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Abigail and I have been making recipes out of this book and it’s been a blast! Crepes! Cream Puffs! (Make the shoe!!)

But I have to warn you…

The 2023 edition of this book is tremendously inferior to the 2019 edition!
Look in the photo, the 2019 edition on the left has MUCH more useful content for budding chefs, with many more helpful photos and larger print. The one on the right only highlights the finished product. It’s a little prettier but this is a COOK BOOK for kids, not a coffee table book!

EVERY recipe gets this new, glamorous but useless treatment.
As of May 2024 on Amazon, the yellow edition with no author mention on the cover is the bad 2023 edition. The blue edition with the author mention (“Angela Wilkes”) is the 2019 edition.

Thank you, Angela Wilkes for making a fun cookbook!

Some random thoughts that came up chatting with a good person.

If you’ve got kids, the El Cerrito local “Wildcat” 4H is worthwhile. Getting on the google group and watching what transpires for a while is a good start, to see their schedules and such. Here’s the Wildcat 4-H Program main page.

If you’re volunteering for a school outing, it’s really important to get all the chaperones and the teacher’s mobile number in case a kid gets lost or somesuch. Consider making a texting group.

Library Elf is a good service to help unify your library experience. All I use it for is to know when anyone in my family’s item is ready for pickup or due back. It also can log your lending.

Until last year, I kept a book list of what we gave Abigail to read and how it went over. You might get some reading ideas from it. Look at the Ratings column and consider as a starting point, to get any books rated 7 or higher. Abigail’s Book List.

We’ve been using EcoEgg laundry detergent for about a year now and I love it.

– It gets our clothes clean. Long ago, I tried 7th Generation laundry detergent and dish soap and they didn’t do a very good job.
– Works as well as our other favorites, Trader Joes Laundry Detergent, Sheets Laundry Club, and All Free and Clear.
– I don’t smell it on my clothes at all. I have been steered away from many laundry detergents due to their strong scent. I can smell the horrid chemical stew of Tide detergent on a person from literally 20 paces. The EcoEgg itself has a slight smell (my princess-and-the-pea nose would say it’s a moderately unpleasant smell) but that smell doesn’t transfer to our clothes. Update on the smell 9-28-22: I refilled the egg a few weeks ago and for the first week my clothes came out with a slight off smell. But about 5 washes later, that smell is gone. I guess when the beads are new, they have a slight smell.
– Really easy to use: just throw the egg in the washer. No pouring, no measuring. You can take the egg out of the washer when you’re done but it’s not vitally important.
– It’s compatible with all the regular stain treating products. We use Oxyclean, Clorox Max Performance stain remover, and real bleach on occasion.
– Very inexpensive at ~$0.04/load instead of most detergents at $0.10-$0.20 per load.

Rclone is the right software to copy multi-terabyte file repositories from one place to another! It’s also very capable at rearranging files in lots of other different ways. Check it out. It’s something of a sister program to rsync on unix.

I had to fiddle with rclone a bit. Here is the command I ended up using:

c:\aaa\rclone\rclone sync –modify-window=2s -v –exclude=”System Volume Information/**” d:/ f:/[my new repository]

It was so simple (after a two weeks of fiddling and yelling at my computer). Just run that command, wait 3 days (yipe, I’ve got some bandwidth/scale problems) and profit!

(If you copy-paste that text, make sure you don’t use smartquotes, use regular quotes)

Let’s look at that command one argument at a time:

c:\aaa\rclone\rclone

rclone isn’t installed, perse, on a windows computer. You just unzip it and go! That means it doesn’t set PATH variables (unless you do it yourself. So I open up a Windows Powershell with Admin rights, specify the folder to run in (c:\aaa\rclone in my example) and go!

sync

It’s so magically simple. Sync is better than copying because it will delete extra files on the target side.

–modify-window=2s

The FAT file system doesn’t accurately capture file modification times. So every time you run rclone, it’ll compare file modification times and get it wrong. If you turn on very verbose mode with “-vv” you’ll see errors like “Modification times differ by 1.490000000s”, and it’ll copy files over and over and over :-(. This “modify-window” setting says “if the files were modified within 2 seconds of each other, don’t sweat the difference.

-v

“-v” is “verbose” mode, “-vv” is very verbose mode, for when you want to figure out why your rclone session is failing. You can eliminate it when you are sure of your sessions.

–exclude=”System Volume Information/**”

I’m copying from the root (d:\) If I don’t specify this, rclone will try (and fail) to grab files from the system volume information folder.

d:/ f:/[my new repository]

Note that I’m using slashes instead of Window’s backslashes. It might not be essential but rclone (and I) prefers slashes.

————————————————–

What doesn’t work:

Windows File Explorer drag-and-drop copy doesn’t have enough checking, the ability to recover a failed copy, or the ability to “sync”.

Teracopy can copy but not sync. It recovers a bit better from failed copies but not well enough for my 2TB file moves. I think it created system instability, crashing a few times at inopportune times.

Robocopy not enough checking, mediocre recovery from failed copies, not enough feedback.

Windows File History might actually be useful as a local backup tool. I played with it a bit and seemed to work well on a local network. Though it kept nagging me when a computer wasn’t connected (yes, I know, I turned the other computer off an hour ago). Though I’ll likely stick with rclone and Backblaze instead of learning 2 tools.

Minio on a server with some fancy buy-once Amazon AWS compatible backup software for the client like Arqbackup was a good idea until I found that Minio needed to be manually updated every couple weeks or it would refuse to start up.

keywords: backup

The hat smells of… I can think of no better description: hot asphalt. I wrote to the company who responded “Yes, there will be a slight oily smell and feel to the hat. This will fade over time with exposure to sunlight and the elements of nature.” It is horrible, like wearing a tiny bit of a skunk on your head. I’ll stop noticing the smell for a while and then turn my head and think, “What the hell, why do I smell asphalt?!”

Every time I touch the hat, my hands get oily. It’s like the “oil” in “oilskin” was cheap lubricating oil.

Well, after a month… 1 week of full-time wear, 1 week sitting outside in the sun and rain, 2 weeks sitting out, it still smells of asphalt and makes my hands oily.

Don’t buy this hat.

Window-Swap.com continues to be a magical reprieve from the difficulties of the world. It’s so simple. People show videos of what it looks like out the window of their home. This morning I was welcomed into someone’s home in Brazil, heard birds chirping in Russia, felt the buzz of street traffic in Palestine, and whiled away the time listening to cicadas in Texas. The most magical thing is that in all these videos, nothing happens.
The site is free. I’ve chipped into their “buy me a coffee” jar.

I got a pair of Mpow Flame Solo Wireless Eardbuds, model BH503A recently. I’m really happy with them!

Here’s the Mpow Flame Solo User Manual

I did a comparison recently between them, Tozo T12, Jabra Evolve T65, and Anker Soundcore Spirit X, and these came out on top!

Main features:
— $40 inexpensive on Amazon
— They “just work”. It has taken a little effort to figure out how to switch between my now multiple audio-out options on my computer, that isn’t the fault of the earbuds. Syncing is easy, turning on and of is easy.
— audio quality for music is nearly as good as my wired earbuds, I use them for music and Zoom sessions a lot
— The over-the-ear design means they stay on my head and I don’t have to rely on squeezing the earpiece into my ear to stay on (like the Tozo T12)
— The volume and sound response (highs vs lows etc) is sometimes a little bit less than my wired earbuds. But, as Ultron said as he prepared to destroy earth, “I got no strings on me!”

Update 6-26-24: Shokz Bone Conduction headphones are awesome!

I’ve now bought and used 2 laser printer toner refill kits from TonerRefillKits.com and I’m very happy with them!

It took about 20 minutes to refill my second toner, saving about $50 off a name-brand new toner cartridge. I’ll get it down to 10 minutes with practice. It takes a little bit of disassembly and work but they gave me excellent printed instructions and their website practically screams “If you have ANY questions or problems, call us, we’re here!”

Our family has 2 Brother HL-L2350DW laser printers. They’re pretty good inexpensive printers. (Though last month one just died on me, Brother support walked me through everything but… [sad trombone sounds])

I’ve had mixed experience with inexpensive, off-brand toner cartridges. I forget the details but I think about 70% of my toner purchases from V4Ink on Amazon worked flawlessly.

Here’s one way to keep track of the books you’ve borrowed from the library. Many libraries in California do not let you view your checkout history, citing California law that mandates the confidentiality of borrowing records. I can understand that but I wish my local library let me choose.

My library, and thousands of others use a service called Library Elf. I see a few main benefits:
* view consolidated library accounts… ie. see if your daughter’s account has overdue books
* see a history of the books you’ve checked out
* get nice email reminders of almost-due books

I’ve been using it for about 2 months and it works pretty well. It’s free for me because my library subscribes to it. It might be free for you too.

I came across Jim Gill’s amazing finger play song One From The Left and got hooked. He’s got a huge catalog of catchy, fun kids songs. Check him out!