nicholasimon's blog

 If you like cooking you may often have seen recipes for Sausage Ragù online or in recipe books and thought 'where can I get some delicious artisanal sausage in this dreadful country where we have nothing like that at all,'.  You might never have considered that we have a massive range of excellent homemade sausages right here in RSA that you can get just about anywhere - boerewors. You would be surprised just how good this recipe tastes, the boerewors (sausage) gives the bolognese/ragù a unique yet familiar flavour and if you are a fan of Italian food then this is certainly a recipe worth trying. Just a note, boerewors comes in a wide range of varieties which use different recipes of spices and ratios of meat. For this recipe I used Grabouw Boeroewors from Pick n Pay, which is a pretty standard boerewors and I would recommend using something similar. Anything marked (optional) below doesn't have to be included however will improve the flavour of the sauce. INGREDIENTS 400-

Now, before I write the body of this post I just want to first say that I think Takealot.com is brilliant, they offer a wide range of products and a service that was sorely missing in South Africa 10-20 years ago, or whatever the correct time period is at the time of reading. I buy from them regularly and this is not intended to be in any way a defamatory piece of internet writing. Also, just to say don't forget to support the smaller guys, if you can't find something you want on Takealot or want to compare prices then  Loot.co.za  and  Raru.co.za  are two other excellent options for online shopping. However, in this day and age I think whomever is in charge of packaging at Takealot needs to do a bit of a re-think. I ordered two rings, the kind you put on your finger, on different dates, as in the image to the right. One I collected from the Takealot warehouse and the other from a Takealot collection point, which (if you didn't know) are very convenient locations nearer to

Ever dreamed of flying around exploring the universe in a spaceship, going on missions, interacting with alien life and building bases all over the place? If you have heard of No Man's Sky before it might be for the wrong reasons and if you haven't heard about it then that might be because of all the bad press it received on release meaning it never achieved the fame it should/could have. Similar to the release of Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky was massively over-hyped prior to release ultimately resulting in a lot of unhappy customers when they played version 1.0 of the game on release day. No Man's Sky wasn't broken, the game worked fine, it was just very, very empty. A massive procedurally generated universe to explore with not very much to do, many (most) of the promised features of the game were missing and it was evident the game needed a few more years of development. Jump ahead those few more years of development and No Man's Sky is a very different game

 A quick and easy tip for anyone that doesn't know already. If there are websites or online services you use a lot, for example Google Drive or Google photos, then installing them as an app can speed things up a bit. This is super simple, anyone can do it and will mean that you end up with an icon for the website/service that you can click on and it will open directly, meaning you save a little time messing around with opening browsers and bookmarks. Open the new Microsoft Edge, navigate to the website you want to setup as an app and then click the menu button in the top right corner and then scroll down to APPS and you should see a link to INSTALL THIS SITE AS AN APP. Click this and the website should open in a window that doesn't look like a web browser anymore and should look more like an application window. There should also be an application entry in your Start Menu list which you can then pin to taskbar.

Whatsapp is a pretty amazing piece of software if you are old enough to remember the dark ages when people still made use of SMS and MMS to send annoying text messages to each other. You may not know that, apart from being available on your phone, if you have a Windows or Mac PC you can download the desktop client which allows you to use Whatsapp on your phone from your PC or laptop by connecting over your WiFi network. This means that if you are working and getting a lot of messages throughout the day then it allows you to reduce work interruptions checking your phone every 5 minutes and thereby impress your boss by being more productive However, whilst this is a good feature, an  excellent feature of the Whatsapp Desktop client is that it makes working with multiple files much easier than if you were using your phone. If you want to download a lot of messages, images, video or anything else you can do it in just a few short seconds, as opposed to fumbling around with your phone and A

If you sometimes think, "Wow, that took a long time to appear" when you right click in Windows Explorer on a file or folder, if you have the Google Drive desktop app installed (referred to as Backup & Sync at the time of writing) then it may be the culprit. Though you may never have used, you will probably have noticed that when you install the Drive desktop app it adds some entries to the right click context menu. There is, however, a widely reported bug related to the Google Drive right click menu entries as they add a noticeable delay to the time it takes for the right click menu to be visible from the time that you click. I would imagine it has something to do with connecting to/pinging your Google Drive every time you right click in Explorer or something along those lines. Anyway, whatever the reason, it is an unnecessary annoyance which can easily be fixed. All you need to do to get back an instant right click menu is remove or disable the right click entries. This