When I was studying abroad in Beijing during the Fall of 2006, a couple of my fun-loving friends and I were approached by the Peking University HipHop club to join them. Long story short, we ended up starting our own branch of the club… and then actually doing a performance in a club. The semester after I left that branch ended up performing with a Chinese HipHop star during a TV performance.

Here is a short clip from the night at the club, a longer more complete version will follow soon once I get the time to edit it. I’m in the red and white jacket:

Go Beijingrs!

This post can’t really do the multitouch soundtrack composition project justice because you can’t play with it yourself. Trust me though, it was a blast to create and a blast to play with.

For my CSCI 588 Design of User Interfaces course we were challenged to create a new user interface for anything we wanted. Along the way we had to do standard software project management tasks like come up with requirements, create prototypes and document our progress - but we also did a slew of user-centered activities like user and task analysis, color analysis, dialogue analysis and the like.

The end result was arguably the best project of the course and helped to land me an A+. The really wonderful thing about the whole experience however, was that it really brought me back to my roots in computer science. Way back when, Dr. David Berque took me in as a lowly high school student and began to teach me the principles of programming and computer software. Dave’s main interest lies in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and I was soon working on an interactive educational project dubbed DEBBIE which eventually became the commercial software DyKnow which has won numerous excellence in educational technology awards. I had recently asked Dave to recommend some HCI books and had thoroughly enjoyed the classic Design of Everyday Things by David Norman. Suffice to say, it was a nice change from “traditional” computer science topics like Operating Systems, Databases and even Software Engineering.

Besides being interesting and challenging, I really had fun throughout the entire project - even when nothing was working - which means that I would probably really enjoy doing this type of work and thinking about these types of problems for a living… always good to know.

The inspiration for the project came from some limited exposure I had to Microsoft Surface while working there during the summer of 2007 and my neighbor Jangwoo Kim who is a professional soundtrack composer. It seemed like a logical pairing given the complexity and variety of physical and virtual interfaces used to create soundtracks. We had a chance to consolidate and simply many hardware and software devices into one system while leveraging the multitouch aspect to maintain the intuitive interaction style of the physical devices like knobs, sliders, etc. that traditional software programs struggle with via the mouse.

So without further ado, I’ll give you two things: a video of our prototype and a zip file containing most of the documentation and analysis we did along with the source code for the project. There’s a lot of good information in there, and if there is anything that anyone would like me to a elaborate upon, please feel free to ask.

Here is the documentation and source code for the project (which was originally based on the MultiKey Demo by cerupCat).

As a side note, you can often find me hanging out in the IRC chatroom #nuigroup on irc.freenode.net. NUIGroup are the people behind the touchlib library used to create this project. I also plan on posting an Instructable on the whole project soon, so stay tuned.

If you’ve ever had a brisket or roast where the meat literally melts on your tongue you’ll know why that even though a good roast can take 3-5 hours, it’s more than worth it.

This recipe is an adaptation of a few different recipes I’ve tried over the years that’s really delicious and really flexible. Because of YouTube policies I had to make it into a 3 part series, and by the time you finish watching you’ll have the roast in the oven and it’ll be ready to go. Alternatively, you can skip below to the recipe to get a feel for what’s involved.

Savory Pot Roast Part 1

Savory Pot Roast Part 2

Savory Pot Roast Part 3

Recipe

Ingredients

• one large rump roast or similar piece of meat (a bottom layer of fat is good)
• 6 cloves garlic
• 4 tbsp + 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp rosemary, minced (fresh is better but jar is ok)
• 3 large or 5 medium potatoes
• 2 regular cans of stewed or crushed tomatoes
• 2 medium onions
• 2 beef or vegetable bullion cubes or equivalent broth
• 2 1/4 cups of water (alternative: 2 cups of red wine)
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• 1/3 cup worchestire sauce
• seasoning salt and pepper (optional: note if you add more than one of the following you might need to allow for more liquid to cook with)
• 3 large stalks celery, chopped
• 3 large peeled carrots, chopped
• large handful of okra

Directions

1. Peel and mince garlic, place in bowl. Using spoon, mash 1 tbsp salt together with garlic, add rosemary and mash some more until relatively smashed and salt seems mostly absorbed. Add in 4 tbsp olive oil, stir and set aside.
2. Season all sides of meat with seasoning salt and pepper. Then in a large pot that you’ll be cooking the whole dish in, add the second 4 tbsp olive oil and fry most sides of the meat until a brown crust is formed.
3. In the meantime, wash and cut potatoes into 1 inch square chunks (peel if desired) and peel and cut onions into quarters. If you’re adding any other vegetables, prepare them now as well.
4. Once meat is browned, add in all desired vegetables to cooking pan. Add in 2 1/4 cups water, crushed bullion cubes (or equivalent broth or red wine), the canned tomatoes, worchestire sauce and ketchup (even though I forget to add the ketchup until halfway through in the video). Spoon the garlic/rosemary mixture on top of the meat and place bay leaves around sides.
5. Bake at 350 degrees for 3-5 hours depending on the amount of vegetables and the size of the meat. Check ever hour or so and either turn or baste meat. You’ll know it’s done when a fork very easily slips in and out of the meat.
6. After the meat is done cooking, remove pot from oven and remove meat to rest. In the meantime, remove vegetables (as well as you can) to separate dish. Place pot with juices only on stove and boil until sauce is reduced to your liking, usually about half.
7. While sauce is reducing, after letting meat rest for 3-5 minutes, slice into desired size chunks - the meat should come apart easily. Afterwards, remove sauce and pot from heat, add in meat, stir to coat, add in vegetables and stir to mix.

It really isn’t that complicated and it’s totally worth it. Make sure you start making this dish before you’re hungry however because the smell coming from the oven for 3 hours is going to torment you if you’re starving!

If you come up with any awesome variations on this recipe, things to do with the leftovers or an even better delectable pot roast recipe please let me know, I love to try new things!

You know that delicious Southwest sauce you get at some restaurants served up with things like seasoned fries, baja chalupas or Subway sandwiches?

If you love it as much as I do, you’ll be happy to know the To Taste crew (ie. my girlfriend and I) have done some investigation for you and the results are delectable. Here’s 5 new ways to serve up this delicious sauce:

1. mix it in with shredded chicken, corn and black or kidney beans and eat with tortilla chips or inside a pita
2. mix it in with tuna instead of the standard mayo and relish fare
3. use it as a dipper for celery and carrots
4. toss it in a salad (especially with spinach)
5. serve it up with some hot Texas-style eggrolls - it was made for this dish

Here’s how to make it:

And here’s the original recipe on allrecipes.com.

Remember, alter the recipe to your own taste, and if you come up with something mouthwatering or a new way to eat the original - make a silly video about it and link back to it here!

Alright, if you haven’t seen the episode about making Southwest Sauce go watch it now, because you’re going to need it for this recipe AND it’s delicious in general, so make a lot of it… mmmmm.

You now have two paths to choose from, young one:

Follow along and be eating in about 10 minutes (including rare appearances by Annie):

Or skip straight to the recipe (hopefully this will be on allrecipes.com soon). The following can always can be modified to your own personal taste:

Ingredients

• 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 4 white button mushrooms
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp. cumin
• 1/2 can corn
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced
• 1 medium tomato, sliced
• 4 wholewheat pitas
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Southwest sauce

Directions

1. Boil chicken breasts and washed mushrooms together for 6-7 minutes or until chicken is completely cooked.
2. Place cooked chicken in bowl and shred with two forks. After letting mushrooms rest for a minute, coarsely chop and add to chicken.
3. Saute diced onions and minced garlic in pan with olive oil for 1-2 minutes until fragrant, then add to chicken along with sliced green onions and corn.
4. Add cumin and Southwest Sauce to chicken mixture to taste and stir to combine.
5. Cut pitas in half and open pockets. Place pitas in oven at 350 degrees for 2-3 minutes or place in toaster to warm, then fill each half with 2 slices of tomato and a generous portion of the chicken mixture.

See, it’s delicious isn’t it!? I wouldn’t lie about that. As always, if you remix this, let us know cause I want to eat it too!