Mac’s Armagh Cider (Lyte)

This evening, after a long day, I opened a bottle of Mac's Armagh Cider. Only the lyte though, as at 3%, it shouldn't do too much damage to tomorrow morning.

It's a good medium cider, and remarkably dry for a low(ish) alcohol cider (it's not dry, but far from the sweetness of pure apple juice). It's very tasty and appley, a solid cider.

~1 min read

sCider is Delicious

I'm going to start keeping a list of tasting notes for various ciders (mostly Irish, all craft) on the blog. I'm not sure whether to keep it as part of the main site or try to make a subblog, but wordpress isn't making the latter very straight forward. They will be gathered here for those of you who are interested.
It's not quite science, but it is VERY delicious (usually), so it should fit for the most part. Will have to start having my fancy camera on hand when I have the odd pint from now on :)

~1 min read

Modifying the lemon drizzle cake, a little

I love lemon drizzle cake. It's really wonderful, and not so hard to make, and in my experience, (almost) everyone loves lemony cake. As I make this cake often enough, I made some adjustments to it, to see if the people who like it a lot could find it in them to like it even more!

Inspired by my labmate's love of lemon and poppyseed cake from the canteen (I'm impressed, they didn't mess up the cake), I threw a teaspoon of poppy seeds into the cake batter and baked like normal. The seeds give a gentle bite to the cake, it's really wonderful.

1 min read

Graphing with the twitter archive and R : or how I tweet too much

So last weekend, @encephalartos produced a graph of his tweets as extracted from his twitter archive, and thereby tempted me to spend the rest of my weekend and some extra time beyond figuring out how he did it. Turns out he used excel to break the timestamps and R to do the rest, but I didn't realise he used excel till I had spent hours figuring out time in R, so I present to you the entirely R way of doing it.

I like to use Rstudio for doing my R work. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac so you've no excuse. Most of my R knowledge comes from workshops that Kevin O'Brien ran in Tog. If you're based in Dublin and want to hang with some R folk, the Dublin R group meets (ir)regularly around town.

5 min read

Peanutbutter Brownies

A number of members of my collaborator's group are leaving for pastures new, so I have made cake as a goodbye-you're-really-gonna-miss-it-here gift.

1 min read