Blog – Page 3

Wood-Fired

This week I’m at Three Rings‘ annual “3Camp” event. Owing to Some Plot, we had a gap in the cooking rota, and, seeing that there was a pizza oven in the back garden, I figured… I can make a couple of dozen pizzas to feed everyone, right?

Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen. — Step one, as previously-indicated, was to make a *lot* of dough.

There was no mixing bowl large enough to accommodate the 4.5kg of flour so I just dumped it onto a surface, added some salt and sugar, made a well in the middle, and introduced my oil, water and rehydrated yeast right into the middle of it.

Minus a few minor spills, it broadly worked as a technique.

A small wood fire burns inside an outdoor brick pizza oven. — We weren’t able to find the woodpile at the house we’re staying at, so I eventually had to seek a volunteer to go ~~and forage~~ to B&Q to buy a couple of sacks of wood. I can’t wait to hear our treasurer’s response to this unusual expenses claim!

After an initial rise I knocked-back the dough and separated it into balls, and got started on building the fire.

I own a small, portable Ooni pizza oven that’s fired by woodchips, and I find it pretty challenging to use. It eats fuel pretty quickly and loses heat through its thin walls just as fast, and so it’s hard to maintain a consistent temperature while simultaneously maintaining the supply of wood and cooking pizza.

This brick-built oven, though, was a different kind of beast.

The same brick pizza oven, now seen from a few steps back with its chimney and base visible. — Compared to my small metal oven, this brick oven took a *lot* longer – on the region of an hour – to get up to temperature… but once hot, it maintained the heat much better.

I set up a prep station nearby and had Three Rings volunteers “build their own” pizzas: stretching or rolling the dough, adding sauce and cheese and other toppings, etc. And then I rotated them through the oven, up to two at a time.

My arms were already tired from the workout of hand-kneading the enormous pile of dough, and it was hot and tiring work to keep making, moving, and turning pizzas… but it was also… amazingly fun.

As the pizzas started to come out, Three Rings volunteers did too, gathering around the fire pit and in the covered dining areas of the garden, glasses in hand, to enjoy freshly-baked hot slices of crispy pizza, while they talked about volunteering, history, the future, and a diversity of other random topics beside (space travel, politics, music, teaching…).

Awesome.

So yeah… now I really want to build a brick pizza oven of my very own.

Obviously I’ve got other priorities right now (like having somewhere to live following the house-wrecking flood), but maybe that’s something I could look at in a future year.

A crispy, misshapen, slightly charred pepperoni and mushroom pizza on a paper plate. — The first pizza out of the oven was probably the ugliest, but it was also the one I remembered to photograph.

3Camp remains an annual tradition that I love dearly: the camaraderie, the doing-good-in-the-world, the opportunity to work alongside so many kind and talented volunteers, the chance to play with exciting technology, and whole experience… but the pizzas on the penultimate evening have got to go down as a special highlight this year.

Note #28647

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

Fools Mode

I’d completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools’ Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of “features” until I went to it myself and got “party mode”.

So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools’ myself.

Dan Q did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree

This checkin to GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still had no success despite an extended search.

Dan Q found GCARTJ6 The Pylon King

This checkin to GCARTJ6 The Pylon King reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect “hobbit hole” cave within its exposed roots (where he ate his ice cream).

Dan Q found GCARTJB Stop, Look… er… Listen?

This checkin to GCARTJB Stop, Look... er... Listen? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’m volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities… among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It’s a wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed.

Note #28634

Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.

But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.

Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to the insight that gets you to the solution.

Note #28632

Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning… before starting work on a new Three Rings feature!

Dan Q did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree

This checkin to GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

This one’s going to bug me! The second nearest cache to this week’s volunteering event accommodation and I had to DNF it!? Poked my fingers into every hidey hole I could find (while a nearby goose honked at me: maybe it was mocking me, or perhaps it was saying “it’s on your left” – afraid I don’t speak goose) before giving up. It’s right on my doorstep, though, so I may well be back for another attempt!

Dan Q found GCARTJE 1602

This checkin to GCARTJE 1602 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

When I drove along this lane yesterday evening I didn’t appreciate how wonderful it’d look under the morning sun. An easy find with thanks to the cache title! TFTC!

Dan Q found GCARTJK Hencote Lane

This checkin to GCARTJK Hencote Lane reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way through the vineyards, to the especially wonderful view across the valley.

I’m not sure I was supposed to exit the farm grounds the way I did, but I was eventually able to get out and was pleased to discover this cache was nearby. QEF once I’d chosen the correct host. TFTC.

Note #28621

Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional “receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries” activity.

Eject Toast

Most-often when a toaster has a ‘cancel’ button it’s simply labelled ‘cancel’, ‘stop’, or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the ‘eject’ icon – like you’d find on a VHS tape recorder – on its button.

At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I’m coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.

But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say ‘hey, that’s cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out’.

Food divided by Distance

I was pretty ill yesterday. It’s probably a combination of post-flood stress and my shitty lungs’ ability to take a sore throat and turn it into something that leaves me lying in bed and groaning.

I spent most of the morning in and out of a fitful sleep, during which I dreamed up the most-bizarre application: a GPS tracker app that, after being told your destination and what you were eating, reported your journey progress to social media by describing where you were going and how much of your food was left¹.

I should be clear that in the dream, I wasn’t the one that invented this concept; in fact, I didn’t even understand it at first (maybe I still don’t!). In the dream I was at some kind of unconference event with a variety of “make art with the Web” types, and I missed a session by falling asleep². I woke (within the dream) right before the session ended and rushed in to see what was being presented, and only got the tail-end of the explanation of how a project – this project – worked, after which I felt rushed to try to understand it before somebody inevitably tried to talk to me about it.

But it could work, couldn’t it? If you’re one of those people who routinely tracks and shares their location (like Aaron Parecki, whose heatmapping inspired my own) or journeys (like Jeremy Keith does), it’s a way to add a bit of silliness to that sharing.

I’m probably not going to implement this. It is, in the end, the kind of stupidity that could (should?) only appear in the dreams of somebody who’s got a bad head cold.

But if you manage to take this idea and turn it into something… actually good?… let me know!

Or if you’ve just got a cool, “Web 2.0-ey” idea for the name of an app that tracks both your journey progress and your meal consumption, I’d love to hear that too.

Footnotes

¹ Under the assumption that its consumption would be evenly distributed throughout the journey. Because everybody does that, right? Counting the number of steps they make before taking another equal-sized bite. Right?

² Even in my dreams, I can dream of falling asleep. And, sometimes, of dreaming. A fever probably helps.

Blogging: you’re doing it right

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

That’s all you need to know. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. If you have decided to reclaim ownership of your place on the web, you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter how you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re self-hosting or using a SAAS. It doesn’t matter if your content lives on a database or in a TXT file. It doesn’t matter if you did everything yourself or you paid someone to do it for you. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a year. What matters is that you’re doing it. Your effort is commendable. You deserve to be thanked so, thank you.

Manuel “Manu” Moreale, in Blogging: you’re doing it right

Wonderful words from Manu, there, that I think every blogger needs to be told once in a while. You have permission to write stuff. There isn’t a wrong way.

Also worth reading is his “2-step process for AI-free blogging”.

I wish I could be as pithy as Manu. But I’mma keep blogging anyway. After all; I’m doing it right!