Posts by Amy Gale
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More a heuristic than a hack, but:
If a recipe involves special effort (eg puff pastry) or special shopping (eg fondue), always – funds permitting – make at least double and freeze the excess for next time.
(Don’t freeze finished fondue. Freeze the rubbly fluid that results from processing the cheeses into small pieces then pulsing in the wine, kirsch, and cornflour. Do the seasoning at usage time.)
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Use a melon baller to remove cores from apple and pear halves. It's super quick, super safe, and good for getting all the core in one hit without removing vast quantities of fruit. It also looks very tidy, if you care about that sort of thing.
If you ask me, this is the only legit use for a melon baller. Who wants balls of melon?
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Ben Chapman,
a third dilemma: how to distinguish between cubes of frozen chicken stock and frozen white wine.
At least both are reasonable things to chuck into a pot of soup/risotto/etc?
My fail was clam juice vs eggwhite. Meringues did not happen.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to JackElder,
One thing that page mentions is that movement draws the eye more than a static garment – so in terms of visibility, we might be better to concentrate on encouraging people to wear retro-reflective ankle bands or wrist bands.
Is there a usability reason behind the apparent lack of high-surface-area ankle/wrist bands on the market? The biggest ones I have seen for sale seem to be only a couple of centimetres wide, meaning that the advantage of movement might be offset by relatively low visibility distance. (Supporting anecdata: I have been nearly run down at night in wristbands and headlamp, but not in the Epic Christmastree Vest of Doom. On foot, though, if that makes a difference.)
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Southerly: E=mc^2... Your Views, in reply to BenWilson,
In chemistry, you must always spill some of it on the documentation. [Ben Wilson]
I cannot possibly be the only VUW Chem alum having a compulsive flashback to the monologue that begins "When I Was At Oxford We Were Issued A Silk Handkerchief On The First Day...", can I?
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In the spirit of making people sit through things they (possibly) haven’t seen before, I give you: Darths and Droids.
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Bless you, Amberleigh, for that reference to your brother. I know that wasn't your main point at all (and the interview is great, I didn't mean the interview wasn't great), but I had been having an extremely frustrating month looking for good material on embedded vulnerabilities and now I've FINALLY tracked some down thanks to you and google. Yay for him and his colleagues.
(Man there are a lot of people writing a lot of shite in that domain. I've read so much of it I reckon I could start producing it myself.)
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Up Front: Or It's Who We're Drinking With..., in reply to Megan Wegan,
There’s a question on (internet dating site) OK Cupid, that asks “straight girls who kiss each other in bars are…”. I’ve never been able to bring myself to look at the possible answers, but imma go ahead and assume that one of them isn’t “often playing into the patriarchal narrative that faux-same-sex-attraction will get a guy to think you are hot.”
nor "how would I know who's straight?", nor "'girls'? seriously?"
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to BenWilson,
I suggest believing in God is akin to thinking P=NP, and being an atheist is akin to believing that is false.
This is a particularly good analogy in that we - all of us, whether we know it or not - live our lives as if P!=NP. (I love the line one of my profs once threw out in a lecture: "We know P!=NP. We just don't know the proof".) An equality proof would upend everything, but it would be accepted if it were valid.
And so it is with the atheists I know. Nobody goes around thinking "I need to prove there is no god". Most people don't even go around thinking "I don't believe there is a god". The issue just doesn't take up much mental space at all.
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Yeah, you can definitely tell that at some point the GTD optimism gave way to pillow-wielding resignation.