Author: smartpeopleiknow

4 p.m. recipe: pan-fried chicken thighs by Michael Ruhlman (@ruhlman)

I am a fan of Michael Ruhlman in general, so I am happy to recommend this recipe of his: Pan-Fried Chicken Thighs. Three comments:

  1. This recipe is dead simple, but it delivers alot of flavour
  2. It smartly replaces boneless chicken breasts, which are overpriced and underflavoured, with chicken thighs, which are just the opposite. (BTW, you could easily replace chicken thighs with turkey thighs if they are on sale. Just make sure you flatten them to roughly the same thickness as you see here.)
  3. It replaces buttermilk (which often just goes to waste and takes up room in my fridge) for a more common yet better set of ingredients.

Ruhlman keeps it simple here, but you could easily add dry flavourings (i.e. herbs and spices) to the flour, or wet flavouring (e.g., hot sauces) to the dairy mix. Once you start doing that, you can vary this recipe in all kinds of ways.

Do you have a PC with no security? Do you have no money? Then you need this

Specifically, start here, with Microsoft Security Essentials for Microsoft Windows.

I haven’t downloaded this, but it comes from Microsoft and you will be much better off getting this from them then from some other vendor (or worse, from some site you aren’t sure of.)

I recommend this especially for people who are nervous about such things but don’t know what to do next.

Robot Fast Food workers, automats, and food trucks: food of the future (some notes)

Are low-wage workers going to replaced by robots? There are cases being made for that happening, both here: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker from FiveThirtyEight and from the recent book, The Second Machine age (pictured above). As well, some bloggers like Matt Yglesias have argued that fast food restaurants are a form of manufacturing, and this makes the notion of replacing fast food workers with machines more plausible to me.

However, in considering this, it is important to look not just to the future, but also to look to the past. In particular, the past that contained the automat.

The automat was once the future too. There are still vestiges of them around, but mainly they have died off. They collapsed for a number of reasons (see Automat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), but the chief reason was inflexibility.

Today’s fast food establishments thrive on inflexibility and low cost. One way people can compete with that and win is with portable food (e.g., food trucks, food stalls). Barring bureaucratic costs, portable food is cheaper to deliver than when it is delivered by traditional bricks and mortar establishments (even fast food ones) and portable food vendors can be much more flexible than fast food places can ever be.  There might still be robots delivering portable food, just like there are vending machines that provide food. But they won’t have flexibility of humans, and they won’t be as cheap.  Additionally, humans can offer human interaction: no robot in the near future will be able to imitate that.

I believe eating is a social act and a human act, and buying and selling food should be a social and human activity.  We humans need to think about it in ways to provide it that doesn’t dehumanize ourselves.

For more on the book, check out: Amazon.com: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (9780393239355): Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee: Books. It’s really great.

 

Should everyone learn to code? And should they learn it from Code.org?

I am encouraged by organizations like code.org and the work they are doing to help kids (and adults) learn how to write code using an approach that is condusive to fast learning. You can see their work here: Learn | Code.org. A somewhat differing point of view is here: Thread: Why you should learn to code.  I say “somewhat” because while Winer agrees with the notion of more people coding, he disagrees with how this is being promoted by code.org.

I think there are lots of reasons to learn to code: it’s a creative activity, it helps you understand technology better, it can help you get ahead in life, and it can be fun. I don’t think everyone has to learn to code, just like everyone doesn’t have to learn to sing or draw or other creative tasks. People may be anxious about their kids being computer illerate, but that fear has been around since the early days of personal computers and it was always an overblown fear. Learn to code for the goodness it brings, not because you fear something if you don’t learn.

Phishing attack of the day

Is this:

Thank you for registering with us.
Email:
Password: ******
Activation code 70751

Please click the link below to access the video that shows how the system work.

Below is a link that I don’t recognize. Not surprising, because I have never heard of the organization sending it, never mind asked for an activation code.

Just a reminder: whenever you get email like that, delete it right away.

Need a cheap domain? Namecheap.com has some good deals right now

Right now, Namecheap.com has .us domains for $1.10 (Canadian) and .org.uk for $6.41.

I was tempted to get iAmSoFabulo.us, but I may get something just for test purposes. (I am testing using cloud sites, and it is helpful to have a domain name, vs going with the full domain name that some of the cloud sites provide).

If you are Canadian or want a .ca domain, then netfirms.ca is a better choice (NameCheap.com has .ca domains for $13.03, vs $9.99 at netfirms.ca).

Finally, from what I hear, namecheap.com has deals all the time. It is worth visiting them from time to time to see what is available.

How to program, as explained by Samuel Jackson :)

Well, not exactly. But this website: Programming, M—–f—– – Do you speak it? is a very expletive laden and funny site for any of you programmers out there, from n00bie to experienced. Click on this especially for some great links to help you with your programming skills. 

Also not your average software development T shirts are on sale there, if you are so inclined.

4 p.m. recipe: roasted red pepper and tomato soup

Some days you just want a simple meal for dinner. This soup with some bread, cheese and a salad could be just the thing. Make it even easier by picking up some roasted peppers and using them instead of roasting your own. You can deepen the flavour with some garlic or make it hotter with pepper sauce or even sriracha added in. Lots of ways to change this up and still make it delicious.

You can find the recipe here: Roasted red pepper and tomato soup recipe, from the good folks at Style At Home

Hack: Facebook’s version of PHP, now for everyone (#technical)

It’s not news that Facebook has been running a modified version of PHP for some time. What is news is that now so can you.

You can get a copy of it at this website:Hack. It installs on most OSs (or will, soon), and even runs in the Cloud (on Heroku).

According to this, Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com, what you get is a high performing version of PHP with very little you have to change to get the performance gains.

It will be interesting to see if this helps to drive up usage in PHP. There are lots of new technologies to build web site with these days: this could make PHP a desirable option.

Thinking of getting a fitness tracker? Consider getting this app first

There are a number of devices out there to tracking your movement, sleep and other things. But you may own such a device already: it’s your mobile phone. If you combine this with this:  Moves – Activity Tracker for iPhone and Android, then that may be all you need to get started.

If you are going to get it, look at the comments here, first: Swissmiss | Moves App. As you can see, there are some limitations to it. My recommendation: try this app first. If you find it useful, consider getting a standalone tracker from someone like Fitbit or Nike.

Anything that helps get people moving, fitter, and healthier is a good thing.

 

Looking to travel to NYC? Here’s some budget boutiques to consider

This NYTimes.com article is older (2010), but that just means that these places may be easier to get into now: Budget Boutiques in New York City – Interactive Map – NYTimes.com. (It could also mean that some of these places have come and gone.)

Boutique hotels have a feel of the city that you are in: it’s a feeling that large scale hotels rarely have. I’d recommend checking out this list if you are thinking of heading to New York. Any money you save on accommodation  can easily be spent elsewhere. 🙂

On goaltending, Five Thirty Eight and the genius of Patrick Roy

This is remarkable:

In this FiveThirtyEight | Why Gretzky Had It Easy, Neil Paine tries and I think succeeds in explaining why the save percentage has gone up year after year. The reason is: Patrick Roy. I have been watching young goalies since my son started playing hockey, and I am amazed at how different they play to when I played in the era of Dryden. Back then, the butterfly was somewhat controversial still, and goalies who played that way and were beat up high were criticized for that style. Not only that, but we were trained to get back up again fast. Now, goalies are going down and staying down. Where once we tried to stop low shots with the stick or the blade (both relatively small), now goalies have both pads (relatively big) on the ice most of the time. Roy brought that on, or is credited with it, and now all the young goalies (and older ones) play that way.

Paine is right to credit the gear too, for it is alot better.  The chest and arm protectors are much better than the old ones, and even the top of the knees and the neck are protected now (not so when I was younger). It makes it a bit easier for the goalie to use more of his or her body to stop the shot. I even think the pads make it much easier to slide around than the old pads ever could. But gear alone isn’t the reason: it is the new style and the training to do it that makes a difference.

I disagree with the title: Gretzky had it easy. Watch the video that Paine shows. Watch how patient Gretzky is with the puck, and how he find the opening, no matter how small. I think he would still be doing the same thing with today’s goaltenders. Other than that, a great piece.

 

Ulster: a study of what’s next, in maps

This post does an interesting analysis of changes happening in Ulster and what might become of it. As the Catholic populations grows and the Protestant population declines, there are a number of scenarios of what might come next, all thoughtfully explored in the piece liked to at Bigthink.com.

As progress was made in Ireland and Northern Ireland,  it is easy to imagine it forget about it and assume it is stable. Perhaps it will remain stable, but change is coming, one birth at a time.

(Map shows the areas in Ulster with a majority of Catholics (green) and a majority of Protestants (Yellow).)

Is Agile dead?

For people who work in software development, I recommend this article: The End of Agile: Death by Over-Simplification | Effective Software Design. It pushes back against what Agile is becoming. It also has some great links to others complaining about what Agile has become, including this, which I really like: The Anti Agile Manifesto | On the obfuscation of common sense in the software development community.

My belief is that there is a wide range of people using the term “agile”. Some of those people have alot of experience doing software development and can use it to create much better software. And then there are other people who use the term vaguely in order to sound intelligent and flexible. If you want to be more like the former and would like to know more about Agile, here’s a good place to start: Agile software development – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don’t think it is dead: but I do think it needs resuscitation.

 

Some suggestions on how to stop iOS 7 from draining your iPhone’s battery life

It’s a common problem: your iOS 7 phone doesn’t have the juice you need to get you through the day. If you want to tackle this problem, this article may be just thing you need: How to stop iOS 7 from destroying your iPhone’s battery life. Getting rid of things like background refreshes, 3D features, location based services can all go some way to making your power last longer. Worth reviewing.

Some thoughts on setting up Thunderbird, the email client from Mozilla. (Hint: I recommend it.)

If you are struggling with managing multiple email user accounts, or having difficulty with the user interfaces of web based email accounts, then you should consider using Thunderbird. (Plus, frankly, the ads that Yahoo! puts on their web site are awful and embarrassing.)

Thunderbird comes from Mozilla, the same people that bring us Firefox. I tried using it years ago, but the integration with Yahoo! mail and Gmail seemed more difficult at that time. This time, it was fairly simple.

You download and install Thunderbird from here. Once you do, select the option to create new accounts. I wanted to set it up with my Yahoo! and Gmail accounts, and to do this all I needed to do was provide my name, userid and password, and Thunderbird set up the rest. (If I recall, one time you needed to have the SMTP/POP settings, etc., but now Thunderbird figures out all that at least for Gmail and Yahoo! You may need to do more work if your email comes from your ISP, but that should be straightforward information to acquire.)

I would like to hear your feedback, but it was a simple process for me. Two problems I did have, though, that you should be aware of:

  • Spam! With Yahoo! mail, if you have a free account, it will download your spam as well as your regular mail. This is something I discovered as I clicked on Get Mail. I went and cleared my spam (which was being downloaded) and then it was fine. If you have a paid account, there is apparently an option to prevent this from happening. (More information on this here.)
  • 2 factor authentication. With Gmail, I had two factor authentication turned on. If you do too, you will need to generate a special password in order for Thunderbird. (More information on that here.)

Having a problem with a USB or SD drive? Use SDFormatter to format and reset it

If you have a new SD card, using the tool SDFormatter makes sense.

However, if you are having a problem with an old SD card or USB drive, it also can help you.

I was trying to install Chrome OS on my SD drive and USB drives using tools unetbootin and win32diskimager. These tools would burn the files to the drive without difficulty. But later, when I wanted to use them, Windows 7 would only recognize 1 GB of space, despite them both being much bigger (4 GB and 8 GB). Typical Windows formatting didn’t help.

I tried SDFormatter on the SD drive first. That worked great. I decided to try it on the USB drive. That worked too! Very quick, and the drives were reformatted and restored to their proper size! Whew. I successfully tested putting a file on each one as well.

It’s a great little tool. I recommend it to help you deal with flash memory.

Some thoughts on the infancy of the Web, on it’s 25th birthday

The web is 25 years old, and I have been using it since the very beginning. For those of you that haven’t — and those feeling nostalgic — here are some fun facts about the early days of the World Wide Web:

  • Before the web, there was just the Internet. And the Internet consisted of various services, from e-mail (of course) to Gopher to ftp to WAIS to news groups/Usenet, etc. It was all great, but then the World Wide Web sprung into action and the browser quickly became THE tool for using the Internet (save email). I wonder if anyone under 30 has even heard of any of those other services, let along use any of them?
  • In the beginning, most people couldn’t access the Web or even the Internet. Most people’s PCs had Windows, and Windows didn’t come with software to connect to the Internet. I was using OS/2 at the time – Really! – and OS/2 did provide a “TCP/IP stack” that allowed you to connect. You could buy a Stack and install it on your Windows machine, and eventually Microsoft bundled it with Windows. When that happened, Internet access took off.
  • To access the Internet, everyone had a dial up modem, with U.S. Robotics making some of the finest ones at the time. Web pages had to be designed to be very small, because every byte delivered by modem had to count.
  • The mid to late 90s was an exciting time to be on the Internet. The web, access to the Internet via new software, ISPs, and email all hit most people at about the same time. Things changed so quickly, the notion of a “web year” (3 months) came about.
  • In the early days, there were a range of browsers, from Mosaic to Viola to the one from IBM called Web Explorer. Then came Netscape and then Internet Explorer. It was along time before Firefox and Safari came along to challenge IE.
  • The “www.” part was important at first when you were using the Web. You could type “www.ibm.com” or “ftp.ibm.com” or “some other protocol.ibm.com” and your browser and the server would figure out what you wanted. It wasn’t assumed you were going to a web site Likewise, you could type “ibm.com:80” to go the web server. Eventually , the only thing that people wanted was their browser to talk to the web server, and the “www.” and the “:80” became superflous.
  • Server technology was very expensive at first. Netscape’s web server came with nice bells and whistles and cost about $10,000 for some form of that. Then Apache came along with their web server and essentially obliterated the web server software market.
  • Yahoo! was a big thing in the beginning. I actually tried to do a Canadian version of it. FYI: you cannot hand craft your own Yahoo! It’s like an artisanal Google. Needless to say, I abandoned that idea soon and left it to the professionals. I was involved with the early development of IBM’s global presence on the web.
  • Early web pages seem ugly now, but at the time they were amazing. You didn’t have to type in a bunch of commands to access information, like you did with FTP. You could type in one thing and just point and click, and each click brought up new information or played audio files or played video files! All of that was simply amazing.
  • The moment I thought the web was going to be big was when paintings from the Louvre went online. I thought: this isn’t just for technical people: any one can do this.
  • In the early days of the Web, there were two big concerns. One was doing commerce on the web. Companies were cautioned to be very discreet about selling things: otherwise the hard core Internet people would make a big stink and make life difficult for you. The second big concern was that the Internet backbone in the United States would get broken up or underfunded or somehow messed up and that this would inhibit the health of the Internet. This was a really big concern. The Internet has always been in various states of precariousness, and the recent threats to net neutrality are part of an ongoing story.
  • Speaking of net neutrality, there have always been special connections between major sites and major ISPs. In the early days it was from big sites like AOL connecting directly to big ISPs. Now it is Netflix who is making the deals. The more things change… 🙂

Happy birthday, World Wide Web, you great information superhighway! May you be around for 25 more!

Some thoughts on dealing with small difficulties

The problem with small difficulties is that if you get too close to them, they seem large. Like mosquitoes, even though they are small, with enough of them pestering you, you can find yourself entirely taken up with dealing with them.

With mosquitoes, you might endure them, and this is one way to deal with them if you have to. You can also endure your small problems and fight through them as if they were a swarm of mosquitoes. Or you might step back inside to a sheltered place. Stepping back is also a good way to deal with small problems. Step back and gain some perspective and see the small problems for what they are: small and insignificant in the bigger frame you view them from. You will still deal with them, but regaining that perspective reduces the irritation that they bring on, and helps you deal with them with great patience and equanimity.

(Via my iphone)

The invisible samurai sword of confidence and other ways to be awesome

It’s Monday: you need some help with feeling awesome. I recommend this not too hard to handle on a Monday post at Pick the Brain. Like all tips, some will help you more than others. I especially like the samurai sword of confidence (feel free to replace a sword with something less violent if that helps you).

My 10 seconds of happiness exercise

I often struggle with how to get through the long, cold winter. If you do too, or are dealing with other difficulties that can make you sad and miserable, try this exercise that I find helps.

For a period of no more than 10 seconds, do something that makes you happy. It can be looking at something beautiful, enjoying a piece of music or a piece of food, or saying something good to someone you love. Choose the best thing you can think of. In that 10 seconds, don’t think of anything else, just that. Think about it before you do it, think about it while you are doing it, then think about it after you have done it. That’s it. That’s the exercise.

Now, maybe you think 10 seconds is too short and a minute or more is something you can focus on. Great! Do that then. Or you so enjoyed that 10 seconds of admiring the snow, or sipping you tea or juice, that you are going to move on and try the exercise with something else. Also great. Whatever you do, try the exercise and then try to do it repeatedly through the day, week.

Happiness is hard to define, and still harder to quantify. But I think that each of us, in our own way, can build up the part of ourselves capable of being happy and work it and make it stronger. The heart literally gets stronger through exercise. The heart figuratively can stronger through exercise, too. At least I think so. Try this exercise and tell me what you think.

The best, easiest, and most effective New Year’s resolution to make (perfect for procrastinators, too) is

The best, easiest, and most effective New Year’s resolution to make (perfect for procrastinators, too) is this: I resolve to make a new resolution every week (or month, or quarter or season, or….you get the idea).

It sounds like a lame suggestion, but think about it for a minute. By making this resolution, you have already made a resolution. Good for you! One down. That out of the way, you can decide what is a schedule you are most likely to stick to. Once a week? Possible, but tough. Monthly? More likely. I personally like quarterly or seasonally. The idea of having a new resolution every season is a great way to kick off a season. In spring you can resolve to plant new / more plants. In summer you can resolve to go to the beach more, or go on that trip you always wanted, or spend more time in the park reading or exercising. In fall you can resolve to get out and take in more culture. And in winter you can resolve to get in shape for next spring and fall.

Whatever you do, keep a list. You will be surprised at the end of the year how many resolutions that you made and kept.

The other good thing about this approach is that you keep up the resolutions, rather than making a bunch in January, only to have them die off.

Good luck!

If you are puzzled as to how Rob Ford became mayor or could become mayor again, then you need a quick guide

It is mind boggling to many that Rob Ford was elected Mayor of Toronto, never mind that he has a shot at being reelected Mayor. If that is you, I recommend this piece by Ivor Tossell here. It quickly and clearly spells it all out. Tossell has been covering Ford for some time and he nails it in this piece. Highly recommended.

After reading it, you may still be shaking your head, but your mind should be less boggled.

10 Dishes to Cook Without a Recipe This Winter

Over at Food52, there’s a nice rundown of dishes you should consider making without following recipes. You may want to refer to some memory aid, but if you like these dishes, chances are you can make them pretty much without the need of a cookbook (or a web site).

They have recipes from Vegetarian or Vegan Chili to Quinoa Salad to Marinara Sauce to Risotto and more.
Risotto from Food52

Well worth a look.

One of the greatest disrupters is one never mentioned in that way

The word “disrupters” is very much in vogue (see here and much of what comes out of start ups from Silicon Valley). Although not spoken of in those terms, one of the great disrupters of the 20th century, Mikhail Kalashnikov, creator of the AK-47, just died. Most disruption is a destructive action as well as a creative one. The AK-47 allowed more disruption to occur than almost any other technology in the last 100 years, and while it brought death, it also brought great change. I don’t support change brought on that way, but when people heap praise on disruption, ask them what they think of the AK-47. If they don’t have a good answer, they don’t have an opinion on disruption worth listening to.

Bitcoin 101 (with references to up and comer alternatives)

You’ve likely heard lots about bitcoin. You may have heard of some of the other alternatives, such as dogecoin. If you finally decided: “I should try and understand more about this”, I recommend this article in the Washington Post. There is lots changing with this technology, but this will give you a good grounding.

I think bitcoin is a highly speculative financial instrument and I’ll continue to think it is a very risky thing to participate in. Still, it looks like it is not going away, and so I think it’s time to share some of the better pieces on the topic.

Unworthy is showing success with a different online publishing strategy

Upworthy is going with a different model than those of Yahoo, Huffington Post and others by publishing just a few, highly curated, articles, rather than constantly posting. The result, as you can see here, is dramatic.

This isn’t new: Jason Kottke has been doing this for along time. But Upworthy seems to be making a big play with this model. It will be interesting if they can sustain it. More than anything, I hope this leads to more and more organizations adopting different publishing models that are both successful and lead to more variety in online media. The last thing we need is everyone trying to be Buzzfeed. Here’s to more success for Upworthy and others who experiment in online publishing.

What if life follows Moore’s Law

A fascinating idea: what if life on earth follows Moore’s Law? If it does, as discussed
here, then it could explain why there are no beings in the universe advanced much beyond ours. It could also mean that life on Earth came from somewhere else.

The article in MIT’s Technology Review is well worth a read. It also makes me think that Moore’s Law could be a fundamental way of understanding much more than integrated circuits.