Category: diary

Birthday party

I had a birthday party on March 4. It was a more complicated party than usual, because I organized a bunch of friends to go to see Oliver Twist at the “American Repertory Theatre”:http://www.amrep.org. (I have a credit as the serpent instructor.)

Then we went back to my place and had food, and before the birthday cake, I made everybody listen to the “Marcello Sonata”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/365.html that I’d been practicing with Hope Ehn.

Here are some “pictures”:http://serpent.laymusic.org/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=birthday04 taken by Dennis Ehn and Ishmael Stefanov.

There’s a “video”:http://serpent.laymusic.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=birthday07video of the sonata, taken by Dennis Ehn. There were some ensemble problems on the fourth movement, but otherwise, that’s the way I play the recorder these days. I’m trying to get it onto youtube instead of my own server, but I didn’t read the restrictions well enough, so I didn’t realize I’ll have to break it up into two or more pieces to get it less than 10 minutes. But there’s the file as I got it from Dennis, and a version that I trimmed and compressed and added titles to.

Here’s a picture to brighten up a winter day

I went on a lounge lizard slither with my “brewing friends”:http://www.wort.org last night, and after I’d had enough to drink (a little single-malt scotch goes a long way) I ordered a chocolate meringue tart at the Oak Room. It came garnished with this orchid, and I managed to wrap it in a napkin and take it home without getting it too squished.

Orchid

You have a cooling rack

Those of us who are low on both money and storage space often look longingly at kitchen equipment catalogs like “The Bakers’ Catalog”:http://www.bakerscatalogue.com/ but don’t order the equipment.

One of the things I have concluded I don’t need is a cooling rack for baked goods. Not because I don’t bake, or don’t want to turn out fresh-baked rolls or cookies onto a rack where the bottom would be exposed to air, but because I already have something that works quite well.

Your stove came with a broiling pan, which is the largest size thing that fits comfortably in your oven. That pan has a rack that allows the fat from what you’re broiling to drip down to the bottom of the pan instead of frying the food it comes from.

If you turn that rack upside down on your counter, you can use it as a cooling rack for your rolls or cookies.

Bread Machine Brioche

I’ve been making a lot of this, and the hostess of the last party I brought it to asked for the recipe, so since I’m typing it in anyway, here it is for my faithful blog readers:

It’s from the book that came with the Cuisinart bread machine, which died after 5 months, but the book is much better than the one that came with my shiny new cheap one from Amazon.

Makes 2 pounds of dough.

* 1/2 cup milk (I use rice milk)
* 4 eggs, large, at room temperature (I’m not fussy about the temperature)
* 1 stick unsalted butter (there really isn’t any reason to buy salted if you keep what you’re not using in the freezer)
* 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
* 2 tablespoons powdered milk (I actually use soy protein drink mix that I bought a large container of once and then didn’t like drinking it.)
* 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
* 3 3/4 cups bread flour (It really makes a difference using bread flour over all-purpose)
* 3 teaspoons yeast

Run the bread machine on the dough cycle. At this point you have a beautiful hunk of dough that’s elastic, not at all sticky and smells wonderful. The standard brioche where you roll a ball and then put a smaller ball on top of it must have happened because people just wanted to play with this dough. I’ve been using a mini-muffin pan with 24 small cups. Have the larger ball just fill the cup and the smaller ball perch on top of it.

You can also roll it out as thin as practical (less than an inch) and cut 3-4 inch circles and bake it on a cookie sheet for hamburger buns.

In either case, you get a better color on the result if you brush the rolls with an egg wash of one egg beated with one tablespoon of water.

Let rise for about half an hour after you’ve formed the rolls. Bake in a 350 degree (Fahrenheit) oven until the bottoms are browned. For the mini-muffin size this will be less than 20 minutes.

More on Zaurus sound

I’ve been running Openzaurus 3.5.4 for some
time now. It’s really good for reading books — they improved
the fonts a lot. I haven’t had time to check out sound, but
because of having previously
worked on it, someone who did wrote me his results.

From: Lee Phillips

Subject: Sound on Zaurus 5500

Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:03:30 -0400

Hi,

Thanks partly to your website and some others that you linked to,
I managed to get sound recording and playback working on my Z with
OZ 3.5.4.

Mainly through ignorant but systematic trial and error I came up
with these procedures:

Record (through left headphone) with

cat /dev/dsp1 > s.raw

Playing this back with cat s.raw > /dev/dsp gives slowed down sound, as
you know.

But if you install sox on the Z (no problems using ipkg from the command
line; as you’ve probably discovered the GUI package manager is useless) you
can convert to another raw sound file with

sox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -b -s -c 1 so.raw speed 1.333 avg -r

and this sounds normal when catted through /dev/dsp1.

But we want a portable sound file. Sox won’t encode to mp3 on the 5500,
but it will make an au (Sun format) file, which is pretty widely useable
(Quicktime plays it on my Mac):

sox -V -b -s -r 8000 -c 2 s.raw -c 1 -v 4 so.au speed 2.6666 avg -r

You might find values for speed and volume (-v 4) that work better,
again this is trial and error and sounds ok for speech.

Laura Conrad



Last modified: Tue Apr 25 11:32:28 EDT 2006

Converting PDF files

The only thing I actually use the Zaurus for in real life is as an
ebook reader. It’s a really good screen that works well in a
wide variety of lighting conditions, so I put everything I can
onto the SD card and read it on the Zaurus.

A lot of the reading matter that’s available electronically is in
the form of PDF files. There are pdf viewers available for the
Zaurus, but none of them seem really suitable for ebook reading.

So I’ve been converting them to html via
pdftohtml. The problem is that this is a fairly naïve
conversion that uses <br> for both the end of a line and the end
of a paragraph. So I’m experimenting with simple scripts that
will remove the <br>’s that are just the end of a line, and
translate the ones that are between paragraphs into <p>’s.

The best thing would be if pdftohtml would put two <br>’s
for the ones that are paragraphs, the way we do when we’re
typing, but it doesn’t. But it does seem to put those at the end
of a line, whereas the ones in the middle of a line are just
line breaks.

So the approach I’m trying now is to change any <br> that’s
at the end of a line to a <p>, and then delete all the
<br>’s. I just did that in emacs last night, but if it
works well, I’ll write a script.

Laura Conrad



Last modified: Fri Feb 17 09:59:30 EST 2006

Bread Machine

I was toy-deprived last year, so when I got some money for Christmas,
I went on a toy-buying spree. The latest item is a Bread
Machine. I got a used one from eBay, on the theory that lots of
people get them and turn out not to use them, so an eBay one would
be a savings and likely to be fine.

It arrived Tuesday afternoon, so I threw in the ingredients for a completely
whole-wheat, one pound loaf. It was a little low and misshapen, but the
flavor was good, and almost all of it disappeared after the
Renaissance Band rehearsal.

So Wednesday, I tried another version. This time I followed the
directions for adjusting the consistency at the
bread machine digest. In my case, the dough was too gooey,
so I added an extra tablespoon of flour. It’s definitely the
best all-whole wheat bread that I’ve ever baked. Well-risen
(almost but not quite fluffy) and
not at all dry.

So now I have the ingredients for a loaf of French Bread, which I’ll
take (assuming it isn’t a disaster) to the friends I’m having
dinner with tonight.

I also bought some barley flour and some carrots at the store last
night. There’s a carrot cake recipe I might take to the
homebrew club meeting tomorrow. The barley flour is for the
next whole-grain bread experiment.

Laura Conrad



Last modified: Thu Feb 2 11:24:42 EST 2006