Brent Has A Blog!

Meatloaf Muffins With Tasty Tom’s Ketchup

I recently had lunch at a local restaurant called Tasty Tom’s and bought their homemade ketchup. I decided to create my own meatloaf recipe using the ketchup and thought I would share it.

Tasty Tom’s Ketchup is all natural with no preservatives and tastes way better than Heinz or any other ketchup I have tried. It is a little more runny than your average ketchup though so be warned when you tip the bottle onto your plate.

Ingredients

1 cup of Carrot, Shredded
1 cup of Green Pepper, Minced
1/2 Onion, Minced
6 - 8 Sage Leafs, minced
3 - 4 Garlic Cloves, minced
1.5 pounds of Lean Ground Beef
1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
1/2 tbsp Dijon Mustard
1 egg
1/3 cup of Ketchup (Tasty Tom’s Ketchup)
1/3 cup of Panko (Japanese Breadcrumbs)
1/2 tbsp Chili Powder
Decent amount of Chili Flakes
Salt
Pepper

Ketchup for the glaze

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit.

2. Shred the carrots and mince the green pepper, onion, sage, and garlic. Place aside.

3. Place the ground beef into a large enough mixing bowl. Add the egg, worcestershire sauce, dijon mustard, egg, ketchup. Mix it all together.

4. Now add and mix in the minced/shredded ingredients.

5. Add the panko, and chili powder, and then the chili flakes, salt, and pepper to your preference.

6. Prepare a 12-cup muffin tin with nonstick vegetable oil spray or wipe lightly with vegetable oil.

7. Fill each cup evenly with the ground beef mixture.

8. Pour a little bit of ketchup onto the top of each cup and spread evenly. This will create a nice glaze on the top of the muffins.

9. Bake in the oven for 25 - 35 minutes.

Serve with potatoes and side salad. Enjoy.

Yields 12 meat muffins.

Bears Motherfucker!

I just created a new tumblog about bears. You should check it out.

If you have any pictures or videos you want to suggest let me know.

Hiding Specific Bookmark Labels in Firefox

To start things off, I use Mozilla’s great add-on Weave to sync my Firefox bookmarks between my home computer, work computer, and my laptop. This has been working great, but I’ve recently noticed that some of my bookmarks on my laptop are being hidden due to the smaller screen resolution. Now some may suggest to remove some unneeded bookmarks, but I decided that there must be a better solution.

One solution I found was to edit the bookmark and set the label to a blank value. This worked, but it caused the tool-tip to only show the URL so I wondered if a more graceful solution was possible.

This is where the Firefox add-on Stylish comes into play. Stylish is an add-on that lets you “fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun.” Using Stylish I wrote a style that hides the label on any bookmark that has a “.” character as the first character.

To use this style you will need to install Stylish if you have not already. Once installed go to my styles page on userstyles.org and click on “Install with Stylish.” Now all you need to do is prepend a “.” character to any bookmark you want to hide the label.

In doing so I was able to go from this:

To this:

All my bookmarks now fit great on my laptop, and I liked the results so much that I applied the same style to my other computers as well.

Let me know what you think of this solution and if you used it yourself.

Adventures in Blog Recovery

A few months ago something awful happened to a coworker of mine.  Due to unexpected circumstances he ended up losing 3 years of blog posts and was unable to recover them. As you can probably imagine, this was crushing to him.

News of this loss traveled fast around the office and my coworker Keith decided to jump into action. He noticed that Google still had the majority of his site cached, so in a dramatic effort to save Sean’s blog he organized a mass download of Google’s cache.  Ignoring that Google thought we were a bot a few times, downloading Google’s cache was a success. Knowing that more data is always good, Keith also ended up writing a script that took advantage of Yahoo’s BOSS API to download their cache.  At the end Keith had gathered over 60 MB of cache data of Sean’s lost blog.

This is where I come into the picture a little more.  Conveniently enough, I seem to take great pleasure in writing scripts to parse data. Keith knowing this came to me with this data and the simple task of recovering as many of Sean’s posts as possible.

The first major challenge I knew I needed to address was that Sean had used a few  different templates over the years meaning that not all posts would be stored the same.  Luckily two of the templates used the same markup for the posts making things much easier.

Once I had the whole post text available I was able to write some simple regex to parse out the post date, title, categories, and the actual post content.

The last step was to figure out the best way to insert the data into Sean’s new Wordpress blog. I came across Wordpress’s WXR format and decided to run with it.

In the long run I was able to recover 183 posts. Sean was ecstatic with these results so the endeavor was well worth it.

Sean has also allowed me to post the data-set along with my code if anyone is interested to see. The file is available here and in 7-Zip format. Please note that my code is uncommented and probably messy.