w/e 2022-03-27

Hello sunshine.

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§ The work project I’ve been working on drew towards a close this week so I started to have a bit of time to catch up on a few things that had been building up while I worked those inhuman hours of four-or-so days a week. Hmm.

I can’t actually remember what most of them were now and I’ve drifted so far from Getting Things Done that hardly any of them were listed and logged in Things. Why even bother doing them?

I did manage to fix the couple of things that had been preventing me from updating this site to Django 4.0, and I also finally got round to reviewing and accepting the bug-fixing pull requests Django Ditto’s one other known user made a while back (thanks Garrett!). Crawling back on top of stuff.

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§ Every so often I look at Apple’s Reminders app, thinking it’d be simpler to use that rather than Things, but am always reminded (ho ho) that it lacks at least one thing I find useful. This time it was only having a single “Remind me on” date for each Reminder. A To-Do in Things can have both a date on which it will appear (when you can/should start doing it) and a date when it should be finished by.

I discovered that Reminders used to have the same thing but the two dates were reduced to one in some previous update. BUT, if you had an existing reminder that had two dates you could keep it and use it forever as a master reminder from which to create copies, and they could still have the two kinds of date. I love/hate that this functionality is still there, in the app, but it’s entirely hidden and unusable. Good one Tim Apple!

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§ We usually make bread in our Panasonic breadmaker, and it’s fine. We get a decent, fairly dense, seeded wholemeal loaf that we like and it only takes a couple of minutes to throw ingredients inside, turn it on, and then wait a few hours.

Occasionally, for a change, I make this No Knead Whole Wheat Bread which is, compared to how I imagine bread-making could be, fairly hassle free. It’s a very different bread to the breadmaker bread, with a hard crust and soft inside, but does involve planning a day ahead and a process of a few steps.

Also, it never rises as much as I expect or want so I decided to start experimenting with other recipes, and am currently reading Flour Water Salt Yeast which I’m enjoying. Yesterday I made the first recipe in it, which didn’t involve that much more work than the No Knead recipe, and it turned out pretty good:

It was quite a faff really but I expect a lot of that just gets easier the more you do it, like any recipe. I was a bit concerned about temperatures, give our house is usually a little chilly and, while Ken Forkish is fairly pragmatic about a lot of things, which I like, he’s pretty obsessed with temperatures. Our house isn’t warm – we have the heating on at 18ºC – which I assume is one reason the No Knead bread never rose much. But yesterday was sunny so the house was warmer, about 21ºC, and, while I don’t think it rose as much as it was supposed to, it was still pretty good.

This isn’t going to become a bread blog but it seems the destiny of a man on the internet to start blogging/whatever about bread at some point, so here we are. It’s that or coffee or bikes I guess.

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§ We finished the fourth and penultimate season of Friday Night Lights this week and I think I enjoy it more with each one. The decision to [make the big change that happened between seasons three and four]* was a pretty bold move I thought, considering it would have been safest to change as little as possible, despite so many of the team’s players graduating. But it really worked well and, by the end of season four, it’s almost hard to remember how everything was before. Very well done.

It probably also helped that Jason Street and Lyla were totally or mostly absent this season, given they were the wettest and most annoying characters. We did miss Tyra though; she was cool.

* Yes, I’m avoiding giving spoilers for TV that aired 13 years ago.

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§ That is all for now, as you were.