Recipe Management

On Sunday afternoons (with the family) and wrapping up on Monday, I plan our meals for the week. Once completed, I post the menu on the fridge. With the menu established, it’s easy to update our shopping list and always get exactly what we need.

What I lacked was a good method for keeping track of recipes. How would I find that amazing recipe for Brazilian Black Beans? Which strawberry cake recipe did I use for Kayla’s last birthday? Which of the 3 blueberry pie recipes from the summer of 2011 did we like the most?

I created a spreadsheet to help me answer those questions. After cooking each recipe, I record our family rating of the recipe in the cookbook margin and/or on the menu. As part of meal planning, I update our spreadsheet with the previous weeks recipe names, sources, dates of preparation, and ratings. Now I have a list with every recipe we’ve eaten. I can sort by date, source, or rating, as well as searching.

The Joy of Cooking – redux

After a multi-year hiatus, I have resumed my quest to to cook my way through every recipe in Joy of Cooking. Notable things I’ve learned in the past few weeks:

  • I like tomato sauce. This greatly surprised me, as I’ve had no special affinity towards foods with tomato sauce. What I learned is that I don’t dislike tomato sauce, I dislike Prego, Ragu, and other ‘canned’ tomato sauces. When made fresh from raw ingredients, I like tomato sauce. I really like it.
  • I learned how to make a good puffed pastry. The secret is persistence. Just like with making bread, accept that the first few times will end in disappointment. So start with something like an apple turnover, so even a disappointing result is good.
  • (My) kids don’t like soups. It don’t recall liking them much as a kid either, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’ve found a greater affinity towards them in my middle years.
  • Kids love, love, love familiarity. I’ve made a dozen types of pancakes and several were excellent. But they still prefer “my” whole wheat banana buttermilk pancakes.

 

My solution for robocall bill collector

This morning at 5:05 AM I got my third call from 877-384-0290, “If you are not Evelyn ____, please call 877-384-0290 and have your number removed from our list. If you are…”

At 9:34AM, when the call came in again, I hung up and called the 877 number to inform them I have no idea whom that person is/was. Not surprisingly, I was placed on hold immediately. While I was holding, my level of annoyance rose as I was repeatedly informed their call volume was “unusually high.”  And I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell them.

So I logged into my BroadVoice control panel, and configured “Call Forwarding Selective.”  Now, when they call me, their calls go directly into their own switchboard. I doubt it will make any difference to them, but at least they won’t wake me up at 5AM.

iPhone 4 reception

For the past two years, I got accustomed to not making phone calls while driving to or from work. It’s an 18 minute drive and in the middle of the drive, around 99 & 105th, my call would get dropped. Every single time. During those two years I used an original, 3G, and 3G S iPhone.

I picked up my iPhone 4 on June 24th. I used my phone a lot that day, calling via FaceTime and normal calls. During my drive home from work, I stayed connected all the way home, for the very first time.

A few days later, I was at a lecture at the Mountaineers on Sand Point Way. AT&T coverage there is meager at best. I experimented there with a SSH session to my home computer, and kept the connection up for almost an hour. That would never have worked with my older iPhones.

This last weekend I climbed Mt. Rainier again. Most of the climbers in our party left their phones in the truck at the trailhead. That is generally wise. Trying to use a mobile phone in the mountains is typically an exercise in frustration.

I had preloaded my iPhone with topo maps of the area and took it out every hour or so to capture waypoints. While pocketed, I had the iPhone in Airplane Mode, which disables all the radios (phone, GPS, wifi). To take waypoints, I’d toggle off Airplane Mode, let the GPS sync, take the waypoint, toggle Airplane Mode back on, and put the phone away.

The surprise was that nearly every time I turned off Airplane Mode, I had an AT&T signal. Getting a signal is one thing. Being able to use it is entirely another. None of us climbers believed it was usable reception until I was able to send out a SMS to each of our wives, letting them know we had gotten permits and were on the route we had hoped to climb.

I can replicate the signal meter issue that so many people have made a big deal about by holding it the wrong way. Then my reception is comparable to previous iPhones (a single bar of coverage in my downstairs). When I avoid holding it that way, I can get outstanding reception. I am quite pleased with the reception of my new iPhone.

bottomless pits

This morning Jen was in the kitchen pitting Rainier cherries. I’m in the dining room, stemming Rainier cherries. Lucas trotted into kitchen, saw mommy pitting cherries and started to help. Mommy swelled with pride at her little helper. When the last cherry was pitted and dropped into the bowl, a burst of laughter erupted as Jen realized exactly who Lucas was assisting.

Lucas pranced around the corner with his prize, a bowl of pitted Rainier cherries cradled against his chest, with one hand shoveling cherries from the bowl to the mouth. He placed the bowl at his place and climbed up into his chair, intent on consuming an entire cherry cobbler’s worth of cherries in a single go.

I think that boy and I may be related.

 

Flash stumbles again

In November 2009, Palm announced Flash support for WebOS in the first half of 2010. In February 2010, Palm released WebOS 1.4 with support for Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta, which would be available for download in the Palm App Catalog. On April 18th, Adobe’s CEO announced that Flash for Android and WebOS would be delayed until the second half of 2010.

Today, Palm announced that they don’t know why Flash for WebOS is not yet available. Perhaps, like Steve Jobs pointed out, after years of trying, Adobe still cannot deliver a version of Flash that runs well on any mobile phone. Look at how poorly Flash performs on the HTC EVO, a brand new phone with super-sized hardware specs.

Goodnight Flash. You will be remembered fondly as a relic of another time. Just like floppy disks, token ring networks, and Helen Thomas.

Using a standard SIM in an iPad

I tried this for several reasons: to share my iPhone data plan with my iPad, to see how difficult it was, and because I will likely want to swap SIMs between my dev iPhones, iPad, and my iPhone 4.

Also, soon I will be traveling internationally and plan to take only my iPad for computing. If trimming down a standard SIM is easy, I can plan to buy a prepaid SIM in each country. If micro SIMs are unavailable, I have a simple method for converting any standard SIM into an iPad/iPhone 4 compatible one.

Prerequisites: An iPad, a standard SIM from an iPhone or any other 3G GSM phone, a pair of sharp scissors, an x-acto knife, and a credit card (or unused SIM).

1. Create micro SIM adapter (skip a-d if using a spare SIM)

a. lay the iPhone SIM on top of the credit card.
b. using the tip of an x-acto knife or a fine marker, scratch the SIM outline onto the card.
c. cut out the new SIM adapter with scissors
d. Use a piece of sandpaper or the edge of the x-acto knife to scrape/sand the edges until the adapter fits into the iPhone SIM tray.

This next step is to position the micro SIM properly in the adapter. The micro SIM must be positioned so that the contacts of the micro SIM are aligned with the contacts of the SIM. I achieved this by flipping my SIM adapter and tray over, and aligning the contacts of the micro SIM in the tray slot. The net result is that my adapter has a border around 3 sides that is of identical size.

e. set the micro SIM on top of the adapter with the tabbed corners aligned
f. align the micro SIM so that it is centered horizontally and the bottom (non tabbed) border is the same width as the side borders.
g. mark the outline on the adapter with the x-acto
h. cut out with x-acto knife. Cut gently and accurately at first, and make subsequent passes to deepen the cut until you are through the material.
i. using the x-acto, scrape off adapter material until the micro SIM snaps into the slot

When you’re finished, is should look a lot like this:

micro SIM adapter

2. Test micro SIM adapter

Insert the micro SIM into the adapter, the adapter into the tray, and the tray into the iPhone. I did so with my iPad micro SIM which was not activated. Upon doing so, my iPhone 3GS detected the SIM, showed AT&T as the carrier, the 3G icon lit up, and I received the following notice, “Could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular data service.”

Voila, my adapter allows a micro SIM to work in my iPhone. Phase 1 was successful!

3. Cut SIM down to micro SIM size

I was a bit hesitant to hack up my SIM card. If I erred and destroyed my SIM, it would require a trip to the Apple or AT&T store for a new SIM, as well as an $18 activation fee. But I couldn’t help myself.

Since the adapter was already built, this step was actually very straight forward.

a. set the adapter on top of the iPhone SIM
b. mark the cutout with the x-acto knife
c. trim off the edges of the SIM with scissors.
d. shave the edge of the trimmed SIM until it fits into the adapter

Notice the alignment of the contacts in the photo. When the SIM and adapter are aligned, the contacts will not be cut. I repeat, the contacts will not be cut.

4. Test SIM in iPad and iPhone

a. stick the newly minted micro SIM into the adapter and the iPhone and verify functionality.
b. point your iPad (w/o SIM) web browser at www.unlockit.co.nz and install a custom IPN for your carrier
c. move the new micro SIM from the iPhone to the iPad
d. turn off the iPad wifi and test 3G connection

I called my iPhone number while the SIM was inserted into the iPad. I was hoping I’d get dumped into voice mail, but instead I get an AT&T error message stating that calling feature wasn’t available from my number. I suggest setting your iPhone call forwarding before and after using an iPhone SIM in an iPad.

Weight Loss Recipe

The mathematics of weight loss is, in fact, quite simple, involving only subtraction. “Take in fewer calories than you burn, put yourself in negative energy balance, lose weight,” says Braun, who has been studying exercise and weight loss for years. — Weighing the Evidence on Exercise

U.S. consumers spend over $60,000,000,000 dollars a year on weight loss products, when the real solution is to eat less.