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Lifehack: Use a to-do app for cooking inspiration
I'm a pretty keen amateur cook; perhaps unusually so (I have a sparsely updated food blog, Objection: Salad!, if you want to see the gory details). However one aspect of my cookery that is probably utterly typical is running low on inspiration for the daily grind of weekday dinners. I've been tried a few things to solve this to this, including recipe apps with "why not make this?" suggestions and food blogs with stunning photography of intricate creations. But to be honest, after a long day at work, I don't want to think too hard about what I'm making. I usually just want to crank out one of my standby dishes. You probably know what I mean -- the two dozen or so quick meals you've made lots of times before and you know you can always turn to to find something you fancy eating on any given day. The problem is, I'm forgetful. I do my grocery shopping during my lunch breaks and I often find myself heading out to the supermarket with no idea what I should be picking up. I forget entirely what I've eaten lately or what I haven't had for ages. I've even tried proper week-ahead full-on meal planning, but that is, frankly, not a lot of fun. I don't particularly enjoy being that organised. It feels too much like work. I needed something less formal. So that's my problem, which perhaps you share. And here's my solution, for your consideration: I created a list in my favorite to-do app, Realmac Software's Clear (you can use any to-do app for this, I just happen to like Clear). That list stores my rotation of standby meals: the ones I know I can cook in a reasonable amount of time, and the ones I know my wife and I will always enjoy eating. That's a screenshot of my current list up at the top of the article. The trick is, I never mark any of those meals as "complete." I'm not using the app to track what I've done. Instead, after cooking any particular meal, I merely drag it down the priority order to the very bottom (you can do this with a simple tap-and-drag in Clear, which is one of the reasons I really like the app). Then, when I find myself pondering "what am I making for dinner tonight?", I look at the top of the list for my inspiration. That way, I get a natural reminder of the things I haven't cooked in a while. When I cook something new that fits in, I add it to the bottom of the list, so I'm naturally expanding my repertoire as time goes on. Occasionally, I go a little further, and where I have some specific ingredients to use up before they go off I add extra annotations to the top of the list. That's as close as I get to formal meal planning. I've also added specific one-off reminders of recipes I see that I want to cook soon but know I'll forget about, and sometimes I delete those rather than move them to the bottom if they didn't turn out great or if they were too much work to be reasonably tackled in a weeknight after work. I'm all about the practical compromises. Since adopting this technique, I've rarely run dry for inspiration, and I've found that there were a surprising number of recipes I cooked once and promptly forgot about that were actually things I wanted to be cooking every few weeks. It's only a small thing -- I'm not claiming this is going to change anyone's life -- but I thought I'd share it with you in in the hope that you might find it useful too.
My cheap, simple livestreaming rig: iPhone, Ustream, Zagg and Clingo
The challenge: On short notice, I was asked to stream holiday services from my wife's synagogue so that homebound congregants and college students could attend at a distance. "Sure," I said, before I really thought it through. My preferred setup for a reliable video stream would include a MacBook Pro running Adobe's free Flash Media Encoder or Livestream's Procaster, quality FireWire-compatible DV/HDV camera and an Ethernet connection for predictable connectivity -- although I wouldn't dismiss Livestream's adorable and compact $495 Broadcaster hardware streaming kit (to say nothing of the company's $8,500 Studio all-in-one switcher). All of this gear would need room and power to operate, which is rarely a problem at concerts or other events I've streamed from the temple. In this case, however, the pews would be full and there'd be no room to run power cables and networking across the floor. Instead, I threw together the above configuration, which is admittedly low-fi and low-rent but worked surprisingly well. It starts with a Zagg Sparq 2.0 portable battery pack (model discontinued, but there are subsequent units). The Sparq's onboard battery will easily charge an iPhone 4S several times over; plenty of juice for hours of streaming without having to string an extension cord. Next up, a Clingo universal car mount. This articulated arm has a suction cup mount on one end and a sticky, figure-eight pad on the other end. The adhesion pad is strong and reusable but easy to detach from the phone without leaving marks or residue. The advantage over a full-back or bracket mount is easy to deduce: the smaller contact area meant that I could securely mount the phone without covering the back camera. The smooth plastic shell of the Sparq, in turn, made an ideal suction cup mounting surface. Finally, the iPhone 4S, plugged into the Sparq and running Ustream's free broadcasting app. I started with the older broadcast-only app; I could (and should) have been using the new version that supports viewing as well. Some users have reported instability in the combo app, and I wanted to be able to leave this running unattended in a corner, but the difference in quality between the year-old Broadcaster app and the new app is pretty substantial. At that point, all that's left to do is plug it in, check for WiFi coverage, aim it to the front and hit the button. As you can see, there's some modeling clay weighting the Zagg in the picture; although it's pretty substantial, depending on the arm angle the iPhone had a tendency to tip. I used a beanbag on site to keep it stable. Later on, I dug out my Glif and a standard tripod to give me some flexibility with the camera placement, but if I faced a situation that called for this combo I'd definitely use it again. Yes, the sound quality's not great, you've got no zoom, and there are plenty of other issues. But in a pinch, this is the sort of setup that lets you stream an event with only wireless bandwidth and your iPhone -- and if that's not living in the future, I don't know what is.
iTunes makes your life better
UsingMac has posted an exhaustive look at iTunes from the perspective of making your working life better. From basic tips like shuffling songs and shuffling movies to more advanced tips like using Terminal to set a half-star rating, it's well thought out.My favorite tip involves browser mode. Many people (in my experience at least) overlook this feature. I find it to be a killer way to categorize and find just what you're looking for, across genres, years, styles, etc. Of course, I'm that annoying guy who gets all excited over tags, charts and graphs, so keep that in mind.Check out the article and feel free to share you own.
