In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which there is a quick update on an old site category…
The old Soldier category has been here since I launched this site back when I used to play a lot more airsoft. The only real post about Airsoft in the category was form a Stag Do I went to at the start of my PhD. Great fun, but sadly one of the last times I airsofted.
While I still enjoy airsofting I don’t do it regularly enough to warrant having a category for it. The category is in the website name so I do want to reuse it. How to solve such a conundrum? Simple! As avid listeners to The AstraCast will know I have been getting back into the hobby. So from now on Soldier will be a place to store all my posts about wargaming. I have a painting guide I’m putting together at the moment and hopefully some stories of actual games to come later in the month!
Tom Out!
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
Remote interviews are a fact of life for every podcaster, and in today’s era of social distancing, more so than ever. Since you rarely get the chance at an interview do-over, nailing down your remote recording workflow is essential. We’ll show you how to prepare for and record a remote interview, so you get it right the first time — with some additional tips along the way to make sure all your bases are covered.
In which I need to slightly circumvent the normal installation…
For work purposes I’m currently dual booting into Linux. There will be a post about the reasons why at some point soon. Fedora 32 is excellent but I have found some occasional issues where software I need to install doesn’t quite work out of the box. MATLAB was one such program so here’s how to get it working.
In which I bake a traditional recipe with a twist that makes it faster…
Prep time: 35 minutes (only 5 minutes with pre-bought pastry) Cook Time: 30 minutes.
Much as I adore a traditional treacle tart I often find it takes a little longer to make than I’d like. I decided to speed it up a bit with some inspiration from my mother’s quick treacle tart recipe and one of my other favourite desserts: flapjacks.
90 g butter (softened)
65 g caster sugar
3 egg yolks
200 g plain flour
200 g porridge oats
115 g butter
115 g soft brown sugar
2 tbsp & 2 tsp golden syrup
Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C for a fan oven).
To make the pastry: cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl.
Add the egg yolks one at a time while beating into the creamed sugar.
Mix in the flour to make a ball of dough and then knead until it sticks together.
Chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before using.
Once the pastry is ready, roll it out and make sure it will fit into a tart dish.
Grease the dish then place the pastry into it.
Blind bake the pastry for 10-15 minutes. While you are waiting for that you can move on to the filling.
To make the filling: heat the golden syrup, sugar and butter in a saucepan until they melt together.
Remove from the heat and stir in the oats.
Combining: pour the oat mixture into the pastry case.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until the filling is bubbling.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool a little before serving.
Enjoy hot and ideally with a scoop of ice cream or clotted cream.
To make this recipe vegan just switch the pastry for vegan pastry (you’ll find most pastry in your supermarket is vegan these days). Then, for the filling, just make my Vegan Flapjack recipe instead (you’ll need about 2/3rds of the recipe).
In which I discuss a simple, handy knot...
Someone suggested in passing it would be cool if I nerded out about knots because I am a Scout so here we go. My first post of an unspecified amount about the topic of knots.
Name: reef knot
Also known as: square knot
Useful for: joining two ends of rope
Knot style: jamming, binding
The reef knot is one of the simplest and oldest knots. It is very versatile and probably one of the first knots most people will learn. It is certainly the first knot I remember being taught in Scouting.
To make this knot you take two ends of rope and go "over-under then under-over"*, as I was taught, before pulling taught. The knot tightens easily and it is a jamming knot so it only gets tighter as you pull on it. However, it is not a good knot for binding in actuality because the ends of the rope need to be matched or it can slip, defeating the point of the knot. If you pull one end away from the knot it can also rotate (known as capsizing) which again, defeats the point of the knot.
It is an excellent knot for teaching some basic knot skills and for quickly tying two things together. I can't stress enough that it should not be used for anything where a life may be on the line for the limitations mentioned above.
Tom out!
*Also formulated as "right over left then left over right".
The Reef Knot used under CC by SA 3.0
In which I discuss mapping a whole new worrrld ♪♫♬...
Generally I like to start a campaign with the world still in my head and get a feel for it before setting locations in stone. There comes a time, however, when your players need to leave their starting locations and you have to stop being wishy-washy about how long travel takes. That is when a map is called for. This is a guide on how to generate the kind of map I like using Photoshop and some select tools.
In which I set my goals for the year, a little late
Fans of Cortex (a podcast from CGP Grey and Myke Hurley) will be aware of the concept of yearly themes. This year they were talking about the concept of the Year of Me where you take stock and refocus on things that matter to you. Since this is my first year doing such a theme I feel that I will take this in its purest form: I'm approaching 30 so is my life headed in the direction I want?
In which I post a reference, mostly for myself, on how to update my chosen media server...
I'm not going to cover how to install Plex on FreeNAS as it is very easy using the plugins system explained in the docs.[1]
Upgrading, however, is a different issue. While the plugin does get updates that will preserve your data they are often quite behind the release schedule of the Plex team. Also I have had issues with some of my Plex plugins (like Trakt.tv) after using this upgrade method. In the past I have tried a hodgepodge of different methods to acheive it but now the most reliable method is using the PMS Updater script.[2]
In which I get some download tracking for my podcasts...
If you listen to podcasts you won't be surprised to hear adverts for Squarespace's hosting platform. It's also what this website and my associated podcasts run on.[1][2][3] The inbuilt analytics are pretty decent but when it comes to RSS feeds for podcasts they suffer from all the limitations that tracking RSS has.[4]
Podtrac is a service that aims to fix this.[5] Unfortunately it used to be a massive faff to get it working with Squarespace.[6] Fortunately following the latest update to the platform it is now really easy.
In which I review the year that was...
It's been a pretty exciting year for me. I've started two podcasts, changed jobs and started reviewing food and drink for Luxury London. Less travel in my new job means that I've been able to spend more of my spare time on my side projects. All in all that's lead to:
And I'm hoping there will be many more in 2018.
In which I summarise November and December...
Due to moving house and the festive period I've been a little less productive the last two months but here's the digest.
You can get the digest only RSS here: https://www.tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com/blog?format=rss&category=Digest
In which I update an old recipe...
I usually make a Christmas Cake around this time of year to take to work.[1] As I now have vegan colleagues I decided to look into making it safe for them to eat. Luckily this is quite easy to achieve with a stodgy cake like this one.
In which I find out what I do all the time...again...
N.B.: I've written this post a bit later than intended. I now have a new job as a developer and will post about that after about 6 months.
Following on from my last post I delve deeper into the types of work I was doing in my previous job and my side projects.
