rothbaum.com

Som Tam is an authentic Thai salad made of green papaya, but it works well with other grated veges like carrot, apple and turnip. It should really have brine crab in it, but I'm not keen on the crunchy shells so I leave it out. Just prepare all the ingredients and mix together. A food processor is a great help for grating and slicing (at least the beans) - use the smallest grater and thinest slicer.

• 1 green papaya grated, or a mix of grated carrot (2 large) and swede (1/2)
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped
• bunch of spring onions, finely sliced
• 4 small red chillies, finely chopped
• snake beans or green beans, finely sliced
• tomatoes, chopped
• 3 T fish sauce
• 1 T caster sugar
• 2 T chopped peanuts

Wikipedia has a good article on Som Tam.

Larb is a fantastic Thai salad made from minced meat, veges and herbs. A characteristic ingredient is the coarsely ground toasted rice. Cook the mince with a little water, then turn off the heat and add the remaining ingredients. The toasted rice is made by putting 1/4 cup uncooked rice in a frying pan and heating gently until slightly brown - make sure you move the rice around regularly.

• 450g pork or chicken mince
• 1 stick lemongrass
• 3 kaffir lime leaves
• 4 chillies
• 4 T lime juice
• 2 T fish sauce
• 2 spring onions
• 2 t coarsely ground toasted rice
• mint leaves to garnish

Peter arrived in April - there are some photos on Flickr (only a selection are public - ask us for a guest pass via our contact page to see all the photos).

Who would have thought it would be so hard to cut cornices properly? The problem is there are about 20 different ways a mitre cut can come out. The method I used is adapted from the DeWalt website and goes like this.

General instructions:

• get a mitre saw (doesn't have to be compound)
• mark the "bottom" of the cornice with a pencil (this helps avoid getting things the wrong way round)
• when cutting, always ensure that the bottom of the cornice is up against the fence of the saw - this is inverted compared to how it will be once in place on the ceiling
• the "top" should be against the base of the saw with the diagonal back making a we triangular channel with the corner of the cutting area
• try both cuts with some scrap wood first - doesn't have to be a long piece, but it's good to check that the cuts look right once in place in the corners

Inside corners:

• set the saw for a 45 degree right hand mitre
• make the left side cut (which will be the right hand once the cornice is in place - remember it's inverted)
• discard the excess to the left of the cut
• move the wood to the left (don't flip it) for the right side cut
• set the saw for a 45 degree left hand mitre
• make the right hand cut and discard the excess to the right of the cut

Outside corners:

• set the saw for a 45 degree left hand mitre
• make the left side cut (which will be the right hand once the cornice is in place - remember it's inverted)
• discard the excess to the left of the cut
• move the wood to the left (don't flip it) for the right side cut
• set the saw for a 45 degree right hand mitre
• make the right hand cut and discard the excess to the right of the cut

As for getting the length right - you're on your own. I never really figured this out, and just resorted to cutting slightly long and then re-cutting till it fitted. For a different explanation of the same method, including a diagram, see the DeWalt website.

Firefox search engine plugins for NZ white & yellow pages. The search tool in Firefox is great, but we can extend it to be useful in NZ? It turns out the answer is yes. Try the following examples:

• White pages (NZ)
• Yellow pages (NZ)

For information on how to do this yourself, see the Mycroft docs. UPDATE: Now works with new consolidated yellow.co.nz site.

We broke the LCD on our Canon PowerShot A650 the other day, and researching alternatives was educational to say the least. Read on for details...

Trying to find a reasonably priced upgrade was impossible, so we've ended up buying a NZ$200 PowerShot A590 to tide us over until the A650 can be repaired or replaced. The A650 is very well spec'd for it's price - it features a 6x optical zoom, 1/1.7" sensor and f2.8-4.8 lens with optical image stabilisation and manual control for around NZ$500. We've been really impressed with the image quality so wanted to replace it with something similar but better. However it didn't turn out that way...

Apart from the A650, the only PowerShots with a 1/1.7" or larger sensor are the A650, Ixus 980 and the G9/10 series. The Ixus 980 looks like a nice camera but is slower at maximum zoom and doesn't have manual focus. The G9/10 series cost significantly more than we wanted to spend. It's a similar situation in the Panasonic Lumix camp, with the excellent LX3 costing NZ$900+, and only having a 2.5x zoom anyway. Both Canon and Panasonic have "travel zoom" models with 10x optical zoom (PowerShot SX110 and Lumix TZ5) at around $400 - $500 however they have smaller 1/2.3" sensors and I wasn't prepared to sacrifice the quality.

So where to next? What if we bought a cheap camera to keep us going until something better comes along. Setting a minimum requirement of OIS, manual control and 4x zoom (and sticking with Canon and Panasonic for simplicity) narrowed down the market to the PowerShot A590, Lumix LZ8. We went with the A590 in the end due to a $70 price difference, and the addition of manual focus. We could have spent even less, say NZ$160 but would have had to drop stabilisation or the 4x zoom.

We visited Robyn in Thailand back in October and had a great time - check out our photos on Flickr (only a selection are public - ask us for a guest pass to see all the photos).

After using IMDB for years, it turns out a much more useful film review site is Metacritic. Metacritic calculates scores based on professional reviews as well as consumer voting so may be more reliable than plain IMDB voting scores. I've created a Firefox search engine: Metacritic reviews (see the Mycroft documentation for details). Also available are full content RSS feeds mangled using Yahoo Pipes:

• Top Cinema by Score
• Top DVDs by Score
• Top Films by Title (both cinema and DVD)

Take a look at Goodreads if you're looking for a (social) book review / tracking site. Trying out social book review sites was an unsatisfying experience until I came across Goodreads. It started with ReadingSocial aka Visual Bookshelf (facebook app). I wasn't happy with the lack of an export function (vendor lock-in - argh!) so went looking.

Goodreads stands out as the only site I've come across so far that has an export function, logic to handle multiple editions, good usability and a reasonable facebook widget. ReadingSocial / Visual Bookshelf is ok, but doesn't have an export function, and doesn't link / combine multiple editions. I found this annoying - often the edition I have was not the most popular and I had to choose between showing the wrong cover, and missing out on the bulk of the reviews. LibraryThing is very impressive, but more technical and seems to be focussed on managing your book library rather than tracking books you've read (and may no longer have). Also I couldn't get the facebook widget to show covers. I didn't even try Shelfari as I heard bad things about them spamming by default.

Jo's quilt 'He tamore ki raro' has just won first prize in a SpotLight quilting competition, earning her a $200 quilting goodies basket.