Alpha Core

In addition to the recipe of Luikse Wafels I want to share another recipe for a Belgian specialty: Samurai sauce or ‘Samurai saus’, as it is called in Dutch, a devilish spicy mayonnaise.

In every ‘frituur’ in Belgium you can be sure to find Samurai sauce on the menu. I’ve never seen it here in Germany, but the reason can also be that I just never enter a french fries restaurant here. Anyway, whenever I’m in Belgium I go and eat french fries with Samurai sauce. Ever since I tried this sauce I thought french fries with boring mayonnaise and/or ketchup were not so very enjoyable anymore and at the rare occasions when I made french fries in the oven at home, I was craving for Samurai sauce. That’s why I searched for a recipe and I found this incredibly easy one on a Belgian homepage for recipes:

For a two person portion: mix 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise with 1 teaspoon of Sambal Oelek.

The alternative would probably be a trip to Belgium to buy a bottle of Samurai sauce.

This article is part of a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

In this article I’d like to list some network and internet tools that deserve some attention. Anything from general every-day-use tools to more advanced analysis software goes in here. Here’s some of the better software out there: Read more

Although the basic idea to offer people a choice what software to use for browsing the internet is not bad at all, forcing Microsoft to bundle Mozilla Firefox (as well as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera) with their operating system Windows, which gets shipped with Internet Explorer (IE) right now, is completely over the top. The situation was revealed in Microsoft’s quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Read more

This article is the third in a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

In this article I’ll list some system tools that I would like to give some attention. These are the ones that come in handy when things go wrong, or that keep things in order in the first place. Either that, or they perform a general-purpose task that I could be without. Here’s my selection: Read more

Crossblock is a nice puzzle game by Hexaditidom (D.J. Trousdale) over at deviantART. The aim of each level is to clear it of all blocks by drawing lines through them horizontally or vertically. The tricky thing however is that you have to remove a certain number of blocks at the same time this way (this number changes throughout the game).

If you’re really stuck, scroll down for my walkthrough below. Enjoy! Read more

After much consideration, I’d like to present to you the best web game of 2008: You Have To Burn The Rope (YHTBTR) (alternative link). It’s an amazingly superb little platform game and has everything that makes a game great. It’s unique and highly original. Enjoy it! Over and over again…

Congratulations and many thanks to Kian Bashiri, Christian Dryden, Henrik Nåmark (for the great music) and everybody who contributed to this little gem! There’s also an interview with Kian Mashiri, who’s responsible for the design, code and graphics of the game.

It’s not the next Sony AIBO/QRIO and it doesn’t include batteries. I’m talking about Electric Sheep, a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves, run by thousands of people all over the world. When computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes to life and the computers communicate with each other over the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. You could call it a global computer-generated art project. Read more