Blog Archives

A useful trick when photographing food in the kitchen

Always buy plain white paper towels. When you want to photograph something you’re preparing, just crumple up a paper towel and make sure you get it in the frame. Then you have an accurate reference for white-balancing your photograph, without … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-04-02 by | Tagged ,

PSA: How to make buttermilk from regular milk

My blog stats are showing a lot of people ending up here after searching for “how to make buttermilk from regular milk”. You can’t. Buttermilk — real buttermilk — is made from cream, not milk. You can only make a … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-03-19 by | Tagged , ,

Random segue time (post-Olympics edition)

So I just watched the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics (on my TiVo, so the delay didn’t bother me — but taking a commercial break during the pre-recorded lowering of the Olympic flag is inexcusable), which always pushes my … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-02-24 by | Tagged

Finally updated my MBP to Mavericks

I was waiting for an OpenAFS release that worked on 10.9, and that finally came out late last week, so I took the plunge. It took a couple of hours to update everything (I had a bunch of Apple apps … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-01-28 by | Tagged , , ,

Random segue of the week

Patty Larkin, “Me and That Train” (the live version from A Gogo) Indigo Girls’ cover of the Stones’ “Wild Horses” (a live-only track, from Staring Down the Brilliant Dream) see below Cry Cry Cry’s a capella cover of Leslie Smith’s … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-01-20 by | Tagged

Summer entertainment: time to make a choice

Today I got my annual envelope from the BSO inviting me to pre-order tickets for the upcoming Tanglewood season. I’ve never had any interest in classical music, but every year since 2007 I’ve gone for the “Prairie Home Companion” live … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-01-16 by | Tagged , , , ,

Musing on accent accommodation

All this reading of Diane Duane novels reminded me of something I observed a while ago. Back in the summer of 2012, I heard, in relatively quick succession, recordings of two Americans living in the British Isles: a podcast interview … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-01-02 by | Tagged ,

On misrepresenting IQ

There’s been a lot of talk in my Twitter timeline about Boris Johnson and IQ lately. Apparently the Mayor of London thinks that some people really are more worthy than others. This controversy spilled over into the comments of a … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-11-29 by | Tagged ,

Playlist serendipity

On Twitter just now, I noted “Sometimes it feels like an inspired segue, but I know it’s really only the output of a pseudorandom number generator.” Here’s what I was hearing: Patty Larkin, “Hotel Monte Vista” (Regrooving the Dream) Bruce … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-11-22 by | Tagged

An addendum to the findslowdisks DTrace hack

In the previous installment, I posted a script that will output a series of lines that look like this: multipath/s33d7: 417.3 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d22: 682.9 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s29d5: 699.2 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d4: 1449.1 ms … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-31 by | Tagged , , ,