A note for future me — when at work and faced with the choice between drinking instant coffee or using a couple of paper towels as a make-do coffee filter because you left the filters you bought the day before at home, always always always go for the paper towels even though it takes longer and looks ridiculous. That one cup of instant you had a year ago that you thought was surprisingly good was a one-in-a-million never to be repeated again.
Not Much of a Career
Last night I arrived a little early to pick up my wife from a dinner in Fremantle and parked on the side of the road to wait. While reading on my phone I heard some voices from behind and saw in my rear view mirror someone trying the handle of the car behind me. It took me a little while to realise what was going on and before I knew it my drivers side door was opening. I let out a surprisingly loud and aggressive shout as I pulled it shut and three guys ran off into the night.
I was genuinely surprised at my reaction. I am definitely more a flight than a fight person. I think it was the suddenness with which it happened. There was no time for my brain to get in the way. If they hadn’t run away immediately, I wonder whether I’d have kept up my aggro facade. Happy I didn’t get a chance to find out.
Once my heart had stopped pounding, Billy Bragg’s lines from Welcome to the New Brunette popped into my head.
The people from your church agree
It’s not much of a career
Trying the handles of parked cars
Whoops, there goes another year
Whoops, there goes another pint of beer
Posted in Life
Tagged Billy Bragg, Fremantle
Denser Than a Hockey Puck
Will I ever learn? On a whim, I looked up the lyrics for the Malkmus song Old Jerry and the line “Art is denser than a hockey puck” is supposedly “Heart is denser than a hockey puck”. What nonsense! I’m going to continue to sing “Art” as I barrel down the freeway.
Hand in Hand
This was almost certainly unintended, but Shiv’s hand coldly placed on Tom’s as they drove away felt like a negative echo of Mr Darcy touching Ms Bennet’s as he helped her into her carriage.
Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures
Tagged Pride and Prejudice, Succession
That Was Close
Phew! That was close. Pretty sure nobody noticed but I just deleted a post in which I questioned the wisdom of a multinational conglomerate releasing a new gaming product. Luckily I remembered that I don’t really care what multinational conglomerates do with their money as long as it doesn’t impinge too much on my ability to enjoy their wares or cause huge harm to large swathes of people, or even minor amounts of harm to very few people.
It wasn’t even an interesting opinion — basically that I, like everyone else, thought it was a puzzling idea.
Skipping Over
I have reached the point with Blue Rev where the songs I used to skip over — Pomeranian Spinster and Tile By Tile among others — are now the ones I skip to.
A bit of a hit around
We’ve been driving past Robertson Park tennis courts for years, thinking we should pop in and give it a go sometime. That feeling gained some impetus when I found out that Steve Malkmus played there when Pavement came to Perth in February. Silly, I know, but still …
Today we finally did it and it was a tonne of fun. It’s been over ten years since I last played tennis, and that was at a house we were staying at down in Yallingup and was very much fuelled and/or hampered by copious amounts of wine, so this was the first sober tennis I’ve played since I was in high school.
It was just $15 an hour and mercifully uncrowded, so our many wayward hits didn’t cause any bother for anyone else. We didn’t actually keep score or anything like that. Our main goal was to keep some kind of a volley going and help each other get the ball over the net. All in all a very good hour.
Maybe Ulysses is the one
My search for a way to edit my blog on my phone or iPad may be over. It turns out Ulysses has pretty robust WordPress publishing support. You can post and edit back and forth on either Mac or iOS and it seems to keep a track of things fairly well. It’s not quite as seamless as MarsEdit — there’s an extra step in the publishing process where you have to confirm that the post settings such as categories and dates and the like are right — but it beats fighting with the WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately Ulysses interactions are one way only. There’s no way to get posts that didn’t originate in Ulysses or for it to update the local version of a post if the one in WordPress has been edited elsewhere. But I think that is outside of the scope of what Ulysses is supposed to be.
And you can get the benefit of Ulysses’ best feature — manual ordering of posts.
Now all I need to do is work out navigation, tweak the archive display, and fix the image problem and I’ll be able to stop futzing about behind the scenes and focus on writing.
Posted in Technology
Tagged WordPress
Something Like MarsEdit on iOS
I wish there were something like MarsEdit on iOS. The WordPress app is okay for little edits but feels like a web page. There’s a distinct lag to every interaction that makes it feel just a bit off.
Posted in Internet, Technology
Tagged Blogging, MarsEdit
Just One Cookbook’s Macaroni Gratin
This macaroni gratin is probably the first actually new recipe I’ve made this year. It was a late request on a Sunday, with just enough time to get to the shops.
For ages I’ve shied away from anything vaguely rouxish. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of mixing flour into things properly. But this time was a total success — not even the slightest floury hint.
Posted in Food, Life
Tagged Recipe Notes
Fun with WordPress
Although I’m something of a ChatGPT sceptic, I have to say it is pretty handy for quickly working out how to do things with WordPress without having to trawl through countless posts.
So far I’ve used it to find out how to:
- Display posts from only one category on the home page
- Hide a category in the list of categories
- Display dates the way I want
- Show related posts without using a plugin
One thing it failed to do, though, was tell me how to style lists with a dash rather than the usual dots. Its answer was wildly misleading. Oh well!
My little project of moving from Hugo to WordPress, but trying to keep things as simple as possible, is coming along nicely. There’s a lot that doesn’t quite look the way I want — for example, category pages and images overall — but I’ll keep chipping away at it.
Posted in Technology
Tagged Blogging, ChatGPT, WordPress
Net Happiness
It makes me happy to think of the millions of people out there joyously gliding, crafting, cooking, ascending, recalling, fusing, climbing, and all the other things you can do in the new game. If world’s net happiness has been boosted even just a smidge, that’s pretty cool.
Halt
While savouring the Roy kids’ final few bouts of sniping and betrayal, I’ve been dipping into the final season of Halt and Catch Fire. I’m struck by the contrast. It builds so much warmth and love for the characters. You really want them to find happiness and feel there’s a good chance they will.
Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures
Tagged Halt and Catch Fire, Succession
Maya’s Feeds
I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Looking to broaden my reading beyond the same old sites, I went ahead and imported Maya’s OPML file of her wonderful blogroll into my feed aggregator. After a day I have nearly 8,000 unread posts. With such a huge number, I don’t really feel any pressure to actually read or even skim all of them. Basically I plan to dip in now and then, get a sense of each site/blog/feed and whittle the list down to something more manageable over time.
Side note: This OPML file had over 300 feeds in it, going way over the free limits of Feedly. I’ve been meaning to move away from Feedly for a while. Even if I take them at their word about their recent AI-assisted protest tracking feature, it feels much more targeted at the enterprise market rather than personal website readers and writers. I came upon FreshRSS and, bravely resisting the temptation to install it on my own server, created a free account on FLOSS Feeds, which seems so far to suit my needs.
Posted in Culture, Internet, Technology
Tagged mayaland, RSS
Succession – Spoiled Yet Unspoiled
Having been late to the Succession season 4 party I went into episode 3 knowing what would happen. While I’m sure I would have enjoyed it just a bit more if I had not, the episode was brilliant. It made me think about what I really like about this show. It’s not the events that matter, it’s the reactions to those events — the side glances, the body language, the moments of realisation and, of course, all that wonderful and nasty dialogue. That said, there are a few media sites, both old and new, that could stand to be a tad kinder in their crafting of headlines and URLs.
Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures
Tagged Succession
Switching iPhone Apps with an External Keyboard
Today I started experimenting with using my iPhone with the external Bluetooth keyboard I bought way back when I got my first-generation iPad. It’s been a while since I used it and the batteries (yes, it’s that old) I left in it had begun to rust. A bit of rust on the outer cap was getting in the way of the new batteries making a connection but a bit of scrubbing got it working again.
All in all it was a good experience. It’s a million times faster to type on a proper keyboard than the usual software one. Some apps, such as Ulysses, Bear, and Safari, have very good keyboard shortcut support. Others are very limited.
The biggest surprise is that there’s no easy way to switch apps without enabling full keyboard support in the accessibility settings. Once you do that you can hit Function+Up Arrow to get the usual app switcher that appears on a swipe up from the bottom of the screen. It’s great that full keyboard support exists as it enables all apps to be fully keyboard controllable. Unfortunately, it makes apps that have taken the trouble to support external keyboards slower and more difficult to use.
At the moment it seems like the easiest way to switch apps without having to tap the screen is to hit Command+Space to bring up the search screen, type in the first few letters of the app you want, then press Return when it shows up as the top hit. It’s clunky, especially when you want to switch back and forth between two apps, but is the best way I’ve been able to work out so far.
Posted in Technology
Tagged iPhone
Salt & Fat’s 707 Fried Chicken
A while back I wrote a little about Salt & Fat’s Butter Tomato Sauce setting me on the journey to learning how to cook. That sauce was and is great, but it’s the Summer Babe to 707 Fried Chicken’s Gold Soundz. I’ve made this fried chicken hundreds of times over the years and it’s become our go-to dish whenever we have friends over. If you’re new to deep frying, I’d suggest following Neven’s instructions as closely as possible but there are some parts of my current process that differ from the recipe.
Cutting the Fat
Neven recommends cutting extraneous fat off the chicken. These days I generally don’t bother — partly due to laziness but also to enjoy its crunchy goodness.
Drying the chicken
I’ve used countless paper towels dutifully soaking up as much marinade as I can from the chicken, but I’ve recently stopped. Again, a bit of laziness and it doesn’t seem to make much difference spatter-wise once the chicken is properly covered in potato starch.
Potato Starch
The recipe calls for sweet rice flour, but it’s something I was never able to find in Japan. Instead I use potato starch, which is the go-to starch for deep frying chicken in Japan and is now easy to get in Australia (check out the Asian aisle in Woolworths).
Candy Thermometer
Temperature control is really the key to stress-free deep-frying. My initial attempts at this dish were foiled by cooking in over-hot oil. I have memories of my kids gamely struggling through those charred lumps. Getting a thermometer made all the difference. Although I once bought a candy thermometer I found it difficult to use and read. These days I just use a regular meat thermometer and stick the pointy bit in the oil. You have to hold it for a little while for it to read the heat but it’s not too much of a bother.
The best writing about cooking doesn’t tell you how to make just one thing. It gives you a springboard to explore. Although I still mainly use chicken thighs for this, it’s a great way to fry wings as well. And once you have confidence dealing with hot oil the delights of tonkatsu, spring rolls, and tempura await.
Posted in Food, Life
Tagged Recipe Notes, Salt and Fat
RSS and ActivityPub: A Bit Less Automation Would Be Nice
Although I love RSS and am keen on ActivityPub becoming more widely used, I wish there were some way to be more selective about when my posts get shared. After I publish something on my blog I almost always spot things that I want to add, fix, remove or improve. There’s something about a post being out in the wild that make me see it in a clearer light.
I’d like to be able to post something then at a later time hit a button to share it via RSS or ActivityPub.
When I moved back over to WordPress, I’d thought there must be a plugin out there that would enable this for RSS. Perhaps there is, but I can’t find it amongst all the other RSS plugins, which seem to be focused mainly on pulling things into a site by RSS.
I suppose I could get around it by sharing only a summary rather than the full text of a post, but I have an old-fashioned fondness for full-post RSS and, anyway, I’m sure I’d also want to edit the summaries as well.
Posted in Internet
Tagged ActivityPub, RSS, WordPress
iCloud Email Custom Domains On A2 Hosting
I’ve been thinking of moving my main email from Fastmail to iCloud for ages. It seems a bit silly to be paying for two email services, although Fastmail offers a lot more power-user type features — none of which I really use.
Apple’s instructions are fairly straightforward, but I ran into a problem when adding the MX, CNAME and other records to my domain, which is registered with A2 Hosting. It seems the DNS Management section on the main client login page has little to do with managing DNS. You have to login to cPanel and create the entries in the Zone Editor. The only other trick is to remove the quotes from the SPF entry that Apple supplies.
Although this in not hard hard to do, it’s still a lot of hoops to jump through. It seems there’s been basically no progression in making creating and using custom domains easier to use in the last two decades.
Posted in Technology
Tagged iCloud
That sweetens the memory
Two of my favourite scenes in After Yang involve Kyra and Jake’s memories of conversations they had with Yang. Throughout the conversations phrases are repeated and echoed with differing tones and intonations. The effect is beautiful, but I’ve long wondered what exactly Kogonada, the director, was trying to get at with this technique. Today I found a wonderful interview with him in which he shares this:
Then in the context of loss or trying to recover a memory that you might start finding as meaningful, I do think that you’re almost auditioning or feeling that scene from different spaces because you’re are trying to get to what matters to you and reshaping it. So I just knew that I would capture that through this kind of repetition and hearing lines over, but maybe a little bit differently. Two of those moments are from Jake’s memory and one is from Kyra’s memory. I think that if we had a recording of that actual conversation it would feel different than what we’re experiencing as a human memory, because suddenly there is more love or care that’s growing from both of them. That sweetens that memory. It makes it more meaningful. At the time maybe certain things weren’t absorbed, but there’s something about that process where they’re suddenly trying to attune to everything that might have been significant about it.
My wife and I have watched this film literally dozens of times. Often I’ll put it on when I’m preparing dinner to let its calming gentleness flow into my day.
Posted in Culture, Life, Moving Pictures
Tagged After Yang, Kogonada