All posts by Thomas Pindelski

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The Presto Belgian waffle maker

Cooking

No mess, great waffles.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Apart from the fact that it has some of the worst weather in Western Europe and that its ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes Forest is invaded now and then by Germans en route to the delights of Paris and champagne, Belgium really is not famous for anything. Unless it’s Belgian waffles that is, the thick and crunchy type that better greasy spoons serve with lashings of whatever pleases you. Well, all those unelected Brussels bureaucrats have to have some joy in their miserable lives, I suppose, while dictating silly rules about milk and cheese to the masses of sheep they rule.

My old waffle maker, now having seen some two decades of service, is on its last legs and few machines in the home have given rise to so much bad language. No matter how carefully I measure the volume of waffle mix it will randomly overflow leaving the most awful mess to clean up. And now the heated surfaces have started sticking to the waffle, making removal an exercise in frustration. So replacement was called for.

There are more waffle makers on Amazon than crooks in Congress and prices range from under $30 to $300 or so for home models, much more for commercial duty ones. After sifting through the reviews (I only read the one star ones as no one is likely to be paid to leave those) I settled on the Presto flip type. First, it makes really thick Belgian-style waffles which hold your maple syrup well. Second, there’s only one thing, maybe two, to go wrong. A heating element can fail or the hinge might break. I can’t comment on the likelihood of the first, though the hinge seems robust enough. Yes, there’s a small digital beeping clock but it is unconnected to anything and is battery powered. No microchips or electromagnets in sight. There is not even an on-off switch. Plug it in, pull the plug out.


The Presto Belgian waffle maker. Click the image to go to Amazon.
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The Presto Corporation was founded in 1905 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin where doubtless many of the workers were sired by Germans with invasion minded intentions. This was back in the day when America actually made the world’s best home appliances, ones to be used and repaired, not used and disposed of. Now, of course, their products are ‘Designed in America’, just like your iPhone, and also made by slave labor in some hell hole in China. Oh well!

How does it work? Very well indeed. If you use exactly one cup of waffle mix, ‘blobby’ not runny, it will not overflow and yes, the waffle looks almost as good as the one on the box cover. Mine came out very evenly toasted on both sides. You flip the maker after the mix has been poured and the lid closed, which Presto claims is the secret to the waffle’s evenness. Reviews suggest never to use any oil or spray on the ceramic surfaces (no Teflon here, no poisons) and to simply wipe the surface with a damp cloth when you first open the machine. After a 3 minute warm-up, when the red light goes out, I found that 3 minutes with Aunt Jemima pancake mix is perfect, the beeper going off the first time when one minute remains and a second time (5 times!) when the waffle is done. The timer does nothing but beep. It does not turn the power off.

Some suggest flipping the irons over part way through the bake, but that makes no sense as the mix will have stiffened by then. I tried it with and without part way flipping and there was no difference. The waffles are perfect. Release is easy, no tools needed. Crisp outside, tender and fluffy inside. One makes for a very filling breakfast. The irons can be locked in the upright position for compact storage. The plastic upright lock is a tad fragile, so take it easy.

Some comments on Amazon state that Presto does not stand behind its product and that warranty claims are a waste of time, so you have been warned. This is a disposable appliance.

Presto has handy recipes here.

I made the maple pecan waffles in that recipe of theirs and they were excellent. By the way, the thickness at center is 1 1/8″. This is a serious waffle.


Click the image for the recipe.

Recommended.

iPad mini – 2021

iPad

Neither fish nor fowl.

The other day saw me with many accumulated ‘free’ shopping points on Amazon Prime, courtesy of a couple of years of ordering home delivery of groceries during the pandemic (I cannot speak for other states, but Arizona shoppers interpret personal freedom as a right to infect and get infected, dropping masks at the first opportunity, making the supermarkets places to avoid) so I thought I would buy myself a toy.

I no longer have any interest in traditional bulky, inept cameras which lack dozens of the features and capabilities of the iPhone, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max has been my ‘go to’ camera since it was introduced. So a new camera was out. By the way, that iPhone too was more than ‘free’, paid for with the proceeds of all the MFT and FF DSLR hardware.

So I sprung for an iPad Mini, the current 2021 model.


iPad 9.7″ A1893 and the iPad Mini A2567.

I rather think what pointed me in this direction was mention by a friend that saw him with a colleague who whipped out the Mini from his jeans’s back pocket. While I’m not into accidentally sitting on devices, if that can be helped, the idea was planted. And yes, the Mini does indeed fit the rear pocket of a pair of genuine Levi 501 button fly jeans perfectly. Heck, it probably fits the counterfeit pair made in Turkey which are gracing your bottom as I type.


In my Levis – nearly put my back out getting this shot …..

Setup is trivial. I simply downloaded my iPad’s data and apps from the iCloud where I have a monthly backup plan running all of $3.23. But you can just as easily transfer everything from your current iPad. Apple could not improve on this painless process.

On a more serious note I have given up on the Kindle as a reading device having had three fail over the years. They cannot be repaired. Disposable tech at its worst. I read a good deal and while reading on the iPhone 12 Pro Max has been nothing but a joy – light, superbly engineered, nice screen size – the thought occurred that maybe a slightly larger screen than that in the Kindle without the bulk of the full sized iPad would be nice.

For comparison, my iPad is the 6th generation model, now discontinued. The screen is 9.7″ diagonal and the device remains perfectly fine for reading, composing blog entries, noodling with stock charts and the like. The iPad Mini has a screen area 27% smaller than the full size device. Here are the comparative specifications for the iPad and the iPad Mini, courtesy of MacTracker:



Specifications.

While the older iPad adopts the rounded edges found on iPhones through the iPhone 11, the 2021 iPad Mini has the square profile ones found on the iPhone 12 and later. They make for decent single handed holding, provided you have long fingers which can comfortably span the device. Mine do, but only just. The Mini could be 1/2″ to 1″ narrower for maximum comfort. Here are the weights:

  • iPhone 12 ProMax, with bumper – 8.6oz
  • iPad Mini – 10.3oz
  • iPad 6th gen – 16.5oz

Reading using the Kindle app, there is a very noticeable drop-off in brightness at the edges. Enough that it’s irritating, and frankly inexcusable on so costly a device. I measured it at two stops, which is unacceptable – like a 1970 era wide angle lens before computer generated design improve things. Not visible in other apps. Why have no ‘expert’ reviewers remarked on this? (Answer – because they do not read. Most are besotted with puerile games). By comparison, my sixth generation iPad shows no such drop off. Also, auto color temperature management renders a slightly warmer image than the full size iPad.

I fitted a stick on loop strap to aid in holding the Mini when reading in a prone position. There are many styles on Amazon, and it helps when reading sprawled on the sofa, the Mini held up in the air.


For easier prone reading.

For those who like long reading sessions while sacked out on the sofa, this is an essential addition to the iPad Mini in my opinion, especially if your hands are small as you will have difficulty spanning the rear to hold it up.

While the screen can be very bright in room lighting, it remains useless in direct sunlight. Only the Kindle works well there. Screen definition is outstanding, by the way.

Apple chintzed on the screen coating and deleted the oleophobic coating on the iPhone which is really good at fighting fingerprints. No that big a deal but at the price asked that is really cheap of them. There’s Apple for you. Always squeezing those profit margins.

Conclusion:

After a period of hard use I confess that I think the iPad Mini is very poor value for money, especially if you already own a large screen iPhone. The best use case I can think of is if you have a small screen iPhone and no iPad and wish to read a lot. But, in that case, a full-size iPad might be better and the base model is certainly cheaper.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it’s not meaningfully easier to read on the Mini for lengthy periods than on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and the Mini’s management of font sizes, even in native applications like Apple Mail is poor. The native fonts tend to be too small so you go to Settings->Accessibility to adjust them, whereupon the screen displays frequently become a mess.

The implementation of TouchID to sign in with your fingerprint is also quite strange. On the full-sized 9.7″ iPad you simply hold your finger over the big home button at the base of the screen. With the iPad Mini you have to lightly touch the fairly small and narrow on/off switch at the top right of the device. It’s counterintuitive, so much so that Apple was compelled to add a flag below the button when TouchID is called for. Sure, it’s very fast, and I’ve given it a week to see whether this is just a problem with being comfortable with what I know, but I still come to the conclusion that it is a poor design. Fingers do not react well to small, narrow touch surfaces. Indeed, programming fingerprints for this small area button is a chore as the finger(s) has/have to be repositioned many times for all of the fingerprint to be recorded.

At the recommended retail price of $500 it’s just greatly overpriced. I paid $400 plus tax (AMZN special) and I still think that is $150 too much. At the price asked, the device should, as a minimum, include FaceID and a lot more memory. For comparison the current base iPad retails for $329, uses a fast A12 CPU from the iPhone X (and the Mini is indeed very fast, using the A15 CPU from the iPhone 13), and seems priced about right. How a device with a smaller display and battery can cost 60% more than its larger sibling is hard to understand.

One positive note is that I have not found the modest memory capacity of 64 GB to be a limiting factor. It’s half of that in my full size iPad (the current base model chintzes yet again, as the memory is just 64gB – what is it with Apple and gouging for memory?), but I really do not need very much for my purposes which include reading, blogging, the occasional stock market chart, email and so on. There is absolutely no purpose in using the camera if you have a modern iPhone.

If there is a consolation it is that mine was “free“ as I bought it with those accumulated Amazon shopping points. I’ll lend it to my son to see if he likes it. If he does, it is his. If not, it’s out of here. Save your money. If you must have an iPad, the base model at $329 is an excellent value by comparison.

The side-cutting can opener

Cooking

A better mousetrap.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

‘Nerd’ is a derogatory term used by the incurious to describe anyone with an inquiring mind. My friends tend to be nerds. Call me one and I want nothing to do with you for yours is a second rate mind. I have the same contempt for users of this noun as I do for people who tell me they cannot set the clock on their electric gadget. Can’t they read the manual?

Note that membership in my exclusive club does not dictate advanced math skills or a postgraduate degree. What it does mandate, however, is curiosity. Show me a successful person and I will show you one who is curious.

As someone who graduated engineering school at the top of his class with ease in the study of ergonomics (we called it ‘occupational psychology’ back then) I have long been interested in understanding how machines work and also greatly frustrated how often they work poorly. So when a better mousetrap comes along, in this case a can opener, I am interested. “With ease” you ask? When something fascinates you, the design of the man-machine interface in this instance, it’s easy.

I would suggest that no commonly encountered field suffers from poorer ergonomic design than the kitchen. Few ‘standard’ tools found therein seem to even be aware of this field of engineering.

You can learn all about the history of cans and openers in this excellent Technology Connection video well presented by someone with an inquiring mind. A fine, inquiring mind.

The presenter relates, in wonderment, the fact that the side-opening can opener has never really caught on. You get that technology in some electric can openers (about as poor a dedication of engineering effort as the electric carving knife) but the humble $10 hand held device is largely unknown. Yet it is superior to the traditional design which cuts into the top of the can leaving deadly edges for your fingers and coating the cutting wheel in the can’s contents.

The design I am referring to can be had for just $10.

And if the traditional cutter exposes nasty sharp edges to your fingers, the pull-off top on cans with a key is even worse. No matter how hard I try I still occasionally cut myself on these and they invariably need great effort to remove, not to mention the need for a tool to pry the key up or risk damaging your manicure. Bad, bad, bad.

You want to get the linked model of the can opener, not the one with the L-shaped extension arm with a magnet attached. First, there is no need for a magnet to remove the severed lid. Second, that magnet interferes with the pull-open key on cans thus equipped, rendering it useless. How do I know this? Please spare me the embarrassment of answering.


No interference with the key.

The cutting wheel makes no contact with the can’s contents:


The cutting wheel.

Note that the contents of the can are nowhere near the cutting wheel.


The arrow indicates marginal contact of the
cutting wheel with the inside of the lid’s seam.

How about those rectangular sardine tins with those deadly pull-off tops?


No problem with rectangular tins.

And be assured, it is impossible – impossible! – to cut yourself on any newly exposed edge on either the lid or can after using this opener.

Few things in a kitchen are more disgusting than traditional can openers with their cutting wheels encrusted with the contents of who knows how many cans past. And that legacy, replete with bacteria, is waiting to infect the contents of the next can you open. Yes, I always washed mine, but really, that should not be necessary in a properly designed tool.

Drawbacks? Because you are cutting through one layer of a seam which is considerably thicker than the surface of the lid (check the video), the torque required to turn the cutting wheel is, I estimate, three times as great as with traditional models. Meaning it’s non-trivial. No problem for me but this may be an issue for those with arthritic joints.

Secondly, because the can opener cuts from the side of the lid not through the top, you cannot see the cut as you operate the tool. Further, it’s very smooth, so you don’t get that ‘click’ at completion that you do with the traditional style of opener. So as to minimize effort, meaning you want to stop turning the handle the minute you have completed a circle, I make a note of where I have started the cut and wait for that start point to come around again.

Overall, this tool is so superior in every conceivable way I do not see going back to the traditional can opener, ever.

Remove ads from Apple News

iPhone

Too much of a bad thing.

Like any news reader seeking to preserve his sanity, I installed AdBlock on my desktop computer and laptop years ago. At no charge this removes intrusive ads from news feeds, replacing them with a blank space or a grey box.

And it has worked well for years.

But when Apple’s iOS devices added Apple News, there was a handy news consolidator whose content you could curate. Well, whose feeds you could curate as the content, which started with light and bearable advertising a couple of years back, has let greed rear its ugly head. AdBlock did not work on Apple News content. Read a typical Washington Post story on your iPhone or iPad and you will get a blaring ad every two paragraphs of text. I already pay for the subscription and see no reason why it should include unsolicited ads, especially as those increasingly include politician lookalikes to make them doubly irritating. You want to lie to me, steal my money and then pay for the privilege? I don’t think so.

It turns out there’s a simple solution which actually improves on the desktop/AdBlock experience, for the ads are stripped out with no empty spaces testifying to their absence.

It’s called NextDNS and you can download it from the App Store for just a one time charge across any number of iOS devices.

Installation is simple.

After downloading, go to the Smart DNS app and touch Enable on its home page:


Enabling

Then touch the dots at the base of that page to get to the configuration screen, touch ‘Custom Configuration’ and enter this code in the ‘Configuration ID’ field:


Enabling

Now jump to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and go to Settings->General->VPN, DNS, & Device Management->DNS and touch ‘NextDNS’:


Enabling

You are done. Exit AppleNews, restart it and the ads are gone.

If the custom configuration code does not work generate your own code using the instructions here.

The app is free for the first 300,000 ad removals per month (that’s a lot), and $19.90 annually thereafter.

Who owns the company? Best as I can find out, it’s a Delaware company owned by two Frenchmen. No obvious indication of dirty Russkies trying to infiltrate your system.

Is it perfect? No. The process is somewhat akin to catching a drug addled Russkie athlete cheating in the Olympics. No sooner does detection technology catch up with the latest drugs than the Kremlin finds new and improved ones which defeat detection. The process here is the same. The maker of the app has to maintain a database of offending sites so as to know to block them. So the occasional ad does get through, but it’s still night and day compared to the original with no ad blocking.

The obsoleting of expertise

iPhone

Denialism rules.

The first time a driver lapped the famed Nürburgring racing circuit in under 7 minutes was in the mid-1970s when Niki Lauda accomplished the task in a Formula One Ferrari. No, you could not buy one at the corner store. Lauda almost died at the ‘ring in 1976 when his car crashed and was consumed, along with Lauda, in flames. Niki survived and added two more championships to his total, but accomplished something far better for the sport. His fiery crash saw to it that henceforth no more Formula One races would be held at the 13 mile circuit, built in the 1920s when tires were slim and drivers were fat. Getting speedy help to an injured driver on a circuit so long was simply not possible.

But the fascination of the circuit refused to go away and, to this day, you can pay up a few Euros and have at it on a nice drive through the beautiful Rhineland mountains.

Niki was driving the old fashioned way, with three pedals and a gearshift. There were maybe two or three other drivers in the world who, given comparable machinery, could match his time. Certainly not you or me.

But Porsche well knows the marketing cachet of the ‘ring, so in 2013 they asked their racing driver Marc Lieb to have a go in a 918 Spyder which you absolutely could buy at the local Porsche dealership, albeit after a wait of a few months while they made it back in Zuffenhausen.


Lieb’s 918

That 918 Spyder only had two pedals – go and stop – and Porsche’s magic Doppelkupplung transmission, a device so complex that for once the German love of complex nouns usually reserved for simple descriptions was entirely justified. We know it as the PDK (Pretty Damned Kwik) and it first saw the (retail) light of day on late 1990s 911s. Today you can even get it on some Honda motorcycles! Anyway, the PDK provided two gearboxes in one casing, one waiting for the upshift, the other for the downshift. As there was no longer any need for transmission fluid to confer the force which advised the direction of the change, along with the attendant delays dictated by the laws of hydraulics, the gearbox shifted right now, faster than any human could shift a traditional manual box, like the one Lauda used. And Lieb delivered in spades, returning a time of 6 minutes and 57 seconds and you can see the whole glorious thing here. What that video does not tell you is that when Lieb tried in a regular stick shift version of the 918 he could not break 7 minutes …. Technology had obsoleted the skill of gear shifting for ever. You may still enjoy shifting, but you will never be as fast as a PDK automatic. One thing remains unchanged. Neither you or I could remotely match Lieb’s lap in that off-the-shelf Porsche, but the technology makes a better driver of us all.

This somewhat lengthy preamble brings us to an interview with famous Leica photographer Ralph Gibson, excerpted below. You know, the Ralph Gibson of such great 1960s works like The Somnambulist and Deus Ex Machina, which brought his own special vision of the world to the printed black and white page. Of course it was black and white. And in a book. What did you expect?

All of a sudden the software that makes everybody in the world a photographer also makes everybody’s photographs look exactly the same. My iPhone shots aren’t any better than yours and yours aren’t any better than the person next to you. There’s a homogeneity that comes with this.

I want to know how this technology, which we will consider to be a formal construct, impacts what I’m able to say in my photographs, which is the art that’s discussed in terms of form and content. Let’s say the form is digital imagery. How does this speak differently than analog film, silver gelatin? There is a difference, and it has to do with the fact that the image is somewhat compressed, in terms of its perspective. The laws of perspective were invented in the Renaissance. Prior to that time, painting was entirely two dimensional. That particular illusion of space, from the picture plane back, as we’ve grown accustomed to it in film, is foreshortened on the digital sensor.

What has happened to poor old Ralph, in all this denialism, is that his gear (shifting) skills have been obsoleted and, man, does he rue that loss. The premium his ability confers to manually focus, expose just so and brew the developer as he had learned over decades – all of these have become irrelevant. Stated differently, the iPhone is Gibson’s PDK. Not for one moment can he tell an iPhone picture from his Leica film snaps, although there will be hints. The cell phone version will be sharper, better exposed and come with lots of data missing in his film version. And it can be sent around the world in a matter of seconds, not days or weeks later in some stuffy old book decorating a coffee table.

Film cameras, stick shifts. So much technological detritus. Technology makes a better photographer of us all.