2 Day before Xmas
It’s all relative
My colleagues in Victoria were complaining about their weather this morning:
“Yuk!”
But I think I win.
Well this is a thing
I guess I’ve earned my pay for this month anyway 🙂
Happy Sourdough Fifth
December 12, 2017
That’s the day I baked my first loaf, 5 years ago, with sourdough starter I that I had barely got started — and that starter is still going strong. Here’s a post I wrote in January 2018 about the first couple of experiments using that starter. Spoiler: they were mainly duds.
My poor starter has gone though a lot: from being moldy, to almost starving after a months alone; it even made the journey to BC in air-cargo this past spring and I baked a bunch of loaves on board before bringing it home and reuniting it with the stuff that had sat neglected in the fridge for two month. Still, it has been 5 years and I guess the poor thing deserves some recognition on having made it through all that …as well as periods of me not baking much, a pandemic, a switch from white flour to rye flour, and back again—and then back to rye once more. It’s been almost dried, lived as a swampy sludge, underfed, overfed, developed some weird skins and spent a lot of time in the refrigerator beside the silk screen chemicals. But so far it seems it’s pretty impossible to kill.
And it’s made a lot of loaves along the way. Here’s some pics from over the years:
But it doesn’t really matter
The problem is that actually the bacteria/microbes in sourdough just don’t live that long. So really, the whole “old sourdough starter passed down for generations” thing is just a myth. But at least it’s a tasty one. Here’s a link to an article that explains the whole thing: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220711-the-worlds-oldest-sourdough
Addendum
I just found a note in my notebook dated Nov 29, 2017 with the sourdough starter recipe I used. So I guess the whole process was actually started a few weeks earlier than Dec 12.
Ever agree and disagree at the same time?
Equity. Or Justice. Sometimes I just don’t know…
An Anniversary of sorts
My first blog post ever was over at: moreblaze.blogspot.com. That’s exactly 20 years ago. The 20-year anniversary for macblaze.ca has to wait until 2025. L has since taken over the original platform after I decided I wanted to host my own blog and not have to rely on external services—an unwarranted bit of paranoia as it turns out.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2002
Hi
Welcome to the Blog…
Hopefully this will house the daily diaries of (B)ruce (L)eslie (A)nd (Z)ak’s (E)lectronic (BLAZE) lives. Come back and visit whenever…—https://moreblaze.blogspot.com/2002/11/hi-welcome-to-blog.html
My last post there was this:https://moreblaze.blogspot.com/2005/11/blog-abandonment.html (https://moreblaze.blogspot.com/2005/11/), I might go back and export all my posts from there and add them in here…for posterity and unity’s sake. And because…why not…?
Markdown & a Pi update
Because I know you care…
Previous updates: December 2021: An Introduction To Dashboards; October 2021: Pi Update; August 2021: What’s Your Pi Doing?
So what’s up with markdown?
Way back in December 2014 (Markdown) I came across this simple markup language called Markdown. Since I wrote in text editors anyway (Word makes me crazy!) it seemed like a good way to add some simple formatting. Fast forward 8 years or so and I am still using it and use it almost exclusively for note-taking and recording (for posterity) things I am doing. (I’ve got a cheat sheet posted for those who are more interested.
These days all my computer set-up and install notes are in Markdown, my yearly books read, and lately, all my ebook and accessibility research have been written in Markdown.
A few weeks back I had one of those “I wonder if…” thoughts and it transformed my world. You perceive, I had a lot of notes and note files going by now and it was getting worse and worse everyday… since I am basically being paid these days to make notes about ebooks and accessibility and I like to give my money’s worth. Frankly it was becoming a big mess of files, folders and disorganized gibberish.
I wondered if there is a way to render all those markdown notes on a simple website? I’ve done it with my notes on GitHub for Standard eBooks but that is a fancy Jekyll installation. And I mean, half the time I am pasting markdown into this WordPress blog and the Jetpack plugin I installed renders it as html so it shouldn’t be that complicated …should it? But a separate WordPress install was just too unwieldy and frankly I have having to log in all the time since WordPress helpfully built in a timer to kick you out after a certain period of time… sigh.
So that disqualifies my first two choices. So time to do a bit of googlin’
Enter MkDocs
— MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that’s geared towards…
And is it ever. A quick docker install, a bit of reading about how to tweak the interface and voila! A clean, searchable interface that updates every time I hit save.
This:
Becomes this:
All organized, neat and tidy and most especially searchable. As you can imagine I am slowly making more and more sites and cleaning up a lot of old notes.
My world has been rocked.
What’s on the Pi these days?
I keep tweaking with things. I did pick up a Pi-400 as a machine to experiment on since I am trying to use the original Pi 4 as a production machine more and more.
A Pi-400 is a 4 GB Pi 4 in a keyboard case. For some reason they are actually available where as all the other Pi models are very hard to get.
The Dashboard Today
I’ve reorganized a bit but the essentials haven’t changed much. Notable new additions are VS Code Server, MeTube, Home Assistant and Snippet Box.
VS Code Server
VS Code Server is one of the code editors I use to write python. Having it on my Pi as a web-based version is occasionally helpful but it is most useful for editing yaml files and configs for the docker containers so I don’t have to mount the Pi as a drive etc.
MeTube
Is a fast and easy YouTube downloader. Paste in the URL and it downloads the video. Great for archiving favourite shows like Taskmaster.
Home Assistant
I bought my first smart bulb. And since I am a cheapo I didn’t buy the expensive Hue that works with Macs, I had to do some hacking to get Siri to recognize it. I will probably do a post later about that whole adventure, but suffice it to say I landed on Home Assistant — which is a missive open source home automation software package with a huge community. All to control one single bulb.
But hey it turns on and off everyday all by itself and even turns on earlier if it’s cloudy outside! W00t!
MkDocs
See above 🙂
Snippet Box
Snippet box may not be long for the (Pi) world… It’s a great app that allows you to store snippets of code that you use fairly frequently but always forget the specifics of.
I was using it to store regex’s but I have a feeling I will replace it with a MkDocs site. We will see I guess…
Keep reminding yourself…
Instagram Since Last Time
My auto updater broke sometime this past spring so here is one big update.
Accessibiity
Accessibility is a big part of my new job, I don’t often add alt text to my images but I guess it’s something I will have to start doing.
Social Media offers some great options but we (the public) don’t actually use many of them, mostly because of apathy and just general ignorance around the options.
Here’s a great overview:
General overview: https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/social-media
(In case you are wondering, this post is really just an excuse to play with alt text 🙂 )