Jan. 21, 2025
We had great success with our sticky toffee pudding as a Christmas Day dessert. It’s a hybrid of a recipe by Jamie Oliver, one that we found in a gluten free cookbook, and one for a make-ahead pudding by the hairy bikers.
Ingredients Pudding 200-250g chopped dates 200ml boiling water (or tea) 100g softened unsalted butter 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda 170g sugar (85g golden caster, 50g light soft brown, 35g dark soft brown) 170g self-raising flour 1/2 teaspoon mixed spice 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 2 eggs (room temperature) Sauce 110g unsalted butter 110g sugar (half light soft brown sugar, half dark soft brown sugar) 140ml double cream Method Pudding Soak the chopped dates in the boiling water with the bicarbonate of soda for 30 minutes.
Tags: Recipe, Food, Twenty Five, Gluten Free, Dessert
Jan. 20, 2025
Around this time last year, I wrote in praise of writing a diary. I also rather misanthropically referred to it as a “negativity casket” because I found that I was pouring a lot of negative feelings into the notebook. It’s not really a diary as such because I don’t write everyday and I also make other non-diaristic notes, but it does appear to have been something of a process that has helped me to work through my negative feelings.
Tags: Diary, Writing, Notebooks, Twenty Five
Jan. 19, 2025
I’m having trouble finding something to write about today. Partly the problem of having a productive weekend of doing things rather than ruminating on blog topics. So unfortunately, we get another space-filling post.
I’ve got lots of books on the go at the moment, including “Orbital” which won the Booker prize this year and “Otherlands” which is a really cool book about natural history going back in time through the eras of the Earth.
Tags: Consistency, Blogging, Writing, Ideas, Twenty Five
Jan. 18, 2025
I’ve written some guides about how to play as various leaders in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, covering Hojo, Alexander, Amanitore, and Qin in his Mandate of Heaven persona. I’m pretty sure I also wrote a guide to Gorgo at some point but all I can find are game screenshots I took one of the times that I played as her.
As such, I lost momentum on what would have been quite a nice writing project.
Tags: Twenty Five, Civ VI, Civ VII, Computer Games, Software
Jan. 17, 2025
Having recently completed my review of 2024’s best albums, I’ve been reflecting on what a strange year it was for me in terms of the music I listened to. According to my Last.fm annual report, I listened to 51% more music in 2024 compared with 2023 (and 2023 was itself a peak listening year). Moreover, I listened to 709 artists, of which 37% were new discoveries. I listened to over 2 albums a day apparently, with Acopia being the album I listened to most often.
Tags: Twenty Five, Album Digest, Apps, Music
Jan. 16, 2025
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever been given about how to tackle programming problems is to treat your code as comments that describe your program to the computer, whilst the comments that are there for humans to read should tell them how the program is supposed to work.
In recent days I have come to a realisation that you also need to try and see things as the computer sees them, rather than expecting it to see what you can see.
Tags: Coding, Software, Twenty Five, Ideas
Jan. 15, 2025
Getting back to my occasional album revisits, I’d like to consider the 2021 Parquet Courts album “Sympathy For Life”. This is partly because I own it on vinyl and put it on the other day while I was doing some rather humdrum data downloading at work. It’s that kind of album, quite loose and jam-based.
Recorded just before lockdown, first in New York then at the Real World studios in Box, the album seems eerily prescient of what was to come later in the Covid pandemic.
Tags: Album Revisit, Parquet Courts, Music, Rock, Indie, Twenty Five
Jan. 14, 2025
Ingredients 1 tbsp of sunflower oil or other high smoke point oil 60g cornflour 60g gluten-free flour 3 eggs pinch of salt (if wanted) pinch of sage (if wanted) 200ml of milk (substitute with non-dairy options if wanted) Four sausages Method Preheat an oven to 220C (200C for a fan-assisted oven). Pour some high smoke-point oil into a metal pan (approx one tablespoon), add the sausages and warm for five minutes in the oven while preparing the batter.
Tags: Recipe, Gluten Free, Twenty Five, Food
Jan. 13, 2025
In searching for something to write about today, I wondered whether I had ever written about Pilates on this blog before. I modified the search of my posts from yesterday’s post to look for the word Pilates1 and it only came up once in a post about revisiting my ambitions ten years on.
There I wrote:
“I haven’t taken up meditation at all because the inside of my head is way too noisy.
Tags: Life Experience, Pilates, Twenty Five, Consistency, Fitness
Jan. 12, 2025
I asked:
For my blog I have a folder called posts. In that folder are more folders that are named for the slug of each post, as per the conventions of the Hugo static site generator. Those folders each contain a markdown file named index.md, each of which has a YAML header. Draft posts have a YAML key called draft which has the value true. Please can you write me a shell script that I can run from the directory above posts that tells me which folders in the posts folder contain draft posts?
Tags: Software, Twenty Five, Blogging, Drafts, Content Management, Meta
Jan. 11, 2025
2025 might be a tough year, but I am going to try and blog every day. It means that now and then I might be writing a post like this one, where I am writing for the sake of continuing the streak. If I find myself doing that too often then I will take the hint and stop trying!
This weekend was the 3rd round of the FA Cup, which is when the premier league and championship teams enter the competition.
Tags: Twenty Five, Blogging, Consistency, Writing, Meta, Portsmouth F.C.
Jan. 10, 2025
Bolis Pupul (the stage name of Boris Zeebroek) is an artist on Soulwax’s Deewee label. “Letter to Yu” is his debut album, inspired by a trip to Hong Kong to investigate his family history. It investigates themes of place, family, and identity. We are exposed to everywhere all at once but we’re also all from somewhere, even if it’s somewhere we might not recommend or understand.
Aside from the theme of the album, it’s a satisfying and varied electronic album.
Tags: Twenty Four, Album, Electronic, Bolis Pupul