Ob Khan National Park is about 40 minutes from Hang Dong market. Starting at the road which goes West from the Rectangle Coffee X Tower, it is more or less a straight (meandering) drive of 22 minutes (according to Google). In the Alltrails site, there are several different hikes with Ob Khan in the name, ... Read more
In February, the state of California announced it was going to begin measures treating the Covid-19 pandemic as endemic though it did not use that word. The realization that there is no end date is poignant. > There is no end date for Covid-19 Resignation in the face of an Endemic Pandemic In some sense ... Read more
Playing internet radio from the command line is quite a thing, especially the excellent Soma FM. Unfortunately there are some problems of late with various clients including: Uscheck, my favorite until this issue in October, 2021 Rocky Madden, who also suffers from the problems of October, 2021 The best approach is to fall back to ... Read more
OBS (Open Broadcaster Studio) Studio is a popular, open source multiplatform broadcasting and recording control panel. OBS Installation for Debian sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) ffmpeg obs-studio v4l2loopback-dkms Note that the Linux headers and loopback (not included in the most recent release of OBS as of February 2022) enable a virtual camera button, so that ... Read more
Google is a behemoth and has a variety of properties that one may need to use, for example: YouTube - to watch YouTube content, and to create and upload YouTube content YouTube Music - to listen to YouTube Music There are subscriptions available for YouTube Premium as well as YouTube Music Premium. As far as ... Read more
Level 1. Level 2. Level 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbmaFTsRK9c
Snake games are quite popular. The first widely played snake game is of course snakes and ladders which originated in 2nd century CE India. The game was imported into the UK in the 1890s and made its way to the US as chutes and ladders, snakes apparently too scary for small children. Snake Video Game ... Read more
These last a few weeks (or longer), and are a quick alternative to a longer pickling procedure. Ingredients 500g small cucumbers (ideally 9 cucumbers, somewhat skinny bunch of fresh dill 250g water 120g white vinegar 1 tsp salt 2 cloves of garlic (more for spicy) Utensils 2 pint size mason jars Procedures Combine water, vinegar, ... Read more
Static Site Generator / Server Side Rendering for Svelte Full documentation on Elder.js and
There are differences in salt. Kosher Salt Kosher Salt generally is only sodium chloride (NaCl), without iodine or other trace minerals or additives, and is coarse grain. It is called kosher salt due to being large grained and suitable for the kosher blood draining process (ensure that kosher salt is certified kosher if needed for ... Read more
I've started on Svelte and Svelte Kit since it seems to produce an excellent product with minimal code. I buy into the basic concepts of the benefits of Svelte (over all other frameworks). There is also Svelte Native. I was reading up on Cloudflare Pages, which apparently has gone full stack, and it mentions the ... Read more
https://generated.photos/faces/beautified/young-adult/asian-race/black-hair/long/joy/brown-eyes https://www.kdnuggets.com/2020/03/generate-realistic-human-face-using-gan.html https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan3
Diagrams.net -- previously draw.io -- is a neat web/web 2.0 diagram editor. It supports Google Drive and also VSCode integration. Currently I usually just use Inkscape and draw whatever I need by hand. It is usually faster, and can embed as an SVG or simply output a PNG file. However, if one does a lot ... Read more
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/video-game-genres
About Spacewar! Play Spacewar! online
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise) Play Doom II at Archive.org
Play The Oregon Trail (1990) Online at Archive.org I Designed The Oregon Trail, You Have Died of Dysentery - The lead designer of The Oregon Trail explains his team's process for creating the most successful educational computer game of all time.
How to use the Scratch Backpack
There is a fantastic Scratch wiki that has excellent information.
Wikipedia says: > Notion is a notetaking software and project management software that is used for note-taking, task management, project management, knowledge management, and personal knowledge management. The app uses databases and markdown pages for use in personal and collaboration work. This is a bit unwieldy, but so is Notion, which does have a bit ... Read more
It turns out that there are many legitimate concerns when it comes to virtual reality and children, the ones that are different than the concerns with video games (addiction, etc.), are around how the eyes focus (or not) in virtual reality as opposed to reality. Currently, one could say that all virtual reality devices and ... Read more
The Asus C214MA-BU0546 is a Q3 2021 durable (milspec) 11.6" 2-in-1 Chromebook. It has: Intel Celeron N4020 Processor, Intel UHD 600 Graphics (Integrated), eMMC 32GB SSD, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 11.6" 1366x768 screen For my mind and money this replaces the venerable Asus C101PA. This device is effectively an update 3 years later, but ... Read more
Homo Ludens is a book by published in 1938 by Johan Huizinga. It is meant to explain The Play Element of Culture(not just children's play). Homo Ludens is an important part of game studies. As such it is a great place to start out when designing course for children, even very young children. They are ... Read more
Home-raised chickens -- gai-baan in Thai -- can be extremely tough. The main reasons is that the chicken has a normal life, and is not kept sedentary, overfed, given growth hormones, nor treated with enzymes after being slaughtered. There are three approaches to tenderizing this standard-variety chicken: Brine the chicken for 12-24 hours (less time ... Read more
Scratch is a visual drag-and-drop programming language developed at MIT. It is the most popular programming language for young learners, with 73 million monthly visits to the scratch.mit.edu website. It is available as mobile apps and the main website, where projects can be shared and remixed. Scratch v. 3.0 is implemented in Javascript which along ... Read more
LibreOffice is marginally (though noticeably) better than OpenOffice. That said, it definitely has more signs of life and so it is the incomplete product which one is better off choosing, when given choice. Installing LibreOffice Installing LibreOffice is a bit strange. First off, the default gateway in Asia hasn't worked in months if not years, ... Read more
Salad Nicoise, (pronounced sa-lad nih-swaaz), aka Salad Niçoise, aka La Salada Nissarda, aka the salad from Nice (nees). > Salade niçoise (French pronunciation: [niˈswaz]), la salada nissarda in the Niçard dialect of the Occitan language, is a salad that originated in the French city of Nice. It is traditionally made of tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise ... Read more
Tomatoes are a great thing. Though thought of as a vegetable, they are biologically a fruit. They also improve nutritionally upon being cooked. We eat them raw; and cooked as a sauce over pasta, vegetables, or meats; as a tomato juice; and as tomato soup. Sun-dried tomatoes and herbs in olive oil are a wonderful ... Read more
Minimalism isn't necessarily only about less, but rather the minimum needed for effectiveness. With recipes this means the least amount of preparation, cooking, the fewest necessary ingredients, etc. Multi-Use vs. Functionally Improved For a minimal kitchen, some people confuse this with not having any single use utensils and instruments. This is a considerable mistake when ... Read more
Canola oil is made from the canola plant, a genetically modified rapeseed plant. This was done back in the 1970s through cross-breeding to remove glucosinates and erucic acid, as those can be inedible and/or toxic. Canola is an invented word combining Canada and oil/ola). Canola is seen as a healthy oil for cooking as it ... Read more
Energy bars can be made at home, much less expensively and with known ingredients. It is possible to make them with few ingredients. In the recipe below there are four ingredients: Peanut butter Nonfat milk Rolled oats Protein powder (whey protein isolate) The key is to have a reasonable ratio of fats to carbs to ... Read more
Gravy is needed sometimes, but we needn't make it mostly salt. Here is an option that can top any dish. It is a combination of a standard roux-based gravy (but without a stock), and a Bearnaise-like emulsion. I find that it is not common in our house to have soup stock. The soups I make ... Read more
This recipe can accommodate 1kg of fresh pork tenderloin. The key is to roast low and slow until the internal temperature reaches 62 degrees Celsius (using a reliable meat thermometer). At which point, let sit 3 minutes, then carve and serve. The second key part of the recipe is to marinade for two days beforehand. ... Read more
Sriracha in the United States Sriracha sauce has been popularized in the United States by Huay Fong Foods famous rooster sauce which contains red jalapeno peppers (formerly they used serrano peppers). Huay Fong Foods was founded by a Vietnamese refugee of Chinese extraction in California in 1980. There is even a Sriracha Film made about ... Read more
Ingredients Six egg yolks 1/4 cup sugar (50 grams) 1.5 cups heavy cream (345 grams) 1.5 cups whole milk (360 grams) 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg pinch of salt Instructions Cream egg yolks with sugar in bowl In saucepan over medium heat mix heavy cream, milk, nutmeg, and salt. Stir until simmering, turn off heat. Add ... Read more
Turns out there are several ways to flush the DNS cache on Linux, depending upon what service is being used for DNS caching. In some cases, no services are being used, which means resetting the network should do the trick. sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart Google Chrome Browser DNS Caching However, Google will have its revenge since ... Read more
Recycle Batteries in Chiang Mai > In the underground parking lot of Kad Suan Kaew you can recycle batteries, fluorescent tubes, plastic and all kinds of stuff. If you park on the very bottom floor near the Post Office, all you do is walk up those 5 or so steps near the elevator and toilet ... Read more
If an artificial intelligence is meant to be thinking and feeling, then it makes sense to understand it as a social being, one which learns in a community of learners, teachers, and others. This might seem obvious. Just as a human being can become human insofar as they are embedded in a community and human ... Read more
For all but the simplest screencasting, there are several tools needed: Vector graphics editor - Inkscape Presentation editor - LibreOffice Impress Screencast / video recording and live streaming tool - OBS Studio Video editor - Shotcut
Nemo file manager is made for Cinnamon by the Linux Mint folks. However, this file browser works well on plain Debian. It is one of two apps from Mint that are really nice and worth installing, the other being pix. The Nemo distribution is available from the Github repository. One functionality it doesn't have is ... Read more
Pix is another Linux Mint application (the second I use, along with Nemo) that is a useful, lightweight, simple image editor, good for cropping, scaling, and converting between filetypes. However, for actual editing, Inkscape is my editor of choice (I find GIMP hard to use). The latest versions of Inkscape may not be available under ... Read more
How to set and modify hostnames hostname commands hostname and hostnamectl will display the static, transient hostnames (hostnamectl also provides other host information). sudo nano /etc/hostname can be used to edit the hostname that will be displayed upon reboot or restart. This can be done more easily from the command with sudo hostnamectl set-hostname NEWNAME ... Read more
US Civilian Air Patrol
LXPanel is the panel for LXDE. Like Longfellow's little girl: > When she was good, > She was very good indeed, > But when she was bad she was horrid. The horrid part comes when something happens and all the settings are lost, which requires about 30 minutes or more of reconfiguring the panel. For ... Read more
Note: as of mid 2023, this still generally holds. The A23 dispensed with Super AMOLED, so that is a non-starter. The A24 does have that, though it seems that a 4gb/128gb is a standard low-end configuration (again, a non-starter). It seems that an A23 and the year earlier A52 are the same price, but with ... Read more
Audio can be a pain on Linux. One thing is the rather low quality of PulseAudio, which is common. The next is the layered configuration of ALSA as a driver and JACK as a connector. However, JACK can override PAVU, so things don't stay in their neat little boxes. That said, I've come to some ... Read more
Introduction to Dorothy Sayers - The Lost Tools of Learning In 1947, at the age of 56, Dorothy Sayers -- a writer of advertising and detective novels -- wrote an essay on education entitled The Lost Tools of Learning. Sayers was also a Christian apologist, and translator of Dante, having learned Latin starting at age ... Read more
To format a USB drive from the Linux command line, we use the following commands: df - disk free umount - unmount filesystems, see also the mount command mkfs - make filesystem lsblk - list block devices df command to display drives df -h Identify the USB drive to format umount command to unmount the ... Read more
DRAFT For Debian LXDE there are a few places to configure the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts. LXPanel Enable the Keyboard Layout Handler in Panel Preferences > Panel Applets Once enabled, right-click on the Keyboard Layout Handler and select "Keyboard Layout Handler" Settings Change Layout Option set to grp:lwin_toggle which sets the left windows key to ... Read more