Last week, I broke my second french press carafe this year. It was just a small bump against the counter, but the crack ran through the thin glass (I feel kitchen counters should be covered by a pliant rubberized mat now rather than fashionable-but-less-practical marble). Thoughts about replacements ran towards Lexan, but the [...]
MAKE blog had a link to this page on how to tie various knots: I Will Knot!, with video demonstrations of the tying process. Next time I stop by Wal-Mart or Home Depot, I’ll have to pick up some nylon rope.
A couple months ago, I stopped by the Lakewood YMCA’s taihojutsu class. One [...]
This is what I’m currently doing for multigrain bread at home:
1 packet yeast
1/2 cup warm water
Mix these in the mixer bowl and wait to see if the yeast is good.
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup barley flour
1/2 cup spelt flour
1/2 cup kamut flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup flax meal
1/4 cup wheat bran
1-1/4 cup warm water
1/3 [...]
City Data looks like useful summary information for all sorts of US cities. Here’s the page for Ohio’s Bigger Cities (over 6000 residents) and Cleveland in particular. Lots of neat demographic, climate, economic, etc., information.
Amazon has taken the brilliantly evil “using porn to defeat captcha” idea and put it to good use in their experimental Amazon Mechanical Turk. (The name comes from 18th Century chess automaton hoax, where the chess-playing “robot” actually consisted of a chess master dwarf moving the levers, as this page explains).
The Amazon system [...]
Here’s the apple crisp recipe we’re using right now. The apples are given a little bit of “pie filling” treatment:
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup rolled oats
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 apples, peeled and cubed
1 lemon, juiced
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 cup water
Pre-heat oven to 375F.
Cream butter [...]
For my own reference. It’s hard to do a clean step-by-step table, mainly because some actions are combined. Some vocabulary can be found here.
Kata 1 (attacker wins)
#
Attacker
Defender
1
From chudan, strike shomen
From hasso-gedan, retreat and take center by striking shomen followed by a tsuki
2
Enter to the left, [...]
We were in Chicago this past weekend. Interesting town: I certainly felt more like I was in a big city than Cleveland, with the density of skyscapers and tall buildings being about the same as Manhattan. Parts of the city, of course, recalls New York, while other parts, in the style of, say, [...]
I was in New York earlier this week to help uke for promotion tests at my old dojo, with Itai testing for ikkyu and Gearoid (who I hadn’t met before) testing for yellow belt. Itai and I started at this together, and it was good to see him get to this rank in person. [...]
At the beginning of the month, I submitted a few photos to Shutter Stock, a micro-stock photography site, to see if any income can be generated from the pool of photos I’ve been taking. It took a while for their reviewers to get to my submission batch, but I had a fair number approved [...]