Pea and Ham Soup

Pea and Ham Soup
One of my favourite things food, I guess that works with most people.
It's winter and that means soup time. Pea and ham and potato and leek are two of my favourites.

Pea and Ham Soup
1 ham hock (some supermarkets have these and they can also be found at most delis. Get a well smoked one)
500 gm of split green peas
Chicken stock.

Place the split peas in a pot, cover with water and boil - cook according to instructions.

Place the ham hock into a large soup pot, cover with water and stock and boil until meat starts to fall off the bone. Remove the bone and cut the rest of the meat off. Cut the meat into small pieces and return to pot. Place split green peas into soup pot and simmer for about half an hour. Taste it occasionally to see how its going.

Serve with fresh crusty bread.

Photo to come

A bit of Windows know how

Recently whist playing wow on my notebook I noticed that game play was freezing every 2-3 seconds, making it almost impossible to play. I looked at heaps of options, updated my video drivers etc but finally found a solution to the problem when viewing process under task manager. There was one process, Wmpntwk.exe that was taking up at least 50% of CPU usage, taking the total CPU usage to an almost constant 100%. I knew this had to be the main issue with my FPS lag spikes in game. Wmpntwk.exe is the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service that shares Windows Media Player libraries to other networked players and media devices using Universal Plug and Play. I don’t know exactly why this began hogging CPU, it may have been through the addition of new phone synching software that was also recently added.
Anyway…I found the fix through a web search. Click on ‘start’ or press windows key and type ‘services’ into the search window under the program list. Look for Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service in the list and right click on it and select ‘Properties’. Set the start-up type to ‘Manual’ or ‘Disabled’.
As soon as I had done this, my CPU must have breathed a sigh of relief, everything went back to normal speed including games and even simple processes like opening applications.

Street Art

Some pictures from the street