It’s a known fact that eating garlic and onions make you socially repulsive.  But garlic and onions also have known curative properties.

Garlic, for one, is known, and I have personal experience with this, to drastically lower blood cholesterol.  The downside is that you have to take it chopped and, yes, raw – for at least 2 weeks. Say goodbye to your non garlic-eating friends.

Onions, as far I’ve heard, is like the anti-flatulence vegetable. According to WikiPedia it has many medicinal properties, but it doesn’t mention purging air as being one of them.  But again, personal experience has taught me that onions make you fart, which at least leads to a less bloated stomach.

Recently though, something peculiar happened to me and I haven’t been able to verify it with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise. So here it is.

Super Onions & Super Garlic

Being of the single persuasion recently I have had the freedom to eat as much garlic and onion as I can stomach. It is important to note that my tolerance for garlic and onions (and chillies, for that matter) is quite substantial.

Also of importance is the fact that I have, in the centre of my lower jaw, two teeth that overlap, which are annoyingly prone to plaque buildup.  Perhaps because it overlaps in a way that protects it from any but the most stringent, multi-directional-approach tooth brushing.

Anyway, plaque, as you may know, is stubborn and never leaves on its own. So it was quite a surprise when mine did. A little bit at a time.

Dentist Grade Tools

It was only when I went at it with a plaque scrapper (you don’t have one?) that I realise how easily it really came off.

And it made me wonder; what brought this on?

Usually odd things in my body are due to a persistent change in diet, and the only change in my diet has been the edition of serious amounts of garlic and onion. Like 2 or 3 onion and a bulb of garlic at every meal.

So I searched Google to see whether or not the removal of plaque has ever been attributed to garlic and onions, or whether garlic and onions can in fact remove plaque.

I found nothing to answer this question, but having had this experience I  can’t help but wonder: do garlic and/or onion somehow work in on plaque to make it easier to remove?



I was called in at 9 this morning for some routine maintenance and an upgrade or two of the computer that Just Works.

Mac Don’t Always Just Work

I started at 9:20am – faced with the 2-year-or-so old Intel Mac Book Pro that was still running OS X Common House Cat Tiger and in desperate need of an upgrade.

The machine was previously used as a photo bank / work horse and was now relegated to the serene pastures of office admin.  The 120GiB harddrive was 100GiB full, and would therefore need a good vacuuming.

Still littering the office from previous Mac upgrades, which didn’t go smoothly at all, I had my 2-step upgrade discs handy.  I’ve read several posts where people have said upgrading from Tiger straight to OS X Snow Leopard was possible, but my mileage varied quite considerably.

So with all 5 or 6 of the various ages of Mac I had to upgrade in the office about 3 months ago, I had to go from Tiger to Leopard to Snow Leopard every time. Not. Fun. At. All.

Bring in the Leopards

Anyhow, the files on this computer had all been backed up, so I could just fire away. I duly slipped the OS X Leopard 10.5 disc into the drive.  The Mac recognised the disc easily enough and a couple of clicks later the disc was humming along nicely and Leopard was being installed.

About 25 minutes later as the progress bar neared 100%, I was thinking to myself how smoothly it was all going. Of course, thoughts like this generates a ridiculously strong electro magnetic pulse, and mere moments after forming this thought in my head, the Mac threw up a non-helpful message to the tune of “Leopard could not be installed on this system. Please restart and try again”.

Luckily the message said please, otherwise I would have been seriously pissed off at just having wasted 30 minutes.

But the fun was just starting. Restarting the iMac it then told me that OS X 10.4 was required for this installation and that OS X 10.4 was not detected on this system. I chose the main drive as the startup disc and restarted the Mac again.

This time it try to boot, but just shut down. I tried a couple of times, but it did the same thing and eventually I realised the harddrive must have gotten wrecked.

How to the get CD out of a Mac that doesn’t boot up

Hit the power button and immediately hold down the mouse button (on the trackpad). After a while the disc will eject.

How to then boot again from the CD of a Mac that doesn’t boot up

Power up the Mac, slip in the CD, hold down the C key.

Eventually I used a retail disc of OS X Leopard to go into Disc Utilities and check the harddrive for errors.

“Oh”, said the Mac, “the disc needs to be repaired”. Wow really? That just works.

I clicked on the Repair button and several more wasted minutes later it apparently didn’t just work as I was told “your disc can’t be repaired. Save as much info as you can and reformat.” Nice one, Apple.

So that’s what I did. I reformatted and started from scratch by running the OS X Leopard 10.5 retail install.  After about 30 minutes of that, I treated myself to an immediate additional 25 minutes by upgrading straight to OS X Snow Leopard 10.6. I was up for even more and thought about immediately installing the patches to bring it up to 10.6.4, but the 900MiB download and a slow Internet connection in the office quickly killed off that idea.

Apple Macs Just Work – Eventually

So at 13:00, the Apple Mac finally just worked.

And the crash, which resulted in the loss of all the installed applications with their files, means that the office is now a superbly uncluttered admin workhorse richer.

When you ignore people on Facebook, they pretty much disappear from your world, assuming that Facebook is the only part of your world where you ever encountered them. Ignoring people in real life is substantially less effective and much more work.

Ever notice when mutual friends reply to a comment on their posts left by the Ignoree? The friend appear to either be having a conversation with themselves or give replies that are out of sync.

If you are the Ignorer, you will sometimes remember that you are, and put 2 and  2 together to conclude that what you’re witnessing is half a conversation between your friend and somebody you’ve chosen to exclude from your Facebook life.

The same goes for when you are the Ignoree – although the realisation that you are the Ignoree is an entirely different feeling all together. Sinking, I believe it is.

The only way you know you’re being excluded from whatever comment / update / post was made in first place though, is by picking up on random snippets of other people’s responses to an apparently non-existing post. And to pick up on those, you must have been expecting to find yourself on some or other limited access list.

At least Facebook privacy works in that regard – a powerful blade that cuts both ways. Deep.

Facebook Life

Also, if you’re spending too much time on Facebook, like I clearly am, then some statistics might cause worry.

Like having 515 friends, for instance, of which 235 are in common with your recently ex girlfriend.  And realising, at about the same time, that of those remaining friends of yours, at least 80% are overseas / out-of-reach / a business contact / were added after a night out when you had a bit too much to drink.

The world suddenly looks a lot smaller and your prospects of future good nights out  a lot slimmer.

It’s the price you pay for the choices you make.



For me a major WordPress Blog annoyance is the WordPress Revisions feature. It essentially saves a copy of your post or page every time you update it. If you share my frustration, here’s how to stop or limit WordPress Revisions and clean current revisions from your database.

Remember kids: Backup before you try this at home

WordPress is an awesome blogging platform with many useful features, but WordPress Revisions is the one feature I have never said about “oh, wow, I wish I had the previous iteration of this article“.  I back my database up regularly (and so should you), which gives me a backup of my article anyway, so for me it makes sense to disable WordPress Revisions all together.

There are various plug-ins that can handle this for you, and I recommend that you use one of them if you’re not comfortable fiddling around in code.

Otherwise, open your wp-config.php file, which resides in your WordPress root/install directory, and add either one of the following lines before the ?> at the bottom of the file.

To totally disable WordPress Revisions to prevent additional copies of posts and pages being saved, add this:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', FALSE);

To limit WordPress Revisions to say 1, 2 or 3 revision copies only, add this and change the number to suit your preference:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 2);

The following line of code will erase all the WordPress Revisions in your blog. I did this, because I don’t want any copies anywhere – it reduced my 7.4MiB database to 3.2MiB, which just shows how much space WordPress Revisions can occupy (and this is a development database, which means it’s still relatively small).

Do you really want to delete all your WordPress Revisions?

Open you favourite MySQL interface software (commandline, PHPMyAdmin, MySQL Workbench – they all work), back up your current database and then enter the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

Your database will now be wiped clean of every single WordPress Revision (but obviously not your actual article or pages). In any case, please take my my advice: back up your database.

And… you’re done!  You should now have a significantly smaller WordPress database, which will speed things up a bit – it really makes a different if your blog is huge, less so if you only have a few entries.

Happy blogging!

Ever since I switched 1EarthAdventures to WordPress way back when… erm *flipsthroughblog*, on 15 October 2005 or not too long after, I’ve been using this awesome Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

However, this is 2010 and my blog has evolved from a Twilight-esque, emo diary in to a blog where some of the posts are actually helpful enough to be linked to and read quite often.

So, I think it’s time for a new theme.

Although I’m not an expert yet, I have dabbled quite extensively in WordPress theme modification, most notably SabahBah.com – which was an extensive project with custom theme and custom plugins *patonmyback*.

I’ve also adapted a Blogger blog to be emulated by a WordPress install, as well as adapting a RapidWeaver theme and blog to work in a WordPress install.

Quick and easy, it was not.

But alas, today marks the first day of Project Fiddle, of which the achieved mission will be a brand new shiny theme for 1EarthAdventures.com.

Let the work begin…