gotten the best results using 16:9. This setting is in the Playback options of the TV section of the MythTV setup.
References
In the application selection process for 10.5, the X11 maintainers elected not to include Xnest.
While most users will probably not need this, since you can export X11 application through a SSH connection, sometimes it is quite handy to have the entire gui session available from a remote server.
I use this when managing some of my Solaris servers. With X11 on 10.4 this was readily available, but after installing 10.5 I found that it had not been included. Initially I just copied the binary from my 10.4 install into the expected location and tried to use it. However, as I expected, the results were not particularly satisfactory, given that the binary was built against a different X11 source tree.
After posting some of my compile issues to the X11-Users mailing list (archives are here), the code maintainer released a patch to the xorg code that fixed the symbol issues that had reared their ugly heads.
For those who are interested in making it work here’s what you need to do:
- Follow the first seven lines under the section Source installation on the XDarwin wiki page
- Change the configure instruction line to be as follows: ./configure –prefix=/usr/X11 –enable-xnest=yes –with-mesa-source=`pwd`/../Mesa-6.5.2
- Continue with the rest of the source instructions as posted in the wiki page
- After copying the new Xquartz binary over, copy the Xnest binary as well: sudo cp hw/xnest/Xnest /usr/X11/bin/
- Don’t forget the manpage: sudo cp hw/xnest/Xnest.1 /usr/share/man/man1/
Now you have a nicely patched install of the latest fixes for Xquartz as well as the Xnest binary.
If only compiling Xpehyr was working now…sigh.
Resources:
- Applications supplied with the default X11 install on 10.5
How heavy is your laptop bag? According to my passenger airbag sensors my latptop bag is at least as heavy as a small child.
The way I understand the system is that if the passenger is below a certain combination of height and weight, then the airbag is turned off and the seatbelt light is not triggered, but if you are a little heavier and/or taller then the seatbelt light is triggered.
The point of this is apparently to prevent injuries to small or under-weight passengers by a deploying airbag.
Awful nice of my truck to want my laptop to be secured by a seatbelt but not injured by the airbag. 