Audio, Mashups

Imma Gonna Be – The Proclaimers vs Black Eyed Peas Mashup

How well do you think the songs “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers and “Imma Be” by Black Eyed Peas go together? If you guessed “perfectly,” then you’re right. Check out this mashup I made called “Imma Gonna Be.”

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Audio, Doughboys, Drops

Doughboys Drop: Tricky

Doughboys is a podcast about chain restaurants. In each episode, they play a listener-submitted audio clip that is usually a mashup or remix of audio from previous episodes. This is one that I made.

Some drops practically write themselves, much like this Doughboys drop that I made in about 15 minutes. Some might ask if a drop is that easy to make, is it even worth making? Probably not, but it made me laugh.

If the player doesn’t load right here, you can download the file directly.

Update: This drop was played in the episode “800 Degrees with Betsy Sodaro” and is followed by both Nick and Mitch correctly pronouncing my last name, something that is rare for even one person to accomplish.

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Audio, Comedy Bang Bang

Comedy Bang Bang Plugs Theme: Feliz Novvy-Doggy

Comedy Bang Bang is a comedy podcast. In each episode, they play a listener-submitted song or audio clip to introduce and/or close the Plugs section of the show. This is one that I made.

Comedy Bang Bang is a comedy podcast. As it’s been running for almost thirteen years, there is a lot of lore, and I would sound insane if I tried to explain it all, but long story short, I submitted this clip as a Plugs theme. (If you know, you know.)

It’s sampled from episode 731, Nutshell Yourself, where host Scott and friend Jason Mantzoukas ring in the beginning of November, a.k.a. Novvy-doggy.

If the player doesn’t load right here, you can download the file directly.

Update: Feliz Novvy-Doggy was played as the closing-up-the-plug-bag theme on episode 732, “Pause and Respond.” Sadly, Scott credited a different listener for it, which will make it difficult for me to parlay this newfound fame into fortune.

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Audio, Doughboys, Drops

Doughboys Drop: L’Chaim

Doughboys is a podcast about chain restaurants. In each episode, they play a listener-submitted audio clip that is usually a mashup or remix of audio from previous episodes. This is one that I made.

It’s another Doughboys drop from yours truly, this time riffing on Mitch’s praise (and pronunciation) of Kayem hot dogs.

When I went to look for a clip of either of the hosts mentioning “kosher” or “Jewish,” I immediately found an exchange where they both said “L’chaim” multiple times, so it’s possible that this drop could have used those clips, but then it would have been even less worth it.

If the player doesn’t load right here, you can download the file directly.

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Audio, Doughboys, Drops

Adventures in Audio Editing – My First Doughboys Drop

Doughboys is a podcast about chain restaurants. In each episode, they play a listener-submitted audio clip that is usually a mashup or remix of audio from previous episodes. This is one that I made.

Doughboys is a podcast about chain restaurants hosted by two comedians, and a regular feature on the show is the featuring of user-submitted “drops” — remixes of content from previous episodes, almost always involving music.

I’ve been a listener for years, but I’ve never submitted a drop… until now.  I’ve used the theme from the old Electric Company segment where they sound out words along with some choice clips from a few different Doughboys episodes.

If the player doesn’t load right here, you can download the file directly.

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JavaScript, Programming, Typo.js

Typo.js 1.2.1 Released

I’ve tagged and released version 1.2.1 of my pure JavaScript spellchecker, Typo.js on npm. The only change in this version from 1.2.0 is that it’s now less susceptible to a regular expression Denial of Service attack, which is to say that it more elegantly handles .aff files with lots of consecutive whitespace. (Thanks to huntr.dev for reporting the issue.)

Some stats and fun facts:

  • Typo.js is 10 years old this year!
  • I initially wrote it because Chrome did not expose its spellchecking API to extensions like Firefox did, and I wanted to port YouTube Comment Snob to Chrome.
  • Typo.js is a dependency is 27 other npm projects.
  • It’s downloaded about 50,000 times per week via npm and has been downloaded more than 7.2MM times.
  • It has 408 stars on GitHub and is by far my most popular GitHub repository.

 

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Maker, Woodworking

I Made Some Karate Belt Racks

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine needed a karate belt rack for her son who had begun racking up the belts in his karate class (pun definitely intended). The racks available on Amazon were of suspect quality, so I made one for them out of maple.

Two years later, she has another son who is also racking up the belts (puns are funnier the second time), so I made him a contrasting one out of walnut.

If you’re interested in making one yourself, each slat is 14″ wide, 1.5″ tall, and 5/16″ thick, and I chamfered all of the front-facing edges. They’re spaced about 7/8″ apart, and the boards that they’re glued and pin-nailed to (from the back) are 1/2″ thick and 1.5″ wide. The entire rack is about 51″ tall, large enough to display twenty belts.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: What do you get when you cross Brazil and Botswana? Full.

You. Me. “Cooking Around the World.” This week’s entry is a classic teamup: bread from Botswana and stew from Brazil. Specifically, the bread is Botswanan diphaphata and the stew is Brazilian feijoada.

The bread is not dissimilar to an English muffin; I used this recipe from Gourmet Vegetarians. The stew is a cornucopia of meats slow-cooked along with a black bean base. I followed this recipe and used pork shoulder, corned beef, chorizo (which provided most of the seasoning), kielbasa, and a ham shank. It was delicious; all of the meat was fall-apart tender.

Continue reading →

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Cevapi

Today in “Cooking Around the World”, there’s another variation on ground meat shapes: cevapi from Bosnia. This meat is beef and pork, and this shape is little sausages.

I followed this recipe, and it tasted exactly like it’s shaped: oblong.  Luckily, I didn’t have to have to have the most stressful restaurant experience ever in order to taste them.

Previous Entries in Cooking Around the World

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Unboliviable

In my ongoing “Cooking Around the World” series, Bolivia is up next, and like many other South-American countries, their cuisine seems to be centered on grilled meat. So, I give you: grilled meat.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Bheautiful Bhutan

Bhutan is the next country on my list for “Cooking Around the World”, and I tried to make a Bhutanese potato dish called Kewa Datshi, but it turned out closer to potatoes au gratin that I think it was supposed to (and it did not photograph well).  

The recipe I used was from Shruti on AllRecipes. My verdict: at least I tried!

Previous Entries in Cooking Around the World

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Okey-Dokey, Yovo Doko

Benin doesn’t have many options for representative dishes for my “Cooking Around the World” challenge, but the one I found and made was little doughnut balls called yovo doko:

 

 

I used this recipe from The Blvck Gourmet. We dipped them in chocolate syrup, which probably isn’t traditional, but nobody objected.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: You Better Belize I’ll Be Making This Chicken Again

For our stop in Belize on my Cooking Around the World Tour, I made a Belizean stewed chicken dish served with kidney beans with rice and potato salad:

Belizean stewed chicken with kidney beans and rice and potato salad

I didn’t make the potato salad myself because I’m the only one in my family that likes it, but I did make the chicken, rice, and beans from scratch, and they were great. I couldn’t find a definitive recipe, but I relied heavily on this one from My Hungry Tum, this one from Explore Cook Eat, and this one from He Needs Food.

Previous Entries in Cooking Around the World

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Woodworking

How to turn your Irwin Quick-Grip clamps into decking clamps

If you’re building a deck or replacing decking, you have probably found that it would be helpful to have a clamp to hold the deck boards in place while you attach them. You could spend $52 for a specialized decking clamp, but you probably already have at least one Irwin Quick-Grip bar clamp that you could modify in just a few minutes (if you don’t want to spend $5 on the conversion kit Irwin offers).

Just remove the yellow rubber cap from the fixed jaw (the end opposite the handle) and file down the plastic from the first 3/4″ so it looks like this:

Now the clamp jaw will fit between the deck boards, so you can use it to pull bent boards into alignment, like so:

When you’re done with your deck (if one ever really finishes building a deck), you can put the rubber cap back on the jaw and continue using your clamp like normal, and no one will be the wiser.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Belgium for Dinner

Although French fries are arguably Belgium’s national dish, for this week’s entry in Cooking Around the World, I made Belgian Liège waffles — the yeasted version of the deep-pocketed batter-based breakfast that we’re all familiar with. Unsurprisingly, these cakes covered in syrup, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce were a hit.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: The True BBB

As I continue doing this thing where I cook a dish from every country, I’ve been looking for ways to speed it up a little. So this week, I made a meal out of the three B’s: Barbadian pigeon peas and rice, Bahamanian pineapple pie, and Belarusian draniki (pork-filled potato pancakes).

Our review of each was the same: fine, but I wouldn’t make them again.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Fool me once, shami on you. Fool me twice, shami on paratha.

This week in my Cooking Hero World Tour, my taste buds are visiting Bangladesh. I made shami kebabs and paratha flatbread; we ate them together with lettuce and tomato like a taco or gyro. I liked it — it was like falafel and hamburgers had a baby, and I ate that baby.

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Cooking, Food, Maker, Woodworking

Cooking Around the World: Machboos and Maamoul, the original M&M

Bahrain is up next in my challenge to cook the national dish of every country, and I made chicken machboos plus maamoul cookies for dessert.

The chicken machboos was not too different from the many chicken and rice dishes that serve as national dishes for other countries, but it used some more fragrant spices like cinnamon and cardamom. I liked it, but it’s not my preferred flavor profile for a savory dish.

For the cookies, I took a shot at making my own maamoul mould. I carved a 1 3/8″ hole into a piece of walnut scrap with a Forstner bit and then scalloped the edges with a rotary tool. It turns out this was mostly a waste of time, since the cookies lost all detail during baking. This might be due to the dough being too dry, which it definitely was.

Sorry to anyone who was hoping to read about a Bahamanian dish this week; it has been postponed until the fresh seafood selection in southern Oregon can accommodate it.

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: From A to Zerbaijan

It’s been another week since my last passport stamp in my culinary world tour, and this week, I’m stopping in Azerbaijan for some baliq shashlik and tenbel pakhlava.

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Baliq sashlik is a platter of fish fillets that were marinated in lemon and dill and then grilled on skewers (although I removed them from the skewers before taking the photo). I realized that this was the first time I have ever cooked fish in my life that wasn’t previously frozen and deep-fried, and it was, if I do say so myself, not bad.

Tenbel pakhlava is a sort of less time-intensive baklava — it has two thick layers of meringue-covered nuts plus three layers of pastry. This was fine, but I would still prefer baklava (although I’ll never make baklava myself). I may have undercooked it, since the center pieces were pretty gooey, but the edge pieces were nice and crunchy.

That’s the last A country — there are only approximately 25 letters to go!

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Cooking, Food

Cooking Around the World: Tafelspitz, Bratkartoffeln, and Sachertorte. Gesundheit!

Tonight’s meal in my series of national dishes was Austrian from start to finish. The main course was Tafelspitz (beef cooked in broth) served with Bratkartoffeln (fried potatoes with bacon and onion), and dessert was Sachertorte, a Viennese chocolate cake.

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I have yet to get the hang of cooking beef via all-day simmering in liquid — it always comes out very very dry, but the broth and carrots from the soup were good. The potatoes were great; it’s hard to mess up potatoes cooked in bacon fat.

The Sachertorte turned out ok for how involved of a recipe it was, but my glaze was closer in consistency to hardened Magic Shell than it was to fudge. I must have cooked it to a higher temperature than it was supposed to go.  As the Austrians say, c’est la vie!

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