miss-newyork.net

New Movie Caps: In Enemy Hands

Jenny — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:19:43 +0000

1350 caps
990 x 550 pixels
William H. Macy, Scott Caan, Til Schweiger, Thomas Kretschmann, Ian Somerhalder, Jeremy Sisto, A.J. Buckley, Carmine Giovinazzo, Lauren Holly

Gallery

Let me know if you want me to upload the ZIP file.

App Recommendations

Jenny — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:01:51 +0000

For a while I have been looking for two different apps: one to manage my recipes on my MacBook, and one to manage my DVD library on my iPhone. So after trying, buying and deleting some I'm gonna present you my findings to save you some time.

Recipe App

You know the problem: you have tons of recipes - everywhere. In books, magazines, online, in your grandma's paper collection (handwritten and unreadable) and files scattered around your harddrive. You have a recipe for everything and no chance of finding it when you need it. That's why I have been searching desperately for a neat app that's gonna take care of this mess. My requirements: fast and easy adding of recipes and photos (duh!), simple organization and search and nice layout when viewing on-screen and printing. Pretty straight forward, no?

After some research I narrowed my list down to five apps - Measuring Cup, MacGourmet, Connoisseur, Yum, and YummySoup - and downloaded all of them.

All of them have are easy to navigate: categories on the left, content on the right, much like iTunes, and you can add categories - sometimes even "smart categories" and subcategories - as many as you like.

Adding a recipe is very similar with all the apps: just fill in the blank form. But that form is more or less extensive depending on the app. While Yum only has the necessities, like title, portion, time, rating, ingredients, directions and a picture, Measuring Cup also lets you add the calories, YummySoup has space for a description, difficulty level, ethnicity and a source, Connoisseur asks for cuisine and course and with MacGourmet you can fill out a multi-page questionnaire with all of the above and detailed tables.

All apps offer easy backup/export/import functionality, some go a step further, like exporting to different formats, sharing via email, importing an online catalog of recipe, synchronizing with your iPhone and importing recipes from other sources. MacGourmet and Yum even have their own iPhone apps, but since synchronizing requires a shared WiFi connection of MacBook and iPhone I was unfortunately unable to test the functionality.

Since all apps use tables for the ingredients with specific fields for "amount", "unit" and "ingredient" it's usually not possible to simply copy & paste this part of the recipe from a website or another digital file. To make it easier some apps have smart import options given that you adjusted the unit settings to your needs: Connoisseur is able to import a recipe in simple text format into the "New Recipe" form, even filling in the ingredients and units although this didn't work flawlessly for me, it still saves a lot of time. Yum has a similar option, where you can copy & paste the ingredients into the directions field and have the app draw them into the right columns. The smartest importer however is offered by YummySoup with their so-called Any-Site Web Importer. It's a built-in web browser that lets you mark certain parts of a website that are then automatically filled into the "New Recipe" form. In addition a drag & drop import is available as well.

Conclusion: Measuring Cup is a free program and definitely worth checking out. If it had a way of importing recipes this would have been my first choice. I was even able to use it in German. Connoisseur rings in at $19,95, but unfortunately doesn't store photos along with the recipes and that was a deal breaker for me. MacGourmet costs $24,95. It only offers an importer for selected websites and I felt quite overwhelmed with all the details when adding a new recipe. Yum is a solid, but expensive choice at €21,00 (~$28,00). I like the ability to edit the print layouts and the option to print on small cards. However I failed to change the way the photo was displayed and printed with the recipe, all huge and pixely and cut off. So my choice right now is YummySoup for a decent $20 even though it has the most awful icon I love the importer and the way the recipes are displayed with a picture slideshow. The print and on-screen layouts are nice and organized, the app helps you scale the recipes and it even offers full-screen view while cooking and a shopping list and beverage inventory functionality. There is a slight room for improvement, and I'm going to send a quick note to the author, but overall this was my favourite!

DVD Library App

My other quest was the search for a DVD library app for my iPhone. I have been using Delicious Library on my MacBook for a while now, but unfortunately their iPhone app was pulled from the store very fast due to Amazon's restrictions on using their data on mobile devices.

My goal was to simply have all of my DVD stored on my iPhone, searchable with nice covers. Again I wasn't able to use the synchronizing option that many apps are using, simply because my MacBook and my iPhone cannot use the same WiFi connection (long story!), so importing the data from my Delicious Library wasn't an option and I needed a way to add my DVDs fast - therefore a barcode scanner was a requirement as well. In addition I wanted the ability to add and search by actors as well as make a note if a DVD was loaned out. Last but not least I wanted a DVD wish list so I can get rid of my stupid spreadsheet!

While some of the programs I found had a free "lite" version for testing purposes, many didn't so I had to go by screenshots, ratings and reviews, and unfortunately ended up buying a program that turned out to be useless for me... Many were ruled out simply due to their awful layout (I do not need colored background images on every page, thank you very much!)

One of the most popular apps is called Movies. It was almost perfect except you can't search by actor. iMovieList seems to be fairly new, but looks promising nonetheless as it can store both movies and TV shows. However I didn't find anything about search for actor or a barcode scanner and I was not willing to manually search for 450 DVDs on imdb.com!

I ended up using iCollect Movies and I am VERY happy with it. You can add DVDs by scanning the barcode, entering the barcode number manually or simply adding all the info yourself. The barcode scanner was super fast and accurate, there were only a couple of times when I had to enter the code by hand and even fewer occasions when nothing was found for the entered code. I did add 450 DVDs without going crazy In most cases the cover was added automatically, if not - or if I wasn't happy with it - I was able to change it fast and easy by either using Google search, taking a photo of the cover myself or using a picture from photo roll. The movie details page links to imdb.com and rottentomatoes.com, tons of information can be added and edited very easily (i.e. Format, Star Rating, Description, Loaned Out, Last Time Watched, Type, Genre, Rating, Year, Length, Region, ... ), actors and directors can even be pulled from a database. You can switch between list view and cover view, when you turn your iPhone you even have a stylish CoverFlow! You can customize which information and which shortcuts you'd like on the main page, you can search by any information available, there are tons of settings and even a wishlist. iCollect Movies has everything I was looking for and I think €2,39 is a very reasonable price.

New Kate Winslet Caps

Jenny — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:27:09 +0000

Thanks to Roberta I finally managed to make screencaps on my Macbook with the help of the VLC Player. I'll add some more Kate Winslet movies soon, I just got a package with new/old DVDs Enjoy!

1000 caps
1024 x 576 pixels
Kate Winslet, Dougray Scott, Saffron Burrows, Jeremy Northam, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Tom Hollander, Matthew Macfadyen

Gallery | download ZIP 103 MB

950 caps
1024 x 576 pixels
Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Mary-Louise Parker, Mandy Moore, Steve Buscemi, Aida Turturro, Bobby Cannavale, Christopher Walken, Eddie Izzard

Gallery | download ZIP 81 MB

Chocolate & Egg Liqueur Cake

Jenny — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:47:07 +0000

For our family Easter get-together I tried two new recipes today - well, I already started yesterday. One was a Martha Stewart recipe for Cannolis. I had Cannolis for the very first time last year in Boston when Sarah made me stand in line for what felt like forever to get the treats from "the best place in Boston". No idea what that bakery was called, but DAMN they were good! Unfortunately this recipe wasn't that good: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/classic-cannoli-2

In the end the shells tasted good, but I had to add A LOT more liquid to make the dough somewhat workable. I had prepared the shells yesterday, so they were ready to go, but the filling was a complete disaster today, so as a last minute substitute I used a very light and fluffy stracciatella dessert, which I think worked very well.

If you can recommend another recipe, I'd be happy to try it!

But now back to recipe No. 2 for today: Chocolate & Egg Liqueur Cake. I took this picture a second before we started cutting it, so it's not the best, but you get an idea of the decorations I made:

And this is how the cake would have looked if I hadn't screwed it up at the last minute:

Recipe: Chocolate and Carrot Easter Cake with Egg Liqueur

Ingredients

For the base:
2 carrots (250g / 0,5 pounds)
3 eggs
100g / 3,5 oz sugar
1 pinch of salt
50g / 1,8 oz flour
150g / 5,3 oz ground almonds

for the dark cream:
250ml / 1 cup heavy cream
75g / 2,6 oz sugar
3 sheets gelatine
100g / 3,5 oz dark chocolate (70%)

for the light cream:
4 sheets gelatine
3 egg yolks
75g / 2,6 oz powdered sugar
150ml / 5 fl oz egg liqueur
200ml / 6,8 fl oz heavy cream

decorations as needed

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven - 180°C / 350°F. Peel and finely grate the carrots. Separate egg whites and yolks. Beat the egg yolks with 1/3 of the sugar until fluffy. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until very stiff. Then slowly add the remaining sugar. Mix flour and almonds. Fold the egg whites into the egg yolk mix, then add the carrots and the flour/almonds mix. Fill the dough into a 21cm / 8,2 inch baking form and bake for about 20 minutes. Let cool down in the form.
Put a large cookie cutter in the shape of a bunny (about 2-3 cm / 1 inch high) on a tray. Soak the gelatine for 5 minutes in cold water. Mix cream and sugar and bring to a boil. Take pot off the stove, wring out gelatine and stir into the hot cream. Grate or chop the chocolate and stir into the cream until molten. Let cool down and stir occasionally until it starts to thicken. Then fill into the cookie cutter form and put in the freezer for 1 hour.
For the light cream soak gelatine in cold water for 5 minutes. Beat egg yolks, powdered sugar and egg liqueur in a double-boiler until thick and creamy. Wring out gelatine and stir into the mix. Whisk the heavy cream until it's almost stiff, then fold into the egg mix.
Carefully extract the chocolate cream from the cookie cutter and place in the middle of the carrot cake base. Place a cake ring around the cake and spread the light cream around the bunny. Let cool in a fridge for 2-3 hours. Take off the cake ring and decorate.

Quick Notes

We didn't have a cookie cutter that was large enough, so instead we used 6 large round cutters. But then the balance between light and dark cream was off and we ended up covering the whole cake with the yellow cream. Make sure to work fast after you've added the gelatine or you will end up with a thick pudding instead of a smooth surface.

In the original recipe they simply decorated the cake with some thin chocolate sheets all around. We did that too, but since we didn't have the big bunny sticking out we added a bunch of other stuff. I colored some plain marzipan with Dutch-processed cocoa powder and cut out some smaller bunnies, then added some marzipan carrots I bought in the supermarket. It's a good way to "mark" the slices so you'll know where to cut the cake later. I colored more marzipan with green and red food coloring and cut out some small flowers, and last but not least we ground some pistachios and used it as grass.

Recipe by Johann Lafer found in several German magazines.