The Minor Pleasure Thread

Getting the asshole parked in front of your garage ticketed.

Audi or army truck?

Chevy Traverse.

May have been toad.

I like watching Can't Pay We'll Take It Away, especially when the high court enforcement people take away goods from businesses. Taking away people's cars is also satisfying.

Lemon Cooler cookies.

https://imgur.com/t9giGZa.jpg

Not Lemon Coolers, but not bad either.

bumping for more lemon cookie hot news:

https://imgur.com/2180vQt.jpg

I’m not sure if Waze is humoring me, or it’s learned something, but now it takes me on my side street route to the expressway.

My car's Garmin nav took me to a place once through the least direct, least obvious route available. The next time, it saw me turn off its recommended route and recalculated - to give me a direct route. To the correct part of the correct street, anyway. It still thinks the place is about two blocks farther down the street...

How's this for minor pleasure: chocolate hummus. (Assuming one likes hummus, anyway.) Hummus texture with good chocolate flavor. Not quite "dark chocolate" but not "milk chocolate", either. Yum.

Is it normal hummus (chickpeas and tahini) with some melted chocolate added? I can kind of see tahini maybe tasting ok with chocolate added. I’m not sure about the chickpeas, though.

There’s no flavor other than chocolate. I personally like chick peas, so I’d notice that. Not there. Just yum. Here’s the product.. Apparently Sabra has a similar product that is similarly made of food vs. ingredients.

Looks like Sabra and Boar's Head both make a chocolate hummus. Both are chickpea-based, neither has tahini. Boar's Head does use sunflower oil vs. Sabra's soybean oil.

This sounds disgusting.

Why? Texture, possible flavor issues? Serious question.

It seems wrong. I like hummus a lot, but it’s already kinda gross to begin with. This just makes it worse. Also seems like a weird sweet-savory mix. I’d go more regional and do date or fig if I wanted to sweeten it up.

Not a huge chocolate fan either, which I know is weird.

We tried this a while ago. It does not taste like hummus (garlicky etc) at all. The chocolate is mild, not too sweet. Not bad. That said, we don't buy it any more either!

Ironically, my favorite parts of the hummus are the garlic part, and the tastes like hummus part.

Garlic bread that’s been griddled instead of baked.

Baked? I make mine under the broiler. Nice and toasty.

I really meant griddle vs. oven.

Grill or griddle, that makes any bread product crispier. And it adds a different flavor if you use a good old fashioned cast iron griddle. Yum!

+1 for broil in the oven. so it crisps without drying out

Rosehip lemonade from Kung Fu Tea. With bubbles and Aloe. It's medicinal. Yeah.

GT’s Gingerade Kombucha. I’m hooked bad.

My favorite part of the griddle version is the crust stays soft, and the bread inside gets crispy.

Not dry at all though, because the crispy part’s basically been shallow fried.


Somewhat related, a bit of griddling with some oil really helps a pita.

Shredding with a high-quality paper shredder instead of one of those cheapie models.

Just got back from having an MRI w/contrast done on my shoulder. Protip: Choose either club music or EDM to listen to during the procedure. The sounds of the MRI machine blend really well with it. It was actually fun.

even better: bringing shredding to the bank shred day so you don't have to shred it yourself.

A close friend runs Information Security at a local (big) university. When they do a “shred day”, they bring in a service that shreds hard drives. Not figuratively, either. Hard drive in, metal fragments out. I haven’t been able to be on hand for this, but I’m told the sound is quite satisfying. :)

Otherwise, I like feeding a decent shredder. My home unit is OK, but I have experience with some really high end shredders. One, the size of a very large room, could take a whole phone book (remember those?) at a time. So loud you had to wear hearing protection, but wonderfully satisfying. Set up was a hassle; no staples or paperclips, but it was worth it.

My favorite: a small unit, about the size of a large home shredder, that could take one or two pages at a time, and put out…lint. Really. Fluffy, completely amorphous, dry pulp. Delightful!

My shredder isn’t lint grade, but it’s getting there.

https://imgur.com/VdQN1XK.jpg

Ikea Kafferep Oat Biscuits with Chocolate.

Finally tried these. Yum!

Glad you liked ‘em! :)

This time, the Mac service place I go to didn’t ask for passwords to do a RAM swap.

Minor irritant is doing a RAM swap on a 2018 Mini… JFC

Consider yourself lucky you have the 2018 mini with memory slots. The versions on either side (2014, 2020) both have soldered RAM. Oh, and they're both limited to 16 GB. Yours can go to 64 GB.

Yep. Everyone will likely copy Apple’s SoC so the days of discrete memory/storage/GPUs may be gone soon.

I haven’t complained too much about the SSDs because the Apple ones are incredibly fast, but the memory is a problem. After Effects is a RAM hog… I’m putting 64GB in the 2018.

I forgot which model, but there was at least one Mini design where you just popped the bottom off and the RAM was right there. Took two minutes.

Did an upgrade on a “twin putty knife” Mini once. That was the worst, though I’ve never pulled apart a post-gumdrop iMac.

I had one of those Minis - it was a Core 2 Duo unit, my first Intel Mac. That wasn't bad compared to the glass front iMac that needed suction cups to get the glass off and then a billion tiny torx screws to pull the whole screen out, which I ended up doing like three times. Actually, that was just for the SSD. The RAM on that iMac was behind a little door at the bottom of the unit, which was super nice.

I miss the original MacBooks - pop out the battery and you have doors right there for RAM and hard drive. I upgraded my dad's unibody MacBook with more RAM and an SSD and it was a nightmare in comparison.

Actually still have that Mini sitting in storage. It’s one of my (hopefully) lifetime supply of computers that can run legacy After Effects filters.

That was definitely the worst for me. Runner-up was the PowerTowerPro. Had at least 20 steps. The Quicksilver I replaced it had one step. Open the door. That’s probably my next favorite Mac after the gumdrops.

Yesterday I swapped out the SSD in a Chromebook. I put in a much larger SSD so I could run Linux on it.

The task was anticlimactic at best. Take out about a dozen screws, gently release a bunch of plastic hooks to separate the bottom case from the unit, and there it is. It’s an M2 2242 device; I’ve used postage stamps that have a bigger footprint…

Compares to swapping almost any Mac’s drive, this was almost as easy as just thinking about it.

Of course now I have a stupid-large (512 GB) drive in a Chromebook that worked fine with 16GB. I haven’t installed Linux in it yet, but I expect that to be a bit of a chore, though not really challenging.

Had to do more massive Finder copies, and Monterey pulled it off without a hitch. I’m somewhat amazed.

Egg nog from the local dairy.

With rum, bourbon, or brandy?

It is the best. Hard to find though.

Here’s a Christmas memory… while angrily shaking the bottle, my mom screamed at my brother “you thought this was enough bourbon for our family?!?”


The biggest local dairy here is large enough it gets into stores. They also run ice cream shops where they do a brisk nog business.

I spotted someone with some egg nog + cold brew from AE and I'm intrigued. Aldi doesn't carry it so I haven't spotted it in the store yet, but I want to give it a shot.

https://www.aedairy.com/products/Cla...d-Brew-Coffee/

Egg nog has many guises. I submit one: Bluebell’s Egg Nog Ice Cream. Purported to be yummier than legally allowed, we’re going to sample it today.

Another guise; I had a boss who made his own. Tons of eggs, sugar and cream, and a generous amount of a specific blended whiskey. So smooth and sweet, most people didn’t notice how plastered they were getting until they had to sit down to avoid falling. Cool, right? Even better: this was in an Air Force unit, so overly trusting officers and enlisted people got to have more “relaxed” fun than they expected at the squadron’s holiday party.

Hard drives in a box. Imagine that. Go ahead, I dare you.

TIL there is a World Chase Tag championship. It’s a mashup of parkour and tag, on a closed indoor course. And, it’s actually fun to watch. The world championship matches will be in London.

It came on today after the World Axe Throwing League championship on ESPN2.