Put a couple tablespoons of olive oil in an 8 inch pan on medium heat
Put in 4 eggs making sure not to break the yolk
Sprinkle salt and pepper. Cumin is good, too.
Using a flipper, inspect the bottom of the eggs along the perimeter occasionally until it’s slightly brown and the egg pancake, if you will, is firm. Personally, I like my egg yolks half cooked.
Remove to a plate
Eating method
Personally, I don’t like to break the yolk cuz that’s messy. I’d eat the egg white separately and each entire egg yolk separately.
Let’s say you’ve taken a screenshot of some text and you’d like to highlight part of the text. By using different blending modes, this becomes an easy task. Here’s how to do it.
1. Open the screenshot containing text in Photoshop and select the text you want to highlight
2. Create a new layer and fill it with yellow
3. Change the blending mode to darken or any other one you like to create the highlighted text.
I’ve tried various types of tillers that you can rent from Home Depot. The light duty mantis tillers and mid tine are really only good for soft dirt.
MTA Rear Tine Tiller (Model # FRC800K1A-656912)
This tiller is heavy duty and can break up hard clay BUT both the wheels and the tines move forward so unless the tines are partially underground breaking the dirt, you can easily be pulled forward and lose control of the machine. Though this is a heavy duty machine, I find it less easy to control compared to the Barreto Hydraulic tiller.
Barreto Hydraulic Tiller (Model # E1320HX)
This tiller is big and heavy but it’s easy to use, easy to control, and will destroy clay and hard dirt. The rear tines move in the opposite direction of the wheels so the machine never runs away from you moving you forward out of control. It’s the most expensive to rent, but the time savings and ease of use make it worth it. I personally recommend this tiller over all the others.
Last week I made an egg sandwich with spinach, smoked sliced beef brisket, cheddar cheese and ciabatta bread. It was good but messy as the ingredients kept falling out as I’d eat it. Also, it wasn’t easy tasting all of the ingredients with every bite since they’d move around while holding the sandwich.
Since the sandwich would end up all mixed up in your mouth and stomach, I figured why not just mix all the ingredients up in a pan. It turns out this was not only much easier to cook and eat but also tastier as you could taste more of the ingredients.
Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients:
pita bread (available at Costco)
potatoes (optional)
pre-cooked tater tots
pre-cooked chopped baby potatoes
chopped tomatoes
diced onions
diced red, green and yellow bell pepper (can get it pre-diced and frozen)
diced jalapeno peppers
baby spinach
shredded cheddar cheese
pre-cooked smoked sliced beef brisket (available at Costco)
3 eggs
maybe broccoli?
Instructions:
If the bread is a bit hard, warm it up in the microwave for 50 secs to soften it.
Pour / spray cooking on in a pan and turn the heat up to medium
Put in all ingredients except eggs and mix for a minute or so
Put in eggs and mix for a minute.
I prefer my eggs half cooked with the yolk still wet so I’d turn off the heat and transfer everything to a play in time for the yolk to remain wet.
To eat, you can stuff the pita bread with the egg scramble though it may be hard separating the two sides of the bread without breaking it. Otherwise, just rip pieces of pita bread and scoop up some of the eggs scramble with it as you would for curry.
To save time in the morning, prepare everything the night before.
Add all ingredients except eggs in a zip lock bag and put in freezer
In the morning, transfer frozen ingredients to a bowl and defrost in microwave
Trying to find a thick, plush rug with high pile can be difficult with so many options but inaccurate advertising. Here’s my experience and recommendations for comfy carpet.
Thomasville Shag Rugs
Basically, all of the Thomasville Shag rugs are good, if not the best. They are definitely the best value.
Thomasville Bali Shag Rug I felt this rug at Costco and it’s definitely thick, soft and super dense.
Thomasville Marketplace Luxury Shag I personally have this rug. It’s definitely high pile and soft but not as soft at the Bali Shag rug. I like the edges of this rug more than the Bali shag rug, though.
Thomasville Marketplace Savoy Shag Rug I haven’t felt this rug but it’s got a lot of good reviews and is by Thomasville.
This article explains how to remove a green background in a video using Corel VideoStudio Ultimate 2018 and the NewBlueFX Chroma Key.
When applying a chroma key to a video in VideoStudio, you have two options:
using Corel VideoStudio’s native chroma key feature
using the NewBlueFX Chroma Key filter
Native Corel VideoStudio Chroma Key Feature
To use VideoStudio’s native chroma key feature,
select a video on the timeline,
open the Options panel,
click the Effect tab,
check the “Apply Overlay Options” checkbox, and
adjust the settings.
From my experience, this feature doesn’t work well for imperfectly lit backgrounds. Unless you are filming in a professional studio, the chroma key results will likely be poor.
NewBlueFX Chroma Key Filter
For better chroma key results, you can use the NewBlueFX Chroma Key filter. Disable the native VideoStudio chroma key by unchecking the “Apply Overlay Options” checkbox described in the previous steps. This will minimize confusion due to the application of multiple chroma keys. To use the NewBlueFX Chroma Key, do this:
crop your video to remove any areas outside of the green screen. If you don’t, the background will be gray instead of transparent.
click on the FX Filter button
select NewBlue Video Essentials II in the filter dropdown
drag the Chroma Key filter to the video in the timeline
if the native VideoStudio chroma key panel is visible, close it by clicking the x button in the top right corner of the panel
select the “Chroma Key” filter and then click the “Customize Filter” button
The NewBlue Chroma Key control panel will appear.
Uncheck “Show in preview window” to improve performance
Uncheck “Use keyframes” to apply the same chroma key settings for the entire video. Unless you need to apply different settings for different sections of the video, you don’t need to use keyframes.
If your background is green, leave the “Default – Green” button selected.
Check the “Show Mask” checkbox to show a black mask for any color in the video other than green
Adjust the Sensitivity value until the subject is completely black and the background is completely white. If it’s difficult to use the radial slider, just enter numeric values.
Drag the slider to scrub through the video to see if any section of the video shows a partially gray background or white subject. If it does, further increase the sensitivity setting.
Uncheck the “Show Mask” checkbox to remove the mask and to see the video in color. If you see some of the green background spilling over on the subject (usually around a person’s hair), adjust the “Erase Spill” value.
Click OK to save and exit the Chroma Key panel.
Some of the green background is spilling over around the subject’s hair. Increase the “Erase Spill” value to fix this.
Nowadays, videos can be recorded at 4K resolution which is great for visual quality but bad for editing performance. To fix this, you can enable some settings in Corel VideoStudio under Settings > Performance as follows.
These settings will cause VideoStudio to generate a smaller version of a large video file so speedier editing. In the example settings above, if the source video is greater than 720 x 480, then a proxy file will be created in a SmartProxy folder. On my system, that folder is at
As an example, let’s compare the original video size to the proxy video size. In VideoStudio, if we select a video and view it’s properties, we see that its size is 636 MB.
If we look at the SmartProxy folder, it is currently empty. Now, if we drag the video to the timeline, VideoStudio will create a proxy file containing a lower quality version of that video. You can see the progress of the proxy file creation under Settings > Smart Proxy Manager > Smart Proxy Queue Manager.
When the proxy file has been created, you can inspect its size. As you can see, the size is only 56 MB. That’s a reduction of 91%!
If the proxy file is still too large, you can tweak the proxy file settings to produce a lower quality file, e.g. instead of 1920 x 1080 frame size, you can choose 640 x 360.
You can also tweak the audio and video compression settings.
If you are unsure whether VideoStudio is actually using the proxy files instead of the original files, you can look for a specific icon on each video in the timeline. If there is a black and white icon as shown below, then the proxy video is being used.
Making a music video often requires transitioning between multiple video clips. Many video editing programs have many effects for transitioning between video clips. The most common transition effect is the cross fade. In Corel VideoStudio, you can apply this transition by dragging it over the two video clips where they meet. Since this is a cross fade, the duration of the two clips necessarily becomes smaller. If you have a separate audio track and you want the video track to be in sync with the audio track, the crossfade transition will cause the video to become out of sync with the audio track. To maintain synchronousness and for transitioning many video clips, use the track transparency feature. The instructions below are for making a music video with multiple video tracks and a separate audio track.
1. Record Video Footage
You can do this using your phone. Just remember to record in landscape. If you want to show a different background behind the subject, make sure to film against a green screen.
2. Add Assets to Corel VideoStudio
The assets are things like each source video, music files, background images and videos, etc. Make sure you name each file something descriptive to make it easy to identify them when working with many tracks.
3. Drag the Background Image / Video to the Video Track
The first track in the list of tracks is the video track. Unlike the Video Overlay tracks, the Video track must start at time 0. If the background video is abstract and can be looped but is too short, you can duplicate it back to back as shown below.
4. Drag Each Video to a Separate Video Overlay Track
To start, each video can be positioned at time 0. Later, we’ll adjust the start time of each video so they are in sync with the music track. You can also mute each video track’s audio so the only audio heard comes from the music track.
5. Create Proxy Files
This will make VideoStudio use a smaller version of each file to improve performance. See how to set up proxy files.
6. Drag the Audio Asset to the Music Track
In this example, I positioned the start time of the music to 20 seconds to accommodate video clips that have a long but useless intro.
7. Determine Visibility Times for Each Video Track
Let’s say you want to make a music video containing 5 different singers each singing a different part of the song. You’ll have at least 5 video tracks to work with. You’ll need to listen to the song and determine what times throughout the song to show different videos. You can do this by creating a spreadsheet like below.
8. Set Cues / Markers on the Timeline
To make it easy to see start and end times for each video track, add a cue / marker (little green triangles below the timeline bar) on the timeline for each start time.
8. Create a Transition Between Each Video
To do this, we’ll be adjusting each video track’s transparency. In order for this to work, you can’t cut any of the video clips in the timeline.
For each track, click on the Track Transparency button to reveal the transparency controls.
In the screenshot below. you see multiple video tracks but only the transparency track for one of them. The vertical position of the yellow line indicates the video’s transparency at any given time. When the line is at the bottom (0), the video is completely transparent (0% opaque). When the line is at the top, the video is completely visible (100% opaque). You create a fade by adding keyframes to the yellow line and dragging them.
Below is a screenshot for a different video track. Notice how the transparency graph both of these video tracks are such that one video will fade out when the other fades in.
