Archive for February, 2015

Easy thin crust pizza

Thursday, February 19th, 2015

While normally I focus on technical things, if you truly know me, you know I love peperoni pizza and thin crust as well.

Here’s a quick and lazy(easy) way to make pizza:

Items needed:
Hardtack rolling pin
Rhodes Rolls
– Baking Sheet
– Sauce
– Toppings (eg: peperoni, cheese)
– Flour

Optional: Cooking Spray, parchment paper

Set out a set of 2-4 frozen rolls per person you would like to serve in a bowl or pan. Spray the pan with cooking spray, or sprinkle some flour on the rolls so they do not stick to each other. Let them warm for 1 hour. You can speed this process up by placing the pan by the vent of your stove and turning the oven on to slowly warm the dough.

After the dough has thawed and risen, sprinkle some flour on the roll or rolling pin so it doesn’t stick and is easy to work with.

Pre-heat your oven to 500-550 degrees.

Roll out the dough so it is thin enough it’s nearly transparent. The finished pizza will end up about 2x the thickness of what you roll out. Roll away from yourself, rotate and flip the dough and repeat until you reach a size of around 7-8 inches.

Put the dough on a cookie sheet, Apply sauce and your toppings and cook for 5 minutes or until the crust starts to be golden.

If you are making many of these, beware you can easily end up with the process of rolling out 2 rolls taking the entire 5 minutes of baking time, so an assistant may be helpful.

I find a kid eats 1-2 of these pizzas and an adult 2-4.

LB4M and cheap switching

Friday, February 13th, 2015

I’ve been starting to play around with the LB4M as a cheap switching platform. These can be had easily on eBay and other sites for around $100-105, including 2x10G-SR optics as part of the deal. The downside is the switches are perhaps a bit noisy and a bit hard to work with as the CLI and software are a bit difficult to operate with. It’s also not well supported by the manufacturer, and the software.

I’ve decided to create a small archive of the images and data related to this platform. Those can be found here: http://puck.nether.net/~jared/lb4m/

I am hoping to document some of the efforts I’m undertaking with these and any progress I have on getting more modern software, or even something linux based running on the box.

If you know how to do a factory firmware restore on these, please do contact me, even if it requires XMODEM or JTAG. I managed to load the improper firmware on the box such that the Boot Menu does not even appear.