All posts by AM

URLs "p1" 20190728 – 73 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.


My plants are 1 month old

It is now 1 month since I first ventured into growing a few plants, starting with a hydroponics kit with six slots.
Last week, two of the plants have outgrown the kit and now live in their own vase. Their slots have been occupied by two mystery pods – I do not know what will grow from them, if anything at all, because the pods were missing labels, by mistake of the seller.

The starting kit included the following plants, here listed with their original labels, including each plant’s sprout window and if it they are “tall”, “medium” or “short”:

  • Thai Basil (sprouts in 4-7 days) Tall
  • Genovese Basil (sprouts in 6-12 days) Tall
  • Dill (sprouts in 8-21 days)
  • Mint (sprouts in 6-10 days) Medium
  • Thyme (sprouts in 7-14 days) Short
  • Curly Parsley (sprouts in 21-28 days) Short

The two plants that have outgrown the kit and now live in their own vase are the “Thai Basil” and the “Dill”.

Here are the Portuguese names for the plants:

  • Thai Basil = Manjericão da Tailândia
  • Genovese Basil = Manjericão de Génova (cidade Italiana)
  • Dill = Aneto
  • Mint = Hortelã
  • Thyme = Tomilho
  • Curly Parsley = Salsa encaracolada

The idea of growing these plants is to learn, to experience a bit of hydroponics and plant growing, and then use some as food!
I think the Thai basil and the dill are big enough to survive a small pruning, so I Googled for related home recipes.

For Thai basil:
https://www.yummly.com/recipes/fresh-thai-basil-leaves

For dill:
https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/fresh-dill-recipes/

Finally, here are six sets of three pictures each; capturing three different stages of growth of the original six plants. From left to right, the first picture is on 2019-06-25 (“planting day”), the second on 2019-07-06, the third and final on 2019-07-26.



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Technical Details

Listening to Until Ben – "Binaries Traveller"

Mostly electronic music, exactly how I like it: it is “electronic” in the sense of heavily created with computer-assisted techniques, but it features vocals (chorus), acoustic instruments (synthetized, I suppose), non-recurring events for a more credible “atmosphere” or “landscaping” of the audio stage, exotic audio patterns that don’t remember me of anyone else – an indicator of originality.

The overall creation denotes rich creativity. It works; it is effective in bringing the listener to a different dimension. Very well done.

The midnight bread

I just baked a mixed flour bread, using a Panasonic machine.
The recipes that come with the now 3+ years old machine are very good in general, except for the “mixed” flour I can buy at the local supermarket.
The risk with most flours is that they might come with undeclared already pre-added ferment, and/or pre-added sugar, and/or pre-added salt, and the unknown quantities of those components can greatly interfere with the bread-making algorithm! Panasonic (or the industrial group that owns it) has one of the very first patents on the process of bread making: among other details, it describes the shape of the blade that will work on the mass and the times (start and duration) of crucial events, namely when to drop the ferment and for how long to spin the blade.
I get very good results with the original recipe for bread from wheat flour (“rapid white bread”), very good results with the original recipe for bread from rye flour, but not so good results with the recipe for bread from a mix of wheat and rye.
If I follow the original recipe strictly, either the bread grows too much or it collapses at the top; in both cases, it ends up being much softer than I would appreciate.
I suppose that part of the complication with “mixed” flour is not knowing the relative parts of wheat and rye in the composition, or even not knowing which cereals at present at all! In my case, I know that the mix if from wheat and rye, but I cannot find the distribution, so I just trust that it is 50%/50%.

After many experiments, my best results are achieved like this:

  1. put 220 grams of mixed flour into the volume that will enter the machine;
  2. add three spoons of olive oil (no butter);
  3. no sugar at all;
  4. one teaspoon of salt, or no salt at all;
  5. on top of that add another ~220 grams of mixed flour;
  6. add 330 ml of water;
  7. put the volume inside the machine;
  8. pick the right program number for bread from mixed flour (program 07 in my case);
  9. close the machine’s cover;
  10. put 1 + 1/2 teaspoons of ferment into the ferment compartment;
  11. start the program;
  12. it will end in 3 hours and 30 minutes.

It worked for me. Now I am going to bed – tomorrow morning I’ll have fresh bread and the kitchen will smell great 🙂

URLs "p1" 20190726 – 68 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.


Listening to Nomina – "The Chroma Plateau"

Similar to Ascendant. This is calm electronic music, painting audio landscapes for the listener to slowly absorb. The proximity to Ascendant’s last album is more than genre-based: to my preferences, both creators could benefit from a better use of punctual silences and other simple elements, for a less monotonic results. For example, the artist “Ultramarine” achieves this with non-recurrent audio events featuring samples from the everyday world, namely water flowing, a cork popping out of the bottle, etc.

URLs "p1" 20190725 – 76 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.


URLs "p1" 20190721 – 72 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.


Listening to Dan Misha Goldman – "Champion of the Afterworld"

For some reason, music from Canada has been coming my way. This Toronto creator performs mostly slow compositions, with eventual lyrics. “Champion of the Afterworld” is an album labeled as “folk”, but I am not sure about that classification.
“Folk music” should be closer to traditional songs, passed from one generation to the next. These tracks do not feel traditional. To me, they feel innovative! They paint audio landscapes, sometimes with no lyrics at all (as in “Corners Reprise”), or they chant beyond-superficial phrases. Tracks like “Pipo Romero”, featuring a classical guitar, might justify the “folk” label; still, the blending of it all is different and very pleasurable!

Here is the corresponding Spotify playlist: