Required Resources

9/8 cups lukewarm water
1 cup unbleached white bread flour
3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
2 tablespoons gluten flour
3/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 cup lukewarm milk
Cooking lube (spray oil works well good)

Apparatus

Griddle or frying pan with a nice flat bottom
Crumpet rings, diameter ~3.5″ (or Rosti rings or similar)
Two forks with narrow inter-tine distance
Wire cooling rack

Method

Batter Prep:

Warm 9/8 cup of water in a jug to about 110 F. Add one teaspoon dried yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar, stand in a warm place for ~10 minutes until a frothy head has formed.

Into a large mixing bowl, sift: 1 cup unbleached white bread flour, 3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour, 2 tablespoons of gluten flour and 3/4 teaspoon cream of tartar.

Pour the yeast mixture into the flour and beat for four minutes. The result should be a thick, smooth batter.

Cover the bowl with a teatowel and let it stand in a warm spot until the batter rises and then falls, (about 1 hour).

Add 3/4 teaspoon salt and beat the batter for about 1 minute. Then cover the bowl and let stand in a warm spot for 15 to 20 minutes, so the batter can rest.

Dissolve 1/2 teaspoon baking soda in 1/3 cup lukewarm milk, and then gently stir into the batter.

GO TO Test Crumpet.

Test Crumpet:

Grease up a crumpet ring and the frying pan and put over a moderate heat for a few miutes. The temperature should be just before the smoke point for cooking spray.

Pour ~1/3″ depth of batter into the crumpet ring. If the temerature is correct it should sizzle just a little.

If the batter if too thin it will run ooze out from under the crumpet ring. If this happens, GO TO “Thicken The Batter”.

As the batter cooks, bubbles should form and rise to the surface. As the batter firms, the bubbles form the holes in the crumpet. The batter will firm from the outside of the crumpet towards the middle, which should take between three and five minutes. When the middle is firm, use the forks to remove the crumpet ring, and turn the crumpet over. If holes did not form properly, the batter might be too thick. GO TO “Thin The Batter”.

Cook the inverted crumpet until the holey side is chestnut brown, and then place on a cooking rack. GO TO “Cook Batch”.

Thicken The Batter:

Work a little all-purpose flour in to the batter, then GO TO “Test Crumpet”.

Thin The Batter:

Add a tablespoon of lukewarm water to the batter and gently mix. GO TO “Test Crumpet”.

Cook Batch:

Grease up all the crumpet rings you have / can fit in your pan. Heat and then pour 1.3″ depth batter into each ring. Cook until firm in the centre, invert and cook until chestnut brown. Place on cooling rack.

IF (batter not exhausted) GO TO Cook Batch ELSE GO TO Eat Crumpets.

Eat Crumpets:

This recipe creates moist, doughy crumpets. Before eating, the should be well toasted and liberally buttered.

Optimal toasting is done under the grill (broil mode of oven) on a medium temperature: cook underside first until it’s slightly crispy to the touch, invert and toast the top until it browns a little.

Alternatively, crumpets may be toasted in an electric toaster, toasted twice for a short-ish time with a minute or two’s cool-down time between toastings. This will help reduce the moisture content of the crumpet. If it’s still all doughy in the middle, more toasting is required.

When toasted, apply a big slab of salted butter. Let this soak into the holes in the crumpet, and try not to think of that glorious saturated deliciousness clogging up your arteries.

Insert into primary facehole.

Credits

Adapted from this recipe.

"tabulate" in action

*edit* Stuff tools (including tabulate) are now available on github.

*edit* I thought there must be some way to do this with an existing command line tool, and so there is as @krazylegz pointed out:

column -t

However, tabulate still has some use, with the addition of the –comment option which lets the tabulation ignore lines which match some regular expression.

However, the process is not so straightforward because the GIMP development code only builds against recent development snapshots of other projects: GLIB, GTK, Pango, GDK Pixbuf, GEGL and BABL.

The process was pretty fiddly, so I ended up writing a script to do all the annoying stuff. With a bit of luck it should just be a matter of firing it off, typing in your sudo password (to install build dependencies), and waiting for a while.

1. Make a directory called something like gimp-src in your HOME directory.
2. Download and unzip build_gimp_dev.zip in the directory you made
3. Edit the build_gimp_dev.sh file and change the TARGET_PATH to where you want to install the various built files to.  Make sure you have write access to the TARGET_PATH directory.
4. Open a shell and go to the directory where build_gimp_dev.sh is located.  Run it like this:

./build_gimp_dev.sh all

Enjoy

On 2011-10-15, a contingent of artists from The Engagement Party, and six intrepid Nottinghack members made a bit of a nerd pilgrimage to Southwold to see The Under The Pier Show and meet up with Tim again.   Here are some pics and such.

Mouse Cottage

Nutters of Southwold

Southwold Pier

Southwold Pier

The Under The Pier Show

The Disgusting Spectacle

Mobility Masterclass

Micro Break

Whack a Banker

Pet or Meat

Quick Fit

Fly Drive

Rent-a-dogPsychoanalysis

Chiropodist

Doctor

Execution

The Booth of Truth

Controls for MyNuke

Test Your Nerve

Defacing some currency

Found this on the side of the pier

The Astronaut's Caravan

Boarding the Astronaut's Caravan

The Astronaut's Caravan going for a spin

Inside the Astronaut's Caravan

Inside the Astronaut's Caravan

TIm's Yard

Nice Watch

Sculpture at Tim's

Tim shows off his workshop

Dominic playing with TIm's Plasma Cutter

David playing with TIm's Plasma Cutter

Nottinghack nerd and Tim Hunkin (looking a bit severe)

Michael Faraday

The event was absolutely heaving all day – a lot of sweaty excited and eventually very tired geeks were at Brighton Dome. I saw some really amazing things there, and met loads of interesting and talented makers.

I spent quite a lot of the day just wandering around gawping at the crazy stuff people had brought along with them.  Managed to get some (but not nearly enough!) pictures – a selection of which are at the end of this post. I was absolutely astonished to find a working BBC Doomsday laser disc system at the Computer Museum stand.  I thought they were all totally dead, but apparently there are still a few working systems around.  I also managed to squeeze in a little Elite playing time on an original BBC micro. I had to quit before I managed to trade enough to get a docking computer, or I would have been there all day.

Dominic, David and I went on a little excursion to the beach in the middle of the day to play with David’s third person camera rig (video should be online soon),which was a lot of fun, and attracted quite a bit of attention on the form of staring tourists and quizzical expressions.  :)

The afternoon was just as busy as the morning. I spent a bit more time at the Nottinghack table, mostly being unable to answer questions about the rep rap, and referring people to Matt.

I was really struck by how engaged the public were at the event. Several of the people I spoke to expressed sentiments along the lines of “this is what is missing in education” – at least three separate people mentioning the recent comments by Google’s Eric Schmidt regarding the failure of the education system in the UK to teach the right stuff regarding technology. Maybe the Maker movement can help to fix that – re-create another generation like the bubble of programmers who grew up on the 8 bit machines before consoles stole away the ability to do real programming without needing special kit.

After everything was packed away at the end of the day, we went over to Build Brighton with some of the HAC Manchester and Brighton Build people.  We had a beer, flew some copters and then headed out into Brighton for a bite to eat.  We wound up at The Brunswick in Hove for the after party, saw some interesting music performed and generally had a jolly good time.

It was really great to meet up with hackers from round the UK.  I plan to be back in Brighton soon, and can’t wait to see the new space Build Brighton are going to move to [*edit* have moved to.  Good lord hackers don't hang around.]

Nottinghack's table

Darlek in the entrance

View of the main halll

Another large robot

Another view of the main hall from above

One of my favourite things at the faire

The orrery hat

Afterparty entertainment

To this end Dominic and I embarked on a little screen printing for next week.

This last one was my effort.  Not bad, although there are a few small splotches which shouldn’t be there, and a bit of a missing but.  However I kind of like this imperfection – makes it unique and interesting looking.

Well, he tried one, decided crumpets are not for him. Good, all the more for me.

The event was well attended, and seemed to go off  without and serious hitches. Nothing new to anyone who has seen his talks before, but it was interesting to meet the man. Wasn’t quite sure how to suggest that he try crumpets, but Dominic saved the day by noting that he was looking for someone to help man the book selling thing. I pounced, and got my photo in return for flogging some books for the FSF.  :-)

Although I find myself in agreement with Stallman on many of his points, I actually found listening to him delivering them in person was something of a turn-off. Perhaps I’ve listened to too many similar talks on podcasts over the years and the repetition has taken the shine off. I dunno. Not sure what I expected really – certainly not some sort of variety show, but… meh.

The inevitable insistence about adding the GNU to Linux was tedious and way too long – if he is trying to make sure credit is given where it is due on behalf of himself and his colleagues who have spent a lot of time and effort on Free Software, then that’s all well and good.  However a quick, cheerful mention would be far more persuasive than laboring the point so much.

One final note – saying a “thank you” for offering to man the book sales and buying him a pizza would have been nice, and would have been free as in beer too. Maybe he was making a statement about having the Freedom to be rude. Still he was a good sport about the crumpet, so there is that.