bw @benjaminwil@tiny.tilde.website

another good plant

“What we must do is be ruthlessly skeptical. It is important not to let overconfident jabberers get away with presenting themselves as sages, saviors, and scholars.“

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/how-to-pretend-that-you-are-smart

classic gin & tonic, with lime 👌

pseudo review: instead of straight up tonic water, i’m using a locally-made tonic concentrate and conventional (sodastream) soda water. this is a very economical way of making drinks that require tonic, and i am a fan. the concentrate is from rootside provisions and i can very much recommend it: https://www.rootsideprovisions.com/

i read an interview with star trek: voyager’s kate mulgrew recently where she complained about how many times they changed her hairstyle throughout the show’s run.

and now, i have just witnessed, in the episode basics, part ii: a scene where they literally cut off 5 locks-worth of her hair and use it to start a fire in a star trek cave. it’s incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmPX3nkKLps

2.50 oz vodka
0.25 oz lavender syrup
+ a pinch of black pepper
+ ice

add syrup to a glass of ice, then add vodka, then stir to chill, then use a fine strainer to strain into a martini glass.

review: just was given some fresh lavender and was able to make some lavender syrup with it. it is so effective, even in such a small quantity here. this is a perfect, difficult to screw up drink. definitely will come back to it.

historic fire ~ by bw

2.00 oz dark rum
0.50 oz lime juice (fresh)
+ lots of ice
+ smoked ginger ale (fever tree tonics makes this)

add rum, lime juice to tall glass filled with ice. fill remaining space with smoked ginger ale.

review: my weird take on the dark and stormy in a house without ginger beer. would be nice to add a little more smokey something next time. something like sesame oil?

mexican martinez ~ bw variant

2.25 oz tequila resposado
0.50 oz vermouth blanco
+ some maraschino cherries (for mixing only)
+ 2 dashes of rhubarb butters
+ ice

stir ingredients and strain into a coupe glass. really sorry if a bit of maraschino cherry meat gets in the glass – use a bit of maraschino liqueur instead if you have it.

review: i think blanc vermouth makes everything taste pure. this is a surprisingly interesting drink and i will make more of them.

for those interested, this is an ergodox. the parts list and build instructions are available at ergodox.io

i ordered the diy cable kits from zapcables.com

and i got the multi-layer acrylic case cut from ponoko.com. i won't link to the github repo i got the case design from because... it didn't quite work out for me, and caused me a couple of problems.

3. the acrylic case had the layer names laser-cut into them. i.e. L2 - LEFT HAND. this was not attractive to me so i painted the underside of the first layer, so that it would hide the layer names from the user.

1. i had to de-solder the usb connector because i didn't do a good job the first time. i destroyed the contacts and ended up having to perma plug in the cable to the microcontroller (instead of having a removable cable.

2. the trrrs connectors were too big for the acrylic case holes. so i had to sand off the edges of them.

after accumulating parts slowly over a couple of years, i finally finished building my own keyboard.

it was my first big soldering project, and i made a few serious mistakes that i cannot undo. but it works and it's comfortable.

the most fun part, honestly, was making the usb and trrrs cables.

i happened upon intercept-tools for the first time today, which is very handy for remapping laptop keys.

it works in x and wayland environments because it intercepts key events at the udev level. i am DE-promiscuous so this pleases me.

https://github.com/benjaminwil/dotfiles/commit/b414b82e236a5ba3d67a54f6d526b95adda6c12c

whisky daisy ~ bw variation

1.00 oz bourbon
1.00 oz rye whiskey
0.75 oz lemon juice (fresh)
0.50 oz simple syrup
0.50 oz amaretto
+ ice cubes

shake ingredients with ice. strain into coupe glass.

review: i had to use amaretto instead of the traditional orgeat. while what i made is pretty great, i can tell why orgeat would be better. it’s missing a bassy nut flavour. looking forward to spending my bar fund’s money on some orgeat.

flying scot

2.00 oz scotch
1.00 oz red vermouth
0.25 oz simple syrup
+ a dash of bitters
+ ice cubes

shake with ice, strain into old fashioned glass.

review: tasted festive. definitively won’t make again, but the scotch-bite was real and i am sure there is a variant of this drink that i’d be more down for. really, really horrible name. there was nothing “flying” about this drink.

tonight’s cocktail ~ pineapple collins

2.00 oz white rum
1.00 oz pineapple juice
0.25 oz simple syrup
+ sofa water
+ ice cubes

mix first three ingredients into a tall glass filled with ice. stir. pour soda water until glass full.

review: not normally my kind of drink, but pretty refreshing. technically you’re supposed to use caster sugar rather than simple syrup – but i don’t have caster sugar and i think what i ended up with is less sweet overall. 👍

last night's cocktail ~ euphoria

2.0 oz white rum
1.0 oz grapefruit juice (fresh)
0.5 oz curaçao
0.5 oz pineapple juice

stirred well with ice.

review: lame name, but i see where they were coming from – the drink is a bit blue and looks sweet ungarnished. next time, i might change up the rum-grapefruit ratio, but good and hard to screw up if you've got the ingredients.

having trouble confirming that this drink exists online, but i swear it's in this book.

@aparrish i watched your 2018 deconstructconf talk today and just wanted to quickly thank you for it. it’s very good and inspiring to me. thank you ~

been working on my first web scraper.

i haven’t actually got to the scraping part yet, as i’ve been learning how to interact with postgresql without an ORM first, then modelling my DB tables. oh, and making a web UI.

next, i’ll be creating a “preview” interface so i can test what should be scraped before scheduling scrape-jobs.

my code is mega shit, but it’s been pretty fun.