The only tiktok trend that matters is people filming those easter chickens and then going “who did ____ without permission?” and one of the chickens is so fucked up and its obvious who the answer is and the intro to You Gotta Move by Mississippi Fred McDowell is blasting
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
ALT
>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
ALT
>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
ALT
ALT
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
Third of 8 sketch animation commissions. The Kirin character belongs to Khan. I tried to took commissions with characters that are radically different from each other. Love animating ferals and humanoids both.
If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level
Does this count as cake hacks?
cake: hacked
OK but if you’re adding all that to the mix why not just scratch bake? There are literally only four ingredients you’re NOT adding yourself at this point.
It’s always so baffling when mix hackers give you a whole ass cake recipe. Like there’s some kind of magic to mixes that needs to form the core of the thing instead of just, a couple dry ingredients and powdered milk.
presumably as a step of intermediate complexity between mix baking and scratch baking, when neither of those fits your complexity needs exactly?
In particular, this is a useful technique for people living in dorms, or traveling, or similar situations!
Baking from scratch means you’ve got to buy a whole tin of baking powder and only use a spoonful, and a whole thing of flour, and maybe multiple kinds of sugar, and maybe cocoa powder, maybe spices, and there’s no way you’re going to use up any of those, you’ll just have to pitch them when you move out.
Not to mention that you’ve got maybe one measuring cup, and there’s no way you’ve got a sifter, and you probably don’t have measuring spoons and how sure are you that your eating spoon is actually the right size…
Scratch baking is great if you’re going to do it regularly! But for situations where it doesn’t make sense to invest in all the tools and ingredients, cake mixes are very practical.
Scratch means you have to worry about ratios. Scratch means you have to keep cake flour on hand. Scratch means you don’t get the benefit of some of the CHEMICALS in the mix that are 100% beneficial to excellent cake.
I bake some things from scratch. Anything requiring creaming a mix is basically a sad joke because all the work is the creaming. Standard cake is not one of them.
Of course, me being me, a standard cake is usually just a component - I don’t actually like “just cake” that much and canned frosting is terrible. So while I don’t scratch bake cake, that cake is getting saturated with tres leches, or put in a trifle, or getting add-ins before baking anyway.
But in a larger sense, who cares? Baking is hard and for fun anyway. Why bake-shame someone?
Just FYI… A LOT of professional bakers (probably more than half) in the US at least use doctored mixes rather than scratch ingredients even for their more expensive cakes like wedding cakes. There are whole forums where they talk about this amongst themselves.
In taste tests they’ve found that while customers may ask for a cake from scratch they often end up preferring the taste and texture of the doctored mixes when all is said and done.
Unless you have some particular allergies or some other reason to avoid box mixes they are often the better way to go.
I’ve been looking into opening up a home bakery and part of the task of producing food for the public is making sure your items are standardized so that every person who gets a cupcake (for instance) is getting the same quality, size, etc., etc.
Doctored mixes really help with that since big companies like Duncan Hines buys in larger quantities, can afford to test/discard bad batches and will rarely have a one-off batch of flour or flavoring that are bad or go bad like you can at home.
Nice seeing this going around again!
My standard cake is box mix + milk for water + melted butter for oil + dash vanilla extract + frosting from scratch. This really seems to hit the right spot for people of “mmm, homemade” but also “exactly like Mom used to make.” (Do that for a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, add candles, and serve to a college student, for the maximum “this is exactly what I didn’t want to admit I wanted” potential.)
Seconding the addition of coffee to chocolate cake; a tablespoon of instant coffee powder in a dark chocolate cake makes it taste chocolatey-er without actually adding a perceptible coffee flavor (I don’t like coffee flavor, personally, and I still do this).
Another good option is a box lemon cake mix plus maybe 3 lemons. Zest the lemons, set the zest aside, then juice them and use that in place of the water; then use the zest to flavor the frosting. Adds a nice fresh kick.
Chocolate chips can be dumped straight into chocolate cake mix without fussing with anything to compensate. Sprinkles can go into white cake mix to make your own “confetti cake” with any specific color combo you like. Any kind of dried fruit can be chopped to raisin-size, soaked in hot water (or, better yet, hot juice with a couple of citrus peels added) for an hour, drained, and then added to batter.
Replacing part (up to maybe 1/3) of the water with yogurt (and then the rest with milk as usual) will give you a denser cake; make sure to check if it’s cooked through, and bake a little longer if necessary.
Swirling things through batter for that fancy marbled look is easy. Consider melting chocolate chips with butter, or mixing brown sugar with cinnamon and a little melted butter, or making up two different cake mixes and swirling those together.
I swear by the Cake Mix Doctor’s two cookbooks (one’s general, one’s specifically for chocolate cakes). I think every birthday cake I had as a child was out of those.
It’s worth noting that the reason the beaver wants the water to be deeper in the first place is that the Beaver is using the deep water as a pantry:
All summer and fall, beavers gather up branches with the leaves they actually eat, and store it in the deep end of the Pond, where the cold water and limited oxygen keep the leaves fresh all winter, so when it’s negative 20 outside, a beaver can take a dip out of it’s lodge, grab some refrigerated leaves in the (relatively) warmer water and go back to it’s cozy little nap hole while everything else is out there suffering and eating bark or the like.
So it’s less “there’s a leak in my house” and more “OH SHIT THE FRIDGE!!”
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
