For the last six months or so I’ve been doing the majority of my development work on an AWS box that I SSH into. I use Tmux so I don’t lose everything if my connection goes down and Vim for editing and almost everything works great (with a few port forwards set up so I can access development servers running on the AWS box in my local browser).
Something came up recently at work when developing a React component that I ended up writing quite a lengthy PR comment on, and I realised it could be a useful blog post to refer back to.
I recently set up a new laptop for working on a few different work projects and as part of it I found a few files that turned up in the project that I needed to add to the git ignore. This reminded me about the two different ignore files, and what they’re for.
When writing code to handle differences between environments it’s often tempting to use something like this:
For Easter weekend we went up to the cottage and had a wonderful time relaxing and getting away from work and the city. While we were up there, Sam made some of her delicious French onion soup so I decided to make a soda bread using a recipe from a new cookbook we picked up - Gatherings by Flora Shedden.
For Christmas Sam bought be Thug Kitchen, a vegan cookbook full of delicious things (no, I’m not vegan, but we are trying to eat more vegetarian meals as the amount of meat we eat as a species isn’t sustainable and buying ethically reared meat is super expensive). The people behind Thug Kitchen also have a website with some bonus recipes and there was one on there for Strawberry Oat Bars that I’d been wanting to try for a while. We had a day at home one weekend so decided to do some making.
This year for valentines day I decided I wanted to make Sam something tasty, so took a look through our various recipe books and settled on coconut macaroons, because they’re delicious and I hadn’t made them before. It’s also easy to add some red food colouring to make some pink ones and get in on the valentines day theme.
I’ve had a nice leather dice bag for years now and it’s been great. I picked it up during viking week one year at York and it’s served me well for many years, but recently, having been getting more into Fate (which uses different dice and involves tokens as well) I found myself wishing I had another dice bag to use so I could separate things out a bit. This seemed like a great opportunity for a make…
I’m always on the lookout for flavourful cold beverages that aren’t full of sugar. I get bored of water after a while and it’s nice to have a bit of variety. So far the best I’ve found is beer, which isn’t really a viable option when it’s the middle of the working day. Tea is my go-to drink when it’s cold, but I never really got into drinking it on a hot day in summer. When I discovered kombucha, a type of fermented sweet tea, I figured I might just be on to something. It has a slightly sweet, slightly sour, nicely tart taste to it and is naturally carbonated (though I’m still experimenting with how long the secondary fermentation needs to be to get the right level of carbonation).
I got a great new brewing book for Christmas (Mastering Homebrew by Randy Mosher) and decided that for the first time since I started brewing I’d brew a recipe from a book. Feeling in the mood for a darker beer while it’s still winter I decided to brew his Squidward’s Inky Ale oatmeal stout recipe.
I’m still behind with these write ups, and falling further behind all the time it seems, though at least I now have the excuse that I was in the UK for 10 days and too busy to write stuff up on Facebook.
I’ve already fallen behind with #52WeeksOfMaking posts, but fortunately have managed to keep up with the makes themselves, so over the next week or so I’m going to try and catch up.
This wasn’t quite what I had planned for make two of #52WeeksOfMaking, but getting ill at the weekend meant I didn’t brew, so that’ll be saved for a future make. Instead, I continued my experiments with sourdough bread with the help of the new book I got for Christmas, Sourdough, by Sarah Owens.
This has taken me far too long to actually write up, for which I’m sorry. The first thing I made as part of #52WeeksOfMaking is a Quinzhee, which is a type of snow shelter made by piling a whole buttload of snow up in a heap then hollowing out the middle. Sam was a huge help in making this, providing some snow shovelling muscles and a lot of patience when I was scraping out the insides.
I had a thought that in 2017 I should do a little more making and a little less consuming. It’s way too easy to get stuck into a loop of browsing websites, flicking through Facebook and turning off in front of the TV so instead of just doing that sort of stuff, I’m going to spend more time making things.