füdpr0n

Chewsday It's Tuesday evening and there's some steel work (gasp!) going on at the Johnson Street Bridge. Not knowing what to expect in the way of traffic insanity; it seemed like the perfect night to grab a bite, out. Foo Ramen Bar had a green curry special that they could do vegan and GF. They always treat me well :) So what else? Well - Aberlour goes well with Americano and 85% dark chocolate. Now that's science at work! I went a little nuts with a Sharpie the other night; prototyping definitions for the bike computer buttons. Some of the more astute readers might have noticed something with the LCD display in the earlier pictures. That little issue had to be addressed and is visible, corrected, in this picture: The first person in the comments correctly identifying my oops gets a free coffee! So there.

Clever Heading Goes Here No joy in getting the CH340/CH341 UART recognised by the Dell laptop. It just refuses to be recognised and enumerated on USB. Now I'm using the little red HP to do the Arduino compiles and uploads. I'm sure there's a joke about a big, bad wolf in there somewhere. Naturally -- there's been no shortage of stupid little mistakes today. After a busy day running around, and a bunch of testing and debugging fit-in where I could, I found myself with coder's block. A little end-of-day brain loosening agent seemed like a good idea: One bourbon, one Dell, and one HP... with apologies to George Thorogood A bit of sipping bourbon, and a bunch more combing through the code, and a few more bugs are worked out. One would think that, by now, I'd know to just search for all instances of "=", and make sure there's none that are actually supposed to be "==". Ugh... though that's just one of todays mistakes. I...

Found this sign on the wall above a urinal, and thought it was pretty strange: Thanks, SLOAN. Seriously? Because this is otherwise a normal place to look for potable water ? Am I the only one who thinks the first sentence is a weird thing to have to add? Then again; is it weird to take a picture of it? -meh.

Ooof; what a week. A link to The Oatmeal seems appropriate, as I chug my morning cuppa: How about some Friday morning soundtrack suggestions? It's one of those days when Boards of Canada, Tycho, etc. just aren't cutting it. I'm turning to VNV Nation for a bit of a brain kickstart along with my coffee jolt . Tracks listed by album, though how much you crank it is entirely between you and your eardrums, and maybe your coworkers. Heh. Matter + Form: Perpetual, Arena, Homeward Automatic: Space & Time, Resolution, Nova I'm sure I'll be back to something a bit mellower, shortly... In other vaguely food-related news - our amazing little bunny patient Tricsie seems to be getting past her recent dietary indiscretions after a few weeks of care. She can be seen, in the background, watching me doing basic testing of the stationary bike electronics: edit: Now to figure out why the Chinese Arduino (with one of those CH340/CH341 USB-serial UARTs) doesn...

While browsing the vegan/vegetarian cookbook (read: food porn) section in Chapters last night, between buses, I found this little gem: I had to snap a pic so I wouldn't forget any details. Skimming through it was pretty inspiring. The recipes come from Blue Heron Creamery  in Vancouver, which I'd never heard of but will have to check out sometime. The Sidney Street Market gave me the chance to sample  some gin and vermouth from de Vine Vineyards , and I ended up leaving with a bottle of each .  I could only find the Genever gin on the website, though they do make mention of their Moderna Vermouth in the Cocktail Ideas section. I'll prob crack it when I finish either the Luksusowa vodka or Tanqueray Rangpur gin that are both currently hiding in the freezer. Expect a full report :) edit: Got a decent picture in the daylight: Time to invite some friends over for drinks... In completely different news -- I've been reading a bit, again...

I know this post isn't technically about food... In order to assuage the guilt of snarfing things like those cupcakes, as well as in the interests of avoiding an expanding girth, some form of caloric output seemed necessary. To this end; a recent dumpster-dive yielded a couple of stationary bikes, minus their control electronics. Just add two nrrds, a couple of Arduino  microcontroller boards, and an assortment of other parts... and the result for one bike can be seen coming together below. Note that the UNO board shown is a Chinese knock-off that was given to me last year, that uses a CH340 ( pdf datasheet here ) USB interface chip. You might enjoy the real thing better, if you're considering one for any projects. Please see the Arduino link above. The switches are OBSN series  Sanwa Denshi arcade buttons, for that bit of nostalgic feel. The knob on the right varies the display contrast to accommodate differing user positions on the bike. They're run thr...

Unfortunately; the aquafaba macarons didn't work out. Some food chemistry tweaking will still be required. We were left with a batch each of vegan white chocolate peanut butter frosting , and vegan salted caramel sauce . Thursday evenings are the night for the Sidney Market , and Vin Coco was selling ready-to-go vegan+GF chocolate cake mix that I'd bought on a whim. Problem solved: we made ostentatious cupcakes. The caramel is pretty firm from the fridge, but melts in your mouth. Perhaps not surprisingly they go quite well with an Americano :-D

The last two days have been filled with experiments with aquafaba, a chickpea protein "glop" that can be used instead of egg whites. There's been a lot of chatter about this over the last few years, and things like this certainly up the ante: http://floralfrosting. blogspot.ca/2015/05/snickers- macarons.html So... what are you supposed to do with all the leftover chickpeas? Some thoughts to play around with: Naomi Duguid's book Burma has a recipe for Shan Tofu , which is something between polenta and tofu, and more recipes for it can be found all over the web, like here . Dhokla looks like another tasty option. The fermented aspect of it is interesting. Chana Dal Halwa is something I hadn't even heard of before today, but is tempting me because of my recently discovered sesame allergy. The link is to a Pakistani version, which looks more like a pudding than the usual middle eastern cakes. Good place to start, and shouldn't be too hard to drag t...