Bitterjug’s blog

I’m feeling delighted that someone has asked me for my veggie chili recipe. When I turned veggie, back in ‘87, chili was one off the last things to go, because I couldn’t build the flavor I wanted… Until I discovered the secret ingredient (iled and drained, or user tinned, probably 2 tins)
2 tins chopped tomatoes
Black olives with stones removed, about  a cup full, this is the magic ingredient.

Chili powder
Cloves
Caraway seeds
Nutmeg

Dried soya mince

Two tablespoons of Marmite
Three tablespoons of dark soy sauce

Fry garlic and onions in olive oil.
Add red pepper and spices.

Two tablespoons of Marmite
Three tablespoons of dark soy sauce

Fry garlic and onions in olive oil.
Add red pepper and spices. Cover and braze, turn occasionally to prevent burning.
Meanwhile boil kettle and pour over soy sauce, and Marmite. Add soya mince and leave to hydrate.
Add kidney beans, olives and tomatoes; simmer to reduce until tomato juice is thick.
Add the soy mince and stir lightly so as not to spoil its texture.
Bring to back to boil and you’re done.

As earlier posts suggest, there have been no cartoons here for a while because such spare time as I can steal these days has been absorbed by the mail project. Thunderbird just can’t hack my work email any more. It’s search functionality is broken (why is there separate quick search and find in messages?) and the dark thunderclouds of compiz fall upon its face if I ask it to find some useful or important message.
Switching to Mutt (actually Mutt-KZ — with built-in support for Notmuch) was more work than I expected. There isn’t just one program but a whole constellation. Most have their own configuration files; tweaking those is a lifetime’s work.
Today I compiled Notmuch 0.15.1 from source and then recompiled Mutt-kz to use the new version of libnotmuch. I don’t enjoy building source packages. Fortunately it’s easy (./configure; make; make install) and the results are rewarding.
Notmuch searches my mail very fast and with a convenient command-line interface. Mutt displays the results and lets me live in a world of vim-like key bindings and dark console colours. The new version of notmuch allows convenient date searches, e.g.: “date:last-week..”, and I’m starting to play with custom tags.
Mail is coming coming under control. What’s this button next to the keyboard? Oh, my laptop has a stylus…

Today I sent an email from Mutt (well Mutt-kz actually), which means from msmtp (well msmtp-gnome, actually). Read the rest of this entry »

I just put my dotfiles into github. Read the rest of this entry »