Bowl.

Using some clay from http://www.mattanddavesclays.com/.  Nice porcelain to use.  have not fired any yet so well see later this month.

Very late, of to bed.

Chocolate Bobka

Some time ago I worked my way through the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking book and mostly enjoyed it.  The thing that was nice about it was that they tried to take much of the pressure off of the process of making bread.  They were good salesmen on the topic.  Then with the second book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients I thought it would be even better, but then I realized that even though they were saying how simple things could be, they were still suggesting that you buy a specialized food container for the bread, specialized ingredients (wheat gluten, wheat germ, etc) and I thought, forget that.

So now, I make the bread for our family every week with a much simpler method.

--In a large mixing bowl add--

4 c. wheat flour

3 c. white flour

2 t. salt

1 palm full of sugar (so anywhere from 1/4 c to 3/4c depending on your mood, or skip it, whatevs.)

2 T. yeast (or two packets)

[optional] Add 1/4 wheat germ

**mix dry ingredients**

--add to dry--

3 1/3 C tap water. 

a couple glugs of oil.  Olive oil is nice, canola is good, caster is not.  (couple glugs would be anywhere from 1/4-1/2 C depending on your mood)

-Mix with a wooden spoon, or the fork you used to mix the dry until all the flour is decently well moistened.  

-Place mixing bowl in the fridge overnight.  (you could do this on the counter and wait an hour and a half but since we are skipping the kneading step, if you let it sit for a long time that gives the mixture time to self saturate with the liquids.)

-In the morning (or whenever you feel like it) turn the oven to 375, place a baking sheet on the bottom rack and put some (4-8C) boiling water in it. (this will keep the oven moist)

- break the dough into two pieces, place in greased loaf pans, or on a cookie sheet if making a boule.

-let rise about 20 minutes and place in the oven for 45 minutes give or take.  Loaf should be evenly brown when turned out of the pan. 

This makes two loaves which is just a bit more than our family of 4 needs for a week.  

We sometimes make one loaf and save the other half for pizza crust.

 

The picture above has the two loaves, then I also made a half recipie and upped the sugar (a heaping handful) and added some chocolate to the dough.  then in the morning I  smushed [techincal bread term] the dough out, sprinkled a healthy coating of brown sugar, some cinamon, and more chocolate powder on it and rolled it up. Baked it with the other loaves and it was great.  I don't have a picture of the finished product because there is such a short window of time before the loaf is mostly gone.  As you see above.  :)

Father/Son sewing project.

Some time ago I made my wife some bulk bags.  We a big fans of shopping at our local co-op. And there is something satisfying about buying goods that you will later combine into a meal and feed your family, and buying the goods without the unnecessary packaging.  The last batch of bags that I made were unbleached muslin.  And it has been immensely satisfying to be in the checkout line buying our groceries nicely packed in bags I made myself, for meals that we will make ourselves later this week.

Ok, enough waxing poetic, the big bags that are particularly useful for oats and flour seem to be in short supply.  So I stopped into the nice folks down at Treadle Yard Goods and bought a yard of this cute fabric.  It was a bit more expensive than unbleached muslin, but I decided it was one of those relativistic scenarios and threw down the extra $6 for the designer fabric.  How lavish of me.  I really spare no expense for my lovely wife.

Oh, and it was a fun father/son activity to work with my 4 year old boy to setup the sewing machine and sew up a bag.  Start 'em young and all.

Decals

I got some decals from Gary Erickson a few days back.  I tried applying them to some pots today.

From

Some parts worked really well, some not so much. Gary's information sheet said that you would eventually get a feel for it. I thought I did for a couple, but then, just as quickly, it was gone.

I have not decided if I would put these in the wood firing this month, or try and work them in to an electric firing.

IP Geolocation, and other geolocation tools

Over the years access to lookup tables for geolocation come up occasionally.  A few years ago we settled on paying every year or so for an updated zipcode file.  For around $80 or so, we could be assured that we were looking up accurate data.

I just ran across http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php, which offers a load of usefull FREE databases.  IP lookup.  Zipcode lookup.  Very cool.  And most with free APIs to boot.

I am going put these to use and test them out on some low impact pages and see how they handle things.

Update to tweeting from the command line

Now that Twitter requires OAuth, a simple curl to the twitter api will fail.  Luckily there are some super smart folks in this community.  Check out this great writeup on tweeting form the command line, with our old friend Python.  It's a great writeup and I had it working on all three of my twitter accounts in about 5 minutes.

http://jmillerinc.com/2010/05/31/twitter-from-the-command-line-in-python-using-oauth/

Thanks Jeff!

Twitter your SVN commits via the command line. (Windows)

Had some fun today. One, I got reCaptcha wired up with asp.net mvc2, and it was as easy as you could hope for. I won't bother re-creating it here, because this post does it wonderfully: http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2008/12/02/using-recaptcha-with-asp-net-mvc.aspx. Plus anyone named D. Whittaker is 100% A-OK in my book.

No, I dorked around and added a line to my single-click batch file (which currently commits to SVN, robocopies out to a fresh directory, compiles the website with visual studio, 7zips up the package, puts a copy on the network for archive, and puts a copy on the server with a flagged file for the server to check and extract and publish the update). The line I added was

tweetupdate

Here are the steps

1. Grab the code from Jason Fowler (here) to get yourself tweeting from the command line.  His "application" is a little bit of my favorite type.  Basically, you need wget.exe (wget for windows), and a simple .bat file which you set your twitter username and password, then because twitter uses the dead simple REST API, you can hit URI with a single wget command which will tweet you status update.
2. Getting the current version of you HEAD is not as straightforward, but not bad.  Thanks to the invaluable StackOverflow.  (I lost the solution link now, but something like SVN command line version).  You can drop
   for /f "tokens=5" %%i in ('SubWCRev .^|find "Last committed at revision"') do set version=%%i
   echo %version%
   into a batch file and you are all set (note that this batch file needs to be in the directory you are versioning from becuase I am calling "SubWCRev"* on " . ".  If you want to test it out, you need to replace "." with the path to your current working directory.  Anyhow, this will return the current version.
3. Put step 2 with setp 1
   twitter "MyAPP just did svn commit number %version%"
   will update your twitter status with "MyAPP just did svn commit number 1099", assuming you are on commit # 109.  :) Like here.

That's it.  How easy could that be?  (well, I combined step 2 and three and made a file called tweetupdate.bat and now execute it from my publish script.

*SubWCRev is a command that comes installed when you install TortoiseSVN on your windows machine.