November 2015 – Steve's Blog

Thanksgiving

The weather was good with temperatures in the low 50’s °F – its often much colder at this time of year.

There were going to be 13 of us for Thanksgiving Dinner and as we wanted enough left overs to go round we’d decided to cook two turkeys. But how do you do that with only 1 oven? The answer is that you don’t

Instead you use two gas burners, two large “kettles” and more than 6 gallons of Peanut Oil.

Take your two “kettles” and having worked out how much oil to put in (by using water and your turkey) you fire up the gas and heat the oil to 350°F.

Once the oil is hot you carefully, and slowly, lower the turkey into the kettle:

You keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the gas flow as appropriate making sure it doesn’t go over 350°F

And cook for 3.5 minutes per pound.

So after 60 minutes we lifted the turkeys out and let them drain for a new minutes.

Then you take them inside, let them rest for 30 minutes and then carve and eat!

Toshiba Dual Boot recovery

A few notes on how to restore dual boot after a Toshiba BIOS update.

Toshiba released 2 updates to my Satellite Windows 10 laptop.

One reset the power settings so that shut down got set back to quick boot and the other changed the order of the UEFI boot so that I could no longer boot into Linux.

Resetting the power options wasn’t a problem but getting Linux back was a little more problematical.

At first I feared that they’d trashed the UEFI boot settings totally so I got a Linux UEFI USB ready to go.

From Windows I took the option to reboot and pick an alternative boot device and restarted.

That was when I found out that things were not as bad as I feared because when I got to the Device selection I had two options:

USB
ubuntu

So I booted into ubuntu and everything was fine.

I searched the internet and found that the efibootmgr command was what I needed to use … and this is what it showed me:

As you can see the Timeout is set to 0 but the boot order has been changed so that 0002 (Windows) is the first option.

So I did the following:

efibootmgr -o 0001,0002,2001

and then checked the boot menu again:

I then rebooted and everything worked perfectly.

So if you’ve lost your boot menu then you might be able to get it back extremely easily….

Coming to America

We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.

It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:

Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).

So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.

The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.

New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.

The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.

But now I’m here for the next couple of weeks: