Martin Pease

Here are all the reasons my wife should allow me to get my private pilot license (PPL). I am writing this on my blog so that I can occasionally send her the link again, in hopes it will wear her down in this war of attrition. To be fair, she really only has one objection: that I will be killed in a fiery crash. In truth, it could also be a watery crash, or a snowy crash, depending on the terrain. But in her mind, one crash is the same as all the others, which shows what she knows. So take all these highly different kinds of crashes and put them on one side of the scale. Now let's fill up the other side with this list of all the wonderful things a PPL would bring into our lives. More exciting family vacations! What's better than flying to small residential airports? All that taxiing! No Shake Shack in our town- problem solved! Fly to a better town where there is one! Planes are so expensive, I won't be able to afford another car for a long, long time! She's alwa...

Bandwagonning has never tasted so delicious It was the ancient Greek philosopher Playdo who once said, "A toaster is complete in itself- reduced to a single form commensurate with its function- while a toaster oven is debased by pretensions of being an oven or whatever." This aphorism has truly lasted the test of time. The Instant Pot and its similar competitors have brought pressure cooking back into vogue. I remember my mother using a stovetop pressure cooker a handful of times in my early childhood, but it's probably been decades since she's used it, if she still has it at all. Trends come and go in the world of cookery and the rise of electric, safe pressure cookers such as the Instant Pot have brought this one back. So this Christmas we got an Instant Pot, the 8 quart Lux model you see here. In theory, pressure cooking reduces the amount of time it takes to cook food, especially tough pieces of meat, to tenderness. These new electric pressure cookers also...

So in a follow-up to my recent post about using Linux again, I took advantage of the downtime over Christmas break to spend some time upgrading my primary laptop to Linux Mint 19.1. Sometimes you have to take the plunge to see if you can swim. This post is a fairly technical overview of how I set up my system. If this sort of thing isn't that interesting to you, I'll be posting a comparison of modern Linux and Windows 10 that might be more interesting to less technically-minded people in the coming few days. Setup: Attempt 1 To do this without ruining my life, I decided to start with a fresh drive in my Lenovo Carbon X1. I bought a 1TB stick of NVMe storage from Crucial.com and swapped it. This way, if I need to get back to my Windows setup, it's a matter of replacing the original disk and booting. No problem. Installing most Linux distributions is pretty easy. You download an ISO and flash it to a USB stick. Then you boot the computer off that and it enters a ...

Every year we forget how much work goes into making Christmas conform to the ideal- the decorations, the tree, gifts, food, friends and family. By the time the kids are asleep on Christmas Eve, it's been weeks of preparation. End of semester activities and the ubiquitous Christmas concerts and plays. Shopping, wrapping and shipping. Coordinating employee schedules for vacation time, and finishing up the last projects that can't wait until after New Years. And it was a good Christmas for all that. It was worth it. The presents brought delight, the food was exquisite, and much good cheer was shared. My memories of Christmas as a child were always happy and full of the things that we now provide to our children. But now I know how much work my parents went through for us! My wife gave me a very fine watch, one I had had my eye on for a while, and something I'll make a blog post about soon. In turn, I gave my wife some fancy boots which do not fit, so we'll have to make...

What was the first Linux I ever installed? Back in the mid to late 90's, I remember trying to get various distros up and running on whatever PC hardware I had lying around. It wasn't so much a problem getting enough working to run a terminal, it was setting up networking and getting my display adapter configured to get more than 800x600 resolution. Mostly, I just noodled around with it. I do recall once buying a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux, and putting the sticker on my Thinkpad and thinking how cool it was. I don't remember what version of Red Hat it was, but the box looked very similar to this one. This would have been 1999 or 2000. But mostly Linux as a desktop OS was a disappointment. The quality of software was pretty low, and drivers were a persistent problem, especially those tricky networking drivers. I believe I once got an early 802.11b wireless adapter working after much trial and error, but it was unreliable. Frankly, Windows 2000 was a superior client OS at...

Following up from my last post about the Anova sous vide machine, here's a recent steak I made. I experimented with a slightly higher temperature, 135°F instead of 130°F. This was a little too medium for my taste, but still tender and juicy. I bought this plastic tub, and it's a big improvement. The lid has a cutout specifically designed for the Anova to poke through. I also bought this rack which fits inside the tub and holds the food up in the middle of the water. You can adjust the spacing between the racks to fit different sized packages. Using my SearzAll gave the post-cook sear perfectly. The alternative way to get the proper sear on a steak is to take the steak out of the bag when it's done, pat it dry, and pop it into the fridge for about 10 minutes. (Helen Rennie talks about this at about 8:30 in the video above.)  Then, you can sear the steaks in a pan (with butter) without the steak losing all its liquid or overcooking. This method works great...

Sous vide cooking has been reaching public attention for about 10 years, with the rise of food bloggers and professional chefs broadcasting on YouTube. Immersion circulators have been used in restaurants for a long time before that. The idea is pretty simple: create a water bath that stays at a constant temperature, and you can cook food in it until the perfect done-ness is achieved. The sous vide part means "under vacuum" in French and refers to the fact that you generally seal the food in a vacuum bag before immersing in the water bath.  Recently, I purchased an Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker , which is one of many sous vide circulator devices available to consumers. The price varies between from about $90 to well over $500. This model cost $150 at Best Buy, and is even cheaper on Amazon.  These mostly all work the same way: you fill a vessel with water, attach the circulator to the vessel with the heating element in the water, and set the temperature you w...