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.
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
Alvvays: Belinda Says
Alvvays’ Belinda Says is the first song in ages that makes me deliberately drive more slowly so I can hear it all before I get home. I’m sure I look pretty silly as I sing along to the “See how it goes … See how it grows” bit but at least I’ll be providing some humour to whoever sees me.
A dumb thing: before I really listened to the lyrics I assumed the Belinda of the title was Belinda Butcher from My Bloody Valentine.
Posted in Life
Andrew Plotkin’s Favourite Games of 2022
In Andrew Plotkin’s roundup of his favourite games of last year he mentioned that Tunic has a combat-free mode. I wish more games had something like this, especially Ghost of Tsushima. I’m sure a lot of people who are not into blood-soaked battles would very much enjoy walking and riding around Tsushima while visiting fox dens, composing haiku and working out how to get to each of the shrines. It would be a very different game experience but one that I think many people would enjoy.
Posted in Games
Tagged Ghost of Tsushima
Pavement: Echelon Your dreams
Do I have a favourite Pavement song? I don’t think I do. Some I like more than others, but for the most part my favourite at any moment is the one I’m listening to right then.
But, of course, there are a dozen or so that exist on a level above all the rest. Among them, and the one I most hoped they’d play when they came to Perth was Fillmore Jive, which I’ve never heard live.
And play it they did. It was every bit as huge, soaring, swirling and glorious as I’d dreamt.
Why not Mars?
Why not Mars?
Maciej Ceglowski questions the wisdom of a manned mission to Mars.
Posted in Links
Hot Spring Amber
While I was dozing off yesterday in a relaxation chair at a hot spring in the Japanese countryside my brain recognised a slight similarity in the bland piano background music to Dick Diver’s very much not bland song Amber and kept trying to match the lyrics to the music. It would get through a couple of lines of lyrics but then the music would veer off in a different direction, but again and again it kept on trying.
Mastodon – Links and Styles
Of the issues with Mastodon raised by Dave Winer, the ones I’m most interested in are links and styles. It’s baffling to me that in 2023 we’re still looking at raw urls and that although I can insert little emoji as much as I like, I can’t make text italic or bold. These limitations kind of made sense in Twitter’s early days but make none for Mastodon.
Posted in Internet
If Pressed
He stands by the door, all ready to go — 250 yen in his left pocket, bus fare, and 550 yen in his right, which is for the subway. He knows he should probably get one of those cards that you can just tap through and not have to juggle handfuls of change. If pressed, he’d find it hard to explain why he hasn’t. The bus he had hoped to be on passes.
Posted in Life
Calendar Days is Back
I made it through a week or so without having Calendar Days playing on repeat in my head.
It’s back now, especially the verse that goes “There’s a kind of quiet. A fighter jet’s applause. They’re all saw toothed fragments. Scattered in an empty hall.”
Posted in Life