Lillesvin Networks

Baking bread is something, I think, everyone does on a regular basis. As such it is extremely common. But everyone does it different. And one of the wonders of baking your own bread is not only is it different from the bread being made next door, it is also different from the last bread you made, using mush the same method. They are all unique small pieces of everyday art.

I normally make a bread that is quite wet. Mainly since then it so easy to make. It takes a couple of minutes to prepare and the cleaning is done quick: I make it as wet as I can still just mix the ingredients in a bowl with a fork. Properly that’s also the reason it was the kind that got me stated.

I instantly fell in love with bread baking. It carries so many nice properties. It’s for everyone, it’s a big part of our daily life as we (I do at least) eat it all the time, it’s simple, it’s DIY, it’s krafty and stimulates creativity, it’s smells and taste good. Heck, it’s all most as if fresh baked bread can make any day good — for a while at least.

This one is different. To pre-cut it I had to make the dough more firm, hence less wet. A price I were willing to pay — even though it was not for a pizza — as I wanted to try it out. I know it is simple, but I was quite happy with the result. This one is made out of flour, watter, yeast, sugar (or was it apple gel), olive oil, salt, fromage frais, cardamom and… that’s it I think. No (update), it also contained chunky oatmeal.

A nice side effect to braking the bread rolls like lumps off was that they were so high that it made sense to cut them into three slices. I can’t foresee the implications three-parting a roll can have to the families where they fight over the upper or lower part, but I reckon will freak ‘em in some way or another.

I finally got the stuff moved to another and better web server (very kindly provided by my dad) so hopefully response times will be quite a bit lower than before. I must say, WordPress requiring more than what the old server was capable of delivering was somewhat of a disappointment, but hell, one’s got to get with the times. Standardization over bastardization, glossy gradients over semi-transparency and squircle is the new rounded rectangle!

All this server-raum means a couple of things besides response times. First of all, there may be problems that I haven’t discovered, so let me know if you encounter some. Second, in my experience webmail, ViewVC and stuff has gotten a lot more responsive to the point of actually being usable, so to those affected by that, do enjoy!

Søren Dilling from Politiken has been digging a little deeper [da] and seems to confirm some of my suspicions.

The Medison Celebrity appears to be too good to be true. It’s cheap, comes with Linux preinstalled (Fedora, according to the FAQ) and ships in only 4–6 weeks! We all know, that on the internet, when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.

If we look a little into this, the domain seems to be registered via Surftown A/S and if we look up the server hosting the site, we get:

madsen ~ $ host medisoncelebrity.com
medisoncelebrity.com has address 212.97.132.106
medisoncelebrity.com mail is handled by 10 mail4.surftown.nu.
madsen ~ $ host 212.97.132.106
106.132.97.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ws6.surf-town.net.


The same is the case for medison.se, which is the Medison company web site.

All this seems kinda weird, since Medison states in their FAQ:

Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops?

A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.[Emphasis mine.]

They have their own plants for assembling the laptops, but they don’t have a web/mail server and need hosting from Surftown? Maybe one could argue that it’s all to keep the laptop cheap, but I still think it’s fishy. Besides, their first reason for the low price is ridiculous — not a single company has ever survived on a business model based on charity.

Apart from that, their web sites (medison.se and medisoncelebrity.com) look really, really unprofessional and are really sparse on specific information except that they claim to have been doing some designs of different sorts, but apparently they weren’t able to transfer even the smallest amount of those skills to their web sites. Also, it seems strange that their contact address is in Kent, UK while the company claims to be Swedish, but there may be perfectly good reasons for that, I guess.

Furthermore, it appears that a second Medison exists — also a technology firm, this one is Korean though, but active all over the world. I find it hard to believe that both have existed alongside each other since 1996 (when the Swedish Medison claims to have been founded) without any legal clashes about the name and one of them being forced to take another name.

On top of it all, it seems really, really odd, that this completely obscure Swedish company all of a sudden offers some of the cheapest laptops in the world.

However, should this turn out to be true, then it’s absolutely great and I’d definitely recommend it to a lot of people. Let me know if you have any experience (good or bad) with them.

I’ve long been wondering how to make good a bean salad. It’s not that i haven’t had any good bean salad ever. I’ve had plenty, but never seamed to be able to redo them. Mostly the good yummy bean salads have been relying on two things; 1) a well thought out combination of the stuff in the salad to got with the beans and 2) a really yummy dressing.

With respect to the first issue. It’s not that hard, I think, to come up with nice things too add to the beans. And something has to be added, since while beans, like for instance kidney beans, are really yummy, they don’t top the foods single chart. – They need company to do what they do best.

Hence the second issue is my problem. I really do not make good dressings. Hence i don’t make good bean salads.

The other day though, I think, I made a slight cracked in the ice. What I did was kind of combining 1) and 2) and served the salad with basil pancakes. This is what it looked like:

First the pancakes. Flour, water, mortared fresh basils, olive oil and salt was steered together. Obviously fired on hot pan.

The bean salad. Rugula (I know it so yesteryear) with kidney beans on top was put in a bowl. Squeezed a lemon over it. The beans was soaked over night and boiled plain — that is only with salt and no herbs.

In the mean while spring onion, fresh chili and bell pepper [0] was cooked in the oven with salt, freshly grind black pepper and plenty of olive oil for as long as possible at low heat (ca. 100 degrees celsius). To shorten the wait increase the heat.

This was the “trick” that combined 1) and 2) to add nice stuff and get a dressing in one go. This was added on top of the beans, while making very sure to get all the yummy grease out as-well. Ready to serve vegan mid day meal.