Folding@Home

I've recently started running Folding@Home. This project (out of Stanford) has been around for a number of years, and apparently they're still going strong! They simulate the way that proteins fold (or assemble themselves t) in order to investigate diseases that occur when the proteins don't fold correctly. Check out their link for more info.

Anyways, I've got these computers, so why not do something good with them while I'm not using them! Here are my Stats!

pyCropper

Occasionally, I need to crop some images. I suspect this happens to a lot of people, and they simply use their favorite photo editor to perform the task. For a few images, this works just fine. Plenty of people have Photoshop, the Gimp, or even iPhoto.

This past weekend, however, I found myself needing to crop about 1000 images, and I need to do it quickly. This was more than my machine could load into the Gimp at once. Even loading 100 at a time was a bit slow for me. So I set out to find some simple tool that would let me JUST crop images. I found a few nifty web-based tools (picresize.com and resize.it) that would allow me to easily crop ONE image... but that's not really what I needed.

So, when I couldn't find what I needed, I wrote my own, and it's now available under the GPLv3.

If you find yourself needing to crop a large number of images, head on over to the pyCropper page. Enjoy!

A Go at California Rolls

Well, I've tried to make some California rolls. I think they turned out OK. Not the prettiest rolls, but they tasted good... maybe I shouldn't have eaten them all, though!





These were made with the following ingredients:

• 1 cup of rice. (most recipes call for short grain rice, but I used long grain rice)
• 1Tbsp of Rice vinegar
• dash of salt
• Nori
• Carrots
• Cucumber
• Imitation crab meat (or real crab meat if you have it)
• 1 Avacado

Boil 1 and 3/4 cups of water and salt. Once the water has come to a boil, add the rice, cover, and reduce to a simmer for 15 minutes. While simmering, julienne (or slice very thinly) carrots and cucumber. Chop crabmeat.

Once rice has finished, mix in the rice vinegar, and let cool for 10 minutes. Spread a thin layer of rice on the Nori, and top the rice with a small amount of carrots, cucumber, and crab, then roll tightly. Slice into thin pieces!

Enjoy with wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger!