salsa

 I don't remember which dried chile I used last time when I made salsa, but this time I used pasilla.

Southern cornbread and buttermilk substitutes

I think this is the third time I've gone looking for this recipe, so into the blog it goes! My thing is savory cornbread. I can't remember if all southern cornbread is savory or not, but this recipe is. Interestingly, the author--Elise Bauer--mentions up front that sugar shouldn't be in cornbread, but then in the recipe she lists sugar as optional, and goes on to explain in the article that it doesn't make the cornbread sweet. I tried it and was surprised to learn that it was true.

The article also calls for a cast iron skillet. I use my cast iron skillet so much it just stays on the stove. But today I'm going to deviate because the oven is currently in use (roast beef in progress). I'll be making cornbread in the toaster oven for the first time, so I bought a 8" cake pan. We'll see how that works out. At first I thought about decreasing the recipe, but since I'm going to make more than one pan of cornbread, that isn't necessary. I think I'll go for two, so I'll follow the recipe twice and whatever is leftover will go in the third batch.

Anyway, here's the link: Southern Cornbread--Simply Recipes

And while I'm on it, I should include this link to buttermilk substitutes from allrecipes.com, since I rarely keep that around. Since I seem to keep yogurt these days, I'll just include here that 

¾ cup yogurt + ¼ cup milk = 1 cup buttermilk

asymmetrical cloning

Okay, so I came up with the bright idea of cloning disks that aren't identical. The target drive is smaller than the source drive, so this doesn't work. So I'm trying to figure out how to do this. Here's what I'm thinking right now. The source is 1 TB and the target is 500 GB. There are three partitions on the source drive. Two of them are small, around 500 MB, and the main partition takes up the rest. The order is 500 MB, ~1TB, 500 MB. So I can copy over the first and last just as they are, with the exact sizes, and then the remaining space goes to partition 2. 

Here's the actual partition information:

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type

/dev/sdb1  *          2048    1126399    1124352   549M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdb2          1126400 1952463634 1951337235 930.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdb3       1952464896 1953519615    1054720   515M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE

So I played around with the numbers on a spreadsheet, and the sectors is end-start+1. And if you divide sectors by size you get 2048.

AND

Disk /dev/sdc: 465.78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors

So, doing the math, if I subtract sdb1 and sdb3 sectors, that leaves 974594096 for my new sdb2. According to DF, only 91G of space is currently being used, so that should be plenty. Then I should be able to do a dd or something. Well a dd will work for the identical ones, but maybe not for the asymmetrical copy. Hmm...

...

Now I'm working with parted, and the sizes are different, which is making me nervous, so I think I'll go with those sizes:

Number  Start   End     Size   Type     File system  Flags

 1      1049kB  577MB   576MB  primary  ntfs         boot

 2      577MB   1000GB  999GB  primary  ntfs

 3      1000GB  1000GB  540MB  primary  ntfs         msftres

...

Now I'm using the GUI partition editor, but I screwed up in my delete and everything is right, but the big partition is sdc3 and that's making me nervous, so I'm going to delete and start over. So here are the numbers

second partition--

size 464.72 GiB

First sector 1,126,400

Last sector 975,712,255

Number of sectors 974,585,856

Third partition--welp doesn't matter because it's copy paste.

Nice versus kind

I'm not sure if I've made this distinction before here, but it is very significant. I went to YouTube and found some very quick examples:

Being "Nice" vs. Being Kind

The thing that stood out with what Andrew Blum said is that being nice is really about you, not the other person. It's about making you feel more comfortable by avoiding confrontation. I like how he called the alternative courageous.

Being nice vs being kind

The thing that stood out in Mark Walsh's explanation is that sometimes niceness and kindness are the same thing, but not always. The photocopy of compassion.

Curry 101

Okay, I've looked this up WAY too many times. I keep Googling 'Curry 101' and not finding the page that I'm looking for. Just now I changed it to 'Curry 101 basics' and that worked. Anyway, the page I was looking for is The Complete Guide to Making Indian Curries at Home from First We Feast. 

DVD Drive not working on my dad's computer

Yesterday I went to see my dad for Father's day. After going out to eat, we went to see my aunt. He had given her one of his computers. A couple of months before he gave it to her the DVD drive wasn't showing up on the computer. It was present in the device manager, but it wouldn't start, and the error that it showed led me to another blog, Computer Repair Guide. The solution to the error message was to remove certain entries from the registry, specifically from

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

I applied the solution and it worked. But it wasn't working at Jean's house. When I checked, the important entry (LowerFilters) was still gone, but the one that it said really didn't matter (UpperFilter) was there, so I deleted that, and it worked again. 

Race was made by racists?

I saw this somewhere the other day, and I don't have time to look up where at the moment. I think Reddit or something. The comment itself is nonsensical, but the truth that it brought home to me is that race is something that we made up, and it just isn't working out. It definitely isn't working for me, and I can just choose to get off this bus. I've always been confused about race, and now I'm realizing it's because it DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE. I'm thinking this is something relatively new. We've got nationalities. That's the big thing. But then there's also the thing I remember hearing about caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid. If that's race, then I guess it's valid, but I don't think it is. Is it ethnicity? I don't think it's that either. Body type? I don't have time to fact check any of this right now, but I wanted to do a brain dump, and that's what this space is for, right?