An exciting project by theBBC, Save our Sounds. Exciting on many levels for me, first being the immediate picture of the world in sound, like exploring Flickr via the geo-tagged photostream. I also find the preservationist angle delightful – saving endangered sounds.
This also introduced me to Audioboo, a social networking site and iPhone app that looks very very interesting.
I downloaded this yesterday – and yes it is fun. I love it for the mid-20th century design motif – and the bleepity electronic music. Delightful.
Nothing much to say – I was pleased to find this gem on YT, and I hope you like it too.
My previous at attempts to use whole wheat flour to bake bread were not exciting. I may have had one or two successes with a recipe from James Beard’s bread book. Wednesday night I decided to give a new recipe a try. Following the recipe for whole wheat sourdough Miche from Daniel Leader’s Local Breads, I was very pleased. The bread had a chewy, nutty crust, tasting just shy of burnt in a few spots (like pizza crust baked in a wood-fired oven) and a rich flavor. Pretty good for flour, water, and salt.
Saturday morning I baked my second loaf of bread from the same recipe, but I doubled it:
my son holds up the second Miche
right out of the oven, note how close it is to the full width of the parchment.
Because I moved the formed loaf from the colander to the parchment a little too early, it had a chance to spread. Next time I will be sure to preheat much earlier.
I learned a good bit about timing with this recipe. Not about how timing effects the results – more how bad timing makes the baker’s life harder.
I fed the starter Thursday night. By Friday morning it had more than doubled in volume – and I didn’t have time to make the dough and let it ferment before heading to the office, so I put the levain in the fridge. This meant I wasn’t able to start until 7 PM.
When I got home from work, I took the levain out of the fridge, made dinner and read for a while. The dough was ready to sit for its second ferment by 10 PM.
Our kitchen was rather cool, so I decided to just go to bed, and let the dough rise for as long as 8 hours if need be – I just didn’t want to stay up until 1 AM (at the earliest) in order to bake.
I woke up at 3 AM, and didn’t feel like dozing was very likely. So I got out of bed, went to check on the dough, and was glad I did. It was slightly more than double in size. So I decided to bake.
I drank tea and read Shelly Powers’ Painting the Web while I waited for the oven (and the pizza stone) to get hot. By the time the bread was baked and on the cooling rack, it was close to 5 AM. I slept well for a few hours. At 8:30 AM, I was tasting the bread.
I wasn’t as happy with the crust on the second loaf, but my wife and son preferred it. A softer crust is a little more acceptable to them – I prefer a crisp and crackly crust. I had tried turning the oven down to a lower temperature after 15 minutes of baking at 470 degrees. I won’t do that the next time I bake this recipe.
Very Short List sends intriguing daily emails. This morning’s message let me know something I find delightful – that I can watch all 16 episodes of The Prisoner at amctv.com.
“Craft electronics, if I may crib a term from the American brewing industry…”
Joel Johnson minted this phrase in an article about the CrunchPad over at boingboing.net.
Interesting comparison really. If small manufacturers can create niche products and sustain themselves, what might the future of our gadget use look like?
Johnson mentions the Chumby. When I saw it at the MakerFaire last year, I was intrigued, but the price was high enough to keep me from following up with a purchase.
As a rule, I prefer a cup of coffee at a Peet’s over just about any other. Rich and strong, my idea of what a cup of coffee should be. I hate to think how many pounds of coffee beans I have bought there over the years – probably enough to buy the best table saw in the world.
My “usual” is Sumatra. Years ago, when they sold a variety they called (simply enough) Java, that was my usual. When they stoppped selling that, I switched to Sumatra.
Stopping in the Belmont Peet’s yesterday, I succumbed to the point of purchase marketing of the extra special “Sumatra Blue Batak” and took a bag of the beans home. After brewing a cup with my Aeropress, for the first time in my life, I considered taking the coffee back. It just tasted weird.
This is the point where my ability to articulate the qualities of coffee fails me. If it doesn’t taste like something else, I can’t really do much more than shrug my shoulders or make faces. I like to put numbers to use where I can, so putting things in terms of 1 to 10 scales etc. is a temptation. But I don’t even know what I would call the scale.
The first word that came to mind after taking a big mouthful of the Blue Batak was sour. I think “astringent” is the word used by afficianados. It tasted like a good cup of strong full bodied coffee covered with the kind of “yellow” flavor I expect from canned Yuban or a cup of weak coffee from Denny’s. Weird indeed.
Anyway – I did not like the coffee. I decided to give it another try or two, since I had recently got over a cold and wasn’t really confident in my palate. Perhaps I was just deaf to some of the wonderful overtones other people hear?
I have had a couple of cups more, and with some sugar in it, I am starting to like it, at least enough to keep drinking it.
Starting to doubt why I even care about “better” coffee. Seems like if the coffee beans are reasonably fresh, I may be able to get used to just about anything. Not the observation of a gourmet, I know.
Bookended by op-ed pieces on Gaza and Wall Street, this morning’s New York Times’ Week in Review section gave us an interesting piece about how bad economic times can be good for design. Michael Cannell writes in Design Loves a Depression “however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy.”
Somehow I am skeptical that designers who were creating fifteen-foot tall floor lamps are suddenly going to focus on better bicycle storage racks or home composting tools, but I appreciate the idea that as the market for high-end furniture drops, some “design for the real world” may be the fallout.
The bad financial news of the last few months has caused more than a little speculation about the effect on the crafters and makers. Reports were that sales at craft materials stores were up considerably during the xmas shopping season. The MAKE television series just launched.
Perhaps we will see more people looking at how they can make their own fun at home as an alternative to going out and buying more stuff. This isn’t what the NYT piece had in mind, but it follows naturally enough.
Watching The Killer That Stalked New York on Tuner Classic Movies tonight, I was put in mind of the troubles today. At one point in the film, after NY’s public health department has been busy vaccinating millions of citizens, they reach the end of the vaccine supply.
