We’ve been working through Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. It’s amazing. Per the NYT: “The technique is more or less as streamlined as this: Mix flour, salt, yeast and water. Let it sit a bit, refrigerate it, take some out and let it rise, then bake it. The crusty, full-flavored loaf that results may be the world’s easiest yeast bread.” Here’s a video of the authors.
We haz a book.. and a bucket:
So far we’ve made:
- Bread
- Pizza
- Sticky buns
Next up, we made the Challah dough. The bread came out well - very light and airy.
One super-cool thing: By not washing the 5 quart container, more complex flavors can be obtained. Less work and waste - my engineer side loves this.
Looks like we’ll be getting our next yeast from Costco - and keeping it in the freezer.
When using Google Docs, the default Firefox menu is overridden. No sweet spellchecker goodness. Using Tools/Options and unchecking “Disable or Replace Context menus”, you can get both menus.
My last post was about full-screen text editors. The goal is to reduce options and choices, encouraging focus and flow.
Turns out, there is a more general solution - Clutter Cloak. Invoke it with a keystroke - CC obscures everything on the screen except the child window immediately under the mouse pointer. I changed the hotkey to Ctrl-Space, easier to type.
This mimics Inattentional Blindness - the tunnel vision we get when in extreme focus. Blocking out extranous content is a great way to promote Flow.
Fun video-how many passes does the White team make in this video?
Recently I was looking for a tool to put up a full-screen writing surface: green letters on a black background.
This is the sort of tool programmers love to write — like Diff tools. I found a half dozen tools, some free and cross-platform.
For now, I’m using Q10. Its lean size (357K) appeals to me, and it has autosave. Q10 plays typewriter sounds (sampled from the movie Amelie!), which can be charming or..annoying. I removed them by changing SoundsEnabled=False in q10.ini. The lineup:
