Abhijit Menon-Sen
amenonsen@flipping.rocks
<p>Writer, programmer, and incurable tinkerer.</p><p>Lives on a farm in a small village in the Himalayas, after a career spent working mostly on open source (especially Postgres). Struggles feebly under a growing heap of off-grid DIY and woodworking projects. Tends to photograph insects and plants more often than other things.</p><p>Atheist. Feminist. Against sexism, casteism, racism, and fascism (in any order). Trans rights are human rights.</p><p>(Formerly <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@amenonsen" class="u-url mention">@<span>amenonsen</span></a></span>)</p>
Posts
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Apparently one can make a basket with nothing more than some jute rope, hundreds of metres of jute thread, a needle, and having nothing else to do. Using material of the same colour for both wrappee and wrapper handily serves to conceal many mistakes. (I had "only" 50m of the wrapping thread, and I've run out now, but the basket is just barely big enough to hold the remaining 8 metres of rope, so at least I can set it aside somewhat neatly.)
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A Nepal Pit Viper (Trimeresurus septentrionalis) literally at our doorstep.
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It feels surreal to be cooking and baking and eating ice cream and doing various normal things while knowing the magnitude of the disaster that&#39;s unfolding in Nepal, barely a stone&#39;s throw away in the larger scheme of things.
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Second loaf, this time using only ordinary whole-wheat flour (atta) and a bit of dark rye flour (&lt;10% by weight of the wheat). This is the combination that I most want to be able to reproduce consistently: plain atta with some small additions for taste and colour. &quot;Fancy&quot; whole wheat bread flour has become ridiculously expensive now, and if we want to use our own wheat, we can&#39;t get it milled as fine here in the village anyway. This dough started out soggy, but...
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After tweaking a baseline recipe over a couple of dozen loaves, I now get results like this quite consistently, even with occasional random additions (like sliced olives and roasted garlic in this case). This is 80% whole wheat flour, 10% emmer wheat flour, and 10% barley flour. No added gluten. It&#39;s not exactly light or airy, but it&#39;s not stodgy and dense either, and it has a nice chewy crust, and it&#39;s tasty and smells good. Acceptable. #sourdough #bread
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BIND&#39;s &quot;session-keyfile&quot; is a clever idea: it generates a temporary TSIG key at startup, stores it somewhere like /run/named/session.key, and you can use &quot;nsupdate -l&quot; to use that key to update zones that specify &quot;update-policy local&quot;. But there&#39;s no way to control the permissions of the key file, so it&#39;s always mode 0600 owned by bind/bind, which foils my plan to add my acme.sh user to group bind so that it can use n...
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This lovely gecko with leopard-like markings fell into our sink, and I took a quick photo before releasing it unharmed in the garden. #lizard #nature
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I didn't know that disposable barbecues were even a thing.
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A very young bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata) clinging to a Jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) that's considerably larger than itself. #nature
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Now joined by freshly-harvested garlic!
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A stick insect from Yercaud, Tamil Nadu. @hiway and @mizoraman #nature #entomology #insects
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«I knew I was close on the server, but close wasn&#39;t good enough when dealing with source coding.» -- Novelist, trying to sound all computer-y.
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This is like one of those &quot;find the cat before it&#39;s too late&quot; posts, but with a crocodile. #nature #reptiles
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I just got into bed and now I see a firefly floating around the room in the dark.
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I notice that the kiridashi has _three_ distinct bevels on the cutting edge. The very last one must be only a quarter of a millimeter or so (but it&#39;s very even, and distinctly visible because of the way it reflects light). Sharpening this blade will be interesting.
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I saw a post titled &quot;Bat table I just finished&quot; on reddit, and I got excited but it was baseball bats. 😑
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Reposting an old favourite photograph taken in a meadow above our village, on the first sunny day after a solid week of rain. This magnificent old Toona ciliata tree was hit by lightning some years ago. #nature #photography #himalayas
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What do you use most often to draw up plans for your #woodworking projects? (Edit: I've changed the "Drafting board/table" option to "Technical drawing (by hand)" to clarify intent.)
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@wplalonde@lgbtqia.space Look what I found! But our bark beetles (I presume) aren't as accomplished at drawing as yours. #nature #insects #entomology
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Old man yells at cloud. Repeatedly. #cats
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I can&#39;t remember if I&#39;ve posted this before, but I wrote an unkind kinda-review of a book called &quot;Coffee can investing&quot;. https://toroid.org/coffee-can-investing
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@roots Gosh, all of today's exhibits are spectacular.
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@pojntfx Did you listen to proof.wav? I found it (and the stuff written about those few sound recordings) just very… troubling.
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Here, have a bee bum. #flowers #bloomscrolling #insects #bees
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Of all the posts from &quot;The Pragmatic Engineer&quot; newsletter that I already don&#39;t read anyway, I think I&#39;m going to not read about &quot;DHH&#39;s new way of writing code&quot; the most.
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Here&#39;s a close-up of one of the Debregeasia flowers I posted the other day. #plants
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@EveHasWords Thanks for the recommendation of &quot;First we Take Manhattan&quot;. I&#39;ve listened to other stuff by Leonard Cohen before, but not this one. Loved it!
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Prunus sp. flowers (because I&#39;ve forgotten what this particular sapling was 😅). #plants #flowers