un-editor
White never even agreed with Strunk and White. White used passive voice. He began sentences with conjunctions. Pronouns floated. Sentences ended on a preposition if that's where they wanted to end. Th […]
shibboleth
The Gileadites had a border problem any bouncer would recognize. The Ephraimites looked like them, dressed like them, worshipped the same God, and kept trying to slip back across the Jordan after picking the wrong side of the wrong war. Cousins, basically, indistinguishable by aspect. Which brings me, naturally, to gringos. […]
memento mori
My wife thinks I built a machine to text her happy birthday after I'm dead. She's not wrong, which is the part she objects to. The setup is dumber than it sounds. […]
reverse september
So … why am I still mad about the internet, thirty years on? Always, needlessly, and I'm still kinda shocked when it does it again. (My wife says “thirty years of complaining about the internet” is, honestly, a joke.) […]
corpus christi
Lemme spoil the lede: I’ve been running a language model over years of chat logs with my wife. No, not to generate fake apologies this time (that was the Markov boyfriend incident, and we don’t talk about it). To see what a machine could tell us about us we weren’t able to see ourselves. It started, as most of my terrible ideas do, with a question I couldn’t shake. […]
no look bread
4 parts flour 3 parts water 1 tsp yeast 1 tbl salt per 4 cups flour First there was no-knead bread, now for … well, not really no look. But no stress at least. I’ve used the no-knead approach, a Cusinart and a stand mixer. It doesn’t matter. Add about 4 cups of flour, maybe […]
curtido
Seems like every culture has it own spin on fermented cabbage. Sauerkraut, kimchee and, obviously, curtido? On a recent trip to Central America we were fascinated by cabbage relish served with regional pupusas. Every restaurant and food stall had a slightly different take on the recipe and all were deservedly proud of their results. The […]
make beer cheap
Now that I have your attention … time for the bait and switch. It very much depends on how much you budget for beer. Lemmee spoil the lede, I got my costs down to one dollar per 22oz beer. The end result, brewed to my taste, competed handily with the better beers on the shelf. […]
homemade vinegar
Bottle ends are a problem that plagues casual and, ahem, more serious wine drinkers alike. The remnants of that bottle of wine that, though good enough at the time, is honestly not improving with age. Rather than drain it down the sink or worse, gritting your teeth and drinking it, consider turning it into vinegar. […]
bacon popcorn
Maybe this is obvious but it was enough of a revelation that I thought I’d document it. After flirtations with curry flavored coconut oil popped popcorn (excellent), I cast around for other ways to impart a unique flavor to popcorn. My Irish immigrant father kept a jar of bacon fat in the fridge when I […]
markov boyfriend
Reading about artificially generated tweets from a certain (in)famous twit got me thinking about an idea I had for a plug-in to my chat app. There was a time, before I implemented the chat app, when I was not the most communicative husband. In my defense, I was deep in code in a state of […]
smoked pork butt
After reading through “Franklin Barbecue, a Meat Smoking Manifesto,” I was inspired to knock the dust off of my Bradley smoker. The results were impressive enough that my resident food critic/wife requested that I write down the recipe. So without further ado here it is: Get your hands on a pork butt. Mine weighed 4 […]
skinner whole house
After experimenting with house automation, I arrived at the inevitable point when I needed something to do with all this cool stuff that nearly worked. Having devoted entirely too much time to the process of raising and training a miniature human, my first instinct was to look for ways to automate the work of parenting […]
couples therapy chat
As part of a more general initiative to take ownership of my data by hosting it myself, I cobbled together a chat app. My target audience is limited to me and my wife mostly discussing logistics. A fa […]
J.A.Y.N.E
Jayne was an automated yelling and nagging entity. She was my early attempt at a whole house AI before that was a thing. She was definitely artificial but not particularly intelligent. She ruled our house from my daughter’s kindergarten until third grade. What follows are a few observations about the experience. Before her retirement Jayne […]
fitness tracker chore dump
We started a family step count game. The idea is simple: whoever wins the daily step count gets bragging rights. We keep a running tally of weekly victories. The weekly winner gets to assign the weekly loser a chore of their choice. I kitted each of us out with a Xiaomi Mi Fit 2. At […]
after a year of home roasting …
It is not hard to roast decent coffee at home. The trick, for me at least, is to remain open to different flavors and to accept a few degrees of variation from roast to roast. That counts double if you are a less scientific in your process. I use a Gene roaster from Burman Coffee […]