Oatmeal

Assorted links from this week. I’ve also been reading a book on Epicurean Philosophy called The Swerve. It has been enjoyable and interesting so far. Also, weirdly apt reading for this day and age, perhaps?

Venusian Habitable Climate Scenarios: Modeling Venus Through Time and Applications to Slowly Rotating Venus‐Like Exoplanets

Evaluating several snapshots in time over the past 4+ billion years, we show that Venus could have sustained liquid water and moderate temperatures for most of this period.

Venus was shockingly habitable until fairly recently…geologically speaking.

Horseradish history

More recent appreciation of horseradish is believed to have originated in Central Europe, the area also linked to the most widely held theory of how horseradish was named. In German, it’s called “meerrettich” (sea radish) because it grows by the sea. Many believe the English mispronounced the German word “meer” and began calling it “mareradish.” Eventually it became known as horseradish. The word “horse” (as applied in “horseradish”) is believed to denote large size and coarseness. “Radish” comes from the Latin radix meaning root.

My 2nd fav. part of a Passover meal.

PicoWars - Advanced Wars DeMake

Advanced Wars was totally my jam on the GBA. This Pico8 demake totally captures the essence of the game. I’ve had a lot of fun playing with it, and combing through the code over the last week.

Also, demakes are a cool scene.

Sourdough Bread

We ran out of flour a few weeks ago, but I am very excited to get back to baking. We placed a bulk order a few weeks ago and it should be ready soon! I’ve got big plans for sourdough baking.

Read-Eval-Print-λove

I am completely smitten by the few issues of this news letter. Lisp and forth!?

This week I’ve also been working my way back through Practical Common Lisp. If you are at all interested in lisp, I highly recommend this one!

Why is CSS so hard

Tbh, I’m adding this piece here mostly because I feel like it doesn’t answer the question it posses — it draws attention to some of CSS’ many weird edges, but doesn’t really get to the root of why it is so…let’s go with “weird” in place of hard, maybe?

Facebook reportedly had evidence that its algorithms were dividing people, but top executives killed or weakened proposed solutions

Ya’ll…Facebook is real garbage. Total garbage. Completely and absolutely garbage.

Deep Space Nine: The Trek spinoff that saved the day by staying put

The show’s unique ability to look back on human history from “the future” offers a perspective that other pandemic-centered movies and shows available now simply can’t broach. DS9’s challenge: can we employ smart decision-making today to ensure that we’ll make it to tomorrow?

Free, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging

No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words.

There is a website obesity crisis. Bloated websites full of scripts, ads, and trackers slowing your readers down every time they try to read your well crafted content.

Bear is all you need to build a fantastic and optimized site or blog. It works perfectly on any viewing device. All you need to focus on is writing good content.

TI Education has announced that the newest OS for the TI-83 Premium CE, the French version of the TI-84 Plus CE, removes the ability to run native programs - assembly, or ASM, and by extension C programs, which compile into assembly. This new version, OS 5.5.1, both disables assembly support and prevents the OS from being downgraded. BASIC, and where supported, Python, will continue to work as-is. Although no such software update has been announced for the TI-84 Plus CE yet, our observations of the broadly shared featureset between the TI-84 Plus CE and the TI-83 Premium CE makes us strongly suspect that ASM/C support will be removed from the TI-84 Plus CE in a similar OS update in the near future.

The end of an era. One of my forest forays into programming was fiddling with a friends TI calculator.

I haven’t done a link log in ages. Here is a miniature one for you!

• More Parseable Output, Please., Collin Donnell putting people over computers. Yes please!
• Smoked Carrot Lox, to go with all the bagels I’ve been baking lately
• Forth
  • gforth’s manual
  • forth v lisp
  • a whole heap of resources on forth
  • factor tutorial
  • …I’m pretty excited about forth, and other Concatenative programming languages these days
• Elevators Changed Cities. Will Coronavirus Change Elevators?
• Voice driven development, an interesting tech demo from Emily Shea on how she writes software with her voice instead of typing
• Getting started with Mini vMac, an introduction to retro mac computing without needing to buy a whole heap of ancient hardware! Emulation station, choo choo!
• For 32 Years, This Japanese Chef Has Been Making a Painting of Every Single Meal He Eats. See His Mouth-Watering Work Here, I am fascinated by long running projects like this. Projects that toe the line by being somewhere between a meditative practice and a compulsion
• Make a PDF looked like a scanned doc using ImageMagick, Piper Haywood’s neat trick to make a PDF look like it has been scanned to appease the monster of bureaucracy

We went to the beach

Turtle looking.

Before brainfuck and Befunge, there was INTERCAL. Its revival in 1990 by ESR may mark the beginning of the esolang movement, but the language dates back to 1972, when it was created in a famous late-night session at Princeton by Don Woods and Jim Lyon. The original version INTERCAL (sometimes called INTERCAL 72) is a rich parody with a more chaotic sense of play than its later revivals. Its instructions are deliberately vague and embrace an almost-believable hacker jargon, collected in a straight-faced, well-organized manual. Don Woods not only co-created INTERCAL, but is also noted for Colossal Cave Adventure, and the original version of the Hacker Dictionary: three essential cultural objects of geek culture.

We went outside.

I’ve been making a lot of bagels lately.

Here’s my basic recipe for doing so; it is more of a starting place than a strict recipe. Sometimes I use some sourdough starter…I’ve been experimenting with the exact quantities of sourdough starter to normal yeasted dough.

Dough

• 1 tbl instant yeast
• 4 c flour
• 2 tea salt
• 1 tbl brown sugar / maple syrup
• 1 1/3 c warm water

Bath

• 2 quarts water
• 2 tbl brown sugar
• 1 tbl molasses (if you can get your hands on malt, that is gnarly)

How

• Activate yeast by soaking in warm sugar water
• Make dough by combining all ingredients
• Knead dough for 10 mins (15 mins if by mixer)
• Let dough double in size, ~ 1.5 - 2 hours
• Divide risen dough into 12 equal pieces
• Make each piece into a long snake, and then make bagel shaped by pinching the ends together
• Let rest for ~ 30 mins
• Preheat oven to 425 f / 220 c
• Bring bath to boil
• Boil each bagel 2 mins (I usually do ~ 6 bagels at a time)
• Remove from bath and place directly on to baking sheet (if you have a silicone mat, I’ve found those helpful to reduce sticking)
• Top with whatever seasonings you wish (if you do this fast enough after the boil there is no need to egg wash/milk wash the bagels — I do this to keep them vegan)
• Bake for 20 - 25 mins, rotate after ~ 15 mins

Bagel bagel bagel