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SB and I went to Mozfest for the first time last Saturday. What a lovely day! Took some haphazard notes throughout, see below for a dump of notes/links related to the sessions I attended. The bits in brackets are mostly thoughts that bounced around my head while taking notes during talks. All quotes are paraphrased.
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It’s impossible to watch GBBO without wanting something sweet… Cocoa powder brownies fill the void. Baking takes a bit of time (25 min), but the prep is very quick since there’s no fiddly chocolate melting. These lie in the fudge-y end of the brownie spectrum, very dark and dense. In fact, I’ve made this in a cake format before since it’s almost like flourless chocolate cake. Bake in a round tin and spoon fresh whipped cream and berries over the top. Finally, this takes substitutions pretty well. I’ve made these vegan and gluten free before (coconut oil not butter, blitzed and gelled chia seeds not eggs, GF flour). Comes out great, though they’re a bit gooier and have to cook a little longer.
Preheat the oven to 160C (320F) and line a 20 cm (8″) square tin. In a pot large enough to hold the rest of the ingredients, melt 150 g (1 1/3 c) butter. In a small bowl, combine 250 g (1 1/4 c) sugar and 90 g (heaping 3/4 c) cocoa powder. Beat this in to the butter. Once the mix is sufficiently cool, beat in 2 eggs and a tiny splash of vanilla extract or orange flower water (optional). The mixture will come together firmly, it will be almost taffy-esque. Gently stir in 64 g (1/2 c) flour just until combined. Pour in to the lined square tin, spread it in to the corners, and bake 25 minutes. The top should be glossy when done, possibly with a few cracks. Let it cool in the tin on a rack until nearly set but still warm.
Edit 23 May 2019
Just came across Prof. Maxwell’s recipe for Churchill Brownies on his faculty page! They’re cocoa powder-based as well, so will need to give his a try. His recipe seems to make the same quantity but with (much) less butter, less cocoa powder, and more sugar. I imagine his are more traditionally brownie-esque as opposed to the nearly cake-like texture of the recipe above, we’ll see!
Edit 04 October 2019
Results are in, Prof. Maxwell’s brownies are fantastic. Metric values below for reference:
See his faculty page for the method and imperial values. It was hard to get rid of the lumps when I was bringing the mixture together, so I might try the method from the Simple cocoa brownies recipe above next time. This will probably be my go-to brownie recipe now, and the previous one will be what I use for gooey cakes.
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I finally got round to exploring Homebase yesterday (jump straight to setup steps). My original intention was to get the SB-PH site on Dat + HTTPS à la this blog post by Tara Vancil. As far as I can tell though, without multi-writer support in Dat this setup would effectively lock Sam out of being able to quickly deploy changes. We’re interested in making that site a little bit more of a collaborative sandbox, so making deployment harder than it is currently is not the right step to take there.
So though I definitely want to get the SB-PH site on Dat eventually, we’re putting that on hold for now and I’m pivoting towards my site. In this blog’s earliest incarnation it was on Tumblr, and for a long while now has been a pretty standard WordPress site. The big task in moving to Dat, besides figuring out Homebase, is converting my site from WordPress to a static site via Jekyll/Hugo/Eleventy/GatsbyJS or something similar. It’s taking a while, I didn’t realise quite how much content has accumulated (1000+ tags?!) and there are a few WordPress-y features that I definitely want to build in (“more” tags, descriptions for tags+categories, proper pagination, etc.). More on that in a separate note.
So yesterday I put that aside and focused on getting Homebase up and running on a DigitalOcean droplet. Overall, setting up Homebase wasn’t too bad. The most involved part of the process was setting up the server. I kind of like tinkering with server stuff, so that’s cool. I 100% agree with the caveat at the top of the Homebase README, you should consider Homebase only if you’re comfortable with and interested in server administration. I would add that your interest should be *ongoing*. Servers take maintenance (related, see note on serverless setups). It’s your responsibility if a process stops running, or the software is out of date, or the Let’s Encrypt certificate doesn’t renew, etc. Hashbase looks like a great alternative for those that want the final result but don’t want to deal with the server configuration/maintenance.
The rest of this note is an outline of the steps I took to get Homebase working. Where good documentation exists elsewhere, I have linked to that instead of elaborating.
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This past Thursday 18 October was the second Server Co-op meetup in Rebecca’s Flat at Raven Row. See all Server Co-op notes.
I didn’t take as many notes this time, wasn’t feeling fantastic. Very sketchy notes below.
click public button twice if the Patchwork feed seems stuck after first install
how to have Scuttlebutt on multiple devices?
eh, maybe not worth the hassle, just use one device
“sameAs” is currently being worked on by devs in Scuttlebutt community
identity = private + public + network key combo
lib sodium
back up private key and gossip.json
dark crystal for backing up private key using social network
“shamir’s secrets” algorithm
kind of like horcruxes!
with Scuttlebutt, your friends are your cloud/datacentre
nothing is ever deleted (same as Dat)
could technically have multiple identities, but functionality isn’t implemented currently. Would have to swap .ssb directories
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Yesterday I went to my second life drawing session at Host.
See drawings from previous session on 26.09.18
2 min warmup. Way too idealised, feels cartoon-y.
5 min warmup. Hard pose to hold!
10 min. Proportions are too exaggerated, but I like the continuous line.
20 minute. Interesting light source.
20 minute. Probably one of the most foreshortened figures I’ve ever tried to draw.
20 minute. Frustrated with the head/face, but like the overall effect of the line.
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A few weeks ago, I got my hair chopped off by Dean at the Garden Room on Francis Road in Leyton. This is it left to air dry with a little bit of product in. Pleased!
© All rights reserved
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Friday 28 September 2018
Swam in the sea at Abbey River Beach with Ben, Daisy, Joe, Sam. It was ~60F/16C outside, ~62F/17C in the water. Very sunny, warm when the breeze died away. GIF grabbed from video by BL.
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Clovelly Bay, Devon, September 2018
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Looking forward to life drawing classes every Wednesday at Host.
These are some drawings from the 26.09.18 session. The last time I did life drawing was in 2010.
2 minute warmup
5 minute warmup
5 minute warmup
10 minute
15-20 minute
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Last night I went to the first Server Co-op meetup hosted by Agorama in Rebecca’s Flat. It’s a more-is-more space, and then some. It was a lovely evening. Notes:
Check out infocivics.com by Paul Frazee. “Computing networks are social and political systems. We should attempt to answer how the technical design of a network will influence the internal politics.”
There *is* a mobile Dat browser, but apparently it’s a bit… buggy. See Bunsen for Android (nada for iOS). Still, kudos to them for taking a stab at it. Apparently the project of making a Dat browser sort of hits a brick wall due to node.js, but a bunch of devs have taken it upon themselves to make a Rust implementation of Dat. TBH I don’t understand the ins-and-outs well enough to be able to describe how that lowers the barrier, but it sounds like the future of mobile Dat might be brighter for it.
I haven’t dug in to Scuttlebutt yet, and it sounds like it’s about time. An offline-first protocol, described by KG as a database/social network/community. See also Patchwork. Feel like I heard HL say that it came about after 2011 Christchurch earthquake due to the difficulties at the time with having any sort of connectivity, but that might be wrong?
And crucially, are there ethical conversations around P2P tech that we’re failing to have, or happily skating past? I’m thinking about when Facebook and similar now-giants were in their nascent stages, surely some of the current nastiness could have been avoided if the making was accompanied by a little more thinking, more extrospection? How do you wrap your head around the potential ethical implications of something that doesn’t yet exist? I found KB’s anecdote interesting, when a few fascistic idiots attempted to hijack Scuttlebutt but were almost immediately, organically, blocked from having any meaningful impact. It feels great, but who’s to say they’re not off in their own node somewhere trolling away? Feels awful to think that Scuttlebutt might be harbouring some sort of extreme-right cell, and yet maybe so be it, should it be a decentralised network’s responsibility to police that? How on earth would that work anyway?
Separate: I got my hair cut by Dean last week and am very pleased. When it’s styled it’s a bit Josie Packard (fabulous) and when not styled, it’s very Shawn Hunter (not totally a bad thing).