Jeff's Brain Dump

Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

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.

YelpFin

Inspired by Redfin’s Walkscore, I’ve done a GreaseMonkey script to link to Yelp from Redfin listings. (thanks rouftop and Navtej!)
It looks like this:

Install the Firefox plugin Greasemonkey
Restart Firefox
Install the YelpFin Greasemonkey script
Find some Redfin listings and click the link that appears below the address

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Posting from Google Docs

Gdocs can post to your blog. Very nice.

As long as I’m posting to test, some Friday links:
Paradox of choice - why abundance of choice is making us miserable.
Business Technology : Bigger Computer Monitors = More Productivity
Pete Seeger’s Banjo

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Using Firefox Spellcheck with Google Docs

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.

Confused? Try the movie - 1:54, with sound.

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Great Validation Email

This made me laugh hard… bodes well -

Howdy and welcome to RescueTime- We’ll make this short and sweet…

Here’s your login info (store it in a cool dry place):

Username: jeff@server.com
Password: As IF we would send you your password in cleartext!

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Hide Distractions with Clutter Cloak

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?

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Full-screen writing apps (Writeroom for Windows)

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:

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“Cherry-picked Intellegents”

… would be a great band name.

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Noise to Signal - geek webcomic

Some very geeky humor…hope they don’t mind hotlinking. My faves:

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Factory Pattern

no Guice or Dependency Injection jokes from the peanut gallery…

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