Phonebaby teardown

The Phonebaby backstory

In June this year, I attended Dangerous Prototypes' Hacker Camp Shenzhen (Possibly the last one too). On the intro night, Aaron from Oomlout showed a dinky little "Phonebaby" mini GSM phone he'd acquired recently.

Slow cooked lamb leg

Lamb legs are $8 a kilo at the big supermarkets right now, so I thought I'd celebrate by cooking a slow-roast half lamb leg.
The recipe's not exactly rocket science:
Roughly chop a carrot, an onion and a couple of celery sticks to make a trivet on the bottom of a slow-roaster. Chop-in a clove of garlic. rub salt and oil all-over a half lamb leg (Bonus points if you leave it this way in the fridge overnight for extra tenderising). Sit the lamb on top of the trivet and sprinkle some dried oregano and lemon zest over it (Or any herbs/spices you like... A bay leaf wouldn't go astray!). Dump a jar of passata over the top and put the lid on.
Set it going on low at breakfast time and by dinner time you'll have delicious, tender meat! I gave mine another 10 minutes in 200° C oven (Could have just been 5 minutes, really). Portion using a spoon and/or fork.
Adjust the seasoning in the remaining cooking liquor and vegetables and use this as a sauce (Pass it through a blender/stick-mixer if you prefer a less "rustic" sauce).

Photos on Google+

The Bikes of China

 

My other bike's a Ferrari!

 So I just came back from a trip to the Hacker Camp Shenzhen inChina. One thing I noticed was the use of wildly diverse bikes of all kinds for personal transport. Here's some of the more interesting ones I saw.

Canberra Centenery Trail

Way back in 2013 (i.e. two years ago from the time of writing) Canberra suffered its centenary of founding: A year-long party was planned and various worthy public works undertaken.
Possibly my favourite and (I feel) most underrated is the Canberra Centenary Trail. This is a 145Km walking/cycling loop of the city of Canberra, that takes-in the city-centre and much of its surrounding bushland. You can walk the trail in a week or ride it in 3 days.
Unfortunately there's no links to Google Maps overlays for it... So I made one.
It has both the walking and cycling routes as separate layers and should be easily sharable.

"Caribbean" chicken

This recipe isn't particularly authentic, but it could better be described as "Caribbean inspired chicken". Nevertheless it's a really tasty recipe and worth blogging about. I got it from an old friend years ago with typically imprecise measurements and times ("approx half a jar of chutney", "when the chicken is cooked", etc.) I've tried to tighten-up the measurements here for all those like me who get a bit nervy when they have to wing it.

Transcend® JetFlash®710 pico-review

I bought a 64G Transcend® JetFlash®710 drive from eBay recently as my previous "tiny keyring drive" (A Sandisk Cruzer Force) had passed-away due to some kind of mechanical failure (For once not the loop that secures it to your keychain/lanyard, but the plastic holding the flash-module inside the shell).
In the past you always had to be wary of flash storage bought through eBay (The brand-name forgeries get more and more convincing as time goes on). So this article is covers my analysis of what I received.