drenehtsral's New Writeups

Cajun Popcorn (recipe)

2007-03-22T01:57:57Z

This is a dish similar to popcorn chicken but using shelled crawfish tails instead of the chicken, and adding a little spice to the mix. Basically what you want to do to prepare this dish is as follows. The recipe is very forgiving, so don't worry to much on the details.

Obtain a pound or so of crawfish tails. You can catch them yourself, or you can buy them. They're better fresh, but if they can't be found fresh you can usually get them frozen.
From here you can do one of two things.
- You can dredge them in egg and roll them in a mix of bread crumbs, a little bit of flour, and your mix of seasonings (I like a light dose of blackening seasoning).
- You can mix up a beer batter and dip them into said batter.
Deep fry the tails (I usually shoot for an oil temperature of about 350 or 375 degrees F and cook them until golden).
Let them

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Crawfish (thing)

2007-03-22T01:29:17Z

Not only are these creatures plentiful, they are tasty. There is also a trick to catching them which will save you a considerable amount of time if you intend to go out to the stream and harvest some for a tasty meal. While may people associate them with Creole / Cajun Cuisine and the South in general, I have caught and eaten some tasty ones in Upstate New York so as far as I can tell, anywhere there is running water with some rocky shallows, there will be crawfish (or crayfish, depending on who you ask) for the picking.

First, wear something like hipwaders, or sturdy water shoes as if you do not you are nearly certain to bash your toes on the rocks in the shallow areas where you will be concentrating, and while not generally harmful, the muck at the bottom of creeks can certainly cause a fairly nasty infection if you do get a cut.
They spook easily and with one powerful

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Game Boy Advance development (idea)

2006-03-31T06:37:19Z

A word on Game Boy Advance home brew development:

I recently stumbled across some really cool information about developing home brew games for the GBA, so I got started right away porting a silly little game I had written for Windows some time back, and was immediately hooked. It is like the meeting of two very geeky worlds. First, there is the modern C compiler (I use GCC which builds fairly tight code for the ARM7 CPU). Then there is the old style freedom (complete with thrill and danger) that comes from writing code that will run unaided (and unhindered) by the Operating System because there just isn't one.

The toolset is pretty mature, the compiler builds clean code and optimization doesn't seem to break anything. The documentation is decent, although it does to some extent all rely on the reader having some working knowledge of low level programming. There are…

Genetically modified food (idea)

2005-01-03T01:36:22Z

Another take on GM foods:

As I see it, the real root difficulty with GM foods, as with many other technologies such as computers, medicine, and even the automobile is not just that of trust and accountability on the surface, but also of relative ignorance relating to science in general on the part of the consuming public.

We tend as a society, to specialize. Part of this has been a result of the sudden bloom of information brought by scientific and technological advancement. The expanding foundation of general knowledge required for the average person to have a fairly solid idea of how each technological process he or she uses on a daily basis really works has left many of us in specialized niches, but with vast holes in our understanding of the modern world. So we must trust. I program computers, and have a general interest in most everything, but that doesn't mean I can (for instance) repair an engine or prune a tree with…

BIOS (thing)

2003-07-24T20:02:41Z

The original intent of the BIOS on PC compatible computers was to be a simple hardware abstraction layer to assure the operating system that no matter what strange hardware was installed in a PC there would be some uniform minimum functionality available so that the operating system (usually PC-DOS at the time) and application software could perform basic tasks in a hardware independent manner.

At the time this was a very solid design decision, as it allowed DOS to leave all low-level disk operations to the BIOS. When the IBM AT came out and the standard entry level hard disk controller moved from RLL to IDE there was very little adjustment to be done on the operating system and application levels because the new controllers came with a ROM chip containing a new set of BIOS services that presented the same software interface (or API if you wish) to the OS and apps despite the fact that the computer addressed the new controller through a totally…

HP 48GX (thing)

2003-05-02T04:09:15Z

The HP 48gx series of calculators have gained almost a cult following among geeks of all sorts. I know mine is always within arm's reach of my desk at home =:-) This being said, there are (as with anything) advantages and disadvantages to this line of calculators, and depending on your application, it may or may not be for you.

First, the disadvantages:

It's slow. Compared to a TI-82 it takes maybe twice the time to do any given calculation. Most of the time this doesn't matter, but in the case of solving really hairy equations, plotting complicated equations, or anything like that it can end up mattering.
It's heavy. They designed this thing to be dropped, stepped on, fall off your desk, and so on. The price you pay for it being so solidly built is that you carry the weight around (all 264 grams if you believe HP's spec sheet).
For those who think of formulas only in normal infix notation, the postfix notation, or

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