Gerrit Niezen

Just over a week ago @aadil@merveilles.town tooted about a subreddit called Eat Cheap and Vegan. On there I discovered this thread which talked about an app called Plant Jammer.

I've been looking for an app like this for a long time. Basically I want to put in some ingredients I have and then find out what I can make with those ingredients, without having to go to the grocery store to find that one missing ingredient. Especially in the current pandemic crisis, I want to minimise the number of times I need to go to a grocery store.

I've tried using using Supercook, where you put in some ingredients and it searches recipe websites for possible options, but the recipes it suggested just wasn't that great. I thought Plant Jammer would be something similar, but it's a different beast altogether.

With Plant Jammer you first decide what type of meal you want to make, for example Italian, Thai, or Mexican. You then give it a couple of ingredients that you want to use, and based on the type of meal it will ask you to select a couple of other ingredients that you have in the house. All of this is done using a type of flavour wheel, where an algorithm determines whether the resulting dish will have the right flavour profile. For example, it may suggest adding apples or walnuts for extra crunch, or some miso paste for extra umami flavour.

The algorithm then generates a recipe based on your ingredients, figuring out the exact amount of each ingredient you need, and even writes down the steps to prepare it. 🤯️

So far I've used it to make a smoothie and a pasta salad, and the flavours were pretty good. It was great at using up some leftover fruit, veggies and nuts we still had around, and I'm looking forward trying to use it to plan a dinner.

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I keep on thinking about that article I mentioned at the beginning of the week, on why trying new things are overrated and how repetition creates space for reflection and can bring unexpected joy.

One way in which I've been trying it out is to listen to my “On Repeat”, “Repeat Rewind” and “Your Top Songs” playlists on Spotify. And it's true: Re-listening to the same songs bring joy, while requiring less cognitive load, so that they fade into the background letting me focus on the task at hand.

This morning I started up my “Top Songs 2017” playlist, and found myself singing along to some of the songs while still being able to focus. Even in that playlist there were songs that felt new, as if I've never heard them before.

This makes me even more excited to try some kind of depth period, where I re-read, re-listen and re-use what I already have instead of always chasing off to search for new experiences, which feels like it's been the default mode for most of my life.

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I've been using Elementary OS for just over 4 months now:

When I installed it, I created a second partition on my drive after shrinking the size of my Ubuntu partition. Now that I haven't used my Ubuntu partition for months, and after running into some “disk pressure” issues while using Kubernetes, I thought I'd remove that partition and resize the Elementary partition to fit the entire drive.

Deleting the Ubuntu partition was simple enough using the Disks app, but then I realised that while I could shrink the Elementary partition, I could not enlarge it when it was mounted as the root partition. I used Balena Etcher to write the latest edition of Elementary OS onto a USB flash drive and rebooted. It took me a while to figure out that I had to press F2 to set the boot order correctly in order to boot from the flash drive. Once running the Live version of Elementary OS, it was very easy to run the GParted partitioning tool, drag the sliders to make the partition fit the entire drive, and click Apply. Not an fdisk in sight.

Even though everything was so easy, it was still pretty nerve-wrecking to wait half an hour for all my data to be copied across the drive. After I came back from a short 30 minute walk, I could reboot into the resized partition and everything was working as expected. Phew! 😅️

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I just noticed that @kev@fosstodon.org, the originator of #100DaysToOffload, has changed the format from a post a day for 100 days, to doing 100 posts in a year.

His rationale is that he wants more time to work on each post, in order to produce higher quality content. I agree with him that it's too time-consuming to produce a great blog post every day, but I'm going to continue with the 100-day format for the following reasons:

• I'm interested in building the daily habit of writing again, as I've successfully written 100 consecutive days in the past
• I see this more of a daily diary than “providing quality content”
• People like Seth Godin and Austin Kleon have shown that it's perfectly possible to write great shorter form blog posts and get something out every day

One change that I will be making is not to use the format “100 Days to Offload: Day X” as my title heading anymore, as the title is the only thing that gets federated to Mastodon, and I want people to know what the actual content of the post is about. I'll still use the #100DaysToOffload hashtag and will also add the day as a hasthag.

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#100DaysToOffload #day19

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Starting a garden diary

As part of the permaculture course I mentioned in previous posts, I'm planning on staring a garden diary/journal to keep track of our food growing experiments.

We have a small raised bed of 1 by 3 metres, in which various sugarsnap pea plants are growing pretty happily. We also have potatoes growing vigorously in two potato planters filled with compost from the local tip. I also have a bunch of garlic plants growing in pots, thanks to the lovely @GwenfarsGarden@kith.kitchen, who sent me hardneck garlic cloves for free, including instructions on how to grow them.

There's also some thyme, parsley, mint and rosemary growing in pots outside, and inside I have a little hydroponic setup with a small habanero chilli plant that's fruiting pretty heavily at the moment. We also planted more seeds over the weekend, that I haven't even been keeping track of. Therefore the decision to keep track of everything in a garden journal.

There's a very pretty garden journal in the video above, but I'm going to try and keep it simple, having attempted Bullet Journals in the past. I still have a pack of Field Notes notebooks I received as a gift, and the one entitled “Gardening” is still empty.

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Going deep

I just read an excellent article over on The Correspondent about how repetition is a lot more important than new experiences.

It reminded me of the concept of depth years, where you spend a whole year not starting anything new or acquire any new possessions you don't need.

I'm definitely the kind of person that is always chasing new experiences and wanting to learn new things. I think there could be massive value in slowing down, focusing on what I already have and what I'm already doing.

It doesn't even have to be a whole year. CGP Grey and Myke Hurley's Theme System talks about choosing seasonal themes, so I could do a depth season instead.

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Shipping cargo by sail

This morning I read an article about a farmer who built a sailboat to take his produce from Vermont to New York City, that @neauoire@merveilles.town posted on Mastodon:

My favourite quote from the article:

Andrus is the kind of guy who puzzles over why, in the face of tremendous evidence, people continue to do things they know are ultimately maladaptive.

I love these kind of stories, and hope that more shipping of cargo by sail will happen the future. I've read about some of the ships mentioned in the article, like Tres Hombres, that sails between Europe and the Americas. There's a pretty good list of cargo sail projects over at New Dawn Traders. The Guardian also published a summary last year.

If you're in the UK, it's even possible to place an order for some olive oil, coffee, wine, beans etc. in the New Dawn Traders online shop, for delivery in July when the Blue Schooner Company ship Gallant arrives in Cornwall.

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Installing Manjaro on a Pinebook Pro

We bought a Pinebook Pro, the $200 Linux laptop, at the end of last year:

The custom Debian install always felt a bit weird, and one frustrating bit was that I never got it to print to our network printer. When Manjaro became the default OS, I thought that it may be a good idea to switch.

Yesterday I finally got around to installing Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro. It took a while to figure out how to do it, but after finally discovering the right image file, and using unxz to extract the .img from the .xz file and using dd to write it to an SD card, I was able to get it installed on the laptop. I wanted to user Etcher, but could not get it to run on the Pinebook Pro.

I'm used to Ubuntu and use Elementary OS as my daily driver on my main laptop, so first I had to learn how to use pamac to install and update packages. I got some weird pacman error, which was resolved after going to the forums and finding the right command-line incantation to make it work again. Doesn't seem like Manjaro is quite ready for people who are not software developers?

After rebooting the laptop, it would only show a black screen on startup. Went back to the forums again and found out that a lot of people are experiencing this, but that the Manjaro developers have not been able to reproduce the issue. I tried a bunch of things, until I started wondering if it may be that the power supply I was using was under-powered. I switched power supplies, let it charge overnight, and lo and behold, everything seems to be working fine the next day.

I tried to set up printing, but it was even harder to do than on Debian, because neither the printer settings applet nor CUPS come preinstalled. Finally discovered the printer on the network, only to have the test page not print even after the applet said it printed successfully. Go figure. I really wish Elementary OS would run on ARM devices, as it's a night-and-day difference in user experience. I sincerely hope that that the stability of Manjaro on Pinebook Pro improves, but I'm a little bit surprised that it's already the default OS.

If you're using Manjaro on a Pinebook Pro, let me know your experience @gendor@merveilles.town.

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Installing a water butt

As part of the permaculture course I started in March, I committed to installing a water butt at my house. It took almost a month to get a water butt delivered from Wickes due to the current pandemic, but it finally arrived this week.

First I had to get the ground level next to a downspout. We still had some bricks left over after re-rendering the back of our house, so two days ago I managed to grab a water level and build a small platform for the water butt to sit on. Today I installed the rain diverter kit on the downspout. Now we just have to wait for some rain (which shouldn't be too long in Wales) to see if it works.

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Using custom favicons on Write.as

If you haven't noticed it yet, I'm using Write.as to publish this blog. As part of their April 2020 Updates, they announced custom favicons for Pro accounts. I actually signed up for a 5-year Pro plan recently, as I really believe in their mission and want them to succeed.

So, how do you get a custom favicon on your Write.as blog? Well, I used favicon.io to create a favicon of the logo I wanted to use, and then you just send it to hello@write.as as an attachment. I don't know how long the turnaround time is on this, but I'm looking forward to having my own favicon instead of the standard Write.as logo.

Update: It took less than an hour to be updated, yay!

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