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Check out WAI’s alt Decision Tree. Really useful for considering how alt text should work against any image.
And more broadly, their tutorials seem great, super practical and succinct. Don’t know how I’d missed them before. The whole WAI website is an unbelievable resource, we’re so lucky to have it.
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So CommandR hasn’t been reloading my VSCode window. But the “Reload window” command in the palette (ShiftCommandP to open palette) shows that it should work. Charles told me how to fix it!
To sort it out, click the cog icon next to the “Reload window” command in the palette to open the Keyboard Shortcuts settings for that command. Then under the “When” column, right-click isDevelopment and select “Change when expression”. Delete the contents, then press enter. There should now be a dash under “When” to indicate that it’s empty. Close the Keyboard Shortcuts file, then try reloading a window by typing CommandR and it should work.
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Leaned hard in to sherry and rum this holiday season. These are a few cocktails I enjoyed the most.
Three are sherry-and-rum based: the Flor de Jerez, Shaken Egg Nog, and the Kingston Sheroni. I use the same Amontillado sherry and dark rum for all of them. Our “bar” area is not large, so economy is the name of the game.
I also included one other cocktail: the Unequal Negroni. Not rum or sherry-based, but we made it a bunch over the holidays so I wanted to write it down here for posterity.
The Flor de Jerez and Shaken Egg Nog are particularly useful holiday cocktails because they aren’t as strong as many others. Nice towards the end of a perhaps heavy-on-the-drink day when you’d like to still partake but not get in over your head.
Both of the above cocktails call for “rich sugar syrup”. To make this, combine 2 parts sugar with 1 part water. Heat until dissolved, then store in the fridge.
For the alcohols, don’t go for the cheapest you can find… it just isn’t as nice, I promise. You’ll try it and think, “This is ok but not great, what’s the point?” You don’t need to get top-shelf stuff, just maybe go for something other than Bacardi Black, you know?
If you aren’t sure which rum to go for, feel free to use your favorite search engine. OR, much better yet, peruse therumhowlerblog.com. Talk about dedication, you love to see it. FWIW, I’m currently using Diplomático Reserva Exclusiva since that was called for in the original Egg Nog recipe I tried. It’s perhaps a bit sweeter than many other rums, so maybe keep that in mind.
In terms of glassware, I’d love to have a bunch of fancy coupes and stuff, but don’t have the space. We use the the 20cl (6¾ oz) Duralex Picardie glasses for pretty much all cocktails. And water, and wine, and so on. So although I mention a coupe glass for the Flor de Jerez since that’s what is called for, know that I actually sling it in a more standard little cup and it still tastes great.
Makes one 3½ oz drink.
Combine all in a shaker with ice, and shake until very cold (about 15 seconds). Strain in to a chilled coupe and garnish with a lemon twist.
* I use Cointreau instead… I just always have it in for margaritas and have never got round to buying the apricot stuff! Though I’m sure it’s nice.
This isn’t the real deal! But I prefer it, it isn’t as gloopy and it’s not a faff. Note: Do not make this unless you have whole nutmeg. It really isn’t the same with the pre-powdered stuff.
This is *heavily* inspired by Anders Erickson’s Egg Nog, just slightly different ratios. His recipe makes one 7 oz drink, which is just slightly more than I personally want for an Egg Nog serving and is a bit too big for our glasses. It’s also a bit eggier, which is not necessarily a bad thing but is not always what I want. I highly recommend trying his Egg Nog, and you should watch his YouTube channel if you’re interested in cocktails in general.
You don’t have to, but I *highly* recommend the extra step of double-straining this thing. You don’t want an errant snotty egg streak sneaking its way in to the glass…
Makes two 6 oz drinks.
Combine all of the wet ingredients in a shaker, and shake for about 20 seconds until very frothy. Add ice, then shake until cold for about 10 seconds. Double-strain into a chilled glass, then grate a whole nutmeg over the top.
* I quite like Oatly Barista for this.
** You could probably use aquafaba (chickpea water) instead. I haven’t tried it! But I imagine it would work alright. Just make sure it’s not salted. One large egg = roughly 2 fluid oz. Maybe try 1½ oz aquafaba and see if that works.
So the Kingston Negroni is a thing (equal parts overproof Jamaican rum, Campari, and sweet vermouth). And the Sheroni seems to be a thing (equal parts gin, Aperol, Amontillado sherry, and sweet vermouth). This is kind of a combination of the two? IDK, I tried it and like it.
Amontillado sherry is a bit less sweet than sweet vermouth generally. And likewise, dark rum is more sweet than overproof rum. Combining the two and omitting the sweet vermouth seems to balance things out a bit IMO.
Used a lemon twist instead of orange because this drink is slightly sweeter than a normal Negroni, and I like the more piercing scent of the lemon peel against that sweetness.
Makes one 3 oz drink.
Combine all in a tumbler with ice and stir until very cold, about 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled glass with fresh ice, and garnish with a lemon twist.
I *know* that Negronis are supposed to be equal parts. But it always seems too syrupy to me. Hey, to each their own.
Makes one 3¼ oz drink.
Combine all in a tumbler with ice and stir until very cold, about 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled glass with fresh ice, and garnish with an orange twist.
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Thanksgiving this year was verrrrry small. We had a few options to celebrate with friends / family, but ended up just sticking to the three of us at home. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now and was not about to give this to someone else. 💀 Plus that meant we could move it to Friday, which was helpful since I was at least feeling a little better at that point.
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Graphic designers Kaisa Lassinaro and Maeve Redmond have designed READING LIST, a series of t-shirts that reference books, which they have selected, from the Glasgow Women’s Library catalogue. All of these books (and many more!) are free to borrow from Glasgow Women’s Library.
So the Reading List t-shirts are really cool, but I would feel like an absolute phony buying one without having read the books. One of them I’m on top of, I have A Room of One’s Own on my nightstand. BW, sorry it has taken me approximately a million years to get round to reading it. But here’s the full list to work through, nonfiction and fiction (including a bit of speculative sci fi!), from oldest to most recent.
And how cool is the Glasgow Women’s Library? It’s “the only Accredited Museum in the UK dedicated to women’s lives, histories and achievements”. Neat.
Thx, SB, for sharing this with me.
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So. I finally got Covid for the first time a few weeks ago.
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So Mastodon’s getting a lot of love! If Musk’s Twitter purchase is what ends up making Mastodon a mainstream thing, then hey, silver linings I guess?
I’ve been on since 2019 as @piper@vis.social but other than a brief flurry of activity, I haven’t used it loads. The main problem was the classic “it’s not where my closest friends are”. The other issue is that I would normally enjoy browsing this sort of thing on my phone, and I didn’t love any of the apps available for iOS. That may have changed, I need to investigate.
But part of it was also that the majority of the conversation on the vis.social server wasn’t quite what I would normally engage with. At the time it was definitely the closest to my preferred content out of all of the instances I could find. But a lot of it is slightly too niche for me or over my head a bit.
At any rate, I’m going to stick with vis.social for the time being since they seem like a lovely bunch. I’m also going to start contributing financially; these things cost money because they’re not financially supported by selling our data! But I’m definitely interested in starting my own instance at some point.
For when that eventually comes around, see Simon Willison’s 5 Nov post about Mastodon, and Darius Kazemi’s unbelievably thorough runyourown.social.
It’ll be interesting to see how significant this move to Mastodon is ultimately… SB and I were talking about it and he made the very good point that it really needs to turn in to something like email at some point, something that people see as so basic that companies like Apple and Microsoft start offering Mastodon clients baked in to their operating systems by default. I think that’s probably right, or at least it would be the clearest indication that it’s here to stay.
Besides that, the vocabulary… It can be hard for people to wrap their heads around “federation”, “instances”, etc. Part of me was thinking, do people really even need to understand that? I mean an unbelievable number of people use email, but they don’t usually need to understand the difference between POP and IMAP and that sort of thing. I guess that comes down to solid email clients and providers smoothing over that abstraction though (return to point above about native Mastodon clients). We need better apps and better metaphors.
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A friend of mine is having a baby imminently and asked about my experience having an induction, so I opened up Apple Notes. I spent much of my extremely limited and precious “me” time in those early post-birth days writing a long note about my experience, knowing I would want to be able to refer back to it both for myself and friends. I began writing it early in the induction, late at night on Misoprostol when I couldn’t sleep. I continued it as B was asleep on my chest in the wee hours of the morning after he was born and finished it in the days after when we had caught up with our doula about a few missing details.
Over half of it is gone.
I have no idea what could have happened to it. It ends mid-sentence, with “Eventually things got too intense, so we made”, and then nothing.
Maybe I never finished it? Maybe I just thought I did. A lot is very muddled in my head from those early days after his birth, but this feels so clear. Besides making sure that B was happy and healthy, there is very little that I made an effort to “get done” in late July 2021. Except for this note.
It feels pretty devastating. I tried checking old versions by restoring from a Time Machine backup (Sam found an extremely helpful article), but the closest backup from mid-August 2021 looks the same as my current stunted version.
Then again, when I look at the “last edited” date at the top of the note, it reads 11:23pm two days after B’s birth. I would still have been in the hospital then, I couldn’t have finished it by that time.
Maybe I did imagine it. I’m so sure it existed.
It doesn’t matter though, it feels like a loss all the same.
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To read: Rest of World
We document what happens when technology, culture and the human experience collide, in places that are typically overlooked and underestimated. We believe the story about technology is as big as the world that’s using it, and that everyone — from those building technology to those using it — can benefit from a broader global perspective.
And
A note on our name: If you don’t recognize it, “rest of world” is a ridiculous corporate term commonly used in global business operations. It’s a catch-all phrase that means, basically, “everyone else.” And it generally represents billions of people outside of the Western world. We know that their stories matter. The term “rest of world” is a symptom of a larger problem: a Western-centric worldview that leaves innumerable insights, opportunities and complexity out of the conversation.
I’ve come across so many great stories on here since I subscribed via RSS. Here is a small handful of the more recent articles I’ve enjoyed: