June oven
I hesitated to make this post because I knew it would sound like a commercial and because the company now pays my salary. Still, this oven has made an unusually large impact on my life and it has some crazy features which, if nothing else, have been a conversation starter.
But first I need to explain. The reason I've been so busy these last few months is because I got a new job. This has been more stressful than I anticipated but so far it seems to be working out. I had a vacation planned months before the opportunity arose so I was in San Diego while I tried to arrange my I-9 forms and satisfy HR's onboarding process while also doing my best to document all the work I was exclusively responsible for at my old company.
We had a house sitter taking care of our cat while we were away and when we returned the front hallway was heaped with boxes. Amanda had a few orders and I'd received more than I expected from my new employer, electronics, swag, a giant box containing a june oven, and another box of oven accessories.
I didn't know anything about the new oven. I didn't even know they were going to send one. The June oven is a luxury appliance about size of a large toaster, priced at $850 on amazon - significantly more than I would have considered paying for a toaster. The reason it costs so much is it's a lot more than a toaster.
The first prototypes were a toaster with an iphone taped to the front and the first shipping version had all sorts of unconventional sensors like digital scales to weigh the water content of your food.
Setting up the oven requires a connection to your wifi network. I particularly avoid these types of appliances but so far the connectivity has been unobtrusive and I'm reasonably sure my marketing information isn't being abused.
The oven has a camera and 5 different neural networks to identify food. Remarkably, it can determine what you put inside it in 200ms (practically instantaneous).
It's a fun party trick to toss a few corn tortillas or a couple eggs into the oven, close the door and see that it recognized both the type of food (corn and not white tortillas) and the number (6 eggs). It uses this recognition to know how to cook what you put into it. The oven currently recognizes around a 150 different types of food, certainly more than I've explored, but it's still nice to put a bagel in the oven, confirm that this is a bagel, and have it run a cook program designed to produce the perfect toasted bagel.
Another thing that is surprisingly nice is the companion app and cook programs. Recipes are featured in the app, along with videos showing the preparation process, and it's all connected to the oven so it will step you through the recipe, turn on the oven to pre-heat, or notify you when the food needs to be turned or moved.
The few recipes I've tried from this cooking app have turned out fantastic. I've made the crispy cauliflower tacos five times now and I just made cast iron grilled soy and miso marinated chicken kebobs that were astounding. I've roasted lamb shanks and made air fried sweet potato fries. I've dehydrated fruit, air boiled dozens of eggs, and I use it to proof dough. I have yet to explore any of the dessert recipes, I haven't tried to make bacon (though it's supposedly really good at this and will offer you a choice of how you want it to come out), and I haven't tried to make popcorn - apparently you have to sandwich two air fry baskets together.
When it arrived I was upset because it wasn't expected and it meant I would have to get rid of my old toaster. It turns out I don't miss my old toaster at all. I'm even coming around to the idea that if I lived in an apartment so small I couldn't have a full sized oven, a June oven would be a reasonable replacement. Despite the price, required network connection, and the phone app integration, I really like it. It seems like something that hasn't taken off only because more people don't know about it.
I encourage every one of my readers to come over to my house this Saturday with some eggs, a bagel, and some potatoes, and I will convince you.
Boxing
Over the past few years I've developed an appreciation for boxing. I can respect the skill, strength, toughness, and bravery of people who participate in a sport that's essentially competitive brain damage but I would never pursue it as a hobby, I depend on my brain for a living.
My dad told me that there was a time when all boxing matches were free on the television and then someone had the bright idea to invent pay-per-view. In that moment if the general public had collectively decided to boycott the idea of paying for sports, the promoters would have abandoned the attempt and gone back to free fights. My disappointment with the outcome of this experiment has colored my entire philosophy. It's one of the fundamental reasons I use free software and it influences my approach to money. That we still have pay-per-view fights tells me there are markets out there which I will never understand.
To me, boxing seems more effective and graceful than other martial arts. I grew up in the 80's when karate was the rage but I was always disappointed when I saw real fights and discovered they were nothing like the kung fu movies on the TV.1 The grace and precision promised by karate to 12 year old na was a fantasy. In every non-exhibition karate fight, fighters reverted to brute force and the smooth back and forth exchanges seen on kung-fu theater were replaced by awkward feints, cringing recoils, sloppy punches, and unbalanced kicks.
Now we have ultimate fighting where fighters are allowed to do everything but gouge eyes and strike groins and we're finally seeing the development of effective martial arts though bouts usually devolve into two men rolling around on the ground attempting to dislocate limbs, punch without reprisal, or choke their opponent into submission.
I find the restrictions in boxing makes the sport more entertaining. Boxers are only allowed to use the front of their fists, are not allowed to hit below the belt or strike the back of the head, are not allowed to cling to the other fighter for too long, and fights can be stopped if the referee feels a fighter is too injured or is not participating.
The referee is often as valued as the fighters. He's expected to know when to stop the fight and is often expected to have the reflexes to catch a fighter that is knocked out and falling to the canvas. I idle in the boxing subreddit and the discussion among the amateur boxers and enthusiasts often centers around the referee's skills. They argue whether he should have stopped a fight earlier and they applaud moments of good judgement when he interceded before a fighter got seriously hurt.
My interest in boxing was kindled by a manga I read called 'Hajime no Ippo' which is a standard-template Japanese sports manga with outlandish characters loosely based on real world fighters. You can read this manga online and I encourage you to do so despite it being 1900 chapters and still unfinished. After following this series I subscribed to the obnoxious r/boxing subreddit. Participants in this reddit spend 80% of their time discussing the manufactured hype around fights and speculating about how legendary fighters would fare against modern day fighters. The only reason I've stuck around is they often include short clips of fights highlighting slick moves or longer videos breaking down the tactics happening at impossibly high speeds.
In boxing I've finally found the promise of kung-fu movies. In slow motion it's possible to see people exchanging blows, with pinpoint accuracy, drawing blows only to slip and counter them with other blows, or you can see them react to a blow with another, more direct blow designed to arrive first. Some blows are only there to obscure the vision and some punches are thrown in a way that makes them less visible to their opponent. The restrictive rules seems to encourage finesse.
It's also interesting to see the physiological freaks. These fighters are ever present in modern day manga but there really are people out there with strange talents who choose to skip the conventional boxing wisdom and go their own way.
Prince Naseem used a bizarre baiting and counterpunching stance with some freakish natural skill to win the local belt only to fail when he fought a solid Mexican boxer. Watching him jump up and down and flop around like a fish to avoid punches is just bizarre. It also helped that he was an asshole in real life so a lot of people watched his fights to see him go down.
Tommy the Hitman Hearns had a tall lanky frame with freakishly long arms which he used to throw whipping jabs from an impossible distance. His most interesting fight might have been against another champion and a different freak of nature, the Argentinian Robert Duran who specialized in close fighting, pressing his head against his opponents chest and using body blows and uppercuts to grind them down. Hearns eventually went up against another beloved fighter (Marvin Hagler - a more conventional freak) and lost.
Mike Tyson is well known and his history is almost as interesting as his domination of the sport. As an 180lb 11 year old hooligan he was beating up grown men and breaking and entering until he was found by a trainer named Cus D'Amato who had some peculiar theories on boxing. Cus adopted the troubled boy, trained him in his weird style, and he came to dominate the sport. As an emotionally damaged youth Tyson would cry before matches. His downfall when Cus died was interesting in the same way as watching a train crash.
Mohammed Ali developed the trash talking hype that overshadows the sport today. Fighters often fake a rivalry, start fights during press conferences, or the ritualistic process of weigh-in. Ali was charismatic with a well-honed sense of humor which irritated his opponents and delighted fans. His fight against George Foreman (another freak of nature) in Zaire was so crazy there have been several documentaries made about it.
More recently we have Tyson Fury a man described as a walking bag of milk and his trilogy of fights against Detonay wilder a lanky man with what was hyped as the most powerful right hand in the game. Their fights were interesting.
Boxing is divided into a huge list of organizations and each organization divides their boxers by weight using this complicated table This means is it's in a boxer's best interest to cut weight so he can fight against smaller opponents, but not to cut so much weight he damages his strength and endurance. This is the reason many professional fighters (with the exception of the heavy weight classes) have very little body fat and the extreme measures boxers take to bleed off water weight before the official weigh-in is crazy: running wearing sweat suits, spitting constantly, or chewing dried mushrooms and spitting them out when they've been hydrated with spit. It sounds miserable. Boxers could gain as much as 15-20 pounds of (mostly water) weight gain between the official weigh-in and the time of the fight.
I'm also impressed of stories of boxers fighting with broken hands. Or Inuoe a Japanese champion that won a fight after he broke his skull in the second 3min long round and won the fight in the 12th. His face is still lopsided. It's also common for fighters to pee blood from kidney damage and I've watched documentaries about what boxing can do to the brains of some people.. The doctors in that film say we basically don't know why some people are more susceptible to brain injury.
So I'm still subscribed to the boxing subreddit and I enjoy the occasional fight breakdowns and highlights but at the same time I'm turned off by all the manufactured hype and what-if discussions. If you take anything away from this post, go read hajime no ippo. It's freely available online and it covers all the weird and interesting aspects of the sport.
| [1] | These days I view kung fu movies as musicals with fighting replacing the dance numbers. It's weird I still enjoy them because watching people dance makes me super uncomfortable. |
Start Backup <computer explodes>
A computer burns1
I recently bought a new 2TB NVMe M.2 drive with the intention of rebuilding my system. I was running ubuntu 20.04 but the next LTS release of ubuntu (22.04) was already available and canonical is leaning hard into snaps. I hate snaps. They solve the same problem as fedora's flatpacks, pollute my network list, and the last time I needed some weird software ubuntu offered to sell it to me through their snap store. The store was filled with commercial software. I specifically moved to open source to get away from this short of shit.
The last few weeks I've been researching different distros and decided to move to an arch based distro called manjaro. Arch, unlike debian, uses a rolling release process so the packages stay more up to date at the expense of having things break more often. I played around with it in a vm and it seemed like it would work.
Friday, I started backing up files and decided the best way to handle the upgrade was to just copy my entire /home/ directory to one of my backup drives so I could pick and choose what I wanted to bring back into the new system. The old M.2 drive would be my safety net. If I couldn't get everything working on the new drive, I could just put the old M.2 drive back in and it would be like nothing had happened.
The backup of my home directory had been running for a couple hours when my desktop locked up. This was unusual but it didn't bother me until I hit the reset button and the computer claimed the bootloader was corrupt. This was when I started to panic.
I pulled out my laptop and started looking up the arcane instructions for rebuilding a bootloader from a live boot. The grub rebuild command seemed to work but when I tried to boot from the drive it still failed.
So I was stuck. The first thing I did was to go online and order a M.2 - USB adapter because the data was probably still there even if I couldn't boot into that disk but even with expedited shipping it was going to arrive on the following Monday.
I work at home and my computer is a critical tool. I removed the old M.2 drive, plugged in the new one, and starting installing manjaro.
Though manjaro is a new linux distribution for me the main practical difference is it uses a package management system called pacman instead of apt. Installing software on linux systems is a delight. If I need mpv, vifm, mpd, nginx, and neovim I can just type:2
pacman -S mpc vifm mpd nginx neovim
It will download these applications from a secure, centrally managed software repository, work out any required dependencies, and start any new system services when it's done. Oh, and it's all free. The last time I used windows I still had to do google searches and download binaries from random people's web pages. I haven't used windows in 20 years but I'm guessing they have an app store that's filled with ads and commercial software. I recently got a mac book for work and that app store is the template for selling software to your customers. My guess is windows is desperate to condition their users to start paying for software and ubuntu wants to do the same.
There are a few packages that weren't in the extensive repositories. My password manager is an old tcl/tk app, my comic reader is abandonware (a project I've considered adopting), and my newsreader is a gtk app that no-one uses anymore. In each of these cases I was able to compile the application from source, without much fuss, getting the required dependencies with pacman commands.
computer explodes3
Because I didn't manage to make a proper backup before this forced upgrade I had to scramble to save the changes I made since my last backup (the night before). Also while restoring from backup I discovered I had neglected to add a '--delete' flag to one of my nightly rsync backup script which meant every backup directory contained every file they ever held the last several years (every test project long deleted and every steam game long since uninstalled).
During my live boot recovery I copied a few files to a mounted backup drive and to a thumbdrive but I was unable to read this thumbdrive later in manjaro. I spent hours combing the internet for clues why the kernel was mounting this thumbdrive as read-only only to realize that my thumbdrive had died. That it decided to die on the same day my other drive failed was just bad luck.
During the rebuild, after rebooting several times, my BIOS changed and started trying to boot from a non-bootable drive. I fixed this and then realized that the problem could have been as simple as a flaky M.2 socket making my NVMe drive go away, and then the BIOS detecting this and 'helpfully'4 reordering my boot order to load from a non-bootable drive.
Knowing this, I tried to go back to my original drive but I ran into the same missing bootloader issue which made me think the NVMe drive didn't fail at all and I broke it while trying to restore the bootloader after a socket hiccup.
The moral of this story is to keep backups. Even with backups from the night before I still had to scramble to rescue some files. A younger na might have thought I was being paranoid when I was running from a live boot and I backed up my latest changes in two places; a second drive and my thumbdrive, but this saved me when the thumbdrive chose that moment to die.
Every time I go through a re-install my backup scripts get sharper and things get easier but I always miss something. I can't imagine what normal people would suffer.
For all the bad luck of having the drive go down before I could finish my backup scripts, and having a thumbdrive fail during the recovery, I was extraordinarily lucky to have it happen when I already had a replacement 2TB NVMe drive on hand. I've still got the old M.2 drive and I suspect it's still OK but take this as a warning.
Make backups!
| [1] | At least this was what came up when when I searched deepai for 'a computer burns' |
| [2] | Manjaro also includes a GUI app that let you install and update software by clicking on nice icons with your mouse but I never use it. |
| [3] | deep ai thinks this is 'computer explodes'. When I tried to get more specific it started showing me pictures of fucked up dogs. |
| [4] | definitely not helpfully |
Right wing moral panic about 'beloved snickers dick vein'
This is real. It was created as a joke that fox news found and ran with. Fox knows that outrage keeps their viewers engaged and they don't care if the target of their outrage is real. There's always something to be outraged about. Most recently the outrage story was the idea that discussing homosexuality is grooming minors for sex.
The manufactured outrage seems like a form of twisted entertainment but I'm always surprised when legislation is introduced to address these fabricated problems. Do people actually believe this?
In this case, the story is so absurd I can't believe they're even trying to make it a talking point. I'm more inclined to believe it's performative outrage designed to make their political opponents feel smug, which they can then use to strengthen their resolve. A big reason Americans elected an inept fascist for president was they felt the opposite party was looking down on them.
Maybe everyone's in on the joke and it's just a form of tribal bonding. People want to join the discourse around a shared idea and it doesn't matter how absurd it is.
Or maybe it's just another in a series of distractions to pull attention away from the fact their leader tried to stage a violent coup?
Maybe it's because they've dehumanized their political opponents to such an extent they believe them capable of this absurdity? This one is a reach. I can believe they've dangerously dehumanized people outside their tribe but having a knee jerk reaction to 'protect the beloved snickers dick vein' reflects worse on them than their opponents and is part of the reason this story is so funny/absurd/dismaying.
So is fox news just desperate for a new thing to be outraged about, is it a long political play, is it a meaningless shibboleth to gather around, or are they serious? Maybe it's all of these things. I'm willing to believe almost anything other than that the republican party considers this a credible threat to their ideology. The alternative is just too depressing.
The infrequently updated blog.