This year I’ve added some narration to the video which is duplicated below for the hearing impaired. Below all that you’ll find my favorite video game of 2019!! Stardew Valley: I was a big fan of Harvest Moon when it came out on the GameCube. My future wife and I spent way more time than […]
Author Archives: Eric Mesa
2019 in Cooking
Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads […]
Review: A Man On the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
A Man On the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin My rating: 4 of 5 stars The book that was used by Ron Howard, et al to make the Apollo 13 movie! I got this book as part of a space-themed Humble Audiobook Bundle. As I was choosing the next audiobook […]
Review: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133 by Neil Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars As usual, the per-story reviews are below this section. But first, a ranking of said stories. The stories I REALLY liked: The Sum of Her Expectations, The Last Boast-Builder in Ballyvoloon, Intro to Prom, Shiomah’s Land Great: Red Lights, And Rain Good: […]
Getting rid of some old Java textbooks
I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be […]
New Dishes I cooked Dec 2019
December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish […]
2019 Annual Self-Portrait
I thought last year’s description was perfect, so I’m going to repurpose it here. Yeah, yeah – even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most […]
2019 in Books
While I continued to read lots of cookbooks in 2019, this was the year of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. On the sequels front, I finished The Cosmere (except for White Sands Vol 3), continued The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. For […]
What I want in #CircuitPython2020
Over on Adafruit they asked the community, “What do you want from CircuitPython in 2020?” What’s CircuitPython? It’s a subset of Python that’s meant to run on embedded processors. Essentially I could use it (on compatible boards) in place of Arduino’s subset of C++ or TinyGo. As you know if you read my 2019 in […]
Last.fm 2019 Listening Trends
In 2019 I went to 5 concerts, starting with Neon Trees and Fitz & The Tantrums in May. Then I saw a bunch of my favorite smaller bands like The MiSbehavin’ Maidens, The Doubleclicks, Lionize, and The PDX Broadsides. Anberlin came out of retirement and so it was great to go see them in concert […]
2019 In Programming
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start […]
A small update on the transition to Miniflux
First of all, I was wrong about needing to trigger it to update. The default configuration is to update the feeds every hour, 10 at a time. This is configurable, but I think that arrangement works fine to me. Having been using it on my phone for a few days now, I’m really liking the […]
Review: Steelheart (The Reckoners, #1)
Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Can Sanderson write a great non-Cosmere book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ I’ve read quite a few superhero decontructions and reconstructions (most famous being Watchmen and Irredeemable), but Sanderson brings something new to the genre, partially by focusing on the folks affected by gods […]
Review: Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day
Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day by The Editors of Extra Crispy My rating: 2 of 5 stars Received this as a gift. I guess I’m spoiled by Milk Street, Meathead Goldwyn, and America’s Test Kitchen, but reading a collection of blog posts put into a book with a […]
Considering moving from Tiny Tiny RSS to Miniflux
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. […]