The recipe is surprisingly simple – the only ingredients are ginger, lime, sugar and water. The most time consuming part was roughly peeling the ginger with all its lumps and bumps.

Tim was correct when he said the recipe is spicy and gives you a kick. Both Oziel and I both watered it down to drink. We agreed it would be good mixed with carbonated water or a Lemon Loka (carbonated water with a twist of lemon and no sugar).

We thought that replacing the lime juice with lemon juice would also help reduce the impact of the “kick.

The post that first caught my attention was pasta with fresh corn pesto. And that is what Oziel and I made for dinner tonight. This is our attempt below.

We were very happy with the result. The recipe makes about four serves.

The other post that caught my attention was ginger beer. We also made that tonight, but haven’t had a glass yet as we want it ice-cold (so no photos).

I love ginger beer but, like salt and vinegar chips, it is one of the things that hasn’t taken off in Sweden. It is possible to buy from Gray’s American Store in Malmö. Gray’s sells supermarket goods from around the English speaking world that are otherwise hard to find in Sweden. They even sell Tim Tams for the bargin basement price of 9.20 AUD per pack!! However, all of their Cadbury chocolate comes from the UK =(

For lunch Oziel and I headed to Max Burger. They have new self-service terminals for ordering, much like the self check-in terminals at the airport.

To our surprise, no one else used these terminals while we were eating our lunch – preferring the queue. But it turned out that these were even better than we expected:

• There was no queue for the terminals, while the queues for ordering with a cashier were at least six people deep.
• We could order by picture – meaning the cashier didn’t get confused with our Swedish.
• We were given many more options than we knew existed (eg. swap chips out for salad, carrots, potato gratin, etc …)
• After ordering we went to the express counter to pick up our meal and it was almost ready (fast food in Swedish is not known for being fast).

We give the Max self-service terminals the thumbs up.

One of the most common ways to stumble across my blog is by people doing image searches for kangaroo meat. The other picture that gets far too many hits is the one below. I can’t help but think those searching for Swedish sluts are disappointed.

In the past month my site has been translated into Chinese 49 times with Google Translate. 你好.

The most popular post from the archives is on how I fixed the sound problems on my HP Mini 2140 after I installed Ubuntu. Most people find this post through various Google searches, and it has been translated into Spanish 16 times in the last month. This pleases me as none of the people I know who regularly read my my blog have one of these computers.

There are also a lot of searches about people learning to drive in Sweden in English. I hope these people have a more positive experience than I had. But ultimately this ended well.

Far too many people use Internet Explorer (and old version at that). I hope this is some anomoly of the spambots, amd that the rest of you have found your way to Chrome or just something other than Internet Explorer.

And for some reason my honours thesis has hundreds of downloads!? Much more than all of my other publications combined. Of all of the things I have written I would have thought this to be one of the less interesting, if for no other reason than it is the longest, and my Euromicro 2006 paper provides an eight page summary.

Almost all of these messages come from eastern Europe. Many are in Russian. The spambots mainly seem to attack a small number of posts with a couple of messages each day. I have played around with some of these posts, and the spambots still try to comment on posts after they have been removed – so they must be automated in some way.

To date I have been using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, this is why you had to type in some distorted word in when commenting. While it initially worked well, in the past couple of months it has been letting far too much through. I tried changing the captcha words list, but this was to no avail. Further I had complaints that this raised the barrier to posting legitimate comments to far.

Next I turned on Akismet. I should have done this from the beginning, it has stopped all of the spam and let through all of the real comments. But I still wasn’t happy – the spambots were still sending messages for me to moderate.

Next I thought it would be better if I only allowed comments from authenticated users. Given how much I hate passwords and that people complained about the captcha words, I wanted an OAuth solution, like that used by TripIt.

I found and installed Janrain, which allows people to register with a couple of by authenticating against Google, Facebook, Yahoo or WordPress before commenting. This also allowed me to get rid of the captcha word.

In the hours since setting this up I haven’t had any of the expected spam – but only time will tell how good this solution is. I’ll keep you posted.

Sweden uses an Idol style tv-series, entitled Melodifestivalen, to select who will represent the nation in Eurovision. With the most SMS votes, the winner this year was Anna Bergendahl with This is My Life. Unfortunately this performance was not “strong” enough to make it to the Eurovision final.

At the time of publishing Anna had 3500 Facebook fans.

Meanwhile the Facebook fanpage entitled The Swedish guy from Eurovision 2010 was so hot has accumulated 6000 fans. This guy is Eric Saade, and he was the runner-up in Melodifestivalen this year with the disturbingly named Manboy.

This has lead to the obvious conclusion that Eric should have represented Sweden this year. While I think the Manboy tune is far more catchy than Anna’s, I just can’t get over the title.

(Personally I think This is My Life was better than many of the songs that made the Eurovision final.)

I had previously tried to install Ubuntu on my netbook (HP 2140), but gave up on the project when I couldn’t get the built-in microphone to work (I want to use Skype). But given Oziel’s positive experience and a new version of Ubuntu I decided to try again.

This time I am happy to report everything works (and happy with Ubuntu) … although the microphone needed some encouragement, and the network card required a proprietary driver installed.

First the network card hiccup. Upon starting Ubuntu I couldn’t connect to the internet wireless or with a cable (a dire situation). However, I just plugging my HTC Tattoo in via USB and the internet worked instantly. With the help of Google I found that Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller used in a number of Dell and HP notebooks and netbooks requires a propriety driver. To resolve this:

1. Check you have the same driver by typing lspci -nn into a terminal window.
2. Refresh the package list in Synaptic Package Manager.
3. In Hardware Drivers activate the Broadcom STA proprietary wireless driver.
4. Relax, you can now connect to a wireless network.

Now connected to the internet I tried to make a Skype call, but was evidently silent. I tried two things to fix this problem, but am not sure which one fixed the problem. Maybe it was both.

• First try the simpler of the two solutions. Click on the speaker in the top bar and select Sound Preferences …. In the Input tab ensure the microphone is unmuted and that the input volume is at 100%.
• If that doesn’t work, try the following. From within the Synaptic Package Manager install the linux-backports-modules-alsa-lucid-generic package. Restart and repeat the simple solution.

Happy Ubuntu-ing.

But traveling around Sweden I have got used using Google Maps to help me find where I am going. Enter MapDroyd, a free offline map application.

Last week took me to Keele University, near Manchester, in the UK. Knowing I wouldn’t have data on my mobile phone I downloaded an application called MapDroyd. Once downloaded, you can cache maps of different regions to your phone as you desire. For this trip I downloaded the map of the UK.

I was very impressed with MapDroyd. The maps were far more detailed that I expected (yet took less than 90 MB on my phone). It used AGPS to find my location, and oriented the maps to match reality using the compass.

MapDroyd sources its maps from OpenStreetMap, another project I have been wanting to support.

The second application I learnt to love last week was TripIt. This is a web-based application to manage your travels, but has phone-based app siblings. After creating an account on TripIt, you can forward it all of your travel confirmations (flights, hotels, etc …) and it will put together detailed itineraries (excellent when your travels consist of a myriad of web-based bookings). The phone apps allow you to cache this information for offline access while on the run.

Today I discovered Livestation, which gives users live access to BBC World News, Al Jazera and number of other television stations. It looks legal and legitimate, but I am no lawyer. I found it as a recommendation through either This Week in Tech or MacBreak Weekly.

Livestation was recommended as the future of TV. In addition to the traditional TV viewing feature, it also provides notifications (MSN style) if there is breaking news on one of your preferred channels. Also, when you start viewing a channel, you become connected to a chat room of people watching the same channel.

Every now and then I read the comments section on a controversial/provocative post on a blog/YouTube video/newspaper article/etc … And I am always disappointed at the level of “discussion”. It seems that basic comprehension skills are lacking in most people, but this doesn’t stop them sharing their opinion. My favourite ones start, “I didn’t read this article, but [insert bigoted slander here].” (I wonder if the same would happen in academia, as proposed by this PhD Comics cartoon.)

My first impression of the chat feature on Livestation was more positive, but the level of discussion was superficial to the point I wouldn’t bother. But I can see the potential for this kind of reality augmentation, if you can discuss a story with an expert or someone who is at the scene of an incident.

All in all I am very impressed with Livestation. It is available in all the traditional flavours – Linux, Mac and Windows. Now they just need to expand Hulu beyond the US border …

So far I have been very happy. While it is strange going back to Windows XP after OS X, it is not as painful as I expected (except for all the useless bubbles that pop out of the system tray). My intension was to run Ubuntu Remix, but as yet have been unable to get the sound working, which is unacceptable given I want to use my netbook with Skype while travelling. So, given my unexpected happiness with Windows XP, I have decided to stick with it for the time being.

So far I have decked it out with free software, and this has prompted me to get rid of my paid for Mobile Me service.

• Chrome is the best browser for a netbook as it provides the greatest amount of viewing space on the small netbook screen. This is one of the main reasons I am not jumping to the Ubuntu ship (and will probably end up jumping straight to Chome OS when it arrives).
• Like my colleagues, I am becoming more and more dependent on Google applications. My current vices are Google Mail and Google Reader. For new mail notification I am using Google Talk.
• Going back to Windows brings with it the need for anti-virus protection, for which I am using the free Grisoft AVG.
• Given I am primarily using my netbook for work I will want to open Microsoft Office documents, without paying for Microsoft Office. Thus OpenOffice.
• Skype has become my de facto phone service provider. I have it on my mobile, and want to be able to use it when I travel.
• VLC plays every audio and video format known to man. At least every video I’ve ever wanted to listen to or watch.

But the gold star goes to Dropbox, for their ingeniously simple solution for keeping the files in sync between my desktop, work laptop and netbook. Previously I was using Apple’s Mobile Me iDisk, but have found this to be clucky for the price you have to pay, especially when I want to add a Window/Ubuntu machine to the mix. My three day experience of Dropbox showns that when I save a file on my desktop it is up-to-date on my netbook within seconds.

Using Dropbox made me reflect on my Mobile Me account and I have resolved not to renew my subscription. I opened my account when I bought my first Mac in 2006.

• I used iWeb the webhosting feature for my blog until I became frustrated at not being able to update my blog while I was on holiday, so I moved to WordPress.
• Next to fall was email. I have a verement dislike for Lotus Notes, so like many of my colleagues decided to use Google Mail instead. It made email so much easier, so I now use it for my personal email too.
• As I have already said, I gave up my iDisk for Dropbox, because it just works.

Now I only have three Mobile Me services left – photo galleries, calendar and bookmark sharing. As you can see I am moving my photos directly onto this site. I have been thinking about using Google Calendar anyway. And while I am not a big fan will use delicious for bookmarks as paying the Mobile Me fees for this service is ridiculous.

I am still looking for a text editing and firewall software that I am completely happy with. Any suggestions?