LOTR Frodo Goblet

I just made one of my famous fruit smoothies this evening, and am enjoying it from my LOTR Frodo Goblet (circa 2001). And then had a thought that I would post it as my Facebook status, along with the recipe.

And then I had another thought: Go ahead and post it on your blog that no one reads so you can keep it handy for archival purposes and later reference when you have forgotten how to make it again at the beginning of next summer.

Thus, the topic of this blog post. Here we go.

First off, get your blender ready. Make sure its clean from all the pancake gook that was sitting in it three days ago from your roommate’s experiments in the kitchen.

Next, fill the blender with precisely six (6) ice cubes of medium density. It must not be four(4)  or five (5), but six (6) shall be the number of ice cubes you fill the blender. Seven (7) is one (1) ice cube too many, thus the number shall be six (6), and six (6) alone.

Now you must get a banana. Be sure to peel the banana the right way, from the bottom up. I would not recommend making the smoothie without following this crucial step. Put the innards of the banana in the blender with the six (6) ice cubes.

Grab an apple. Doesn’t matter if its red or green, or yellow or a mixture of both. Just as long as its not brown. Or wormy. No one likes worms in their famous fruit smoothies. Here, you have a choice on how you do this, but I would recommend putting the apple in the blender in pieces as opposed to just throwing the whole thing in there. I prefer to use my handy dandy knock off apple wedger (here’s the real original product from years ago) to cut the apple into eight (8) nifty wedges without the core. Or you can just use a regular knife and cut the apple up by hand. Put the pieces in the blender with the banana innards and six (6) ice cubes.

Look in your freezer for your bag of frozen strawberries. Or if its the season, try looking in your fridge for your fresh hand-picked strawberries. Place five (5) (not six (6)!) strawberries in the blender with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, and eight (8) apple wedges.

Now open your refrigerator and take out your orange juice. At least that is where I hope you store your orange juice. That is where I store mine. I would imagine if might taste pretty nasty if you kept it anywhere else for any length of time. Pour the orange juice into the blender with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries until it fills about three-fourths (3/4) the amount of blender already filled. Note: this is not three-fourths (3/4) of the entire blender, but instead three-fourths (3/4) the amount of space already taken up in the blender by the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries.

Put the blender on its stand, ensuring that it is fully situated in its base and ready for operation.

Lastly, turn on the blender. If your blender has an Ice Crush feature, I would recommend using it at this point to crush up the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice. At some point when you feel that the blender is ready, you can try putting it on Smoothie mode, and let it run.

If the blender freezes up and does not spin the crushed six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice, turn the blender off. Try shaking the blender and put it back on its stand. Turn the blender back on again. If this continues to happen repeatedly, try adding more orange juice in the blender along with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries.

Let the blender run for a couple minutes on the Smoothie setting. Once the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice seem like they are sufficiently smoothieized, get out your favorite LOTR goblet and pour the smoothie made up of six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice into the awesome collectable.

Finally, sit back, kick up your feet and enjoy this awesome and famous fruit smoothie made up of six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries, and orange juice in a LOTR goblet. You’ll be thanking me all summer long.

P.S. A LOTR goblet is purely optional, if you have another drinking recepticle you would prefer to use, you have my permission to utilize such a lower form of recipticles if you so choose.

By popular request via comments and emails, I have created a page with a detailed tutorial on how to effectively use the Stylizing Modifications textboxes in my widgets. Go ahead and take a read, you might find something that interests you!

It has been brought to my attention that there is currently a small bug in Wordpress 2.7.1 that affects certain users of my Status Press Widget and Customizable Search Widget.

This bug mainly affects users of PHP4, because the htmlspecialchars_decode function is not included until PHP5, so Wordpress has now integrated a simulation of the same function in the code core of 2.7.

If you are a PHP4 user running Wordpress 2.7.1, you may get this error from a plugin or widget that attempts to access the htmlspecialchars_decode function:

Warning: htmlspecialchars_decode() expects parameter 1 to be string, NULL given in /home/myname/public_html/personal/wp-includes/compat.php on line 105:

PHP5 users already have this function inherint in their repository, so it just bypasses the Wordpress simulation function.

Apparently when 2.7.1 was released, a slight oversight caused the function to be looking for a variable that was not being passed to it because of a misnaming error.

Details about this error are located in the Wordpress bug tracking system, and it looks like a fix has been submitted for the next version.

However, what should I do until the update? I did some looking into the code that is affected, and noticed that basically in the htmlspecialchars_decode function, Wordpress passes the two expected variables (the string, and the quote style) to its own parser called wp_specialchars_decode. Instead of relying on the PHP version, I have updated my plugins to directly call the Wordpress version of the function to ensure compatibility. Scratch that, that’s not going to work. The wp_specialchars_decode function is only included in Wordpress as of 2.7.1, so it is not backwards compatible and not wise to use.

Instead, you should go ahead and fix the problem with the core file if you are using 2.7.1 and PHP4.

1. Open up /public_html/<WP Directory>/wp-includes/compat.php
2. Scroll down to line 104:   if ( !is_scalar( $string ) ) {
3. Change $string to $str
4. Do the same thing for the line below it, 105.
5. Save the file back to your server
6. Update your plugins.

When you have followed these steps, you should be good to go.  If you do not feel comfortable editing the file yourself, you can just download my edited copy of compat.php:

  compat.php (3.4 KiB, 113 hits)

You can find the updates to my widgets here:

• Status Press Widget (1.14)
• Customizable Search Widget (1.2.5)

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to let me know. Oh, and if this has helped you, don’t forget to show a little love:

It was brought to my attention that while updating my plugins to be completely 2.7 compatible, something fell by the wayside (as it normally does). This thing that had fallen was indeed the dear Status Press Widget. Apparently in the 1.11 version of the code, my function to simulate a PHP5 function if the user was using PHP4 had been moved to an incorrect placement inside the widget class. This caused the widget to blow up, even when attempting to activate it. Moving this function outside the class at the very beginning (before the class institiation) corrects the problem and allows both PHP4 and PHP5 users to succefully enjoy this widget.

Please accept my apologies for the previous version mishap.

You can download the latest version on the Status Press Widget page.

Tonight I decided to update my Wordpress plugins. So, each of my plugins are now officially compatible with Wordpress 2.7(.1). Please take a look at some of the new features and such of each of them.

• p2pConverter (0.8)
• Status Press Widget (1.11 1.12)
• Customizable Search Widget (1.2.1)