Hand Coding

Low-carb eaters have mostly accepted the restrictions on bread and potatoes these days. But, I never thought I’d see the day where we’d be talking about low-carb potatoes. To be fair, they’re actually reduced carb potatoes (about a third the carbs of a regular potato), but that’s still progress.

Potatoes are among the banned substances on the Atkins diet, which advocates a high-protein, low-carbohydrate food regime. The new variety has yet to be formally named but has already been called the “spud-u-lite” by its inventors. They claim it contains a third less carbohydrate than normal potatoes and has an “exceptional” flavour.

The new breed is believed to have reduced carbohydrate levels because it has a lower density of flesh and matures over a shorter time. It was developed as a result of cross-breeding, but its low-carbohydrate properties were discovered by chance by researchers at the HZPC seed firm. A co-operative of potato growers in Florida is planning to mass-produce the variety for the American market but it is not known when the vegetables could be on sale in Britain. […]

I’m not sure how they’ll really taste compared to regular potatoes, or even when they might become available in stores. But, if I run across them at Super Target sometime, I’ll give them a chance. I’ve almost forgotten how to prepare potatoes but, come to think of it, a baked potato with sour cream and bacon chips could be worth the wait.

I’ve mentioned this to several people already (and posted about it the other day) that my roommate Mike has just moved out. So, I’m looking for a new roommate. My posting on Craigslist has more details, but here are the pertinent ones:

• It’s a two-bedroom townhome in The Village (around 75 & Northwest Hwy).
• Rent is about $504/month plus around $120 for utilities.
• The floorplan is online.
• I’ve already setup the cable modem including WiFi via a Linksys router :).

If you know someone that might be interested, please have him/her get in touch with me. (And be sure to check out the Craigslist posting for the rest of the details.)

I think the sandwich may be one of my favorite food groups (so tidy and yet delicious). And, after I helped Mike move out on Monday, he invited me out for lunch (he’s moving in with his fiancee in College Station). We went for Quiznos and that was just the meaty elixir I needed.

I selected a small Turkey-Bacon-Guacamole sandwich, with double meat. And, as I neared the checkout, I spied a stack of mini chocolate bundt cakes in a cooler. They’re no more than 4” in diameter and, well, in the shape of a bundt cake. I had tried one before, years ago, and it was a bit dry at the time. But, I decided to give Quiznos the benefit of the doubt that maybe the prior cake was just a fluke.

In any case, after eating my sandwich, I opened the plastic dome enclosing the bundt cake. I offered some to both Mike and Annette, but they declined citing shrunken stomaches on account of skipping breakfast that morning (yeah, I don’t understand it either). So, I broke off a piece and indulged.

To my pleasant surprise, it was distinctly better than the last one. While the last one was dry and almost airy, this one was properly moist and seemingly denser. And, the chocolate icing (about 1/8” thick) was chocolaty enough and smothered the top half of the cake. As a bonus, the icing pooled slightly in the hole of cake to form a chocolate nugget.

The chocolate cake was better than I expected and just what I needed after moving furniture all morning. And, judging by the unscheduled carbohydrate-induced coma nap later that afternoon, it had plenty of sugar in it (though Quiznos’ nutrition information is remarkably sparse in this area). I don’t think it’s something that I’d pick up with every Quiznos trip, but I might just grab one of their bundt cakes again sometime.

New Scientist reports on two new studies on the health effects of low carb eating. As with previous studies, the participants lost weight without harmful effects on blood fats and sugars:

Stern’s year-long study […] was twice the length of any previous study. Half the patients followed the Atkins regime, limiting daily carbohydrate intake to just 30 grams. The rest tried losing weight through a conventional low-fat diet much richer in carbohydrates.

By the end, both groups had lost about the same amount of weight, between five and eight kilograms for the Atkins group and three and eight kilos for the low fat group. But the Atkins dieters lost almost all their weight in the first six months, then remained at a steady weight. […]

I found it interesting that the low carb eaters lost most of their weight in the first six months (and leveled off from there). Some news articles covering the studies stressed this point, as if to imply that low carb eating wasn’t effective. However, the participants kept the weight off for the duration of the study.

I was also pleased to read that the low carb participants showed lower levels of triglycerides — a type of fat in the bloodstream which may lead to obesity.

Compared with the low-fat group, Atkins dieters also had lower levels of triglycerides, potentially harmful blood fats which can trigger heart disease. Concentrations of beneficial high density cholesterols (HDLs) also held up better in the Atkins group. And these favourable changes remained till the end of the study, suggesting that there might be lasting benefits. […]

A second study run by Duke University Medical Center has similar findings to the first, though low-carb eaters lost about twice that (12 kg) of those in the study eating low-fat foods. However, a “substantial number” of the low-carb dieters also saw increases in their bad cholesterol — but I’m not sure to what degree that’s relevant since the article doesn’t elaborate on the phrase “substantial number”.

I needed some more sugar free jam the other day, so I stopped by Target to get some more. Normally, I’d go for Smucker’s Sugar Free Jam, but I noticed a brand that I hadn’t seen before: Polaner Sugar Free Preserves. I checked the label and it had the same amount of calories as my usual brand but it was sweetened with Splenda instead (Smucker’s is sweetened with aspartame). Their prices were comparable, so I bought some of their raspberry preserves.

That evening, I made a peanut butter & jelly jam open-faced sandwich to put the preserves through its paces. And, the first thing that I noticed as I spread the preserves on top of the peanut butter was that it was a single consistency — it was completely uniform in texture throughout. In fact, it had no texture other than being gelatinous.

The sandwich turned out all right, but it was missing the crunchy character of the raspberry seeds (it was seedless, after all). And, without any lumps or fruit bits in there, these preserves were more like a sweet topping to the sandwich than a distinct raspberry fruit layer. I tried to look to the bright side — the Splenda should have provided a more sugar-like taste, right? Well, it was actually about the same (that is, both sweeteners were acceptable in the context of a PB&J sandwich). Next time I think I’ll grab a jar of Smucker’s instead.

Reading over the hardware section of the [Ogg] Vorbis wiki, I’ve discovered that iRiver is due to release some new portable Ogg players this month. Sure, there are other Ogg players available, but I haven’t found any with native OSX support — until now. In addition to the Mac support, these new portables have some other nifty features:

• Uses 1 AA battery, for 40 hrs claimed battery life
• FM radio with timer-based recordings
• Firmware upgradable

So, why am I jazzed about Oggs? Well, in addition to their higher sound quality at a given bitrate, Oggs also have the advantage of being patent-free — patent-encumbered mp3s could have their license changed at any time. And, since none of my own music is digitized yet, I’m not locked into a format for music already on my hard drive.

So far, the Craft 2 (as they call it) looks like a decent player. But, I’m a bit torn by its flash-based storage. Though the product isn’t widely available at online retailers yet, it is listed in iRiver’s online store and the 1 GB model has a list price of $400 (gulp). For that price I could get a 20 GB iPod!

Maybe I wouldn’t mind paying such a premium for flash if there were distinct benefits over a hard drive-based player. Normally, flash-based players would be less prone to skipping (since they can’t skip) but, from what I’ve heard, hard drive-based players are rugged enough that they hardly skip in the first place. Really, it looks like battery life would be its main benefit. And I’m just not sure whether that's enough to justify its price. Or… are there any other flash benefits of which I’m not aware?

There’ve been several blogger weddings over the past couple months and I've finished processing my photos for Bryan and Lyn’s wedding. Bryan has been clamoring for some pictures and I would have given him a TrackBack to his post but I couldn't find a TrackBack URL ;).

In all, I took 87 photos and I’ve posted 17 in the gallery. Though I haven’t taken photographs at that many weddings, the lighting seemed particularly tough this time around. It was a bit dim inside, which would normally imply a flash, but my camera doesn’t have TTL flash compensation (variable flash based on the available light). So, my camera compensated by extending the exposure times which created some interesting effects of its own.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

Salon decided to test many of the common low-carb foods, but not just any test — they asked food critics to weigh in. They talked with Mark Bittman (the "Minimalist" columnist for the New York Times), former Saveur editor Liza Schoenfein, Josh Friedland (editor and owner of The Food Section blog), and Salon’s own Laura Miller.

I can’t say that I was terribly surprised by the results as many low carb foods seem to have been rushed to the shelves. Still, I thought the critics would at least like something (they did find one item somewhat palatable, though I won’t spoil the surprise). In any case, if you’re in the mood for some schadenfreude, dig in to these bits:

• Bittman: What are we saying? It’s not going to make you puke? That’s our highest praise […]

• Miller: […] This is horrible. [Munches thoughtfully.] Unless … you think of it as some sort of health snack. Like some hippie side dish. They just shouldn’t make it in the shape of a chip. […]

• Bittman: It’s sandy, powdery. But you should really be feeding this to people who haven't had a muffin in three weeks. I had bread last night. Bread and pasta![…]

• Miller: I feel like I’ve just had nine Diet Cokes. […]

In fairness, the author points out that many lower-carb foods taste pretty good after all — but they’re usually the foods that are naturally low in carbs such as strawberries, asparagus, and other fruits & vegetables. The way I look at it, many of these products are a first-try in their genre; perhaps the second generation versions will be better.

As a Mozilla/Firefox enthusiast, I often run the daily builds (well, the daily optimized builds). Since development is underway continuously, this allows me to get the latest features as soon as they’re available. The only downside is that occasionally a check-in for one feature breaks something else.

That was the case with the April 16th check-in for some “Tree widget refactoring” (whatever that means) which busted a couple things. In particular, Firefox would crash when entering text in an input field. And since that’s a fairly common thing to do, the daily Firefox builds were virtually unusable. Sure, there was a workaround where you could prevent the crash if you turned off form-autocomplete, but I’d rather stick with an older build than turn that off.

So, for the next two-and-a-half weeks, I just stuck with my April 15th build (without the bug) until they finally fixed this in yesterday’s builds (why it took so long, I have no idea). In any case, today’s builds are back to normal and better than ever — URL bar autocomplete is now available. Though I haven’t tried it yet, this should mean that the URL bar can be configured to autocomplete as-you-type (like Mozilla) in addition to presenting the usual list of likely matches.

In other Firefox news, the Flash Click to View XPI has been updated (and it’s now called Flashblock). The basic functionality is still the same — Flashblock adds a placeholder over any Flash content which can then be activated by clicking on it. And, while older Flashblock versions used just a gray box for the placeholder, the current placeholders have a more polished look which includes the background color of surrounding elements. In case I’ve explained this poorly, there’re also screenshots.

I’ve been enjoying photography ever since buying my digicam and I kept running across articles mentioning “histograms” as an exposure diagnostic. Figuring that maybe it could help me take better pictures, I searched for more information on histograms.

I found a couple tutorials and this tutorial at Photoxels was one of the better ones. I learned that a histogram is essentially just a bar graph of the light present in an image (from “dark” on the left to “bright” on the right). And, while it may seem intuitive that a flat histogram would make for a good photo, it turns out that a hill-shaped curve is actually preferred for most shots.

So, how is this useful? Well, if you’re shooting at an event, you can take a couple test shots beforehand. Then, by loading your camera’s histogram function, you can check the shots and adjust your exposure if needed (such as by exposure compensation or tweaking the ISO). Now that I know how they work, I’ll just have to remember go through those steps the next time I’m taking photos.