Since I’ve completely failed to be in the same place as a Korean taco food truck I decided to take a shot at making my own Korean tacos.

Except for the beverages, this is actually a relatively healthy meal… it has a lot of veggies in it. If you want to lighten it up further you might choose something other than tortillas to hold your tacos, and use leaner proteins.

Fillings

Beef

• 1.5 pounds of sirloin steak tips
• 1.5 cups of unseasoned rice wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon crushed red chili flakes

1. Combine the non-beef ingredients and marinate the beef in it in the refrigerator for between 1 – 4 hours.
2. Grill the beef. I grilled it for about 5-6 minutes per side on high heat on my gas grill but your grilling time will vary, I’m sure.

My marinades are very heavy in the vinegar and use no extra added sugar. There’s some evidence that acid-based marinades may help cut down on carcinogens resulting from grilling, and I like the flavor.

There’s enough sodium in the soy sauce that you probably won’t need to further season the sirloin.

My condolences if two people actually eat all the sirloin tips.

Pork

• 1 pound pork cutlets
• 1.5 cups of unseasoned rice wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons of fish oil
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 minced small shallot
• 1/4 cup minced cilantro
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 1 tablespoon crushed red chili flakes

1. Combine the non-pork ingredients and marinate the pork in them in the refrigerator for between 1 to 4 hours.
2. Grill the pork. I grilled it for about 3 minutes per side on high heat on my gas grill but your grilling time will vary, I’m sure.

This is more properly a Vietnamese or Cambodian style pork, but who cares? It’s tasty.

There’s enough sodium in the fish sauce that you probably won’t need to further season the pork.

If you can’t get pork cutlets just slice boneless pork chops horizontally. If you can’t get boneless pork chops, just de-bone regular pork chops and trim the fat.

Both these recipes should work fine with other proteins or other cuts of beef or pork.

Quick pickles

• 1/2 peeled, thinly sliced cucumber
• 2 thinly sliced radishes
• 1 thinly sliced jalapeño
• 1/2 thinly sliced small red onion
• cider vinegar, rice wine vinegar, white vinegar – enough to cover the sliced vegetables

1. Slice the vegetables
2. Put the sliced vegetables in separate small bowls or jars
3. Cover with your choice of vinegar for each vegetable
4. Let sit for 1 to 4 hours before serving.

Leftover pickles will keep in the refrigerator for several days. They’re good on grilled food, sandwiches, salads…

Other fillings

• kim-chee
• sriracha
• shredded daikon radish
• sliced avocado
• sliced lime
• cilantro
• corn tortillas, low carb wraps, lettuce leaves or other “taco shells” – 2-3 per person

Putting it all together

Squirt some sriracha on whatever you’re using as your taco shell. Add some kim-chee. Top that with some sliced beef or pork. Add more sriracha if you want. Top with your choice among the shredded daikon, sliced avocado, pickles, cilantro. Squeeze a little fresh lime over the assembly. Enjoy.

Extra Credit

Grilled Corn

• 2 shots of espresso (I recommend decaf…)
• 2 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk

1. Fill a glass halfway with ice cubes
2. Add the condensed milk
3. Add the espresso
4. Stir
5. Enjoy

Limeade

• Sparkling water
• Lime juice (fresh or bottled, fresh is best)
• Sweetener (I used 1 tablespoon of sugar)

1. Fill a pint glass halfway with ice cubes
2. Pour in lime juice up to the top of the ice cubes
3. Fill with sparkling water
4. Add the desired sweetener and stir
5. Enjoy

Cold fresh watermelon would make an excellent dessert for this meal.

There are a lot of people who are angry about a joke in The Avengers. If you don’t want to know anything about the movie (it’s probably a little too late for that already, right?) then you might not want to read the rest of this article.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love Emacs. It’s the editor I grew up with. I’ve been using it for over 30 years. I don’t think I could switch to another editor now if I wanted to. There’s even an excellent GUI port of it to MacOS called Aquamacs that I use all the time.

I come not to praise Emacs but not to bury it, either.

Emacs is, how can I say this gently… fucking huge. Some people joke about just skipping the operating system and booting directly into Emacs.

So of course, one of the first things that I do when I set up a new computer is install a version of Emacs on it.

I am putting together a Linux installation for a small low power, single board computer that I’m playing with. I’m installing Debian Linux on a compact flash card on the computer. And, yes, I want Emacs.

There are stripped down Emacs-clone alternatives but I naively went whole hog and did:

apt-get install emacs

to get proper GNU Emacs.

And what did it drag along with it? Granted I had only a minimal Debian install on the card already but I was a little surprised to find that in order to install Emacs, Debian also had to install:

gcrypt, Kerberos 5, Perl, LDAP, cpp, expat, libasound, XML

I can’t honestly say that I was surprised that it also installed X11; I knew that was coming whether I wanted and needed it or not.

Likely some of this was necessary in order to build tools that were used to help install Emacs; I don’t know and I don’t care enough to find out. It seems entirely conceivable to me that Emacs itself is linked against encryption libraries and authentication libraries, a sound library and tools for processing XML files.

I am glad that I’m using a 32GB flash card, because now I’m installing 327MB of Arduino support (Python! more X11! gcc! jdk! ogg vorbis!! (seriously?)). Who knows how big that would’ve been if I hadn’t already installed Emacs?

I was going to install gcc next but it looks like between Emacs and the Arduino install that’s already been taken care of.

Some teas like boiling water… some teas like cooler water. Most green teas and oolongs work best with water in the 180 – 185 degree range. Yes, you can use boiling water… no, they won’t taste as good.

I’ve been mostly drinking darjeelings and ceylons for a long time and want to go through some of the greens and oolongs I have sitting around.

It’s easy just to boil water and let it cool for a while, but with the tea kettle I usually use it takes about 20 minutes to cool to the correct temperature! So I’ve timed it now and am recording it… it takes roughly 10 minutes on high heat to get the water in the kettle to 185 degrees. Very easy to remember.

Apple’s iOS 5 introduced Photostream as part of their iCloud offering – when you take photos on an iOS device they are automatically synced to iCloud and from there to other devices and Mac iPhoto libraries.

Once in a while, though, you might want to take a photo that you don’t want to copy automatically to iCloud, and currently there’s no way to do that (iOS 5.1, rumored to be out in March, does apparently let you delete photos from Photostream). I’m sure there are a variety of reasons that you might want to keep photos out of Photostream.

Here’s how you can do it today:

1. Put your device in Airplane mode (or at least turn off Wifi – Photostream should only sync over Wifi).

2. Take the photo.

3. Share the photo out of the photo app – text it, email it, however you want to preserve it.

4. Delete the photo from the photo app.

5. Turn Airplane mode off or Wifi back on.

And you’re free and clear; the photo will not be synced to Photostream.

Over the summer, Iomega announced their latest external hard drive, this one targeted at the Macintosh community: the Mac Companion.
The Companion is a very nice looking external hard drive with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 ports, as well as a built-in 3 port USB hub, one port of which can run at high current to quickly recharge an iPad. And the disk comes with a formatted HFS+ filesystem (which can be reformatted to whatever other kind of filesystem you might like, of course).

Read the rest of this entry »

The Vancouver auction did not sell and has been relisted on ebay at a lower starting price.

Vermont was hit surprisingly hard by Hurricane Irene. The hurricane didn’t cause much direct damage, but the flooding was shocking. The area I live in had two of its major shopping plazas flood, wrecking many stores and putting 500 – 600 people out of work for months while the stores are cleaned and rebuilt. And that’s small compared to the towns which were completely isolated as roads to them were destroyed by the waters, bridges which were washed out and farms which were flooded and completely lost their crops.

When I ran across the Kickstarter campaign for Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer’s west coast tour, I had the idea to buy the 5 show package and put tickets for 4 of the shows up for auction (yes, I am keeping the Portland tickets). I checked to make sure that would be okay and received permission. I am not a scalper – Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are aware of this effort and have given their permission for me to use the tickets this way.

Read the rest of this entry »