Friday, June 1, 2007

Icecream Base

  • 1 cup full cream milk
  • 1 cup cream
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 2 whole eggs
  1. Whisk together eggs and sugar until well-combined and fluffy.
  2. Heat the milk until not-quite boiling, then stir into the egg and sugar.
  3. Stir the mixture over low heat until it thickens slightly (or coats the back of a spoon), custard style. I do this in a Pyrex bowl over a saucepan of boiling water.
  4. Refrigerate until cold, then stir in the cream.
  5. Place the mixture in your icecream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions.
Depending on what you're adding to the mixture, add less milk and cream.

I like this recipe because it doesn't involve large amounts of egg. In my icecream maker, the end product is quite soft.

I often make this with whole 300mL cartons of milk and cream. The custard takes a little longer to thicken, but otherwise I haven't encountered any problems with it.

This recipe was inspired by the proportions at Think Quest, however I like to cook my eggs a little more than that recipe.

WoW Macros

These are mostly for my own benefit, in case I'm playing on my laptop and need my macros.

Get Ready
#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:ctrl] Conjure Water; [modifier:alt] conjure food; [modifier:shift] conjure mana emerald
/castsequence [nomodifier] reset=60 conjure water, conjure water, conjure mana emerald, conjure food, conjure food, evocation

This is a one-button food/water/gem macro. If you hold down ctrl while clicking it casts, if you hold down alt it casts food, with shift it casts mana emeralt (you'll want to change that if your spell is different).
If you don't hold down a modifier, it's a cast-sequence of water, water (makes 20), mana emerald, food, food (makes 20), and evocation. It will reset after a minute.

Mount
#showtooltip
/use [modifier:shift] Hearthstone; [modifier:alt] Swift Palomino; [flyable] Swift Red Gryphon; Swift Palomino

This will cast my (epic) flying mount if I'm in a place I can use it (ie. Outland), otherwise it will cast my ground mount. If you hold down shift it will cast Hearthstone, and alt overrides to the horse.

Polymacro
#showtooltip
/focus [target=focus, noexists]
/focus [target=focus, dead]
/focus [modifier:shift]
/s Polymorphing >%f<! Watch for it!
/castrandom [target=focus] Polymorph: Pig, Polymorph

This will focus my current target if my focus is dead or doesn't exist or if I hold down shift while clicking. It then makes an announcement of what I'm doing, and polymorphs my focus.

Ice Block
#showtooltip
/me is now a block of ice! Watch for disgruntled mobs!
/cast Ice Block

I like to let people know when I do this because it will wipe my aggro. My paladin companion likes it when we're duoing instances because she knows she can shield herself and not worry about me.

THE EYE
/target eye
/cast Fire Blast

If you've ever done undead Stratholme, this is for you. Usually takes out the Eye in one shot.

GTK Themes

I was recently alarmed to discover that my preferred IM client, Gaim, had been renamed to Pidgin and updated and nobody had told me. So I installed the new version and was suitably disoriented by the removal of protocol-specific icons. I see from their website that this is part of their approach to transparency of multi-protocol IM.

At any rate, I found myself somewhat dissatisfied with the default GTK skins. So to save anybody else the Googling and hunting I went through here's how you do it on Windows:
  • You can download new themes for GTK from here: http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/
  • Unzip the theme you have chosen and copy it to C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\share\themes
  • Select the theme using the GTK+ Theme Selector that was probably added to your Start Menu.