December Recipes
Peppermint Kiss Cookies Recipe
Ingredients:
•1 17.5 oz. package sugar cookie mix
•1/2 cup butter, softened
•1 large egg
•1-3 Tbsp. flour
•1 tsp. peppermint extract
•4-5 drops red food coloring
•18-20 dark chocolate Hershey kisses
Preparation:
1.Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2.Dump cookie mix into a large mixing bowl. Add softened butter, egg and one tablespoon of flour.
3.Using an electric mixer or your hands, mix until it forms a soft dough.
4.Divide dough in half. Add peppermint extract to one half. Knead it into the dough until well-incorporated. Add a tablespoon of flour if dough is too sticky.
5.Add red food coloring to the other half. Start with 4 drops of food coloring, and add more until you get a nice, deep pink color. Add a tablespoon or two of additional flour if the dough is too sticky.
6.Pinch off a teaspoon of pink dough and a teaspoon of white dough. Stick together and form a ball.
Important: Don't knead them together, or the dough will all turn pink. You want a nice candy cane stripe.
7.Place balls 1 inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 10-15 minutes, until cookies are lightly browned on the bottom.
8.Remove from oven and immediately press a Hershey kiss in the middle of each cookie.
Chocolate Trifle Dessert
Ingredients
1 pkg. Brownie mix
1 6oz. pkg. Chocolate Instant Pudding (Sugar Free)
(it's what I had on hand)
1 6oz. pkg. Vanilla Instant Pudding (Sugar Free)
(again it's what I had on hand)
3 Baby Ruth candy bars (sliced)
3 Heath candy bars (broken in pieces)
1 12oz. Cool Whip & 1 8oz. Cool Whip (or 2 8oz.)
Preparation
1. Make brownies according to pkg. direction (set aside)
2. Make Chocolate Instant Pudding according to pkg. (pour 1/2 into bottom of Trifle bowl to make bottom layer)
3. Break up (in your hands) cooled brownies & put 1/2 on top of Chocolate pudding
4. Top that with 10oz. of Cool Whip Put the rest of the Chocolate Pudding on top of Cool Whip layer
5. Put (crushed or broken pieces of Heath bar) for next layer (It won't cover all...that's OK)
6. Make Vanilla Instant Pudding (according to pkg.) & put all of it in bowl as the next layer
7. Next...put (sliced) Baby Ruth Candy bars as the next layer...Put the rest of the crumbled brownies on top of that.....
8. Finish with the rest of the Cool Whip & put a Christmas Flower on top & refrigerate for 3hrs.
BootManager - First Android Multiple Boot Manager
BootManager is an application for android devices that is a first of its kind. First I want to go over a few terms that I will be using in this article.
ROM - A ROM, simply put is a tweaked version of your phone's operating system. Developers strip it down, remove stock apps and such, and customize it to run as smooth as they can get it.
Rooting - If your phone is rooted, you then have access to do whatever you want to your phone. This can be very dangerous unless you know exactly what you are doing because you can damage your phone permanently if you don't.
Dual Booting – Dual booting means that you can run multiple Rom’s on your phone and switch between which one you want to start when you turn your phone on.
BootManager is an android application that lets you install more than one ROM on your phone at one time. Just like dual booting your pc with Windows XP and Windows 7. I installed BootManager on my android phone because I love installing custom ROM's. I always try to see what new features developers can put in to a ROM and to see have fast I can make my phone run. I already had my phone rooted and running a custom ROM. BootManager allowed me to install the second ROM on to my sd card and then boot up in to it. I had fears at first that my phone was going to be sluggish because I was running the entire interface off of my sd card but my phone was almost as fast as the main ROM running off of my phones internal memory.
BootManager is $2.99 in the android market but well worth it if you like to play around with your phone as much as I do. I can now leave my main ROM intact and not worry about messing my phone up or having to spend an hour and a half setting everything back up on it. I can install up to 4 ROM's on to my SD card and use those slots for testing out new ROM's. It is a perfect application for what I like to do with my phone.
Kotori Is In the Cloud
A few weeks ago, Kotori Technologies moved their servers to our Windstream datacenter. At our office Kotori Technologies is officially “in the cloud”. The project consisted of creating 2 new virtual servers in our server farm and taking a physical server and converting it to a virtual server. In the scope of the project we were able to decommission 5 physical servers. Not only will this allow us to save energy (doing our part to help Earth be healthier) with less servers running, but space at the office as well. Now that the servers are at the datacenter, we decrease the risk of downtime due to our ISP, decreased our risk of natural disaster destroying the servers at the office and increased our uptime.
In making this move, it is going to allow us to offer many more services for our clients in the near future. We are extremely excited about these upcoming opportunities. Make sure you are checking Facebook and our Newsletters for updates on what we will be offering.
BlueStacks - Android on Your PC
BlueStacks is an application that you install on your computer that lets you run android applications just like you would on your phone. I have spent hours playing with this and the potential here is great. BlueStacks is in its very infant stages. This is their first public release of the software and they are calling it an alpha release. An alpha release means that people who install should expect major bugs and report them to the developers so that they will be able to fix the bugs and release a beta version with the focus shifting to finding the minor nuances.
BlueStacks comes with some predetermined applications that you can use or you can install the BlueStacks Cloud Connect application on your android device and sync your applications to your computer for use. There are a lot of applications that you can sync to your computer but then there are some that are simply unavailable and even some that only work with the paid version of BlueStacks(which has not been released yet). Another issue that I have had was that sometimes the application sync on the computer would just get stuck and not sync all of my applications that I told it to. I had to dig around my computer and restart some things and then most of my apps appeared.
The user interface for using the applications on the computer still has a long way to go until it is functional on a long term daily basis. The application goes in to full screen mode even if the application you are using only takes up a slight portion of your monitor. I have had a couple of application crashes also.
In conclusion, I want this to work and I want this to work now. I love the android UI and a lot of android applications and being able to use them on my computer with a mouse and keyboard would be awesome. BlueStacks still has a long way to go but I will be right there testing until it is bug free.
Top Ten Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts can greatly increase your productivity, reduce repetitive strain, and help keep you focused. For example, highlighting text with the keyboard and pressing Ctrl + C is much faster than taking your hand from the keyboard, highlighting the text using the mouse, clicking copy from the file menu, and then putting your hand back in place on the keyboard. Below are our top 10 keyboard shortcuts we recommend everyone memorize and use.
Ctrl + C or Ctrl + Insert
Copy the highlighted text or selected item.
Ctrl + V or Shift + Insert
Paste the text or object that's in the clipboard.
Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y
Undo any change. For example, if you cut text, pressing this will undo it. This can also often be pressed multiple times to undo multiple changes. Pressing Ctrl + Y would redo the undo.
Ctrl + F
Open the Find in any program. This includes your Internet browser to find text on the current page.
Alt + Tab or Alt + Esc
Quickly switch between open programs moving forward.
Press Ctrl + Tab to switch between tabs in a program.
Adding the Shift key to Alt + Tab or Ctrl + Tab will move backwards. For example, if you are pressing Alt + Tab and pass the program you want to switch to, press Alt + Shift + Tab to move backwards to that program.
Windows Vista and 7 users can also press the Windows Key + Tab to switch through open programs in a full screenshot of the Window.
Ctrl + Back space
Pressing Ctrl + Backspace will delete a full word at a time instead of a single character.
Ctrl + Left arrow / Right arrow
Move the cursor one word at a time instead of one character at a time. If you wanted to highlight one word at a time you can hold down Ctrl + Shift and then press the left or right arrow key to move one word at a time in that direction while highlighting each word.
Ctrl + Home / End
Move the cursor to the beginning or end of a document.
Ctrl + P
Print the page being viewed. For example, the document in Microsoft Word or the web page in your Internet browser.
Page Up / Space bar and Page Down
Pressing either the page up or page down key will move that page one page at a time in that direction. When browsing the Internet pressing the space bar will also move the page down one page at a time. If you press Shift and the Space bar the page will go up a page at a time.