Dan J’s Website

A variety of interesting things

All articles

🔖 Antony Johnston - Just Write 🔗

Perennial favourite from one of my heroes, Antony Johnston. One of many exhortations to "write more, more often" that I am trying to actually live.

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🔖 F# for Fun and Profit 🔗

This is basically my go-to site for learning F#. Full of good explanations of concepts, and worked examples.

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🔖 Aaron Parecki's Home Automation Masterpost 🔗

IndieWeb supernerd Aaron shared this post on Micro.blog the other day, and, having just bought Hue bulbs, I definitely want to dig into this. He has a focus on doing home automation while staying off "the cloud", which is totally my jam.

(via @aaronpk on Micro.blog)

(...interesting how he does permalinks to status posts like that! 🤔)

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🔖 What can we do with the Librem 13 v2's USB-C port? 🔗

I asked this question a while back—if I ever get back to playing with my Librem laptop, it's worth keeping an eye on this.

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🔖 Matthew Walker's “Why We Sleep” Is Apparently Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors 🔗

Dang, I was quite compelled by Walker's various podcast appearances. You just can't trust anyone these days. 😏

Well. The fact is, science is hard, uncertainty is the only thing that's certain... and you have to be willing to stay sceptical without checking out entirely.

Honestly, that last might be the hardest thing of all.

All it really means to me is, best to keep experimenting to figure out what sort of sleep schedule suits me.

(via Mark Manson's newsletter)

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Memory Matters

Memory matters.

We need to know what we were, where we came from, to know who we are, where we're going.

This is true of the individual as well as the society, the species.

It's a powerful thing to crack open your journal from five years ago and be reminded …

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Medium Is Bad for the Web

Medium is bad for the web. It’s just one more silo that people pour their creative work into, because it promises convenience and reach. And then it looks like your work is on the internet, but it isn’t, really.

And Medium is arguably more sinister than e.g …

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🔖 Unicode Lookup: Convert Special Characters 🔗

Awesome tool for finding special characters (and their related encodings/code points/etc.) or even taking an unfamiliar character and finding out what the heck it is.

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A Matter of Degrees

It's possible I'll regret using this title to make a pun about the degree symbol (°), instead of saving it for a pun about the weather, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed, when copying a bunch of temperatures from a website into a CSV file into a Markdown table, that all …

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🔖 Markdown Tables Generator 🔗

Sweet (though non-SSL 😜) utility for easily creating tables in a variety of formats (Markdown being the one I'm interested in).

I used it to create the table in this post, by copying the table off of the website, pasting it into a Numbers document, exporting that to CSV, and loading the CSV into this tool. Worked pretty well.

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🔖 Markdown Guide: Extended Syntax Reference 🔗

I can't remember if I'd come across the Markdown Guide before—useful reference for the less-common bits of Markdown, like tables.

In fact, I found the site when searching for evidence that Jekyll supports Markdown tables (it does). The list of tools and what features they support is handy. 👍🏼

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🔖 Cooking Oils and Smoke Points 🔗

I'd been looking for a quick reference for the smoke points of various cooking oils. I tend to use EVOO for everything, or Avocado Oil for higher-temp frying, or as an alternative to Coconut Oil (which is high in saturated fat).

In fact, in addition to containing the useful table below, this article points out that, as a rule of thumb, oils which are solid at room temperature (coconut oil, and, oh, I don't know, butter) tend to be higher in sat fat, and should therefore be used sparingly.

I mean, butter also has a super-low smoke point, but it's pretty much irreplaceable in the dishes that call for it (most baking, for example). At least in this amateur cook's opinion.

Oil Smoke Point °F Smoke Point °C
Refined Avocado Oil 520°F 270°C
Safflower Oil 510°F 265°C
Rice Bran Oil 490°F 254°C
Refined or Light Olive Oil 465°F 240°C
Soybean Oil 450°F 232°C
Peanut Oil 450°F 232°C
Ghee or Clarified Butter 450°F 232°C
Corn Oil 450°F 232°C
Refined Coconut Oil 450°F 232°C
Safflower Oil 440°F 227°C
Refined Sesame Oil 410°F 210°C
Vegetable Oil 400-450°F 204-232°C
Beef Tallow 400°F 204°C
Canola Oil 400°F 204°C
Grapeseed Oil 390°F 199°C
Unrefined or Virgin Avocado Oil 375°F 190°C
Pork Fat or Lard 370°F 188°C
Chicken Fat or Schmaltz 375°F 190°C
Duck Fat 375°F 190°C
Vegetable Shortening 360°F 182°C
Unrefined Sesame Oil 350°F 177°C
Extra Virgin or Unrefined Coconut Oil 350°F 177°C
Extra Virgin Olive Oil 325-375°F 163-190°C
Butter 302°F 150°C

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🔖 Align SVG Icons to Text and Say Goodbye to Font Icons 🔗

I used this article to properly position the little Micro.blog logo next to the Status Feed link in this site's navigation bar. Useful!

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🔖 Libby, by OverDrive - an App for Library Ebooks and Audiobooks 🔗

Looks like a big leap over the old OverDrive app I used years ago. Gotta check this out—it would be nice to patronize my local library with the same convenience that currently drains my bank account to fill up my Kindle. 😅

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2019-11-16-20-55-28-1906991710

This is what a "status"-style post, the kind you'd see on my status feed would look like here on this site. I'm not sure it makes sense here, but this is an experiment.

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🔖 Video: My Philosophy for a Happy Life | Sam Berns | TEDxMidAtlantic 🔗

I'm glad I took the 12 minutes. Don't cheat yourself out of watching the video, but I'm collecting these bullets to remind myself:

  1. Be okay with what you ultimately can't do... because there's so much you CAN do
  2. Surround yourself with people you want to be around
  3. Keep moving forward
  4. Never miss a party if you can help it

Truer words, and all that. 😄

(via Tim Ferriss's "5-Bullet Friday")

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🔖 xkcd: Map Age Guide 🔗

This flowchart for determining the age of a map is half ridiculous and half enlightening.

(via Tumblr)

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Useful Terminal Trick - Putting a Bunch of Files in Eponymous Folders

I just downloaded the caption files to a bunch of video clips, and wanted each one to go in a folder with its same name (minus the file extension), cos that’s where the work on each clip is going to happen. I found a script to do that all …

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Just Getting Started

One of my IndieWeb idols, Brent Simmons, writes about his blog turning 20.

I've said it before, but I always look at blogs like that and think, "Why don't I have one of those?" Congrats to Brent, and thanks to him and every other consistent blogger for helping me keep …

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🔖 One Page Dungeon by watabou 🔗

I have a powerful need. 🤤

via kottke.org

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