Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Quick-n-Tasty Coffee Addition…

…and a bonus tip or three.

Use a stick of cinnamon (it’s just a lil dried roll of cinnamon bark) as a coffee stirrer. Nah, you don’t have to add cream and/or sweetener (sugar or other). Just use a stick to stir your coffee for a subtle cinnamon kick.

Update: forgot to mention that if you don’t just use the cinnamon stick as a stirer but leave it in the cup as you sip (you do sip, not gulp, right? hmmm? ;-)), it’ll continue to add cinnamon flavor and it’ll soften enough as it soaks up some of the coffee that you can actually nibble on it. Chewing a wee nibble of cinnamon stick along with a sip of coffee is… nice. And cinnamon is good for both weight control and boosting brain functions, particularly recall.

Bonus hot weather drink: Do add some cream (the real stuff) and some sort of sweetener to some hot coffee in a thermos. Add a stick of cinnamon and leave it in the fridge overnight with the lid cracked open on the thermos. Or, instead of the cinnamon stick, grate some nutmeg into the coffee (I’ve done that into the brew basket when I was making some for just my own consumption). I normally do not like cold coffee, but this lil tip makes it drinkable, even enjoyable, for me. While it’s not “coffee-coffee” in my mind, it’s still tasty.

Try other “bright” spices that come to mind, or add some cocoa powder or whatever for your own unique cold coffee-based drink.

Beats the snot out of buying some refrigerated coffee drink crap from Starbucks or whatever.

BTW, do make sure you buy “food grade” cinnamon sticks/bark. Apparently some is available that’s some sort of manufactured crap for “decorative” purposes (whatever that means). I generally get six-ounce bags for a buck. YMMV.

Oh, and when you think you’ve sucked all the flavor out of your cinnamon stick, think again. Let it dry, then put it through your coffee grinder (we have three: a burr mill for coffee and two blade grinders, one for “sweet” spices and herbs and one for “hot” spices”). Even with the flavor pulled from it by several cupsa coffee (or the equivalent), ground up it’ll probably be more flavorful than the pre-ground crap that’s been sitting, losing flavor, on some grocer’s shelf for who knows how long. Ditto for just about any spice. Buy whole and store well, then grind however much you need a bit at a time.

And (tightwad tip!) always buy bunches of whole spices whenever they go on a blowout sale. If you’re really concerned about preserving them, use a vacuum sealer and mylar bags and store ’em in your freezer (or, with the mylar bags and O2 and H2O absorption packs, just store ’em on a pantry shelf–most folks say the O2 absorption packs are unnecessary with vacuum sealed mylar bags, as in the linked video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU8W92U37PU

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A “Not-Quite-a-Recipe” Egg Dish

Mostly ingredients and process, no amounts; you decide those.

-Eggs
-Butter (no, not margarine)
-Cream
-Cooked bacon, chopped into ~1′ pieces
-Onions, minced and either sautéed or “microwave sautéed”*
-Jalapeños–sliced, canned works best for this one, IMO, and/or
-Other diced peppers
-Shredded cheese
-S&P to taste

Baking dish
Oven at 350 °F

Melt some butter for the bottom of the baking dish–however much will cover it when melted; whisk together eggs and cream; bacon in bottom of dish, onions on top of bacon; pour in egg-cream mixture; slide jalapeños on top and then sprinkle with shredded cheese. About 25 minutes more or less in 350 °F oven. Remove and let it set up for a bit. You could turn th oven to broil for the last few minutes if you want to get a lil more top browning. Eat it up.

*”Microwave sautéed”=some olive oil and/or butter in appropriate-sized (for amount of onions) microwavable dish, uncovered. Microwave for a minute, first, then 30 seconds at a time until the onions are nicely translucent and, when sampled, have sweetened a bit.

Also, if you want to go ahead and make a “piperade” sauce, then fine. Peppers, chopped; onions, minced; sauté in butter or olive oil and then add some diced, canned tomatoes. Let it simmer a while to come together. Heck, a little garlic wouldn’t hurt.

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Avoid This Printer

I don’t usually dump all over a piece of hardware, but I’ll make an exception in the case of the HP Deskjet F4580 AIO. I bought the thing because I read the wrong reviews, apparently. Oh, boy did I! *sigh* Nice, thought I: a wireless-enabled printer by HP, a company whose printers I’d always had good experiences with in the past. Cool. That way, I wouldn’t have to leave a computer on and connected to the network with printer sharing enabled in order for users on the network to print to it.

Besides, it looked like it’d save desk space, given that I’d be able to scan documents as well. (Sure, we have a couple of other scanners, but again, to not have to have it connected to a computer… and the space issue.)

I should just have bought a device to connect our 13-year-old, failing, HP workhorse printer to the network. I’d have gotten better service. Sure, the printer was failing, but still…

Oh, when it prints, it prints very nicely. When it scans, it does that nicely too. But. Keeping it connected is a PITA. Sometimes, the only thing that I’ve been able to do to get it to connect is to completely uninstall the thing (and the humongous software package that should NOT be required to install the printer) and then reinstall it. Again and again and again.

Router shows it’s connected? Nope. The printer isn’t. Print a document and the print queue shows it’s printing? Nope. Not until the thing’s turned off and then turned on again. A whole mess of things like that. HP’s diagnostic utilities and installation wizard and cleanup utility? All junk. Utter, completely useless crap.

Oh, and did I mention that we’d scarcely printed 10 pages of text (all black ink) before the damned thing (yes, I think it was designed and manufactured by demons in hell) was reporting both cartridges nearly empty?

I was already POed at HP for some of its crappy notebooks/netbooks it’s shoved out the door recently, but this thing takes the cake. The other day, it performed a partial print of a document four times before it printed the whole thing. And I’d cleared the print queue each time it tried and failed to print the thing and did not resubmit the document at all.

What a PITA.

Oh, and the scanning? Yeh, still pretty much need to have the nearest computer on, since one has to place the document to be scanned and it’s far easier to control the scanning from a nearby computer (wirelessly, there’s pretty much only one way: via the web interface; that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but invoking the scanning facility via one’s graphics software or even the HP imaging software has about a 50/50 chance of working at best). Of course, since most printing/scanning away from my desk is from notebooks, bringing one in and doing the scanning (via the web interface) would let me leave the always nearby compy off, I guess…

All in all, aside from the demonically-engineered and manufactured piece of crap dropping its wireless connection willy-nilly all the freakin’ time, the sheer clunkiness of the thing is irritating.

Avoid it.

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Tightwad Electrical

OK, I’m a patzer in the area of electrical work (OK, perhaps just lacking the practice necessary to own a high level of skill, ‘K? :-)). I know that. It means, for one thing, that I work very, very slowly when working with electrical wiring, etc. BTDT as a young kid with the live socket thingy. *heh* It also means… tools. As in, my better tools are designed for car mechanicking, plumbing and wood working.

The “proper” tools for doing electrical work are fairly expensive. I’m talking about the screwdrivers and pliers, etc. (I have circuit testers that work for the simple electrical circuits I work on around the house. Yeh, they’re overkill, but I’ve also found them useful for electronics stuff.) Since the electrical work I have planned will end when everything at twc central’s finished, I didn’t want to spend $20 for a pair of pliers, etc., but just have some tools that’d do the job–safely. Of course, almost all of it could be done with uninsulated tools as long as I were pretty darned careful (shut down circuits, etc.), but rewiring electrical panels w/o detaching the meter (detach meter=get the electrical company pi$$ed off at me) does require working around some hot lines, so…

Bought some new, cheap-a$$ed tools and wrapped the handles with some self-fusing silicone/live rubber tape rated for high-voltage electrical wire wrapping that I always have laying around.

Works. Cost me about $2/tool. Added to the $1/”cheap-a$$ed” tool price, I came out of the operation with tools as safe (electrically) as $10-$20 tools (screwdrivers in the “pro electrical” range are still expensive) for about $3 apiece. Yeh, yeh, the tools backups. I already have one designed for wiring work (has the nifty lil wire bender for socket/junction box, etc., installations built in–and it’s had its insulated handle beefed up by rubber tape wrap, just ‘cos) and a couple of better wiring pliers, but @$3 apiece, making sure I have one to leave behind at one end of a run can be really handy for my work style.

Besides, if I “lose” one of these, I’ll not weep and moan and gnash my teeth as badly as if I lost one of my better (still not “pro” grade) tools.

Oh, first up? Running a new circuit off an outside circuit that’s been unused for ten years or so. Still not planning to use it for the purpose it was once used for (above ground pool, now gone), so re-routing it inside as a new, dedicated, circuit for the overloaded kitchen. There’s another unused circuit available on that panel (it’s a simple two-circuit sub-panel) that I think I may dedicate to the freezer or the dishwasher, just for the heck of it. Three more unused circuits on another outside panel that may get used outside in the near future, but they’ll just have to wait.

Some strange stuff in this house’s wiring already, so I don’t feel too weird about these lil projects, even though I know it’d be best to just rewire the whole house “correctly”. I’ll settle for safe, for now. Heck, four years ago, I started tracking down a “mystery circuit” that was wired in the main breaker panel but didn’t feed to anything in the house I could find. It was in a terminated box, unused, coming out of the basement ceiling. It’s now serving ONE room downstairs… Son&Heir’s electronics only. Gotta love 12-gauge Romex. (Strangely, that circuit was wired with 12-gauge from the box, whereas the rest of the house 110 has 14 gauge wiring… weird. I kept that circuit at 12-gauge throughout.)

I’d like to pull new wiring, circuit by circuit, throughout the house and rationalize some of the weird layout, but that’s something I’ll just have to do a teensy bit at a time, I think. May take me the rest of my lifetime, as I have plenty of other projects to complete around here. *heh*

Anywho, the “proper tools for the job” don’t always have to be expensive, special-purpose tools. As I did with these, they can be common tools adapted and repurposed to very closely approximate the special-purpose, “pro” tools while maintaining both functionality and essential safety features. Less expensively.

After all, I don’t plan on making a living with ’em, nor do I plan on willing ’em to my heirs.

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One Small Example…

…of the stupidity of usual and customary modern (mis)”education” practices:

“Drill and kill.”

That’s a phrase used to deprecate dilling facts such as multiplication tables until they become second nature. Combine that with stupidly practiced positive reinforcement of “tender widdle egos” and we have such idiocies as congratulating ignorant little brats for “5×6=33” or ignorant and nearly illiterate college students who are super-confident of their intellectual prowess.

No, the proper view of drilling facts is:

“Drill to skill.”

Indeed, facts must be drilled, practiced, exercised regularly for quite some time before they can be useful and contribute to useful skills–or even by themselves be skills. Intellectual pursuits are non different in this regard than physical pursuits. Most pubschools have some sort of athletic teams. Are the kids just set out on the field and told to “just have fun” or do they have a coach who drills them in fundamentals and has them practices skill sets and play patterns?

The latter, of course. Apparently, pubschools view athletic endeavors as more important than intellectual ones, because in athletic endeavors, pubschools actually coach kids to attempt to be successful, having them practice and drill the skills they need until they are skills.

Or take an even simpler task. Has anyone ever seen any person just pick up a hammer for the very first time and drive a 10-penny nail in two (or maybe three) blows, perfectly straight with no problems? No, because it takes (usually) some minimal instruction (I can’t count the number of inexperienced adults I’ve seen simply holding a hammer incorrectly!) and lots and lots of practice.

Ditto for calculus or stats calculations or grammatically-written sentences or playing piano: (proper) practice yields skills that mere knowledge cannot. Of course, that’s one reason many “educators” deride such things: actually supervising such practice to assure what’s being learned is useful is often hard work (and I use the term derisively; teachers teach while “educators” are more often puffed-up, toxic drones who need an extra two syllables to assure themselves of their importance).

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One Thing to Like About Kindle for PC

while I generally don’t much care for the formatting, pagination, text sizing options, etc., in the Kindle for PC app, I do like that fact that I can go from one device to another and simply resume reading where I left off on the previous device. I understand it works pretty much that way between the Kindle and other devices as well.

That’s a Good Thing since I tend to have several books “in process” at once, and with eBooks I generally read on more than one PC–my preferred reading device for eBooks, largely because of screen size, greater flexibility in the way the screen displays text, and old eyes.

Having the app keep a thumb in the text, as it were, and open where I last was is nice.

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Ponderables

If you were to have a Siamese twin, would you need an interpreter to communicate with him?

If you met your Doppelgänger would you need to speak German?

If you met an honest politician, would you… scratch that one.

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In Context

The Zero did say if his administration (well, himself, in his own words) couldn’t turn “this thing” (referring to the economy) around in 3 years then he’d be a one-term president. It’s been about 2.4 years, now…

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

But then, American sheeple are almost too stupid for words, and the Dhimmicraps have grand masters at vote fraud, so maybe he really doesn’t have to worry about being turned out of office by the voters.

Do we really have to wait until his term ends? Couldn’t the House just impeach his ass? I mean, take their pick of his illegal actions and just go to town on him?