Celebrating 5 years of blogging with Semia Payasam( Vermicelli Pudding)!

                 Techie Cookie Freaky turns 5 today and i would like to thank my friends and family who inspires me to keep blogging. Initially i started off this blog as my online dairy to keep track of my dishes, when my friends or relatives ask for any recipe i used my blog as a medium to share the recipes with them. After being aware of some copycats i had to make my blog private so that only my friends and family can access it.Recently i decided to make my blog public with a copyright protection. As my blog is all about Technology and cooking i would like to write this post with a dessert recipe and a technology tip.

Technology Tip - Understanding Google's spam Inbox

                  Bloggers must have noticed google's spam inbox. Let me explain how it functions and how to deal with blog comments. I have noticed in many food blogs comments such as yummy! droolworthy! delicious! nice recipe etc.....With my understanding google detects these comments as spam and automatically sends it to the spam inbox. It might be upsetting for you to see your blogger friends comments going into a spam inbox. Google's spam detection is technically a function to help bloggers to avoid any spam messages. It functions in such a way if the number of words on the comments are too less it detects it as spam. If we have really read through the recipe and appreciated, we do leave a comment with some details , don't we?

Semia Payasam/Vermicelli Pudding -Recipe

    Payasam is a south Indian pudding traditionally made with milk and rice/lentils/semolina/vermicelli.

Ingredients:

   Roasted Vermicelli - 50 gms
   Ghee - 3 tsps or  Butter- a small chunk
   Whole Milk - 1 pint
   Raisins - 1/4 cup
   Cashews - a dozen
   Cardamom - a few
   Sugar - 3/4 cup
   Raspberries - a few(optional)

Cooking method:

    Boil the milk in a saucepan in a medium heat until it foams up. Reduce the heat and start cooking in sim by adding the vermicilli and cardamom . Cardamom can also be added in the powdered form for a better flavour. Stir occasionally until the vermicilli is cooked thouroughly.Add the sugar at this point and stir until it dissolves. Heat up a small chunk of butter or 3 tsps of ghee and roast the raisins and cashewnuts .Add it to the pudding,mix well with a spatula,wait for the vermicilli to absorb the milk. Top it up with raspberries . Best Served Chilled !

Here's a virtual treat for all my loved ones and my readers

Sending this entry to FSF Summer - August Challenge  'Summer Puds'
Four Seasons Food hosted by Delicieux and Chezfoti

An inspiring App on my iPhone

I feel having an exercising machine at home doesn't tempt me to do any workouts. Probably because of the mindset that it's available 24/7. My hubby has installed an inspiring App on my iPhone called Runstart. Techically it's a very simple application but when i started using it today i feel  motivated to walk/jog more. It shows some interesting information about the amount of calories you burn based on the activity chosen like Walking, Running etc...

Telegram going into History

BSNL  announces it's plan to the end its Telegram services in India . The apparent reason being the losses incurred , many people are unhappy with it. I would call telegram as the SMS of the olden days. As a child i use to watch my dad's expression wide-eyed until the news is confirmed good or bad.

Though the telegrams were used to convey any type of message say wishing a couple on their wedding ,i would say mostly it was used to convey any sad news. 'START IMMEDIATELY'  being the commonly used telegram.


I'll finish it with a telegram style note  'SAD TO C U GO'

India unveils world's cheapest tablet PC

As a part of the 12th 5 year plan , the world's cheapest tablet computer named Aakash

was launched by the Indian government. I would like to appreciate the government's efforts to make this dream come true. Aakash will defintely bridge the digital divide between rural and urban areas in India.

Dual SIM phones

Working professionals tend to carry two mobile phones for personal and business related purposes. The dual SIM phones makes it easy to carry both the SIM on the same device. Initially only one SIM was allowed to be active at a time which makes the other SIM unusable. Though it helped to save some space it didn't serve the purpose. Recently some of the phone companies have introduced dual SIM phone with options of both to be active at the same time. Currently major phone companies are not supporting this facility but we can expect them to do it sooner as the demand for Dual SIM increases.

Be aware of 'Tab Napping'

While many internet users in today's modern world tend to use online banking for ease of use, the number of phishing scams increases in too many ways. The recent one among them is 'Tab Napping' which targets at the inactive browser tab and replaces it with fake web pages. The user is asked to log in for the second time and all the details are redirected and stored on the attackers website and misused. Though it is very difficult for us to differentiate between the actual and the fake website , we can avoid keeping login pages open for a long time and we should also make sure that the web address that we are using is the right address.

Floppies to come to an end soon

The much loved floppy disks will be a thing of past, as Sony says that it'll stop selling them from March 2011. Plenty of portable devices with huge storage capacities has resulted the floppies to come to an end. I'm very sure many more devices will be added to this list bcoz our increasing data storage requirements.

Internationalised Domain Names(IDNs)

Plans for naming non-latin-script web addresses, Internationalised Domain Names(IDNs) has been approved by the internet regulator ICANN(The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) . These addresses are expected to be up and running on the web by Q2 of 2010. I would say that this is gonna be a huge tranformation since the invention of the internet.

Email Phishing Scam

BBC reported that thousands of Hotmail username and password has been posted to pastebin website. This is really annoying and i don't understand why people use technology for destructive purposes. To be safe it is always better to change our email password very often.

Live Coding

A couple of days back, i was watching an interesting demo in the BBC about 'Live Coding'. Live coding is nothing but on-the fly programming in which the program is modified while its running without stopping or restarting. Its is the process of writing computer code, in real time, to compose and play music or any kind of animation. This may not sound be very easy but its visually more attractive. You can make your own one man live music band with the computer.

OFCOM - ISP List

List of UK Service Providers who signed for OFCOM can be found in the URL below

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/copbb/list/

Net Speedometer

Did u visualise Speedometer device which measures speed of a moving vehicle? I'm talking abt broadband speed rules coming into force in the UK.

For companies offering Broadband, OFCOM has defined a new speed code. Itz called 'Voluntary Code of Practice' & helps customers know their broadband speed. Major Service Providers in the UK already signed up for the Speed Code of Practice this month. Over the next 6 months Ofcom will monitor service providers and check their standards. Check if ur ISP has signed for this & enjoy the speed u deserve!!!!!!!!

Logitech's Billionth Mouse

Dr. Douglas C. Englebart invented the computer mouse on 9th Dec, 1968. Mouse has made a long journey for the past 40 years. With the rapid changes in the Electronics industry & never ending series of innovation, surviving for forty years without much changes in functionality is a gr8 achievement!

Though Logitech's Billionth Mouse stands as a proof for the customer base of the mouse, in reality the usage of mouse is coming down with wide use of laptops and other touch screen devices.

Quad-Core & More...........

For desktops & laptops, first came the single-core
processor, then the dual-core and now Quad-core. Core is used
for handling data strings, in other words itz used for executing
tasks on a thread. A Thread is a stream of instructions related
to a task in any program.With many cores, multitasking becomes
easier which helps improving the efficiency of the processor.The
first thing is OS should adapt more than a core in a chip but most
of the OS today supports upto 64 cores making the job easier.
Only few applications like DVD compression ,Mp3 compression
and 3D games r benefitted by Quad-core processors today.In
my opinion the future of computing lies in multi-core processing.