I bundled the dog into the car and drove out to Piddington, a couple of kilometres North of the hashpoint. Cherwell Council advertise a circular walk
that seems to circle from the village (which looked like a good place to park) up to Muswell Hill, the summit of which is near the hashpoint.
She and I walked through Piddington, past the church, and up onto the path. A soggy kilometre or so later we quickly discovered that this was going to be more-challenging than I’d
anticipated. We quickly got bogged down in a flooded field and needed to double-back. With my socks already soaking wet and the dog in a similar condition, we found a different route
that looped around the entire hill and through an alpaca farm (or were they llamas?), then we worked our way up the South face of the hill, over the summit, and down to the hashpoint.
We got there at 11:00 UTC, took a quick look around and pulled the closest thing a dog can manage to a silly grin, and then hacked our way back (by road) to Piddington for the drive
home and some dry clothes.
I hope to cycle/walk to the GZ about lunchtime? I’ve an opportunity to pass nearby the GZ between other errands this morning!
Expedition
I was excited to see this spot pop up on my radar, because it’s a lovely meadow that I’ve ocassionally walked my dog in, within comfortable cycling distance of my house. As it happened,
I had an even easier route here because a drive this morning to drop the kids off at a half-term activity took me “close enough” to be worth stopping and walking from there.
I parked at The Talbot Inn, just West of the Swinford Toll Bridge (a bizzare old bridge that, for weird historical reasons, continues to use human operators
to charge 5 pence per car to cross, which surely cannot be cost-effective!). From here, there’s a footpath along the back of the Seimens buildings in the nearby light industrial estate
which eventually comes out into the Wharf Stream Way circular walk. It was pretty damp out here today and I quickly regretted my choice of light trousers which would have been fine to
drive the kids to their camp and back but wasn’t really a good choice for stomping across the long grass of a damp meadow. Some way across I disturbed some grazing deer, but ultimatey
it was following a deer-trodden trail that eventually provided the best route to the GZ.
I reached the GZ at 09:19, took a selfie, and then turned around to go and get to work. I also shot a video covering the whole expedition which is presented, unedited, below.
Tracklog
My GPSr kept a tracklog; note that this was an “on the way” stopoff so the start and end point isn’t the same!
This video accompanies a blog post of the same title. The content is basically the same – if you prefer videos, watch this video. If you prefer blog posts, go
read the blog post.
After talking about impulse control, our “puppy school” OABT
half-jokingly issued homework to photograph our dogs waiting patiently next to their initial, written in treats. #holdmybeer
This video accompanies a blog post of the same title. The content is basically the same – if you prefer videos, watch this video. If you prefer blog posts, go read
the blog post. If you’re a superfan, try both and spot the differences. You weirdo.
For lunch today I taste-tested five different plant-based vegan “cheeses” from Honestly Tasty. Let’s see if they’re any good.
Prefer video?
This blog post is available as a video (here or on YouTube), for those who like that sort of thing. The content’s slightly different, but you
do get to see my face when I eat the one that doesn’t agree with me.
Background
I’ve been vegetarian or mostly-vegetarian to some degree or another for a little over ten years (for
those who have trouble keeping up: I currently eat meat only on weekends, and not including beef or lamb), principally for the environmental benefits of a reduced-meat lifestyle. But if
I’m really committed to reducing the environmental impact of my diet, the next “big” thing I still consume is dairy products.
My milk consumption is very low nowadays, but – like many people who might aspire towards dropping dairy – it’s quitting cheese that poses the biggest challenge. I’m not even the
biggest fan of cheese, and I don’t know how I’d do without it: there’s just, it seems, no satisfactory substitute.
It’s possible, though, that my thinking on this is outdated. Especially in recent years, we’re getting better and better at making convincing (or, at least, tasty!) plant-based
substitutes to animal based foods. And so, inspired by a conversation with some friends, I thought I’d try a handful of new-generation plant-based cheeses and see how I got on. I
ordered a variety pack from Honestly Tasty (who’ll give you 20% off your first order if you subscribe your favourite throwaway email address to
their newsletter) and gave it a go.
It’s supposed to taste like Brie, I guess, but it’s not convincing. The texture of the rind is surprisingly good, but the inside is somewhat homogeneous and flat. They’ve tried to use
mustard powder to provide Brie’s pepperiness and acetic acid for its subtle sourness, but it feels like there might be too much of the former (or perhaps I’m just a little oversensitive
to mustard) and too little of the latter. It’s okay, but I wouldn’t buy it again.
This was surprisingly flavoursome and really quite enjoyable. It spreads with about the consistency of pâté and has a sharp tang that really stands out. You wouldn’t mistake it for
cheese, but you might mistake it for a cheese spread: there’s a real “cheddary” flavour buried in there.
This is supposed to be modelled after Gorgonzola, and it might as well be because I don’t like either it or the cheese it’s based on. I might loathe Blue slightly less than
most blue cheeses, but that doesn’t mean I’d willingly subject myself to this again in a hurry. It’s matured with real Penicillium Roqueforti, apparently, along with seaweed, and it
tastes like both of these things are true. So yeah: I hated this one, but you shouldn’t take that as a condemnation of its quality as a cheese substitute because I’d still rather eat it
than the cheese that it’s based on. Try for yourself, I guess.
This was probably my favourite of the bunch. It’s reminiscent of garlic & herb Boursin, and feels like somebody in the
kitchen where they cooked it up said to themselves, “how about we do the Ched Spread, but with less onion and a whole load of herbs mixed-through”. It seems that it must be easier to
make convincingly-cheesy soft cheeses than hard cheeses, but I’m not complaining: this would be great on toast.
If you’d served me this and told me it was a baked Camembert… I wouldn’t be fooled. But I wouldn’t be disappointed either. It moves a lot like Camembert and it tastes… somewhat like it.
But whether or not that’s “enough” for you, it’s perfectly delicious and I’d be more than happy to eat it or serve it to others.
In summary…
Honestly Tasty’s Ched Spread, Herbi, and Shamembert are perfectly acceptable (vegan!) substitutes for cheese. Even where they don’t accurately reflect the cheese they attempt to model,
they’re still pretty good if you take them on their own merits: instead of comparing them to their counterparts, consider each as if it were a cheese spread or soft cheese in its own
right and enjoy accordingly. I’d buy them again.
Their Bree failed to capture the essence of a good ripe Brie and its flavour profile wasn’t for me something to enjoy outside of its attempts at emulation. And their “Veganzola” Blue
cheese… was pretty grim, but then that’s what I think of Gorgonzola too, so maybe it’s perfect and I just haven’t the palate for it.
What happens when you give Gutenberg and Elementor to complete Beginners? In this challenge, Meg and Lily (two of my daughters) are tasked with re-creating a webpage. They’ve never
used Elementor or Gutenberg before, and I only gave them 30 minutes each.
…
Jamie of Pootlepress challenged his daughters – who are presumably both digital natives, but have no WordPress experience – to build a page to a specific design using both Gutenberg and Elementor. In 30 minutes.
Regardless of what you think about the products under test or the competitors in the challenge (Lily + Gutenberg clearly seems to be the fan favourite, which I’d sort-of expect because
IMO Gutenberg’s learning curve is much flatter that Elementor’s), this is a fantastic example of “thinking aloud” (“talkalong”)
UX testing. And with (only) a £20 prize on offer, it’s possibly the best-value testing of its type I’ve ever seen too! Both the
participants do an excellent job of expressing their praise of and frustration with different parts of the interface of their assigned editing platform, and the developers of both – and
other systems besides – could learn a lot from watching this video.
Specifically, this video shows how enormous the gulf is between how developers try to express concepts that are essential to web design and how beginner users assume things will work.
Concepts like thinking in terms of “blocks” that can resize or reposition dynamically, breakpoints, assets as cross-references rather than strictly embedded within documents, style as
an overarching concept by preference to something applied to individual elements, etc… some as second nature once you’re sixteen levels deep into the DOM and you’ve been doing it for years! But they’re rarely intuitive… or, perhaps, not expressed in a way that makes them intuitive… to new users.
You may remember that I was excited to hear about the upcoming release of Dune (which I
suppose should be called Dune: Part One). It turns out to be excellent and I’d recommend it to anybody.
But once you’ve seen it and while you’re in the two-year wait for Dune: Part Two (argh!), can I suggest you also enjoy this wonderful creation by the folks at Bad Lip Reading,
whose work I’ve plugged before. Note: minor spoilers (amazingly) if you haven’t seen
Dune yet.
Called @Tesco Abingdon for a #flujab but fell down a black hole in their menu system. Had to choose the “continue to hold” option several times… and then nobody answered
anyway…
For most of 2013/2014 and intermittently thereafter my sister ran a weekly-ish “Family Vlog” on YouTube, and I (even more-intermittently) did an ocasional
tonge-in-cheek review and analysis of them.
Today, a friend reported that they had eaten “Sunday dinner on a Wednesday”, and I found myself reminded of a running gag in this old, old vlog… and threw together a quick compilation
reel of some of its instances.
There was a discussion this week in the Abnib WhatsApp group about whether a particular illustration of a farm was full of phallic imagery (it was).
This left me wondering if anybody had ever tried to identify the most-priapic buildings in the world. Of course towers often look at least a little bit like their architects
were compensating for something, but some – like the Ypsilanti Water Tower in Michigan pictured above – go further than
others.
Anyway: a shot tower in Bristol – a part of the UK with a long history of leadworking – was among the latecomer entrants to the competition, and seeing this curious building reminded me about something I’d read, once, about the
manufacture of lead shot. The idea (invented in Bristol by a plumber called William Watts) is that you pour molten lead
through a sieve at the top of a tower, let surface tension pull it into spherical drops as it falls, and eventually catch it in a cold water bath to finish solidifying it. I’d seen an
animation of the process, but I’d never seen a video of it, so I went about finding one.
The animation I saw might have been this one, or perhaps one that wasn’t so obviously-made-in-MS-Paint.
British Pathé‘s YouTube Channel provided me with this 1950 film, and if you follow only one hyperlink from this article, let it be this one! It’s a well-shot (pun intended, but there’s
a worse pun in the video!), and while I needed to translate all of the references to “hundredweights” and “Fahrenheit” to measurements that I can actually understand, it’s thoroughly
informative.
But there’s a problem with that video: it’s been badly cut from whatever reel it was originally found on, and from about 1 minute and 38 seconds in it switches to what is clearly a very
different film! A mother is seen shepherding her young daughter off to bed, and a voiceover says:
Bedtime has a habit of coming round regularly every night. But for all good parents responsibility doesn’t end there. It’s just the beginning of an evening vigil, ears attuned to cries
and moans and things that go bump in the night. But there’s no reason why those ears shouldn’t be your neighbours ears, on occasion.
“Off to bed, you little monster. And no watching TikTok when you should be trying to sleep!”
Now my interest’s piqued. What was this short film going to be about, and where could I find it? There’s no obvious link; YouTube doesn’t even make it easy to find the video
uploaded “next” by a given channel. I manipulated some search filters on British Pathé’s site until I eventually hit upon the right combination of magic words and found a clip called
Radio Baby Sitter. It starts off exactly where the misplaced prior clip cut out, and tells the story of “Mr.
and Mrs. David Hurst, Green Lane, Coventry”, who put a microphone by their daughter’s bed and ran a wire through the wall to their neighbours’ radio’s speaker so they can babysit
without coming over for the whole evening.
It’s a baby monitor, although not strictly a radio one as the title implies (it uses a signal wire!), nor is it groundbreakingly innovative: the first baby monitor predates it by over a decade, and it actually did use
radiowaves! Still, it’s a fun watch, complete with its contemporary fashion, technology, and social structures. Here’s the full thing, re-merged for your convenience:
Wait, what was I trying to do when I started, again? What was I even talking about…
It’s harder than it used to be
It used to be easier than this to get lost on the Web, and sometimes I miss that.
Obviously if you go back far enough this is true. Back when search engines were much weaker and Internet content was much less homogeneous and more distributed, we used to engage in
this kind of meandering walk all the time: we called it “surfing” the Web. Second-generation
Web browsers even had names, pretty often, evocative of this kind of experience: Mosaic, WebExplorer, Navigator, Internet Explorer, IBrowse. As people started to engage in the
noble pursuit of creating content for the Web they cross-linked their sources, their friends, their affiliations (remember webrings? here’s a reminder; they’re not quite as dead as you think!), your favourite sites etc. You’d follow links to other pages, then follow their links to others
still, and so on in that fashion. If you went round the circles enough times you’d start seeing all those invariably-blue hyperlinks turn purple and know you’d found your way home.
Some parts of the Web are perhaps best forgotten, though?
But even after that era, as search engines started to become a reliable and powerful way to navigate the wealth of content on the growing Web, links still dominated our exploration.
Following a link from a resource that was linked to by somebody you know carried the weight of a “web of trust”, and you’d quickly come to learn whose links were consistently valuable
and on what subjects. They also provided a sense of community and interconnectivity that paralleled the organic, chaotic networks of acquaintances people form out in the real world.
In recent times, that interpersonal connectivity has, for many, been filled by social networks (let’s ignore their failings in this regard for now). But linking to resources “outside” of the big
social media silos is hard. These advertisement-funded services work hard to discourage or monetise activity
that takes you off their platform, even at the expense of their users. Instagram limits the number of external links by profile; many social networks push
for resharing of summaries of content or embedding content from other sources, discouraging engagement with the wider Web, Facebook and Twitter both run external links
through a linkwrapper (which sometimes breaks); most large social networks make linking to the profiles of other users
of the same social network much easier than to users anywhere else; and so on.
The net result is that Internet users use fewer different websites today than they did 20 years ago,
and spend most of their “Web” time in app versions of
websites (which often provide a better experience only because site owners strategically make it so to increase their lock-in and data harvesting potential). Truly exploring the Web now
requires extra effort, like exercising an underused muscle. And if you begin and end your Web experience on just one to three services,
that just feels kind of… sad, to me. Wasted potential.
I suppose nowadays we don’t get lost as often outside of the Internet, either. Photo by Leah Kelly.
It sounds like I’m being nostalgic for a less-sophisticated time on the Web (that would certainly be in character!). A time before we’d
fully-refined the technology that would come to connect us in an instant to the answers we wanted. But that’s not exactly what I’m pining for. Instead, what I miss is something
we lost along the way, on that journey: a Web that was more fun-and-weird, more interpersonal, more diverse. More Geocities, less Facebook; there’s a surprising thing to find myself saying.
Somewhere along the way, we ended up with the Web we asked for, but it wasn’t the Web we wanted.
For GC9EXXX Church Micro 14129…Sutton, a geocache I recently set up, I wanted to use a “pole topper”
style cache. I’ve always felt slightly let down by finding yet another magnetic nano stuck inside a pipe, so I wanted to do something better. You can watch the video here or on YouTube, or scroll down for written instructions.
Sand down the lid and the inside of the pole topper so the glue adheres to it better.
Mix up your 2-part epoxy in the pole topper. Don’t use too much or it’ll overflow and block the lid from closing.
Put the lid into the pole topper and press down firmly and evenly to squeeze out any air bubbles.
While you’re waiting for the epoxy to set, file off the flange around the edge of the tub. It’s there to catch drips but
you’re not going to be storing food anyway! The lid is easier to take on and off with the flange filed away.
Finally, roughen the bottom edge of the tub with some sandpaper to make it easier to grip when opening and closing the
container.
Music:
For Lorilyn by Casey LaLonde, used under a CC-NC Creative Commons License.
