Today I made a chocolate swiss roll (brazo de gitano)... Funny.

My wife has two recipes and mixed them in her head to create the swiss roll. It's hard to describe her efforts. Twice, she managed to create a batter that had no air in it, whatsoever.

The second time, she separated the yolks and added the sugar and put that in a double boiler...

This afternoon, I followed one of her recipes to the letter and made a delicious swiss roll (her words). It wasn't so hard, just some dedication.

Heh.

I tend to stray from recipes too.

I always think, "oh, what all the fuss, is this really necessary? I can do it quicker" etc. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail.

@rumtscho ~1GB of images (JPEG only, I'm not uploading the raws unless you request one—they're another 3.5GB) hitting the Google Drive now

I made pancakes for the first time :D

@Mien congratulations. How did they turn out?

Quite nice, actually!

I used the ones in Ratio, in case you want to know.

And they do fit well with maple syrup.

Did you ever try them?

I have made pancakes from time to time, but don't remember if I made those from ratio. Last time I made the ones from NBR.

Last week, a new pancake fast food restaurant opened in my vicinity, and I tried it literally on the first day, the staff was still completely disoriented. The pancakes were nowhere as good as my NBR ones. I wonder if it was a mistake on the part of the cook, or if the NBR pancakes are indeed much better than anything else, including some chain's professional recipe.

What does NBR stand for?

New Best Recipe

Oh, I don't have the book.

I got it after Yossarian's review. It is very American-centric in its recipe choice, but if this is what you want to cook, everything turns out great.

Yeah, I've read the review and it sounded like a nice book.

But I bet it's all in volume measurements.

Yes, it is. I have started sticking post-its with my conversions into my books so I don't have to convert every recipe each time I cook it.

Yeah, I just write the good ones down.

with the used measurements

@rumtscho you take a look at any of the pictures? Or at grive, so you could download the drive to your Linux boxes (but make sure to always use --dry-run, as grive still sometimes wants to do silly things)

I don't plan to use grive, don't need access to the pictures that often

haven't looked at them yet, should do it now because I'm not at home tomorrow

@derobert why does your picture folder contain lots of pictures of nothing, as well as pictures of some things which look like the mutant children of clothespins and cablebinders hanging beside a 2008 calendar?

@rumtscho the pictures of nothing are (hopefully) neutral gray for color balancing. The colored clips are to check the color...

assuming by nothing you mean something like 4659

and of course 4713–15 is what ate the seeds that fell on the floor

There is so much noise in your neutral grey that I thought it could be unfocused foam packaging of the kind which has these pyramidal "peaks"

@rumtscho its an unfocused white cloth

my actual gray card set is supposed to come Monday :-P

Maybe it is some kind of moire pattern. I meant 4665 when I spoke of foam packaging.

By the way, I insist on including the Delikatessen-inspired 4674. Looks great.

Really? You included a picture of the inside of your trash can? I don't think we need that :)

Also, I am not sure your robotic vacuum cleaner is somehow connected to the post.

But the baked pumpkins after it look good. The contrast is very nice. And they somehow have kept their shape.

@rumtscho that's the cloth again, I'm pretty sure. Some of the earlier ones may have been the cutting board

@derobert I'm not sure it will give a better white point than your oven's surface, but whatever.

@rumtscho YES WE DO. Well, maybe a crop of it, to just show the pumpkin guts

@derobert Why do we need to show the pumpkin guts? And if you insisted on showing the pumpkin guts, why didn't you photograph them by themselves, instead of mixed with plastic packaging and moldy pepper parts?

Well, because I scraped the pumpkin guts straight into the trash. Then thought "hey, maybe we'll want a picture" afterwards, and wasn't about to fish them out!

And none of the paper is moldy :-P

Don't take me too serious tonight, I am peeved. Going on a 18 km hike tomorrow, had planned to use my small photography bag to carry food, because it is one-shoulder-only. When I started packing, I realized that it is carried on the wrong shoulder.

wait, how is it shoulder-specific?

It has only one strap, and it is sewed on in such a way that it has to be carried on the right shoulder.

yes, I'm curious how you sew a strap for one shoulder only.

amazon.de/…

It is there in such a way that it goes up and to the right, over the right shoulder, and ends at the low left. It is sewed on diagonally, and has a supporting waist strap too.

Ah, yeah, I see from the video, its actually two straps

Even if it had been one strap, it wouldn't have been possible to carry it on the left shoulder, the bag would have hung in such a strange angle as to be practically useless.

I'll have to carry a normal backpack (actually a small daypack) on one shoulder only. I hate it, but at least it won't be very heavy.

yeah, that sounds annoying

oh, btw, when you do the pumpkin roasting at 425–450, not only do the pumpkins keep their shape, but the shells turn hard. You can use them as bowls afterwards.

It's "grumping on a high level" actually, as the Germans would say. I should be grateful that my shoulder heals well enough that I can go on the hike at all, not be peeved that I have to carry my food on the other shoulder :)

I must try this with the pumpkin temperature, I only know baked pumpkin with the rind so soft they collapse during baking. If they are hemispherical at all, in Bulgaria we tend to use big muscat pumpkins, not the small round ones.

@rumtscho Yeah, when you bake them at a lower temperature, they collapse (you can see the 375 ones doing it in the picture). But higher, and they turn quite hard. I've served pumpkin soup in them before :-)

Not sure if it'll work with non-pie-pumpkins, the pie pumpkins have hard shells to start with

I still can't convert F temperatures easily. I had written them on my oven dial in permanent marker, but it turned out to be not so permanent after all.

All pumpkins have hard shells.

At least all pumpkins I have seen.

@derobert do you scan under Linux?

@rumtscho yes, though normally I use the UI on the printer (its a multifunction device)

@derobert My printer has an UI too, but it is not that comfortable.

hmmm, I'm pretty sure I've used a scanning program that does what you want (but that's actually how my printer's UI handles it)

The multifunctional device at the university does it much better, I had hoped that it can be emulated per software here. And Xsane almost does it. Only I don't understand who thought that having the scan go ahead without waiting for the user to position the page is a good idea.

but, actually, I'd tell you that if you're scanning something non-flat like a book, a camera is a much better option

I am sure that I set it to "flatbed". There is a separate setting for Automated document feeder.

@derobert I have tried it, it is not really that good. Even with the tripod to hold the camera in place and the lighting positioned well (and this setup takes at least 15 min), it is hard to hold the book pages flat enough, they get distorted.

you use software to undistort them... but yeah, that's always a problem with books. Unless you unbind them.

The university library has a book scanner which photographs from above, costs millions of Euro. The results are worse than scanning on the flatbed.

If I unbind the book, I'll just put it in the feeder. But I don't want to do this with expensive books.

@rumtscho that can't be right. Either they got scammed (OK, possible) or they don't know how to use it right.

Actually, I didn't want to do a whole book today, that's way too slow at my home scanner. I wanted to scan the table of contents of Bakewise so I will have a list of the recipes in it.

wow, for that just use camscanner on a phone!

@derobert They didn't get scammed, these things cost a lot because they are made in very small runs. And there are old manuscripts you can't just press on a glass plate.

But the newer heavy-duty Ricohs installed for normal copying are so good it is easier to use them.

They are very quick, have a good UI, and my thumb doesn't get depicted on each page.

trying to find the program I've used before to scan multiple pages from Linux, but apparently my SANE config is currently broken. Wonder when that broke. Been a long time since I used it

@derobert OK, now we have a proof that things can break on Debian too :P

sure, a copy machine works pretty good. Though you usually get that black edge where the book refused to flatten

@rumtscho not sure, I've never actually done it from this machine. So maybe it was never configured on this machine :-P

@derobert This is unavoidable, but doesn't disturb me much.

it disturbs me when I'm paying for the ink :-P

The thing I don't like at my home scanner that it automatically does a preview before each new scan task. And it can't handle multi-page scan tasks from its own UI. So I have to start a new task after each repositioning - it only takes two button pushes, but it first does a preview scan and after that a full scan.

@derobert I don't copy the books, I only scan them.

@rumtscho ah, that sucks. Mine does a preview (to find the page boundry, I think), but it does it all as one job. So it all goes into one PDF, for example.

as in, it does all the pages as one job. It scans each page twice (without additional user interaction)

Yes, my scans each page twice too. But I have to wait for it to turn the page, so this scan-twice is dumb, especially since I can set the scan area to A4 so it doesn't need to find a boundary. The scanners at the university scan each page once only.

Yeah, mine only does it twice if I tell it to do auto-page-size

Also they are A3 and scan quickly. I can do about 100 double-pages an hour there, it is not much work to scan a whole textbook. And I get the complete PDF delivered.

At home, I have to wait for each page to get scanned twice, then combine with ImageMagick, which often includes doing the odd conversion first.

That's nice... Though I don't think I'd have the patience to babysit a scanner for an hour.

I can't even set DPI from the printer UI, it just has "text: standard" and "text: high quality" settings.

wow, that's a crappy printer UI

@derobert We are talking about the kind of book which takes 10 minutes per page to read, understand, take notes and memorize. And has 500 pages. 5 hours upfront for scanning is not too bad.

Sorry, 2.5 hours, because I am doing double-pages.

The saddest thing is that the book is also available as an e-book - but it is only accessible online in the flash browser app the publisher wrote. Dependent on Internet access, not readable on any device but a computer with a sufficiently large display, and who knows if it will stay accessible forever.

that's a seriously sucky way to make an ebook available

I'd have to pay $70 for the online edition without even the possibility to download a DRM-ed file.

The paper edition costs double that.

So I ordered it from an affiliated library, and scanned it before I had to return it.

yep, textbooks are way too expensive

Yes, there are some seriously skewed markets around. Textbooks are certainly part of them.

bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683033

... apparently why its not working. Bloody Ubuntu influence :-P

Yep, updating to the experimental package, and it works again

nice