Ingredients

• Chicken breast fillets or tenderloins
• 2 short cut bacon rashers
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 6 drops Tabasco sauce
• 1 tablespoon Soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 Tomato
• Lettuce
• Parmesan, shaved
• Buns
• Salsa (optional)

Steps

1. Heat a griddle and a fry pan.
2. Open out the chicken breasts and remove any fat.
3. Mix mustard, Tabasco, garlic and soy sauce in a bowl.
4. Dip the chicken into the sauce and coat well.
5. Place the chicken on the griddle and cook 8-10 minutes on each side.
6. While the chicken is cooking, add oil to the fry pan and cook the bacon to desired crispiness.
7. Cut open the buns and spread a small amount of salsa on the top slice.
8. To each bun add bacon, chicken, shaved parmesan, sliced tomato and lettuce.

The Result

Photo and bun-cutting by the great Sarah Ward. Serve with a cosmopolitan for the girls or a lager for the blokes.

Dear little lad
Here's the story of my life
I lived on the moon
I lived on the moon
Grey flying snakes along
Mountains of destiny while
The three tailed moneys
Were drawing the stars
Light from the Sun and I
Hide myself on the dark side, alone
I've run so far
To find my way
Then I dream again.. alone

Dear little boy, listen
To voices of your soul
It showed you the way of
Silence and peace
Follow your thoughts and fly
Choosing all the things that you desire
Giant waves, fireflies
Your dream will be your only shell
Your secrets, your hiding place, my son
Don't let them try
To crush your brain
Let you go far
My son

kwoon-music.com

We were a family. How'd it break up and come apart, so that now we're turned against each other? Each standing in the other's light. How'd we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What's keepin' us from reaching out, touching the glory?

There is hope, however. It's not immediately obvious, but Fedora does have a few Gnome shell themes and extensions already packaged and ready to install. Best of all, is a great little app called "Gnome Tweak Tool" which allows you to fiddle with many different aspects of your Gnome desktop.

Gnome shell themes

At the time of writing, I found 5 extra themes already packaged, so I just installed them all. [ben@zim ~]$ su
[root@zim ben]# yum install gnome-shell-theme*

Gnome shell extensions

There are quite a few extensions available, so rather than installing them all and disabling the ones I don't use (a lot), I listed them all and installed individually. [ben@zim ~]$ su
[root@zim ben]# yum list gnome-shell-extension*
[root@zim ben]# yum install gnome-shell-extension-theme-selector gnome-shell-extensions-places-menu gnome-shell-extensions-native-window-placement gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu gnome-shell-extension-remove-accessibility-icon

Now hit Alt+F2, and run r (yes, just the letter 'r'). This will reload the Gnome shell, and also load your new extensions. If you installed gnome-shell-extension-theme-selector, go to 'Activities' and you'll find a new tab called 'Themes', allowing you to switch your shell theme on the fly.

Gnome Tweak Tool

It's extremely simple to install and use: [ben@zim ~]$ su
[root@zim ben]# yum install gnome-tweak-tool

Just load it up from your applications menu (it should be called 'Tweak Advanced Settings') and have a look around, all the settings are fairly straight-forward. After tweaking some settings, changing the window border theme and background, my netbooks desktop now looks even better (in my humble opinion, of course :).

Showing off Google Chrome, new themes and the alternate status menu.

The 'activities' menu, showing favourites dock, window selector and workspace selector.

Step 1: Update your kernel

As root, run "yum update kernel" and reboot. [ben@clamps ~]$ su
[root@clamps ~]$ yum update kernel
[root@clamps ~]$ reboot


Step 2: Install the drivers

In this example, I'm using packaged drivers from the ATrpms repository. If you'd prefer to use the packages from RPM Fusion, try this HOWTO instead.

Again we'll need root access to create a .repo file for ATrpms. [ben@clamps ~]$ su
[root@clamps ~]$ vi /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo

Add the text below (press i, then paste/type) and save (press Esc then :wq). [atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1


Finally, install the drivers [root@clamps ~]$ yum install nvidia-graphics275.09.07 nvidia-graphics275.09.07-libs nvidia-graphics275.09.07-kmdl-`uname -r` Please note: the latest driver version at the time of writing was 275.09.07 - you may need to go to ATrpms to find the latest version.

Step 3: Disable the nouveau drivers

Blacklisting the nouveau kernel module in modprobe should be taken care of by the previous step, but that isn't enough to stop it from loading (iknowright!). We'll also need to add the parameters rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0 to the kernel in /boot/grub/grub.conf. [root@clamps ~]$ vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

Modify the kernel row so that the new parameters are added near the end: title Fedora (2.6.xx.x-xx.fc15.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.xx.x-xx.fc15.i686 [...snip...] rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0 quiet
initrd /initramfs-2.6.xx.x-xx.fc15.i686.img


Step 4: Reboot and enjoy

You should now be able to reboot into a working desktop, albiet without the fancy graphical boot screen. If you are using a laptop, it's quite likely you will see a substantial increase in battery life - my netbook now gets 4 hours on a full charge, compared to less than 3 hours using the nouveau drivers.

First off, you will need to add or edit a Mobile Broadband connection. To do that you need to get to the "Network Connections" dialog; go to System->Preferences->Network Connections or right click your NetworkManager icon and go to "Edit Connections..." - this will vary depending on your distro. Once there, select the "Mobile Broadband" tab and edit or create a connection named "Virgin Mobile Broadband".

Now onto the settings:

Mobile Broadband tab

• Number: *99#
• APN: VirginBroadband

PPP Settings tab

• Allowed auth methods: Select PAP only

IPv4 Settings tab

• Method: Automatic (PPP)

The blog software itself is something I cooked up to get familiar with Zend Framework, a fantastic (albeit bloated) MVC framework for PHP. The server setup is simple, with one Linode host serving the PHP, and static content shared with a Slicehost node via round-robin DNS. That's way overkill for the amount of traffic I'll get, but hey, you never know right?