Lower Thought

Bye bye Blogger

2010-04-01T22:26:00.000-05:00

I never knew how much Blogger sucks. It's like development was abandoned a few years ago. Wordpress is leaps and bounds ahead. So I'm moving to a Wordpress hosted blog: lowerthought.wordpress.com. You should to if you're not sure which one to choose.

How to Eat Lard

2010-03-30T23:29:00.003-05:00

You may have been wondering how I eat all that lard. Well, I actually go through it surprisingly fast, thanks to a dish I lovingly call "fat 'rots". That's all it is—fat and carrots. I steam some grated/blended carrots in a little water (until it mostly boils dry). Then I melt lard into them... a lot of it.

That's not ice cream!

I decided to weigh it for the shot, and it turns out I'm eating about 100g of lard per bowl of fat 'rots. That's 900 fat calories! Talk about a nourishing dish!

Dosage: 100g of lard

I usually scoop some lard into my bowl (using an ice cream scoop!) and cover it with piping hot carrots to melt it. You can spice it for flavor—cinnamon is good, but my favorite is cumin: it makes lard taste so good.

Delicious fat 'rots: fat-soaked carrots

Fat 'rots are my staple meal. They're simple and convenient: quick and easy to prepare, using 2 cheap ingredients. The carrots provide almost no calories, they're just a fat vehicle. One bowl is truly filling. I only eat twice a day, and a bowl of fat 'rots plus a piece of meat is totally satiating. Another good fat dish is "fat yams": mashed yams soaked in fat. They're delicious, especially with a generous dose of cinnamon and a splash of vanilla. They're much starchier than carrots though, so be careful if you're trying to minimize carbs. Canned salmon also deserves a mention—drain off the water, mash it up, and it can soak up puddles of lard.

Be sure to check out Melissa's awesome Faileo Diet post about fatty, nourishing meals.

Gmail-style keyboard navigation as web standard

2010-03-29T17:16:00.001-05:00

Gmail, Google Reader and Remember The Milk are the big three webapps that have the wonderful 'j/k' keyboard shortcuts for navigation. They let you command the app without taking your hands off the keyboard. Essentially, 'j' moves the cursor down the list, 'k' moves it up, and 'o' or 'Enter' opens the item (and there are many more great hotkeys, too). These hotkeys make for a very pleasant user experience. They're way faster than mousing, and especially laptop track-pads.

I'd like to see 'j/k' navigation become a common convention in web-apps and websites. Any app or site with items in a list would benefit: search results, blog archives, forums, etc. Some sites badly need it, like Google Docs (for navigating the doc list) and Youtube (for search results). Forums are also an ideal candidate (navigating the threadlist, posts, jumping to different forums ,etc). Google Experimental Search adds hotkeys for Google search results (very nicely implemented as usual). A Wordpress plugin and a bbPress plugin would really help to spread 'j/k' navigation as an unofficial web standard on blogs and forums.

Major sites with keyboard navigation:

Gmail
Google Reader
Google Calendar
Google Maps
Google Experimental Search
Remember The Milk
Wordpress comment moderation (from the admin panel)
Netvibes

Other noteworthy implementations of 'j/k' navigation:

Firefox vs Chrome

2010-03-11T00:02:00.004-06:00

A comparison of the pros and cons of Firefox 3 and Chrome 4:
Firefox 3
Pros:

Awesome Bar (address bar) instantly pulls up results from history and bookmarks
Search keywords: search other sites from the address bar
Bookmark keywords: bookmark shortcuts
Type-ahead-find (aka find-as-you-type or quick find): links only mode is great for mouseless navigation

Cons:

Slow cold starts (sometimes painfully slow)
Screen-space inefficient: the best you can do is have one toolbar, but that still leaves the title bar and status bar

Google Chrome 4

Pros:

Super fast startup and browsing
Very screen-space efficient: title bar is eliminated and status bar is replaced with an unobtrusive popup whenever a link is hovered
Omnibox (address bar) remembers any site you search so you can search it from the address bar ('press tab to search this site')
Address bar instantly fills with commonly used URLs (no need to press down to select the result)

Cons:

Omnibox is terrible at pulling results from history and bookmarks, even if you type something exactly as it is in your history (it always gives search suggestions instead) - this is a huge flaw
Lacks a native type-ahead-find (what an oversight!); there is a pretty good extension that implements it, but it has some minor flaws (e.g., it conflicts with sites and extensions that use keyboard shortcuts)

Both are great browsers that have some key weaknesses. Which browser is better depends on which features are more important to you. I'm split: after switching to Chrome from Firefox, I'm contemplating going back to Firefox for the quick-find and Awesome Bar, though I'd really miss Chrome's extra screen space and speed. Hopefully these issues get resolved in future versions... Chrome would be an amazing browser if it didn't have the two glaring weaknesses I noted.

How to Render Lard

2010-02-27T18:02:00.006-06:00

Lard is such a great food for paleo nutrition, and accounts for the bulk of my caloric intake. I just got 60 lbs of pig fat (pastured and organic) so I decided to make a how-to. I took these photos while rendering the last little bit (I previously had rendered two huge batches—4 gallons each—in a big water bath canner.)

First of all, use ground fat. It renders so much faster and more efficiently and cuts out all the work of chopping. If it's frozen, let it thaw in the fridge. Then, stick it in a suitable vessel and put it in the oven at 250 F.

Putting it in the oven

After one hour it's mostly done (if it isn't ground it can take several times as long). I ladled most of it out into a pot to cool, strained through a steel mesh strainer to catch bits of cracklings. Others say to strain through a coffee filter or cheesecloth, but since I don't use the lard for baking, it doesn't matter to me if its not 100% pure. Then I put the rest back in the oven to finish the cracklings.

After one hour

After another hour it's done. The cracklings are nice and brown, so I strained the lard...

After the second hour

...leaving some tasty cracklings.

Cracklings

That's it. Keep the lard refrigerated, or freeze it for longer term storage.

The complete haul from 60 lbs of fat: ~8 gallons.

Chrome is now a viable alternative to Firefox

2010-02-03T22:01:00.000-06:00

Firefox has been the leading browser for the last few years, but now Chrome has improved to the point that it may now be the better browser (both are excellent, open-source programs). Ever since Google launched Chrome, I've kept an eye on it because of two major advantages it has over Firefox:

Lightning fast startup and browsing—Firefox is frustratingly slow to startup.
Streamlined design that maximizes the viewport: Chrome puts the tabs up in the window frame and replaces the status bar with a transparent pop-up bar that appears when you hover over links.

But Chrome couldn't beat Firefox because it lacked two crucial features:

A Firefox-style find-as-you-type feature.
Extensions.

Now Chrome has overcome those weaknesses, thanks to the addition of extensions. While Chrome doesn't come natively with find-as-you-type (what an oversight!!), this excellent extension implements the feature perfectly. And with that, Chrome overtakes Firefox as my browser of choice.