NYC Pizza Dough
New York style!
A 12–13” pizza (~63% hydration) that I usually double so I have one in the fridge for later. Perfect for 2 people.
If I have time this is the dough I make. It works best with at least 24 hrs to ferment in the fridge but I have successfully let it sit in the fridge for up to 5 days. If I want pizza last minute then I usually go for Ricardo’s dough recipe.
- 225 gm flour (~1 3/4 cups)
- 1/4 tsp (.8 gm) active dry yeast
- .5 tsp (3 gm) kosher salt
- .5 tsp (2 gm) sugar
- 143 gm lukewarm water (slightly less than 3/4 cup)
- .6 tsp (3 gm) oil (non virgin olive oil)
Mix dry ingredients, then add water & oil.
Mix, then knead ~8 minutes.
Put in sealed, oiled container for a minimum of 24 hours, and up to 5 days.
Warm dough at least 1 hr before using. Preheat oven and pizza stone to 525°F for around an hour.
Form into a ball and flour dough heavily. Flatten into a small (6″) circle. Create edge of crust by pulling the edges into the circle with your fingertips. Continue to spin dough and stretch from the edges in.
Transfer to a piece of parchment paper (or a heavily floured peel). Add sauce (not too much), pepper flakes and preferred ingredients. Top with cheese—you can get away with remarkably little if that is your jam.
Bake until the bottom is done to your particular preference (around 8–12 minutes)
Tasty and Easy Sauce
Open a can of plain tomato sauce and pour into a tupperware container. Add 4 or 5 glugs of extra virgin olive oil. Mince 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and add that in too. Add pepper flakes or dried oregano if you want but it’s not necessary. Store in fridge for a day or two to let it all flavourfy. Lasts for weeks.
Silly Assumptions
I’ve been doing a bunch of video work lately. Some quick and dirty editing of videos for NYCSS so they could do boat briefings remotely, a bunch more for a friend who is an instructor at NAIT and needed to do demos remotely, and finally I am just starting on some for L and her COVID-mutated instructional semester.
This has involved over 30 or so videos to date and well over 250 gig of data.
The Need for Speed
My 2015 Macbook Pro has been working like a champ and I really only ran into issues when copying massive files off the internal drive (500 gig with barely 100 gig left as working space) back and forth to my externals and rendering a few of the files with lots of adjustments. And I really didn’t think I could do anythingto speed up any of that without a huge investment of $$.
Turns out I was wrong.
Issue 1
I was using my external 2 terabyte usb/sata drive as both a repository for my cache files and storage for completed work. Copying a 4 gig finished file took 5 or 6 minutes and if I left it too long and had to transfer 15 or 20 gig it was etter if I just left and went and had a coffee.
I don’t remember what it was that got me looking at my USB hub, but at some point I noticed it was a cheapo one I had bought years ago and was strictly USB 2.0. That is to say 60 megabytes a second. I did a quick “About this Computer” and lo and behold the Macbook Pro physical usb ports were USB 3.0—that is to say rated for 500 megabytes a second. Um. But I still didn’t do anything about it because, well, math is hard. Then one of my 2 USB ports on the Macbook stopped working.
$37 dollars later and now things are really screaming. Silly, silly boy.
Issue 2
My trusty externals have been chuggin’ away like champs but because they are mechanical hard drives they can really only do one thing at a time — imagine they are remotely like a turntable: the read/write arm has to move back and forth across a physical “platter” constantly every time it performs an operation.
What the alternative? A SSD (solid state drives: essentially just big flash drives) which are purely electronic and have no moving parts. But SSDs are really expensive right?
Ummm. No.
At least not any more. I picked up a couple of high speed Samsung 500 gig SSD drives for ~$130/each. Scream-ing Fast. (See above screen shot.)
And so tiny!
So now I can fire stuff back and forth quickly and have an extra terabyte of space. And best of all if I dump my working cache files to one of them, it can also read/write asynchronously which helps to dramatically improve performance when I am working in Premiere and After Effects.
In summation
I made some pretty silly assumptions. The core of which was that technology, and most especially technology pricing, would stand still — with the corollary that my 5-year-old machine couldn’t be made to work faster and harder. I am especially chagrined by the USB hub debacle. $37 bucks. 8X faster (I finally did the math). Duh.
As an Aside
All this work has really been an awesome learning experience. I have honed my After Effects skills some more, learned to deal with a new kind of workflow, and best of all got to try out Adobe’s cloud-sharing to work collaboratively with others. We must of moved 300+ gig of files back and forth over the cloud.
I should set up shop doing fancy video effects for all those remote teachers and professors 🙂
Covid times…
I wrote this back in 2013 as part of my write-something-everyday project (It’s Novel).
7 years later it most certainly applies to my current thinking of the state of the world.
It changed everything and changed nothing. The mere existence, the actuality of it, the overwhelmingly realness meant that nothing could ever be the same. The reality shift had occurred and could never, ever be erased.
And yet nothing had changed. Planets orbited, children starved needlessly in wastelands while their neighbours nodded their heads. Young girls discovered love and old men counted their regrets like a miser counts his gold. The season slowly shifted, the morning was alive with sound and sun, and the birds started to get restless, eager to move on but not knowing why.
There were tasks to be performed and jobs to be done, just like yesterday; yet it was all so … different. And that difference was what it was all about. Or rather, the difference that the difference made. Everyone reacts differently to change and everyone is afraid of the unknown. Some revel in their fear and drink in the elixir from their adrenal glands, but many, even most, see it as a bizarre illness or an uncontrollable affliction that shreds their sanity simply by the fact of its existence.
Knowing things have irrevocable changed is often the reward for curiosity. And knowing it existed, changed it again.
Theme Code notes
A few Macblaze.ca specific fixes
To get my Instagram posts to play nice with flex rather than floats I added
.category-instagram .post-content{
display:flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}Fixed the Headings CSS
Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 5
Heading 6
Ascending post order
macblazev v 0.75.9
Back when I posted about changing the order of certain categories and/or all of them. But for some reason the feature seems to be missing from MacblazeIV which reversed the order on all categories. So I needed to put it back in.
What I came up with is this. It goes in the category.php file after if ( have_posts() ) and allows me to specify which categories are sorted by ascending order and which are descending. This snippet also allows me to specify posts per page which I didn’t end up using but I left in here for posterity.
< Changes display order for certain categories >
$thiscat = get_query_var('cat');
$catobject = get_category($thiscat);
$parentcat = $catobject->category_parent;
$slugname = get_category($parentcat)->slug;
if (in_array($slugname, array('cat-1', 'cat-2')) || is_category(array('cat-3','cat-4')) ) {
query_posts( $query_string."&orderby=date&order=ASC&posts_per_page=2" );
}It’s based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19961130/wordpress-how-to-get-parent-category-id and essentially finds the current category, finds the the id of the parent category then uses an if statement to check if that parent is one of the categories in the array. Then it checks to see if the current category is listed (without having a parent) as one that should also have an ascending order.
Parents and individual categories are listed by their slugs.
Right now the parents are: array('Trips Etc.') — so that all trips under that category read front to back — and the individual categories I want ascending are array('its-novel','recipes-of-yore').
All-in-all it works, but I need a more elegant solution.
Useful links for the future
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/891238/wordpress-php-way-to-test-if-pages-are-children-of-a-parent-page#comment698429_891284
- http://rachievee.com/wp-tutorial-how-to-apply-a-template-to-sub-categories/
- https://perishablepress.com/6-ways-to-customize-wordpress-post-order/
- https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wp_query-arguments-categories-and-tags–cms-23070
Instagram this (Past Few) Weeks
Announcing MacblazeV
So with all my work on the Hugo websites it occurred to me that this site could use some love. It went through a major redesign last year, but the back end was still in the last century.
Redesigned Theme
So while the look hasn’t changed much (except for some fixes/refinements I have been meaning to do for ages) the theme itself (now called MacblazeV) has been redone almost from scratch. My intent was to build it completely from scratch without borrowing any code MacblazeIV was built on a blank framework from Underscores but this time I was trying to avoid that. In the end I did use some of their functions for customization, but it was pretty minimal. 95% of this theme was done from a blank file—I am actually pretty chuffed with myself about that.
WordPress has gotten more and more complicated over the years and all the bells and whistles are pretty complex to implement. Because this theme is for personal use I was able to ignore a large part of that and just add the features I knew I would use.
Design stuff
I am not 100% about all the design elements at this point. As I said this was more about rebuilding the back end and getting rid of floats etc. So I will likely still be tweaking it for a while. But I am super happy with its responsiveness and and the overall structure. It will be much easier to modify now.
I still have to work on some technical issues regarding Instagram and some excessive resource use on the server, but that’s a separate subject.
ebook Update 2020
We’ve added a few more books this year to the list.
L and I worked on some childhood favourites of hers and I added a few plays, some Wodehouse and a Barsoom book. As usual they can all be found at Standard Ebooks‘ website and the whole list is current on my portfolio site: astart.ca.
And so…
The Wodehouse shorts took a lot of work and research—a massive canon and many only available in modern collection or the original serial publications. And there are still a lot more stories to add. It was fun to delve back into Restoration drama (The Way of the World) and I added a few Shakespeare—I had actually never read The Merry Wives of Windsor. As always, I hope you give some of them a try. I also try to keep a current list of books over at astart.ca/ebooks.
Thought of the day
Amid the Covid-19 explosion of online experts and the concurrent shift to populist governments it occurred to me that:
The internet has fostered the age of ideologues.
—August 1, 2020
Hugo Notes
I’ve added my markdown notes for hugo to a page for easy future reference:
Hugo again
A quick update
Having (mostly) successfully updated my professional site using Hugo I decided to take a swing at L’s. It was more of a blog format so it gave me some insight into how that kind of functionality could be used.
I also learned I was a dinosaur who still used floats and ended up updating both it and my own site to use flexbox. Learn something new every day! That in itself is worth a post or two.
Netlify
Under the category of learning and things I need to go into greater detail about later, I also switched the hosting of readingwithapencil.com from wordpress.com to Netlify. As a result I have a more flexible site without actually having to pay for anything (WordPress charged for the use of a custom domain).
The workflow works off of Github which I have been using more and more with the Standard Ebooks project so it is pretty smooth. All in all it is really worth of a post of its own but there are so many videos out there it might just serve you (the reader) better to go watch a couple of them.
But I will eventually jot down my thoughts here…at least so I can figure out what I did when I inevitably break it—that being, originally, the whole purpose of this site.