Clear ice isn’t just for fancy bars and ice carving competitions — you can make it at home. This post shares my experience with DIY clear ice.
My Way to Make “Clear Ice” at Home
Dealing With The Endless Flow Of Email
Turning on keyboard shortcuts and other features in Gmail can help make your email experience a little less terrible.
Two Small Kitchen and Computer Hacks
Now and then I come up with a simple solution to a problem that’s causing me trouble. In this post, I share two small home and office ‘hacks’: preventing finger burns on metal pot lids and avoiding unintended pop-up help windows on your computer.
Two User Interface Design Features That I Hate
Although Gmail and Evernote are useful tools, they have design features that annoy me, most notably their frequent and seemingly random file status updates (e.g., “Saving…”, “All changes saved”).
Celery Bonus: Did Jane Austen’s Mister Elton “simply love celery root”?
Today brings some bonus celery content. Last year, one of my pretty-good ideas was to go through my small collection of DVDs and look up the release date of each film, and then try to re-watch the film near the release date. Back at the end of September 2022, the film of the week was […]
San Francisco in the Movies: Taking Goldfish To The Ocean
The 1947 film Dark Passage has quite a bit of San Francisco geographic weirdness, like Sam the cab driver’s story about a fare who with a bowl of goldfish who wanted to go to the ocean.
B.T. Babbitt’s Soap Factory and a New Shoreline for Lower Manhattan
B.T. Babbitt’s New York City soap and saleratus (baking soda) factory was near the southern tip of Manhattan, right on the Hudson River. Until the 1970s, anyway.
B.T. Babbitt, Soap and Baking Soda Magnate of the Late 1800s
Benjamin T. Babbitt was a big deal in the late 1800s: he held numerous patents, his soap company was an innovator in advertising, the company had multiple factories and multiple product lines, including a 300,000 sq. ft. (27,870 sq. m) factory in Lower Manhattan.
Using Arduino for Better Homemade Bread
To improve my homemade bread, I built a DIY proofing box using an Arduino Uno as the microcontroller, and a string of Christmas lights as the heat source.
“Cocoa…Might Well be Called the Vegetable Egg”
During my extensive explorations of Flickr Commons, I ran across a magazine called The Utah Farmer, a periodical for all kinds of farmers in the Utah area. Ghirardelli Chocolate, the legendary San Francisco chocolate company (“since 1852”), was one of their regular advertisers, with an ad in most issues. One of their ads in 1915 had […]