Banana-Peanut-Butter Ice Cream

Posted on by Jordan

I feel kind of dumb right now. I spent five or so minutes looking, and it appears I never actually posted the pictures of the banana ice cream back when Heather and I first tried making it.

Let me bring you up to speed on the situation:

  1. Heather basically will not eat refined sugar
  2. I like desserts
  3. I would like to share said deserts with Heather

Because of point one, I spent a lot of time looking around for something I could make. I have had some success with making peanut butter balls. That recipe involved Splenda, and at some point Heather soured on the idea of eating fake sugar too. About that time I read that you could run a frozen banana through a blender / food processor and get an ice cream like result. We tried it shortly thereafter, and the results were a huge hit!

I learned a few things such as, peeling the bananas beforehand is important! I nearly removed my thumb peeling a frozen banana with one of our wonderfully sharp knives. We were in Atlantic at the time, and cleaning the blender without a dishwasher was a huge pain.

jumping back to ‘now’, and we have a food-processor that was given to us for Christmas. What I have discovered is that making this dish in a food processor is about twenty times easier. With a blender I was having to scrape the sides of the dish repeatedly to get all the banana blended. The food processor doesn’t seem to need as much attention. It also doesn’t hurt that we have a dishwasher, so cleanup is more or less “free”.

All of that to introduce the how-to video! Enjoy! 🙂

-Jordan

Video Codec Pain

Posted on by Jordan

Heather, for some time now, has been saying that she wanted us to have a simple video camera to record little parts of our lives.

After some quick research I grabbed an older model Vado HD that was cheap, and looked like it would be easy to use.

It has turned out to be really easy to use, and Heather and I have enjoyed getting to play with it. Last night however, I wanted to actually work with a video we had recorded. When I say work with, I mean I wanted to load the video into an editor and you know… edit it. I am not an expert with video editing tools, but that is a post for another day. What I discovered is that the codec (Video Encoding) was some goofy custom thing that none of the editing tools I had access to could work with. To make things worse, none of the variety of video conversion tools I had were able to convert it to a more palatable format.

After a few hours of grief, I think the secret was to install the video editing package that came with the camera, and somehow that dropped a second “edit mode” codec into the registry, letting STOIK open the video to re-sample it. I should not that I still cannot open the native off-the camera video in an editor. Being able to open the video with STOIK means I don’t really care, I just have to convert to an edit-friendly format before starting work.

I would like to be angry at Creative Labs for picking such a weird, unsupported codec for their camera, however I am painfully aware how complicated the job of a codec can be. Complicated means expensive in this case, all the nice easy-to-use codecs are not cheap, and must be licensed. I feel like by buying a cheaper camera I kind of asked to deal with this mess.

On the bright side, I have a workable system to convert video to something I can use. Probably not much chance Heather can do it solo, but she has no problem using the camera. I can live with having to do the imports myself.

-Jordan

Quick Link, For A Long Read

Posted on by Jordan

I really hope to get something more substantial posted later this weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to post something I read.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

A few notes:

  1. It’s rather depressing, I hope he is wrong about some of this
  2. It’s really long, I read it in bites over the course of a day
  3. As I reflected on it, I have a huge amount of respect for someone putting that together. There is a lot of research there, plus interviews.

As a side note, if you use Firefox (and you should, although I haven’t even managed to sell Heather on that yet) Delicious has a plug-in you really need to be using. Being able to bookmark anything you think you may want to look at later is wonderful, and you just attach meta-tags so finding links is typically easy.

-Jordan

Think About Warmer Places…

Posted on by Jordan

Actually, it hasn’t been as cold the past few days, and I have actually seen a little sunlight!!

The past two days have been mostly cloud free, and I am starting to hope spring will someday come.

This post isn’t actually to complain about the weather, it was to share this awesome video:

Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog

A little background, if you aren’t familiar with the term, check out the wikipedia article on the Sun dog phenomenon.

You have no idea how much child-like wonder that video evoked in me. I really want to watch a launch someday. I hear it’s kind of hard to catch a NASA launch because of the frequent weather delays. Right now the prospect of hanging out in Florida waiting to see if the rocket goes up today doesn’t sound so bad though 🙂

Another random thing that would be really fun, although perhaps only for me… is this place: Titan Missile Museum

It isn’t really close to anything though. I lost the link to it, but I found that place from a quick article with a bunch of pictures from somebody else going through it. Looked pretty interesting.

-Jordan

Website Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I am setting here, watching it snow again. I think it’s time to re-vamp the website here.

I will move the current wedding site off to some sort of archive area, so it can still be viewed. I just haven’t figured out what to do with the base domain.

My most recent project was a website for friends of ours Casey and Carson.

That site was basically just massaging WordPress, using a theme somebody else put together and just tweaking it. I would like to do something more ambitious for my site. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

I am also really tempted to change the robots.txt settings so that google can index the blog. Not that I really desire more traffic, it just seems silly to hide from search engines.

-Jordan