• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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It’s so easy to cook Cauliflower poorly, leaving a bland colourless tasteless mush. That’s probably why so many people have such a poor opinion of this wonderful vegetable. One solution to this flavour problem is to add a bunch of salt and fat and turn a healthy daily side into a calorific threat food — just add some bacon and cheese, et voila! I definitely do this from time to time, as a treat, but that kind of exuberance is not a part of my daily diet. I want to enjoy cauliflower while keeping it healthy, and at this stage I’ve found lots of ways of doing that. In this post I’m going to share four of my favourite cauliflower recipes, and I’m going to focus on just those where cauliflower can be the only vegetable in the recipe. If you want to add some colour to the mix, you can replace up to half of the cauliflower with broccoli in all these recipes, and some are actually a little nicer when you do that, but the all work really well with cauliflower, and only cauliflower as the main ingredient. I might share some of my other recipes pairing cauliflower with things like courgettes (?? zucchini), sugar-snap peas (?? snow peas), shallots, red onions, and even cooking apples in future, but today I want the much maligned and under appreciated cauliflower to be the star of the show!

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I’ve spoken a lot on recent Let’s Talk Photo episodes about how my iPhone has become my primary camera, and how the ultra-wide angle lens is one of the features of the recent iPhones that excites me most. The reason why is simple — different focal lengths (zoom levels) give you different perspectives, and you can’t compensate for that by moving closer or further away from your subject. When I’m shooting artistically, zooming really isn’t about getting closer, I have feel for that — it’s about controlling the background by altering the perspective (literally).

Anyway, I was out walking this morning and came across a scene that illustrates the point nicely. I was on the grounds of St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth (well within my 5km limit and socially distancing like a responsible citizen) when I noticed that both the blue Wood Anemones and some white Daffodils were in bloom in the old apple orchard. That presented a scene with three interesting things — the two different types of flower, and the gnarly trunks of the old apple trees.

I made a point of taking the same photo with each lens to see how that changed the scene, and hence, the story the photo told. Ordinarily I would have kept the best, shared it on Twitter, and then deleted the other two, but given recent podcast episodes, I kept all three so I could use them as a practical example instead.

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As of October 2020, if you go to Microsoft’s site and download the very latest version of Teams and install it on a brand new Mac running the very latest version of macOS with all patches applied and all the default settings set, the Teams app will fail to log you in because it thinks it can’t see the internet. You’ll get a cryptic error that includes the phrase “Failed to connect to settings endpoint”.

The fix for this is really simple, but it took me for ever to find, so I figured I’d share it with the world and perhaps save other some stress ?

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the whole App Store model in the last couple of months, and that goes double this month with Epic’s choice to use the release of the next major version of their iconic Fortnite game as an opportunity to pick a fight with Apple.

Three things have become extremely clear to me. Firstly, there are no saints or Satans in this drama. Secondly there are no simple solutions — every possible way forward I can conceive of involves tradeoffs. Which makes my third realisation all the more stark — things simply can’t continue as they are. Users are increasingly finding themselves stuck in the middle and having a worse experience for it, and regulators all around the world are taking note. The status quo simply cannot stand, so change is coming, the question is simply what change, and who’ll be in the driving seat.

When I started writing this post I had no idea how I’d end it. I chose to write it precisely because I needed to organise my thoughts, and writing helps me do that. It took a while, but eventually the fog cleared and I was able to marshal my thoughts into a coherent suggestion for how Apple could resolve all this in a positive way.

TL;DR — I think Apple should take the initiative and act before they have a poor solution forced on them, and that they don’t need to throw everything out and start over, but can evolve the current system into one that has a bright future by making just a few important changes.

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This post is part 39 of 39 in the series Taming the Terminal

In the previous instalment we learned how to use the tmux as a replacement for the screen command which has been deprecated on RedHat Enterprise Linux (and hence CentOS too). In this instalment we’ll take TMUX to the next level, making use of the fact that a single TMUX session can contain arbitrarily many windows, each consisting of arbitrarily many panes.

As a reminder from last time — in the TMUX-universe, sessions contain windows contain panes. By default a session contains one window which contains one full-width and full-height pane. Windows can be thought of as stacking behind each other, like tabs in a browser, and panes are arrayed next to each other within a window.

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This post is part 38 of 39 in the series Taming the Terminal

Since we covered the screen command in instalment 36, it has been deprecated in Red Enterprise Linux 8, and the official advice from Red Hat is to transition to the tmux command. Having been a fan of screen for years, I was skeptical, but I shouldn’t have been — tmux can do everything screen can, it can arguably do it better, and, it can do much more than screen ever could!

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This instalment is hosted on GitHub — Read the Show Notes Here.

This instalment is hosted on GitHub — Read the Show Notes Here.

This instalment is hosted on GitHub — Read the Show Notes Here.

This instalment is hosted on GitHub — Read the Show Notes Here.

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