Fast, tasty and healthy is a rare combination. One thing I always looked for is tender and flavorful meat dishes. If it is dry or tough, it does not matter how it tastes.

One technique to make the meat tender, is to use a combination of pan grilling and steam sautee. This is the technique used by the late chef Pasquale Carpino to make a four course meal in less than 25 minutes!

Here, I describe this technique, combined with my own experimenting and variations of that technique.

Adding broth to many recipes is sometimes the most important key to their success. Of course, you can buy ready made broth in tetra pack, or cubes from any supermarket. However, you do not have control over the taste and unhealthy ingredients (e.g. fat and salt) when you do so.

Therefore, making broth of stock at home and freezing them into cubes is a good alternative, both for health and taste.

I tried out the Kobo Arc 10HD for a few days, because it went on sale for $199.99, down by $100 from the regular price.

As I write this, the price is down $20 further, to $179.99 at BestBuy.

Here is a quick review of the pros and cons. Note that I am not evaluating as an eReader, but rather as a regular tablet.

Pros

When using nvflash or APX Tool to repartition an Acer A500/A501, some people get data errors, and assume their device is bricked, and is good only for parts.

For example, the command:

nvflash --bct flash.bct --setbct --odmdata 0x100c0105 --configfile flash.cfg --create --bl bootloader.bin --sbk 0x... 0x... 0x... 0x... --go

Will output:

failed executing command 11 NvError 0x120002
command failure: create failed (bad data)
bootloader status: failed to create the partition (code: 10) message: nverror:0x3 (0x3) flags: 0

Since I moved from cable TV to free HDTV over-the-air (OTA) ATSC TV, I have been using the Homeworx HW-150PVR as a PVR (personal video recorder) for HD TV.

Attached below are the slides from my presentation at the KWLUG on Virtualization using KVM and libvirt.

More and more large companies are implementing more restrictive email policies to fight increasing SPAM. These are mainly DMARC. Such companies include Yahoo, Cox, Verizon, and others.

As this happens, some of your legitimate email may be rejected because email servers are more restrictive.

In order to minimize the probability of your email being rejected, the following describes how to implement Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DKIM on your already running Postfix mail server.

Now that OpenWRT has released a new stable version: Barrier Breaker 14.07, it was time to upgrade my D-Link DIR-835 router running snapshots to it.

Do do this, I first did the following:

1. Save a list of the packages, using the command:

opkg list-installed

Then using some scripting on the output to ignore the version numbers.

2. Updating the /etc/sysupgrade.conf file to look like this:

/etc/rc.local
/etc/syslog-ng.conf
/etc/crontabs/

Having moved away from Rogers Cable TV to over-the-air (OTA) using a TV Antenna, I needed a way to record programs so I can watch them later.

For this, I got the MediaSonic HomeWorx HW150 PVR, which is inexpensive ($50 with price matching).