Rice or pasta is an easy way to extend a meal.
In addition to how to cook Justin’s Perfect Rice®, here is my recipe for using last night’s meat or veggies as today’s Fried Rice
Please enjoy and stay safe.
Tech Support
Technical support topics that can’t easily be found elsewhere.
Stores are out of bread (and tortillas).
Tortillas are easy to make, and they last about a week if stored in an air-tight zip-top bag.
- Combine 2 cups of flour, a pinch of salt, 3/4 cup of water, and about 3 tablespoons of fat (butter, lard, vegetable oil, olive oil)
- Mix
- Roll in to 1″ balls, and then flatten each ball in to a small disc
- Use a floured tortilla press or a rolling pin on a floured surface to roll out each ball to 10″.
- In a lightly-greased skillet on medium heat, cook each one on both sides for about 1 minute per side.
Makes 8-10 tortillas.
Here are things you can do with tortillas:
- Quesadillas
- Sprinkle some meat and other toppings on half of a tortilla
- Sprinkle some cheese on it.
- Fold in half
- Grill or fry for 2-3 minutes per side, until the cheese melts and the tortilla is golden-brown on both sides
- Fajitas / Street tacos
- Cut your meat in to strips.
- Grill or fry over high heat with onions and peppers
- Steam some tortillas to warm them, or use a microwave tortilla warmer
- Serve family-style with cheese, sour cream, pico, and other toppings
- Nachos
- Tear tortillas in to strips
- Bake until crispy
- Cover with chili, cheese and other toppings
- Bake until cheese melts
- Roll / wrap – makes an excellent substitute for a sandwich. Lay out a tortilla, then stack on lunch meat, cheese, and other sandwich toppings, and simply roll it up.
- Thin-crust pizza
- Stack 2 tortillas, with some cheese sprinkled between them
- on the top tortilla, spread some pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, or whatever you have laying around
- Sprinkle some cheese
- Add toppings
- Sprinkle some more cheese (do it, or you’re a communist)
- Bake for 10 minutes until the bottom tortilla is crispy and the cheese is melted
- Enchiladas. I’m not quite sure how that works, but my wife does. I’m sure you can google for a recipe.
- Burritos
- Lay out a tortilla
- Fill with beans, rice, meat, cheese and other toppings
- Fold carefully
- Enjoy
- Chimichanga
- Take that burrito, and deep fry it
Reduce PDF Size of a Scanned Document
I recently had to e-mail a multi-page document – e-mail is that awesome 1990’s technology for submitting documents when the recipient doesn’t have a secure file transfer server – only to find that the attachment size was too large.
I scanned in three separate multi-page documents and then used pdfSAM to combine them all in to a single, 9-page PDF document.
Are you with me so far?
The final file size was over 80 meg!
I didn’t think anything of it, until my e-mail server complained about the attachment size.
After a little bit of thinking…
- I had used xsane, a GUI front-end for SANE.
- Where Windows has TWAIN, Linux has SANE.
Connecting a scanner to a PC pre-TWAIN used to be a kludge, and TWAIN was the answer: a manufacturer-independent hardware interface and driver standard that provides a scanner user interface, and also allows third-party programs to access any TWAIN-compliant scanner via a standard Application Programming Interface (API).
SANE works like TWAIN, but separated in to two pieces: front-end and back-end. The back-end drivers allow the OS to talk to the scanner hardware, and provides generic access to other applications (like the TWAIN API). This allows any of several SANE front-end user interfaces to access any SANE back-end, even across a network. Very cool stuff, and there is even a SANE shim for Windows that provides TWAIN services, while using SANE on the back-end. - As my print server is a Raspberry Pi (Linux) and my main PC is Linux, it made the most sense to set the Pi up as a SANE back-end server.
- I scanned all three multi-page documents using xsane, as mentioned, which allows you to scan a multi-page document and then save it as a single file.
- While poking around a bit, I noticed that the intermediate format for xsane’s multipage applet is TIFF.
- Like most other computing standards from the 1980’s, TIFF just isn’t very good, especially compared to modern file formats that use much better compression algorithms.
Unfortunately, TIFF was developed as a standard file format for scanners, which means that any time you’re dealing with scanners (or, oh lord, fax machines), be prepared to deal with TIFF, despite the fact that it’s a completely obsolete standard. I mean, while we’re at it, let’s just fire up the 1200 baud modem and a copy of Telix, and we can XMODEM some TIFF files, shall we??
So it became clear that xsane / sane was just saving a bunch of TIFF files, and then copying them straight in to the PDF.
It turns out that Linux has a built-in command to split a PDF apart:
pdftoppm file.pdf imagefilename -png
This will create an image file for each page of the PDF, stored in PNG format. For example, if file.pdf is 5 pages, you will get:
imagefile-1.png imagefile-2.png ... imagefile-5.png
These can then be recombined using ImageMagick’s convert:
convert imagefile-*.png newfile.pdf
As predicted, the resulting file was around 20 meg – 25% of the original file size.
Internally, PDF probably stores the images as TIFF, but in either case, the round trip through the PNG format is what affected the compression.
PNG performs “filtering” or normalization of the image before it’s compressed, and thus, the resulting image is “more compressible”, and the artifact of this process is that going back to TIFF (or any other format) makes the older compression algorithms perform more efficiently with the normalized image data, resulting in a much smaller file size.
Moral of the story:
If you have a huge PDF (or any kind of source image), try converting to PNG and then back again, which might make the original compression more efficient.
Other options:
- Subsample the document down to a lower resolution. I scanned at 300 DPI, but my next option if that didn’t work was going to be to subsample the document down to 150 DPI, which would result in a 4x file size reduction.
- Go from color to grayscale or black-and-white. Going grayscale from color usually results in about a 4x reduction in file size, and black and white from color might result in readability issues, but can save 16x or greater from the file size.
How to Prevent Freezer Burn
What is Freezer Burn?
Freezer burn occurs in meat and other frozen items (especially meat), where the water sublimates (goes from a solid to a gas) and then condenses as ice crystals. This leaves the food severely dehydrated, with a stiff, stringy texture that most people consider to be quite disgusting.
Especially in a zip-top bag, once the bag is frozen, the plastic becomes stiff and unpliable. Although the moisture content within the bag would normally be in constant equilibrium, once you start shuffling through the freezer, plastic zip-top bags can fracture and create tiny holes that allow dry air in, and moisture out. This is also the reason why most freezer bags leak once you pull them out of the freezer.
Once the zip-top bag has a few nicks and dents, freezer burn will quickly form in the vicinity of any holes in the bag, as moisture is allowed to sublimate and simply leave the bag through the tiny holes, to form ice crystals on the inside wall of your freezer!
As the moisture leaves, the food left behind is destroyed on the cellular level, making it tough, stringy, and unpalatable.
Typically, you either need to cut off freezer-burned portions, or throw away food that has become severely freezer burned.
Freezer burn can start to form in as little as 3 months, and by 12 months, the food in question is probably ruined.
Vacuum Sealing
If you vacuum seal your food, this removes air, reducing air pressure and preventing sublimation. The plastic liner used for vacuum sealing is much thicker and tougher than a freezer bag, and thus, the food will last a lot longer.
Vacuum-sealed food lasts much longer – up to 2 years.
How to Prevent Freezer Burn
Freezer burn forms when food is exposed to air inside the freezer, which allows the moisture in the air to sublimate and then migrate elsewhere, leaving behind stringy, nasty food.
This is one of the main reasons that the grocery store packaging for most meat products is not your friend. It’ s better to re-package them in a zip-top or vacuum-sealed bag before freezing.
The Trick to Keeping Food Forever
The trick is to pack your food, especially meat, in fat or liquid before it freezes.
This eliminates contact with the air, preventing sublimation.
- Make sure there are no internal air pockets. Even though the moisture level is kept in equilibrium, internal air pockets can allow food to shed moisture over time (ice crystallizes elsewhere), leaving the food with a tough texture and stale taste.
- Put the food in a zip-top bag.
- Add any of the following:
- Water.
- Marinade.
- Brine.
- Olive oil or some other fatty oil that will eventually congeal.
- Cover in butter or some other fat
- Make sure the food is covered completely, and squeeze out all of the air as you seal it.
- Freeze.
Notes:
- Cooking oil, vegetable oil, and other non-fatty oils remain liquid, even at freezer temperatures. This means that over time, your zip-top bag can take damage, and the oil can leak out, leaving a greasy mess in your freezer.
- If you use a brine or marinade, reduce the salt content. Everything freezes from the outside to the inside. As the bag of brined / marinated food freezes, the water in the brine crystallizes, forcing salt and other elements further in to the food, making the flavor much more concentrated. What you would consider to be a “normal” amount of salt for a brine or marinade can easily result in the food being way too salty when you thaw it later.
One trick is to simply add 50% water to a brine or marinade. - As meat freezes, ice crystals form inside the meat, which destroys the cellular structure. Later, when you thaw it out and cook it, the meat can be dry and tough as a result. If you freeze meat in a bag of oil, brine, or marinade, the larger ice crystals form at the edges of the bag, in the liquid surrounding the meat, whereas the ice crystals that form inside the meat itself are much smaller, because the meat is further from the air interface, and the rate of freezing increases over time. This means that your meat, if frozen properly, will come out much more tender and juicy once thawed, drained, and cooked.
What began as an apparently simple task ended up as a trip down the rabbit hole.
Read on, or just download here.
Bluestacks used to be an ‘OK’ alternative to an Android emulator for PC. Now, it’s just crap.
It’s rare to find a tool that’s simple, small, versatile, and useful.
It’s even more rare for me to realize that I had been staring at such a tool for years, and never realized it.
Thou shalt protect your data.
Passwords are the most versatile and effective way to protect your data, but most people break these simple rules.
Using a weak or ineffective password strategy in an always-connected world means that your money, data, and identity are at risk.
Thou shalt follow these commandments in order to protect yourself, both online and offline.
The default star rating system in zen cart, for registered users who post a review, is less than spectacular.
Here is how to fix it with CSS + Javascript
Read on…
Many retail stores want you to go out early on a cold Friday morning to stand in line for that TECHNOLOGY DEAL THAT’S TOO GOOD TO PASS UP.
There are no good technology deals on Black Friday.
Watch Out for Personal Computing Door Busters
Regardless of what you see on TV, or what it says in the newspaper flyer this week, DON’T BUY IT.
Don’t buy:
- Tablets
- Phones
- Drones
- Televisions
- Computers
- Laptops
- Monitors
- Robots
The retail stores know how to manipulate the specs so that they can sell you a cheap piece of crap at a “discounted” price.
- That tablet for $150? Yep, it’s worth $150 – it’s not “discounted” from $300. It’s a CHEAP PIECE OF CRAP.
- Buy your loved one a new phone for $200? Yep, it’s the one with 32GB of memory, the crappy camera, the short battery life, and no external memory card. It’s not the $500 phone you think you’re buying.
- Every kid wants a drone! I’ll get one for little Timmy! Timmy is going to HATE a crappy little 3 inch drone that he can’t fly very well because it sucks.
- YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT A 4K TV!!!!! Yes, you can. Wait until the new models come out in February. Right now, you’re buying last year’s model at this year’s price, at a slight discount because they have to get rid of it anyway.
- Time to upgrade to a state of the art computer! A 16GB Chromebook is NOT AN UPGRADE from anything!
- You get the picture
Instead, all online retailers, including the brick and mortar stores, are offering great deals online all week, and you can probably get a “real” deal next week during Cyber Monday as well.