skud

You've all seen this, right?

Sun, 12 May 2013 23:42:13 GMT

Best. #ThankYouCommanderHadfield

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In praise of Bob

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:18:06 GMT

Bob is our ginger beer plant. He’s a living, breathing organism. We started him a month or so back, and after one false start, tonight we had our first taste of him.

I had a lot of trouble finding and understanding ginger beer recipes online, so I thought I’d write up our process here, in case it’s useful to others.

Step 1: the plant

Combine:

8 sultanas/raisins (our recipe said exactly 8, but I suspect you could just use a random small number — they provide the yeast)
juice of 2 lemons
1 tsp lemon pulp
4 tsp sugar
2 tsp powdered ginger
500mL water

Put them all in a large jar, and cover loosely with a cloth (we use a napkin and a rubber band). Keep it in a warmish place — ours just sits on the kitchen bench and is fine, but I guess my point here is not to keep it anywhere that’s uncomfortably cold or hot by human standards. We put Bob outside on a hot day, once, and killed him. Oops. So don’t do that.

Step 2: feeding

Daily, add 2 tsp sugar and 1 tsp ginger, and give it a good stir. After about 3 days you should start to notice it’s fizzing a little bit when you stir it.

Keep doing this for 7-10 days (probably more like 10 days the first time, because it took a little while to get going). It can skip a day, but don’t skip too many or it’ll die. I recommend making a chart and putting it on the fridge or somewhere handy to track when you’ve fed your plant. Ours has seven boxes where we note the date and add a checkmark for each feeding.

Step 3: splitting

This is where we got awfully confused early on, so I’ll try and explain it clearly. By this point you should have about 600mL of stuff in your jar: 500mL of liquid and a layer of sludge at the bottom. Your goal is to split this evenly in half, making sure you get about half the sludge and half the liquid into each resulting batch.

To do this, we have a big 1L pyrex jug and a smaller 500mL one. We put a sieve over the large jug, and line it with the cloth that was covering Bob’s jar. Then we strain Bob through it. You can gather yours up and give it a gentle squeeze to hurry it along (wash your hands first!), but don’t wring it completely dry.

Now you should have about 600mL of liquid in the large jub, and a napkin covered in ginger sludge. Halve the liquid by pouring half of it into the smaller jug. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should wind up with about 300mL. Top this up from the tap to bring it to 500mL.

Now get a spoon and scrape out about half the sludge from the napkin. Again, doesn’t have to be perfect, and there’s no need to actually count the raisins or anything. For us, it’s just about a spoonful. Whatevs! Dump your spoonful of sludge into the smaller jug and give it a stir. This is your new plant.

Rinse out the jar you were using for the plant, pour the new plant into it, and cover with a fresh cloth. Give it some sugar and ginger to get it started, and continue to feed it as per step 2. As you can see, you have set up an endless cycle of ginger plant feeding and splitting.

Step 4: make the beer

Now you should have around 300mL of gingery liquid in a jug, a sieve, and a napkin with ginger sludge on it.

In a large saucepan (and seriously, I mean large — our big pasta pot isn’t really big enough, and we need to fudge things using a large mixing bowl as well) put 1L water, 1kg sugar, and the juice of 4 lemons. Heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves.

Now you’re going to add 6L more water, along with your gingery liquid. In theory you’re meant to wait for the sugar syrup to cool down first, but if you’re impatient like me just add a couple of litres of cold water to it and continue with the rest.

Put your sieve over the big pot with your gingery sludgy cloth still in it. Now pour all that water through it — 6L in total, or like 4L if you dumped 2L in at the start like I did. This can be kind of slow as it strains through the cloth, depending on how thick and tight-woven it is and how much sludge you have, so again, you can gather up the corners of the cloth and give it a gentle squeeze if you want. This will also push more ginger through, which I personally think is a good thing.

Finally — or really, at any point during these proceedings, as long as it won’t get frightened by the hot sugar syrup — add your ginger liquid back in.

You should now have between 7L and 8L of ginger beer. If there’s any sediment or pulpy lemon bits, give it a stir so it’s all evenly distributed.

Step 5: bottling

Clean your bottles thoroughly with hot water and dish soap, then rinse them well. We just use recycled 1.25L soda bottles and find that 6 bottles is a pretty good fit for one batch of ginger beer.

Pour the ginger beer into the bottles. A funnel and a smallish jug are good for this. Don’t fill them all the way to the top — leave about 5cm headspace. This air gap is compressible and will help prevent your bottles from exploding under pressure.

Screw the caps on tightly, then store the bottles somewhere dark, laid on their sides, for 2 weeks. We keep ours in the cupboard under the laundry sink. From the second batch onward, you will probably find it useful — indeed, necessary — to label them with the date they went in.

Step 6: drinking

The bottles are under pressure. While they’ve been napping in the cupboard, the yeast has been converting some of that sugar into CO2, and you’ll find that there’s a pretty exciting whoosh-fizz as you unscrew the cap. Do it over the sink, unless you want to be wiping up spills. You might think you’re good at opening soda bottles, but seriously, we made a mess because ours was so fizzy.

We found that our ginger beer made to this recipe was lightly gingery, somewhat lemony, and had a mild fizz in the glass. We definitely would have liked it to be gingerier (if that’s a word), so we’ll be experimenting with that a bit more in future, adding more ginger powder to Bob each day, or maybe trying out some grated ginger in the sugar syrup at beer-making time. If we bugger it up, it’ll only take 7-10 days to get it going again.

We don’t think we can drink 7L of ginger beer a week, so if anyone wants to take some off our hands, we’re happy to swap for other things: empty 1.25L bottles and lemons would both be nice, actually, as we’re going through a lot of them. We’re always up for a produce or preserves swap too. So if you’re local and would like some ginger beer, let us know and we can set up a handoff.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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So hey two three things

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:05:55 GMT

1) Growstuff is live. Go check it out. It's what we're calling a "soft launch" and we're still building features at a cracking rate, but it's there and it works and we want people to try it out. (What's Growstuff? Haven't you been paying attention? It's a social website for vegie gardeners. It's an open source project. It's an app platform AND a dessert topping.)

2) The Disreputable Order of Hopperites, a Melbourne gathering of geeky/technical women, is having its second meeting next Monday. It's a really chill, fun group, with interesting talks. If you are in Melbourne, identify as a woman/girl/female, and are into technical things, you should come! Register at the link above. We still need another speaker, too, if you have a tech topic you'd like to talk about for ~15 mins.

3) I've been sitting on this for a little while, but it's been announced now, so: I'll be keynoting Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon (USA) in June. I know a bunch of my people will be there and I can't wait to see you all. If you have never been to Open Source Bridge before, it's one my my favourite conferences, bridging (get it!) software and social responsibility in a way that you don't see many other places. I'm pretty sure I'll be talking about Growstuff and how growing food is like writing software. It is, really!

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stuff going on in my life

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:38:49 GMT

In dot points, because.

* Soft-launched Growstuff: http://growstuff.org/ (Blog post explaining soft launch: http://blog.growstuff.org/2013/03/21/a-soft-launch/; tl;dr = kinda like dreamwidth alpha but without the invites). Grand total of 40-something users right now, which is about right for one day into things. We want to get a few hundred while we're in soft launch, so if you grow stuff -- well, veggies or fruit or any other kind of herbs -- and are interested please give it a try.

* Epically busy with a business course at TAFE (as part of the NEIS program), writing business plans and doing businessy crap (partly for NEIS, partly for grants, partly dealing with banks and stuff), and trying to actually develop software and run a website at the same time. Trying not to work ridiculous amounts of time, and to at least have one day off a week, and some me-time every day. The scheduling is a PITA though. Can't wait til the course is over and things go back to more WFH, less requirement to be in the city.

* Going to Portland, Oregon in June for Open Source Bridge. Hoping to see some DW people there!

* Home/house stuff going well -- got a new housemate (Crystal) a month or so back, and she's great. Lots of nanna-ing and cooking and generally being domestic.

* Bought a bunch of winter clothes in the northern hemisphere end-of-season sales. Delighted with the merino wool sweater-dresses I got cheap from the Lands End clearance. I suspect I will be pretty much living in them once the weather cools down.

* Garden is going well, in an end-of-season kind of way. Need to get started on autumn planting.

* Installed wordpress multi-site and moved infotrope.net (personal/professional blog) and chezskud.com (domestic/cooking/craft/garden blog) there, along with some others. The downside is that the journalpress plugin doesn't support multisite so I can no longer crosspost to DW. Grah. So if you want to read my posts on those blogs I guess you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, because I'm too lazy to dig into WP source code and fix it.

* Laughing bitterly at Google canning Reader. What did you expect, people? I'm using Newsblur and liking it pretty well -- I especially like samuelclay's responsiveness and support. Great guy, good indie business, open source code, so I'm happy to support him/it even if some aspects of the UI do make me mutter under my breath.

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Looking for an artist to design Growstuff schwag

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:43:44 GMT

So, we have a launch date... or at least a launch month... for opening Growstuff to the general public. It will be around May, and we'll be having a "seed account" sale similar to the one Dreamwidth had. As part of this, we'll be offering tshirts and other schwag to those who buy seed accounts at a certain level.

We're looking for an artist to help us design these shirts and other items. This is a paid gig.

We have a basic idea of the design we'd like (it involves hand-lettering, swirling branches/vines, fruit and vegetables) and the technical specs for it. We're open to digital art or traditional media, as long as it's printable -- and yes, our printer does full colour and all that. We'd need the final artwork by April 1st, but definitely want to have some time for drafts/revisions before that.

If you're interested, we can send you more detail. Just email info@growstuff.org with a link to your portfolio or where we can find some of your art (fanart is fine! Dreamwidth links are fine!). Bonus points for sending us a link to the single piece of your work that you think best matches what we'd be looking for.

Please feel free to signal boost!

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Running the numbers

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 03:18:31 GMT

Our house has a pretty cool way of tracking who spends what on groceries and household items. We have a whiteboard with three columns, one for each housemate, and as you spend you just keep a running total, like this:

50
+ 25 = 75
+ 40 = 115
+ 35 = 150

(We round to the nearest five dollars, as you can see.) Over time, we just try to keep them fairly balanced. If someone’s falling behind, it’s their turn to do grocery shopping. When you run out of vertical space on the board, you erase the column and start at the top, carrying over the total.

Today we ran out of vertical space and started fresh, and I took the opportunity to calculate how much we spend on groceries. We’re averaging around the $800 mark, since October 10th last year when Connie moved in. That’s about 15 weeks, so that’s $800/15 = $53 per person per week.

All the figures I can find online say that the average for Australian adults is about $100/week, but I’m not sure whether that includes eating out or not. My housemates buy their lunches most days, and I have a meal out out once or twice a week, depending on schedule, plus we each have dinners elsewhere from time to time. We order pizza for dinner a couple of times a month, so that’s another thing that’s not counted in our grocery bill. We also don’t count special/fancy/gourmet/snacking food that we buy outside of the regular grocery run, for instance fancy tea or chocolate. If we don’t count any of these, that could be part of the reason our figures are so low compared to the average.

On the other hand, we cook for other people fairly often, when they come round for meals. We also give away some of our food, especially when Emily’s baking a lot, or in the summer when we’re making lots of preserves and handing them out to anyone who comes by at the right time. Those factors probably aren’t enough to balance out the extras I listed above, but they must do so to some extent

Even so, $50-ish per head per week seems low, and I’m quite pleased with it, so I thought I’d take a look at what factors went into that figure.

We mostly eat — or at least shop — vegetarian. Our usual weekly meat purchase is a few rashers of bacon, or maybe a couple of sausages. Most of our meals rely on legumes, tofu, eggs, and dairy for protein, which are cheaper than meat. Every couple of weeks we have a bigger meat meal (like a roast chicken, or the Christmas ham that kept going forever) but the leftovers usually stretch out into multiple dishes. (I think we’re more likely to eat meat when we’re eating out, or at least I am.)

We make a lot of things from scratch. The freezer has a stack of tubs of frozen stock and a bag of scraps for the next batch, so we probably save a few bucks a week right there over people who buy those containers of UHT stock. Connie and I eat home-made muesli, made from rolled oats and whatever fruit and nuts we feel like, which is cheaper than buying it. We bake — not everything, but usually anything sweet like biscuits or cakes are made here, as are many of the bread-like things we have with our evening meals. We buy plain yoghurt in big tubs and add fruit and flavourings if we want them. We make many of our own sauces and condiments, either on the spot (as for pasta sauces or salad dressings) or canned/preserved (chutneys, pickles, ketchup, salsa). We also have lots of whole spices from which we can grind up blends as needed, so we almost never buy packets and jars of flavourings.

We buy in bulk. We’re lucky to have enough room to store a big 3L can of olive oil, 5kg of basmati rice at a time, onions and potatoes by the big bagful, and lots of big jars of beans and grains and dried things. We mostly buy our dry goods at the market where they’re cheap, minimally packaged, and somewhat fresher than the dried stuff at the supermarket. We buy spices this way too, and have our own containers for them. Typically we spend about $2 for a bag of spices that has four times as much in it as one of those little supermarket jars.

We shop locally and seasonally, in moderation. We’re not 100% anal retentive about it, but we do tend to adjust our eating based on the time of year and what’s cheap. By the time winter comes round, I’ll actually be looking forward to cabbage and root vegetables, but right now it’s all stone fruit and tomatoes and zucchini. We keep an eye out for fruit and veg that are around $2/kg at the market and focus on them, sometimes taking the opportunity to preserve or can them if appropriate.

We have a vegie garden, and we have friends with vegie gardens and fruit trees. Our own garden doesn’t do much more than supplement our weekly market run, but it’s often enough to make a salad or turn a couple of eggs into a meal. Herbs from the garden are way cheaper than buying them, of course. Yes, the vegie garden costs us money, but we include the consumable items like seeds and bags of compost in our grocery calculations. Our friends also supply us, from time to time, with whatever they have in surplus. We’ve made preserved lemons from donated fruit which, with chickpeas/tomatoes/stock from the freezer/herbs from the garden, all served over couscous, make a great meal. Over Christmas a bag of warrigal greens turned into a really amazing quiche. Giant mutant zucchini go into stews or get grated into cakes. Emily’s mum’s kumquat tree yielded jars and jars of marmalade.

We’re pretty good about food waste. I won’t say we’re great, but we’re not awful either. I already mentioned that we keep scraps and bones for stock. We also have lots of meals based on leftovers. For instance, last weekend we had friends round for a taco party, and (after a week of nachos) last night we ate the very last of the leftover beans, ground up into vegie burgers along with rice from Tuesday’s stir-fry and salsa from Wednesday’s lunch. We’re good at using the tail ends of legumes, grains, or sauces in other dishes. Overripe fruit gets turned into smoothies or baked goods, either immediately or after a stretch in the freezer. Stale bread (if it’s not too grainy or full of weird extras) gets dried in the oven then ground into breadcrumbs. Parmesan rinds get saved for minestrone. Occasionally we have to chuck something out that’s gone strange in the back of the fridge, but with so many people cooking so regularly, things don’t have much chance to fester back there, and if they do, they get fed to the worm farm.

We count our household cleaning supplies in with our groceries, including laundry detergent, toilet paper, and all that. For most of those we buy inexpensive eco-friendly brands, and we tend to shy away from uni-tasker cleaning products, preferring dish soap, baking soda, and vinegar for lots of our cleaning. We don’t use fabric softener. We use re-usable dishcloths and cleaning rags, and buy toilet paper in bulk if it’s not too awkward to carry home.

For all our cheapness, we eat some pretty nice stuff, and I don’t think we feel like we’re being self-sacrificing or particularly ascetic in our tastes. We buy fancy cheese, organic eggs, and delicious butter from an independent dairy. When we buy meat we try to go for the kind that comes from happy animals, or at least from independent butchers, and choose it based on tastiness not budget. We buy icecream and biscuits and soft drinks in moderation (lately we’ve been buying lots of tonic water that goes in G&T’s, which we buy in small glass bottles that get reused when we make our own sauces and ketchups). Our fancy tea shelf is overflowing. Our pantry contains macadamias and dried cranberries and the best balsamic vinegar we could find. We’re doing okay.

I know I’m probably sounding a bit smug, and yeah, I guess I am smug. It’s actually something I’m proud of, and that I’ve worked for and continue to work for. Between planning and shopping and making things from scratch I put a few hours a week, at least, into this. I probably couldn’t do it if I wasn’t working from home (and, previously, unemployed), or at least not to the same extent. So that’s something to be thankful for, along with the fact that I have the space and ability and support for all this, excellent food vendors nearby, and the collaboration of my excellent housemates.

In conclusion: here’s to our hippy/nanna house, and long may it prosper!

(PS: we’re looking for a new housemate. Is it you?)

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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The once and future room ad

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:08:37 GMT

Once again, our fabulous geeky/fannish/feminist/nanna house in Thornbury is seeking a housemate, because hope is leaving us :(

Short version: $180/week + bills, medium sized room, well furnished house, vegie garden, friendly/communal household with 2 queer/genderqueer women (i.e. me and frabjous).

( Long version )

Interested? Email me: skud@infotrope.net

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Hurrah, I’m $37 richer!

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:10:08 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Just a quick post to note that Growstuff (my open source project for food gardeners) was selected as one of the winners of Pinboard’s satirical startup incubator program. I get $37 in funding, woohoo!

While the $37 won’t pay for much of anything — that’s the point, after all — I’m looking forward to Maciej’s advice and help with getting our name out there, and to getting to know the other winners. I’m pleased to see another food startup on the list (home baked goods via the Internet!), would love to be able to use the pre-hardened machine images for AWS, and can’t help but be excited that a sailing-related startup is amongst the winners. While I don’t play board games much, nor have a kid in school, both those projects sound useful and likely to succeed, too. Congrats to my co-selectees!

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Inflection point

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:37:32 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

I just asked the Internet to crowdsource a professional bio for me, figuring that literally anything would be better than having to write one myself. The results aren’t bad, though the process was far messier than that would suggest. (Etherpad link will disappear in 30 days, may get messed up before that. I’ve saved a copy offline for posterity.)

My favourite quote from the process, from Sumana:

She reinvents herself so frequently that any given moment is an inflection point, unextrapolatable.

I don’t know where I can possibly use that, but I love it, so I’m posting it here.

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#altstartup

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 03:56:54 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, prompted mostly by Maciej’s Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud, I asked whether there was any sort of discussion/community/nexus of information around tech startups that don’t follow the VC-funded Silicon Valley model, but look for alternative/more sustainable ways to do things. I got a few answers with links to things of interest, but nothing that really made me say “Yes! There is a thing here!”

Still, I thought it was worth collecting links somewhere. So this post is just to say that I’ve put together a reading list of sorts, and I’m going to keep tagging stuff there as I find it. So far it includes things about tech co-ops, criticism of Silicon Valley’s “disruptive” business models, thoughtful posts about more sustainable business models, and some examples of alt startups that I really like.

If you were going to start reading anywhere, I’d recommend Anil Dash’s To Less Efficient Startups. I think what he’s saying is really important.

If you have any other good links, please let me know.

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No resolutions this year

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 04:14:05 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Just wanted to note the new year and say, yes, it is indeed 2013. I didn’t feel moved to make any resolutions this time round. I figure I’ll be busy enough with Growstuff and if I can do a good job of that, that’s achievement enough.

A number of my friends have made or renewed resolutions to read more books by people of colour. I was at the public library yesterday and found myself looking at the shelves with that in mind. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, so I just started on the nearest shelves, which happened to cover the history of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Very few authors’ names struck me as being other than Anglo. Sigh. I did find two books about Egypt though, and a couple of books on Australian Aboriginal history in the next row. I’m glad that other people’s resolutions made me more mindful of this.

What are your resolutions this year? Or have you punted like me?

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All the preserves

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:29:23 GMT

As I mentioned the other day, I picked up a bunch of cheap nectarines and tomatoes with the intention of having a preserving fest over the Christmas holiday period. These are some notes on what I did.

Nectarines in light syrup

Monday afternoon, canned nectarines. I was originally thinking of stewing them, but decided to just dice them and can them in a very light sugar syrup: 2L water to 1 cup sugar. I also wanted a bit of citric acid to counteract the lightness of the syrup and help the nectarines stay bright and not disintegrate in their jars, but I wasn’t sure how much was enough and just chucked a spoonful in unthinkingly, tasted the syrup, and decided it would do. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably too much, but we shall see. They won’t be inedible, just perhaps a bit tart. So if you’re trying it, maybe just do 2 tsp.

The whole point with the syrup was that last year I tried to do nectarines in just water, and they came out kind of icky, flavourless and watery and kind of slimy-squishy. So apparently a little bit of sugar really is necessary. That really irritates me, but oh well.

I’m canning them using my Fowlers Vacola thingy. I don’t know what the piece of equipment is called. People talk about the Fowlers Vacola Method or Fowlers Vacola Kits but what is the urn thingy called? I’ll call it the urn, I think.

For people not in Australia: the FV urn is a piece of equipment that can let you do hot water canning without a stove, and (most importantly in my opinion) without overheating your kitchen. It’s a plastic bucket-like thing with a power cord, a heating element in the bottom, a shelf for the jars to sit on, and a lid. You simply put all the jars in, fill it with water (I used the garden hose), then plug it in and bring it almost to the boil. For most fruit canning, you can put the fruit in cold, and if you turn off the unit when it’s just below a boil, the jars will have spent ~10-15 mins at that all-important temperature of over 80 degrees C, and will be safe to store in the pantry.

Fowlers Vacola would like you to believe that you need to buy their special fancy jars, but you can actually use any jars you want in the FV urn. We use anything, including recycled jars from supermarket-bought food, though we do buy clean lids for them. Be careful not to overfill your jars, or to boil the urn, or to put the jars in while the water’s hot (instead, put them in cold and bring the heat up gradually, like boiling frogs). Fail in any of these points and you run the risk of nectarine soup. Ask me how I know this.

Results: 6 large jars, which are now sitting in the pantry with all the jams and chutneys and things, looking very colourful.

Indian lemon and mango pickles

Next up, I decanted the Indian pickles that have been stewing away in the hot sun outside our back door. Last year after we made Moroccan preserved lemons my friend Sumana said they reminded her of an Indian lemon pickle her family had made. We made it last year but I didn’t blog it. It was great though, so we did it again this year: a double batch with 12 largish lemons.

The best part about these are that they’re no-cook preserves. You just put everything in a big jar and leave it out in the sun for a month. Ours sits outside our back door, where we go past it on the way to water the vegies or hang washing on the line. Once a day or so, we give the jars a good shake to distribute all the flavours. The high proportions of salt/sugar/sourness/chilli discourage anything nasty from growing in it, as does the high heat that happens when you leave a big jar of pickle on a brick pathway in weather of up to 40 degrees celsius.

Since the lemon pickle worked so well for us last year, this year I also made a mango pickle along similar lines. It’s called Aam ka Achar and it uses unripe green mangos, salt, spices, and mustard oil. Like the lemon pickle, it’s left out in the sun to season. I did two things differently from the recipe as written: firstly, I did the mango-drying stage in a low oven, rather than in the sun, since the weather was bad that week, and secondly, after adding all the spices and mustard oil, I found the mixture a bit too dry, so I added some more neutral-flavoured oil (grapeseed, but anything would do) to make it wetter/oilier, and make sure that the oil would cover all the mango.

I left both outside for about a month, and waited til we had a really hot day to give both pickles one last blast of heat outside, then brought them in and decanted them into very clean jars. We got 3 large jars of lemon pickle and 4 medium jars of mango pickle, which we’ll eat mostly with dal and rice throughout the year.

Tomato sauce, Nanna style

Finally, today my friend Meg came around and we made tomato sauce (ketchup) from an old Australian recipe quite similar to the one my Nanna used to make. When I was a kid I much preferred the bought stuff (preferably Heinz) and never understood the adults who were always going on about how the home-made variety was so much better. Now I’m one of those adults, though I will still say that if you’re going to squirt it over heavily-processed junk food, the Heinz kind is definitely the way to go. Still, if you’re talking about a nice flavourful sausage or a home-made burger or even a grilled cheese sandwich, I think the homemade kind is best.

We used a recipe from “Classic Preserves: From Blackberry Jam to Worcestershire Sauce” by Alice May, which I picked up in a cheap remainder bookstore almost 20 years ago, and which is full of classic Nanna-style Australian recipes. I’ve always found the recipes in it reliable and just interesting enough without being totally WTF. The pickled dried figs recipe, for instance, was a favourite for a few years, and I’ve had good results with most of the chutney recipes.

Here’s the tomato sauce recipe:

3kg ripe tomatoes
2 onions
2 apples
125g raisins
4 garlic cloves
180mL vinegar
625g sugar
60g salt
2 tsp whole black peppercorns
2 tsp whole allspice
1 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp mace

We doubled the garlic, substituted brown sugar, used chilli powder instead of cayenne pepper, and didn’t have any mace. We also didn’t bother with the fiddly instructions to put the whole spices in a muslin bag, since the whole thing was going to be strained later anyway.

Basically all you do is chop everything up and chuck it in a big pan. Simmer til it’s mushy. The next step is to push it through a sieve or mouli, which was a bit exciting because I’d bought a mouli as a Christmas present to myself, from the amazing Costante Imports up the street, but it took a bit of figuring out how to put all the pieces together. Once we’d figured out that the sieve part went in the other way up, it all came together well and we had a good time grinding through the paste. We generated about 2 cups of dry fibrous matter, I suppose, and the rest of the liquid went back in the pan to boil down to about 50% its original volume.

The results were delicious, though perhaps a little sweeter than necessary. I’ve made a note to try reducing the sugar to around 500g next time. I’ll also wait and see how it tastes after aging a week orso, because it could be that it just needs to sit and mellow out for a while.

We bottled the sauce in recycled Schweppes lemonade/tonic water bottles, well cleaned and then sterilised for 15-20 mins in a lowish (120C) oven. I poured some boiling water over the lids, as well as the funnel and ladle we used for the bottling. In Australia we don’t traditionally bother with hot water canning for sauces/chutneys/jams/anything that’s fairly sour/sweet/salty/alcoholic, but just use scrupulously clean jars. You can also sterilise the jars with very hot water in the sink, or in the dishwasher, but I find the oven method easiest, especially for narrow-necked jars.

We ended up with 6 x 300mL bottles, one of them a little scant, so we’ll use that one first. Meg took one home, so we’ve got four more sitting in the cupboard to use throughout the year.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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Christmas, Chez Skud style

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 02:08:48 GMT

Christmas is a bit fraught for me. For years I’ve lived overseas, and it’s been easy to say that my Christmas tradition is to curl up on the sofa and watch videos and eat pizza. But here in Melbourne, where Christmas coincides with all the wonderful summer food, and where I’m constantly reminded of childhood summers at my Nanna’s house and all the Christmas preparations and special dishes we had there, it’s harder for me to just brush it off.

I wasn’t sure which way I was going to go this year, and even this morning I was tossing up whether to try for the pizza thing or get off my arse and go up to the market and buy something nice to eat this week. Not necessarily something Christmassy, but something seasonal and a little bit special.

In the end I went to the market, and I’m glad I did. The weather has cooled down from yesterday’s 40 degree scorcher, and it’s around 27C and overcast, threatening rain. I rode my bike up to Preston, got a quick breakfast and iced coffee at the Old Fire Station cafe, and then went to brave the market itself.

The first thing I saw as I came out the back door of my favourite Asian food store, Quoc Te, and entered the market proper was 99c/kg nectarines, then right next to them, $1.50/kg tomatoes. The moment I saw them my plans were set.

I bought 3kg of each of them, along with a small free range chicken, some eggs, some special butter (from Warrnambool dairy, violently yellow in colour), a small handful of shelled pistachios, some glace ginger, a bunch of sage, and a few other bits and pieces.

This afternoon I’ll be stewing and canning nectarines, using the hot water method in my Fowlers Vacola whatchamacallit. I’ll make some short crust pastry too, and stick it in the fridge, along with a log or two of refrigerator cookies like these.

The tomatoes, I’ll sort out into squishy and less-squishy (that’s the thing about buying $1.50 tomatoes and cramming them into a bike basket for the ride home — they don’t all survive). The squishy ones will become Nanna-style tomato sauce and the less squishy ones will get halved and put on a baking sheet to be oven-dried.

Yesterday I got together to talk shop with Kirsten and Serenity from Eaterprises, and they sent me home with a big bag of warrigal greens (an Australian native perennial that’s a good substitute for spinach, though you’re not meant to eat it raw because of its oxalic acid content). Those will make a nice quiche I think, which I can bake and have for dinner tonight with a tomato salad and some of the nice “pana di casa” I picked up at the Italian bakery. There are beautiful cherries for after.

What might not be obvious is that this is a HUGE bag, about three times the volume of a normal grocery bag.

Tomorrow, I’ll roast that little chook with some classic sage and onion stuffing (made from whatever bread’s left over), have some more tomato salad and maybe grill a zucchini or two from the garden. When that’s settled and I’m hungry again, I can bake some of the refrigerator cookies.

On Thursday the market re-opens, and I’ll be back, looking for more tomatoes to oven-dry and some capsicums to roast and bottle. Last year we made just 4 jars of roasted red peppers, but this year I’d like to try for twice that. It’s a bit of a chore to do alone, but if I can get some help it’ll go quickly. (Anyone want to come round and help in return for a jar of the results?)

These are last year’s. Wish I’d written down the recipe.

As I write this, I’m starting to hear the first heavy splats of summer rain. It will be a cool Christmas, just like every Christmas I’ve spent in Melbourne in the last decade or so. Remember that one where it was 10C in the city and it snowed in the hills, putting out the bushfires? Remember last year with the hailstorm that killed half our vegie garden? Looks like this year will be a mild 22C without any drama. A great day to spend preserving and cooking for my own pleasure.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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A quickie

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:36:12 GMT

I’m posting this because FIRST ZUCCHINI FROM THE GARDEN.

I diced it up with some mushrooms and green beans…

Sauted them in olive oil with half an onion finely diced, then tossed the results through some whole wheat pasta along with 4 ice-cubes worth of pesto that was still sitting in the freezer from last summer’s basil.

Crumbled feta on top. It was pretty good. I call it my Earth Mother pasta because it was green and brown like a back-to-the-land 70s hippie dream. (Not that that’s a bad thing…)

Speaking of basil, this year’s is starting to be big enough to pick. Made a pretty good tomato salad for lunch yesterday and ate it outside.

The tomatoes themselves aren’t coming along all that well — just a few little green ones on two of the bushes, though the rest are all flowering and I guess they’ll get there eventually. Other Melbourne friends who put their tomatoes in around Cup Day are telling me they’re having the same experience, so it looks like it’s just a slow year.

Meanwhile, the cucumbers are just starting to show their first fruit:

This one’s about 3cm long. I call it a CUTECUMBER.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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Global Shifts conference

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 11:15:25 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Tomorrow I’m off to Global Shifts, a three day social enterprise conference being hosted at RMIT. I’m very glad someone happened to mention it to me last week, just in time for me to register.

I’ve started describing Growstuff, in appropriate circles, as a social enterprise. Lots of people don’t know what the term means, so I’ll just quickly define it: a social enterprise is a business which hopes to achieve a social good, but does so through its business practices rather than the fundraising/donations model that most charities use.

I consider Growstuff to be a social enterprise on several levels. The first is that by helping people grow their own food, we are addressing food insecurity and promoting environmental sustainability. The second is that by aggregating data about people’s food growing activities and releasing it under a Creative Commons license, along with our open source code, we’re freely providing technology to help other people build tools and services for food growers, or to help researchers understand how people are growing food. The third way that Growstuff works as a social enterprise is through our community and development processes: as a non-traditional software project, we offer training/mentoring and a supportive environment for people from non-traditional technology backgrounds or who are marginalised in the technology industry to learn, improve their skills, and take leadership roles.

I’ve been to an uncountable number of tech conferences over the past decade or so, but Global Shifts will be my first social enterprise one. I keep remembering something someone said in an intro session the one time I attended SXSW: “Don’t attend sessions about things you already know. You’ll only sit there being annoyed they’re not covering your favourite topics, and thinking you could do better. Instead, go to sessions about things you know nothing about.” Some of the best conferences I’ve been to have been the ones where I’m stepping outside my usual field — I’m thinking especially about the museum/library/archive events and digital humanities “THATCamps” I attended in 2010-2011 — and I’m hoping that Global Shifts is going to have the same effect: lots of new subjects to fill my brain, and very few where I doze off because I’ve heard it all before.

Here are some of the sessions I’m hoping to attend:

Wednesday

Developing your social enterprise idea to a workable model — 2 hour workshop, hoping it will be very useful, but slightly worried that we’ve already advanced beyond it. On the other hand, I suspect the other main contender in this timeslot, “B Corporations (what, why, how?)” will be covering material I definitely know from having pored over their website over the last week or two.
Structuring a social enterprise – what are the options? — 2 hour workshop, and I’m very interested in this, because this is one of the next steps for Growstuff.

Thursday

Measuring Impact — not the obvious choice (that would be “Paddock to plate, food is leading the revolution”) but another Growstuff person will most likely be attending that one, so we’ll each take notes and swap info afterwards.
Making Change: If it’s so good, why aren’t more people doing it? — another one that’s on against a green/environmental session, but I’m planning the same note-swapping deal in this session too. I actually think this session might be useful for insight into why people might not want to use our stuff.
SOCIAL DRAGON’S DEN: Real projects pitch to real investors — I want to watch other social enterprises pitching their ideas, and see how they’re doing it — and how we can do it. Not that we’re pitching to investors, but it’s good to be able to explain our project in a compelling way to all sorts of people.

Friday

State of Australia — I’ll just quote the description and you’ll see why this is so interesting to me: “What structural supports are in place to get social enterprises up and running successfully? Who and what is available to back-up your start-up? Where do you go when you need support, guidance, direction or simple good advice?” Yes please.
Structuring success — this is a session about co-ops, B-Corporations, and other alternative governance models. I actually think this might be more interesting than the B-Corp workshop on Wednesday, since it presents a wider range of options.
Leadership and people: how to create a movement — not super psyched by this (suspect it might be a bit Social Media 101) but it looks way more interesting than the alternative (“Can big business save the world?”) so I’ll probably go to it anyway.

So, that’s my plan for Global Shifts. I’ll probably be tweeting from there (hashtag #globalshifts). If anyone reading this is attending and wants to meet up, drop me a line.

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OEconomist is now Chez Skud

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 09:12:49 GMT

I’ve had the domain chezskud.com for ages, and today it seemed like the time to switch my domestic blog over to there. So, this is more or less a test post. Those of you reading via Dreamwidth should see it as normal, and all links should point to the new domain. Also testing the new “Publicize” thingy in WordPress to notify Twitter of the update. The old domain will stick around until my attempt to redirect actually takes effect on my hosting service — less than a day, in my experience.

So, how did that go?

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

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My Name Is Me is back

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:19:56 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

A few people have contacted me lately asking where “My Name Is Me” (previously at http://my.nameis.me/) had got to. Well, the domain registration expired, the WordPress site that I didn’t login to very often got malwared to hell and back, and when I asked around, nobody wanted to take it over.

However, I recently set up WordPress Multisite (and wow, that was easier than I thought it would be — recommended!) and I’m in the process of moving all my various blogs to it. Among them, since I had an archive sitting around, is MNIM.

And so, in “celebration” (a ha ha) of Google+ releasing a “community” feature that excludes LGBTQ people; abuse survivors; refugees; whistleblowers; people in the military, medical, legal, political, education, or social work fields; people from countries which commonly use monomyms or mixed character sets for names; people who want to chat with their gaming, open source, fandom, or SCAdian buddies; nuns and monks; performers known by their stage names; authors known by their pen names; activists and political dissidents… oh look, just go see the site. In recognition of all these people and their exclusion from G+ and similar social networks, MNIM is now back at mynameisme.org.

Note that it’s in “archival” mode — I’m not actively soliciting new people to list on the site, and the forms for submitting stories have been removed. It took a team of hard workers slogging away at all the editorial work for MNIM, and we’re no longer up for that. Hopefully the work we did last year will still be useful as it stands.

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Importing data is hard: a rant about integrating open data projects

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 07:02:31 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

A few times on the Growstuff mailing list or IRC channel, someone’s excitedly suggested that we should import data from another CC-licensed data set. Each time, I say, “Trust me, that’s pretty complicated,” but I’ve never actually sat down and explained the full gory details of why.

The following is something I wrote up for our wiki so that I could point people at it next time the subject comes up. I thought it might be interesting to a wider audience, too, so that’s why I’m posting it here.

Importing data is hard.

This is a bit of a rant by Skud, who used to work on Freebase, a large open-licensed data repository which imported data in bulk from a range of sources, including Wikipedia, Netflix, the Open Library Project, and many more. She’s had a lot of experience in this area, and learnt a lot about the weird complications of mass data imports.

The simple case

They have a database. You have a database. Your fields are the same. Their API is easy to use and their license is compatible.

map their fields to ours, eg. their “name” is our “system_name”
import data
PROFIT!

Their fields aren’t the same

What if the fields aren’t quite equivalent? For instance, let’s say they have measurements in imperial and we use metric. We’ll need to have ways to convert them. That’s actually a really simple example. Import incompatibilities are more often at a semantic/ontological level. Growstuff has the idea of “crops” and “varieties” but what if the other database only has “plants” with no distinction? Or what if they have crops and varieties but draw the line somewhere slightly different to where we do? These sorts of incompatibilities are more common than not, and massively complicate any import effort.

Some of their data is bogus

Nothing against that other database — some of everyone’s data is bogus! But we need to check it. What “bogus” means will vary from place to place, but it might be spam entries, duplicate records, simple errors, or it might be cruft from their own broken imports. We need to look carefully at every import and make sure we’re skipping as much of this as possible. And this is largely a manual process, since what the bogosity will never be the same twice. You can do this by sampling, of course, but you still need to look at something on the order of a hundreds of records, and know what you’re looking for. Could you spot a mixed-up scientific name on a randomly chosen herb? I couldn’t.

The stub problem

Let’s say we want to import from a database of plant life that lists 10,000 edible plants and their nutritional content. Growstuff has 300 crops at present. We import everything! Now we have 9,700 pages with nothing but nutritional data. Nobody on Growstuff is using them, they have no pictures, they have no planting data, they have no discussions (except maybe spam comments that nobody cleans up because nobody notices). Our “newest crops” page, usually a source of interest, is now just a wasteland of grey placeholder images.

Should we have imported all 10,000 plants, or just the nutritional data of the 300 we already have? Or something in between? The answer is usually “something in between” — you might want that data if and only if you can get other partial data from other imports to make it more interesting.

The best way to do this is to import the 300 and make a note of the 9700. Then later, you can cross-correlate the notes you’ve made from various data imports and re-import those that have, say, at least 3 useful data sources and a picture. But that’s pretty complicated. (Also, see the discussion of repeated imports, below.)

Don’t forget the license

Let’s assume that their data is licensed compatibly — that means CC-BY-SA or CC-BY in our case, since we’re CC-BY-SA and none of the other clauses (ND, NC) are compatible with us. (Ignoring CC-0 and public domain stuff for now — those don’t need attribution at all.)

So by importing, we have to credit them. Now we need some way to represent that in the database. If we do this at the object level, it’s fairly simple: each thing in the database (crop, etc) has many licensors, each of which includes a name for the work (eg. “Katie’s Plants”), a license (eg. CC-BY), a licensor name (eg. Katie Smith), and a URL to link to the original data.

Now we have to display them on the page. Where? Probably at the bottom somewhere: “Some information on this page came from: Katie’s Plants (that would be a link) — CC-BY Katie Smith; SuperPlantDB under CC-BY-SA SuperPlants Inc; etc.”

The license chaining problem

Now imagine that the data on those sites came from other sites. For instance, let’s say Katie’s Plants previously did an import from Freebase.com, and SuperPlantDB did one from Wikipedia. We not only need to credit Katie’s Plants and SuperPlantDB but also those places.

Some questions to consider:

Are those second-degree sources, their licenses, licensors, etc available via the API? When Freebase imported images from Wikimedia Commons, we encountered this problem, because the license metadata had to be scraped from inconsistently-formatted HTML. Getting this wrong leads to complaints from licensors whose licenses we’re violating.
Do we know what part of the data on Katie’s Plants was sourced from Freebase? Maybe it was the international names, but we’re importing medicinal uses and not touching that part of her data. Does Katie’s license notice express this? Probably not — there’s no requirement in the CC licenses for the attribution to be at the field level, and our own attribution notices definitely don’t operate at this level of detail. Because we don’t have the detail, this means we end up with attribution inflation: pretty soon, every page on Growstuff has a hundred attributions at the bottom of every page.

Sure, we could just choose not to chain licenses, or to do it in some restricted way… but the moral high road here is to respect everyone’s license and attribution, and besides, if you only attribute some contributors, where do you decide to draw the line?

The infectious NC clause problem

This is a subset of license chaining problems. Let’s say Growstuff (a commercial entity using CC-BY-SA) imports from Katie’s Plants (a non-profit entity using CC-BY-SA) which imports in turn imports from Hippie Herbs (a non-profit entity using CC-BY-NC — note the “non-commercial” clause).

Katie’s fine — she imports from Hippie Herbs’ data with impunity because she’s non-profit. She attributes them on her site, and Hippie Herbs is happy. She doesn’t have to use the same license as them because they don’t have a “SA” (Share Alike) clause.

Now Growstuff comes along and wants to import data from Katie’s Plants. Katie’s Plants is CC-BY which is compatible with Growstuff… but what about the data that originally came from Hippie Herbs? We’re commercial, so we’re not meant to use it.

But how do we tell what’s what? Katie probably doesn’t attribute HH at the level of individual bits of data, so we can’t extract just the ok-for-commercial-use bits.

Basically, if you believe in license chaining (and as I said, it’s definitely the moral high road to take, so I think we should) then you have to be constantly vigilant for the taint of NC-licensed data anywhere in the sprawling tree of ancestors to your data.

What if we already have some data? (the merge case)

The simple case is fine for a green-field import with no existing data, which is described above. But let’s say we’re importing data into an area where we already have some contributions from Growstuff members.

map the fields as before
for each piece of data imported, compare with Growstuff
1. is Growstuff’s field empty? IMPORT!
2. are the two the same? no-op!
3. do they differ?
If they differ, do we trust our own community or the import source? Or do we need to adjudicate?

Let’s say we decide to adjudicate. We now need to build an app to let people vote on which one is “correct” — probably best of three or something like that. Freebase did this (multiple times) and I was involved in some of it. We called them “data games” and had leaderboards for who’d voted the most. We couldn’t get enough throughput, though, and sometimes by the time something had been adjudicated, another community member had edited the field on our site, thus invalidating the whole thing. We ended up paying people in developing countries to churn through these votes for us (we used ODesk, but you could use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or whatever). However, they needed training, and weren’t cheap — even after all the work of setting up the voting queue, there was still considerable expense.

Do we let people edit the data after import?

This came up quite often with Freebase because sometimes they would import from “authoritative sources” who licensed their work specially to Freebase but didn’t generally have a CC license or an open community editing process. For instance, the time when I was talking to some people from the BBC, and one (an older dude) said, “If we gave you our programme data, we wouldn’t want anyone to edit it because we are the experts on our programmes.” This was pretty silly of course — another, younger BBC dude immediately turned to him and said “Ha ha ha, I’ve got two words for you: Doctor Who.” — but sadly these situations are common when you’re dealing with closed/non-community-based/”authoritative” data sources who don’t understand the power of crowdsourcing information.

But even when dealing with compatibly CC-licensed sources with open developer communities, there can still be some problems around the “authority” of the data and how it’s attributed.

Take the case where Katie’s Plants community have spent heaps of time editing their data and are very proud of it. We import it to Growstuff, then our community looks at it and decides that bits of it are wrong and change it.

Do we leave the license link to Katie’s Plants intact? Most likely yes, because our data has theirs in its DNA, so to speak. But what if we essentially deleted all the data from there? This might happen if, for example, we’d imported a picture from Wikimedia Commons then found that the picture was incorrect or inappropriate, so we blew it away. Now we should probably remove the license note. But how do you tell when data has been completely removed as opposed to modified or built upon?

In the Katie’s Plants example, what if Katie’s high quality medicinal plant information gets mixed up with ($DEITY forbid!) low-quality data from less experienced Growstuff members or from yet another import? What implications does this have for Katie’s site and their reputation? Under the license we’re allowed to mess it up because there is no “No Derivatives” (ND) clause, but socially/culturally they’ll be pretty unhappy if we do, and we can expect some backlash.

Repeat imports

Great news! Katie got a government grant and some fantastic press coverage, and her database has expanded enormously. We want to re-run the import. But now consider this case:

Katie’s plants, original: “Tomato – red”
Growstuff, original: “Tomato – red, yellow, green, black”

When we first imported, we put it to adjudication and found that Growstuff’s data was better, so we went with that.

Now we re-import, and Katie’s data has changed:

Katie’s plants, changed: “Tomato – red, yellow, green, striped”

So of course we put it through adjudication again. The correct answer is probably a union of the two sets.

Now, Katie’s database is growing fast, and so is Growstuff. We want to do a regular import from there — perhaps monthly. But somehow along the way, we’ve ended up with different ideas of tomato colour. Every month, their data is different to ours, and we have to keep re-adjudicating the same question: what colour/s are tomatoes? Boring. Our community is tired of playing the voting game, and/or it’s costing us money with our Mechanical Turk people.

So we decide to implement a check: if nothing’s changed on either side since the last adjudication, leave it. But now we have to implement change tracking, not just on Growstuff, but on Katie’s Plants as well. We need to keep a history of changes for every site we import. This is in addition to the infrastructure we’ve had to build to automatically run imports at regular time intervals.

How do we make our data available in return?

Obviously we have an API for people to access our data under CC-BY-SA. But keep in mind the license-chaining effect: if anyone uses data from Growstuff, they will also be constrained by the licenses of all the data sources we import. We will need to make that license information available in the API alongside our data, and make sure all our API docs and related materials explain the necessity of license chaining.

Take a look at Freebase’s Attribution Policy. They use CC-BY, but because of attribution chaining, they can’t just say that — they need a whole page with a wizard to help people figure out how to attribute something on the site. It’s incomplete, too: Freebase decided that they would only require license chaining for “content” as opposed to “facts” (a complicated issue in itself) which means images Wikipedia-based descriptions. They don’t require chained license information for other data sources. This is dubious in terms of the legality and culture of how Creative Commons works — there’s no really firm guidelines on this, but in my opinion the most moral/ethical stance is to always chain your attributions, and Freebase has chosen otherwise. In the past, this has caused some concern from the owners of other data sources that were imported to Freebase. Even Wikipedians have complained that Freebase doesn’t enforce their Wikipedia attributions strongly enough. This sort of thing can lead to reputation problems, if not legal ones.

Just the facts, ma’am

One final complication. Various courts have ruled that “facts” aren’t copyrightable. For instance, the fact that the crop “Corn” has the scientific name “Zea mays” can’t be copyrighted. Even if you have thousands of these facts all together, they can’t be copyrighted, because they’re not a “creative work”. They’re just a statement of fact.

This actually throws the whole idea of CC-licensing collections of data into doubt. And yet we have nothing better, so we do it anyway.

Some data projects have come up with various justifications for this. For instance, Freebase says that the arrangement of the facts is a creative work — that what’s CC-licensed is their schema. That’s pretty creative in itself! The thing is, none of this has really been tested. And so most open data projects have some kind of Terms of Service which explains what they think the CC-license is for and how it’s meant to be used. These generally say, “By accessing our data via our website or API, you agree to behave as if this CC license applied to it (even if there’s not a very strong legal basis for that outside this TOS).”

The original idea of CC licenses was to stop people having to write their own terms and conditions of use for their work, and standardise in such a way that people could easily re-use creative content. Yet for data projects, we end up having to make up our own TOS just to apply a CC license, and we’re back where we started — having to peer at a bunch of legalese and figure out what the hell it means.

Of course once you get into the complexities of license chaining described above, you now also have TOS chaining — if Growstuff uses Katie’s data under their TOS, and Katie uses Hippie Herbs’ under their TOS, is Growstuff now subject to Hippie Herbs’ TOS? No idea! I am not a lawyer! I don’t want to be one! I just want to make a website about growing food!

Conclusion

Importing data is hard! That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but we should go into it with an awareness of the potential potholes, and carefully weigh up whether importing something is the best choice for us at any given time.

Final note

Katies Plants, Hippie Herbs, and SuperPlantDB are all made-up examples. Any resemblance to actual open data projects is coincidental. Freebase, Wikimedia Commons, and the BBC are real, though.

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The joys of jobseeking

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:58:06 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Technically, for most the last year or so since leaving Google, I’ve been unemployed. I didn’t receive unemployment benefits, though, because I didn’t really need it and because the paperwork overhead seemed higher than I was prepared to deal with. (Plus of course the periods when I was studying or overseas.) But now I’m working on Growstuff and I’d like to get onto the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, which offers small business training and mentoring and some small amount of funding for a year while you work on your new thing. Thing is, you need to be on unemployment benefits to qualify, and so I recently applied for Newstart.

As a Newstart recipient, I’m required to search for jobs, even though my goal is to run my own business. Whatever, I can play the game. I applied for a number of jobs online, figuring I’m probably over-qualified for most of them, but it fulfils the requirements. Today I got an email back from one of them, asking me to fill in an online questionaire. Obviously, to show good faith in my “job search” I need to do this, but I have to admit that it sapped my will to live.

The first part of the process was an 80 question “IQ” test which included the following questions:

The idea that the Earth is the centre of the universe is

a) improbable
b) intelligent
c) subversive
d) insular
e) astronomical

Such things as language, clothing, customs, color, idicate[sic]:

a) temperament
b) race
c) birthplace
d) location
e) personality

Which of the following is a trait of personality?

a) affluence
b) reputation
c) position
d) withdrawn
e) power

The second part of the questionaire, about the “product” of my most recent work (i.e. my year at Google) was even worse. Luckily their web app crashed and I couldn’t actually complete it.

My prospects as a trainee fleet co-ordinator seem less than stellar.

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Harvest Monday, November 19th 2012

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:58:33 GMT

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

The other day I asked on Twitter whether people could recommend me some good food blogs, and among all the others there was Suburban Tomato, who’s a neighbour of mine (or at least, “northern suburbs of Melbourne”, which is my area), and who participates in this weekly Harvest Monday thing, hosted by Daphne’s Dandelions. It looks like a good idea, so I’m on it.

There’s not much of a harvest this week at our place, because the garden more or less died down over winter and we didn’t really start working on it til I came back from my trip mid-October. So things are really only just starting out around here. Still, there are a few bits and pieces! Most of these are this week’s but I think a couple might be from the weekend before? Not sure! Hopefully I’ll get into a rhythm with this in future.

So without further ado, what we got from our garden this week…

Mulberries. We have a tree by our driveway, which is a special favourite of the Indian mynah birds that infest our street. Sigh. We still manage to pick a good handful every few days. We’re freezing them as we go, and will probably make some jam or something when we’ve got as many as we’re going to have. Pretty sure this pic is from last week, but we’ve had another similar bowlful this week as well.

We get about this many each time we check the tree, then rinse them and freeze them.

Herbs for a salad. Mint, lemon balm, and nasturtium.

In the background: roasted beets and their fresh, destalked greens.

I chopped them up with beet greens and a diced cucumber, then topped them with slices of beetroot, toasted walnuts, and a dressing made of greek yoghurt and preserved lemons.

The light was fading as I took this photo. It looked and tasted great, though.

It went with the roast chicken we had for dinner last night. My housemates seem to approve!

Approving housemates, Emily and Connie.

A few nasturtium seeds. Some of last year’s nasturtiums were in hanging pots and are now all dry and dead. I gathered these before we chucked them. The remains went into a huge terracotta pot that came with this house, and which has just been messing up the backyard til now. We’ve put it under the clothesline and we’re filling it with garden scraps and the dead, dry dirt from other unused pots. It’ll get a little layer of decent potting mix on top, and then a few nasturtium seeds deliberately planted. With any luck we’ll have a huge, sprawling, edible nasturtium display pretty soon. They’re tough little beasts, so I reckon they won’t mind the haphazard collection of stuff we put in their container. Fingers crossed.

I suspect a lot more fell in the dirt and we’ll have some surprise nasturtiums in due course.

The last of the lavender. This is some sort of drought-tolerant variety that our landlords planted, and I’m just getting the last, kind of sad flowers off it to dry and use. They’re not as fragrant nor as purple as they would have been back in September/October, but they’re better than nothing. I keep them in bowls on my desk and mix them around and turn them over with my fingers every day or so, and they dry out in about a week, while making my work environment a tad more pleasant. When they’re dry I’ll be putting them in sachets amongst my woollen clothes in the hope that they’ll help deter moths. Meanwhile, we’ve chopped back the lavender bushes pretty violently, and pulled out the dead one, which we’ll replace with a rosemary bush.

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I resent clothing that lasts less than six months.

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:41:09 GMT

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Before I went on my overseas trip in July, I bought a few pairs of black cotton-lycra leggings from Target (Australian Target that is) in various lengths. After three months of traipsing around Spain, France and the UK and another at home since then they’re starting to look rather transparent around the crotchular area and threatening to split at the inner seams. Does anyone have tips for extending their life?

Darning doesn’t seem like it’d work, and I’m not sure if they’re patchable, though I’d be delighted to be shown I’m wrong. I suppose I could lay down another layer of black cotton jersey and machine-sew across it with a stretchy zigzag stitch? The more firmly I sew it, though, the less stretchy it’ll be. Sadly, I don’t think the construction of the leggings is such that you can turn them upside down or roundabout to distribute the wear elsewhere, so that method won’t work.

If I can’t make them last, what can I do with them before chucking them? I have a friend who cuts old t-shirts into yarn and knits dishcloths out of them, and of course they can always be cut up as cleaning rags or strips used to tie the tomatoes to their stakes, but I’d rather use those ideas as a last resort. The problem is that most of my uses for scrap fabric are for woven fabric, not knitted, so I never quite know what to do with old knits apart from sending them to the rag bag, even if parts of them are still quite solid fabric, which seems a waste.

Suggestions welcome (up to and including where to buy more friction-resistant leggings, with the caveat that I’m looking for large sizes, natural fibres, varying lengths from bike-short to ankle, and either Australian or with affordable shipping to here.)

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Apricot rock cakes, onion focaccia, and a garden update

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 04:27:49 GMT

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Rock cakes! Somehow I’d forgotten they existed, til I had a sudden craving for them a couple of weeks ago. I’ve made two batches since then, from different recipes, but this one I made yesterday seems the most successful so far. It’s a recipe from the Australian Women’s Weekly “COOK” book (subtitle: “How To Cook Absolutely Everything”, which seems like hubris to me, especially because it’s far less complete than, say, Mark Bittman’s book of a similar name). Anyway. It’s not a bad cookbook, especially for modern Australian family cooking, and the AWW have always been pretty good with recipes for baking.

This is a recipe for apricot and honey rock cakes. I made it according to the book, but to be honest the honey flavour disappears and I could have done without it. So this is my slightly adapted recipe. If you want to put the honey back in, you do it at the same time as the eggs and milk, and use a little less milk to compensate. Or you could skip the caster sugar, replace it with a bit more flour, and use honey as your only sweetening. Rock cakes are pretty adaptable.

2 cups self-raising flour (white or wholemeal or a blend)
OR 2 cups plain flour and 4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
100g butter, chopped
1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
1/4 cup sultanas/raisins
1 egg
scant 1/2 cup milk

Australian apricots are chewier and more sour than the Turkish kind, but you can use whatever you’ve got, or substitute any other dried fruit.

Mix dry ingredients. Rub in butter til it has that sandy texture. Add dried fruit, then wet ingredients, and mix well. You want a just-spoonable mixture, not too sloppy, the sort of thing you need to scrape off the spoon.

Use two table spoons to place lumps of the mixture on a baking tray. The recipe says it makes 15, but I made 12 big ones.

Bake 15 mins at 200C. They’re done when, if you push them with your fingertip, they slide on the tray. They’ll still be soft, but when you cool them on a wire rack they’ll harden up. They’re excellent with a cup of tea, and have enough body to them that you could eat them for breakfast and not crash straight after.

You can’t see the 12th one because I stuck it in my face.

I made another rock cake recipe a couple of weeks ago from a CWA recipe, which I’ll include here, too, in case anyone’s interested:

2.5 cups SR flour
155g butter — THIS WAS TOO MUCH, use 100g instead
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar — I misread and used 1/4 and it was just right, I have no idea what they were thinking saying 3/4, eww.
1 small cup sultanas (I’d say 3/4 cup)
salt
milk

Instructions as for the previous recipe, basically. The 155g butter version was extremely rich and tasty, but it seemed unnecessarily wasteful. Guess I’ve been watching too much Wartime Farm. And I just don’t have the kind of sweet tooth that wants 3 times the sugar.

Of course with all these rock cake recipes you can use whatever dried fruit you like. I think I’ll do some mixed-peel-currant-sultana ones one of these days, and maybe some fig-and-date ones.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting better at yeast bread. A year ago I was pretty much terrified of it. Now I have a few different ones I’m comfortable baking, and I’m not too scared of trying new ones. Yesterday we were having a frittata and salad for dinner, and I felt like we needed something to go with it. While I was flipping through the AWW “COOK” book looking for those apricot rock cakes, I came across a recipe for onion focaccia that looked pretty promising. This is my slightly adapted version.

2 cups plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 packet instant yeast
1/4 cup finely grated parmesan
generous pinch dried oregano (or other herbs to taste)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup warm water
1 small brown onion, sliced thinly
additional salt and olive oil

Place flour, salt, yeast, cheese, and herbs in a bowl. Mix in the oil followed by the warm water until it comes together into a soft dough. Knead on a floured surface until it becomes smooth (about 5 mins).

Stretch it out til it’s about 1.5cm thick and put it on a baking tray or in a shallow pan. The original recipe says to make a 24cm circle; mine was a rectangle of similar area which perfectly filled a small baking tray I had handy. Cover with greased plastic wrap, and leave somewhere warm for an hour or so to rise (I left it in still-warm oven from baking the rock cakes.) It should approximately double in size.

Take the plastic cover off, and poke your finger into the dough here and there to make dimples. I did about 20 dimples across the surface of the loaf. This apparently stops it rising in an undesirable fashion, though I’m not sure exactly what that would be. Perhaps I should skip the finger-poking next time and see what happens.

Next, you scatter the sliced onion on top of the loaf. The recipe says to sprinkle salt and drizzle with olive oil, but in retrospect, I think it would have been better to toss the onions with a little oil and salt before spreading them around, which might have made them bake a bit better without burning. Not that burnt onion is a bad flavour in this case — it’s reminiscent of the onion rolls we used to get in the suburbs when I was a kid — but I think I would have liked them to caramelise a little more and be a little less black.

The onions would have been better tossed in the oil, I think.

Bake at 220C (or as the Women’s Weekly so helpfully says, 200C if your oven is fan-forced, thank you WW!) for about 25 mins. Cool it on a wire rack.

We ate it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, which is to say, we used it to mop up the salad dressing at the end of our meal. I forgot to take a photo, so all you get is this:

Crumbs.

Finally, a quick garden update. Lots of action in the containers out back. The landlords, as I may have mentioned last spring, won’t let us dig up the grass for a vegie patch, so we’re mostly restricted to tubs and pots. We’ve also had a rat problem so we’re trying to keep the tomato plants well isolated and away from the fence this time, so they’re less readily accessible to the little critters.

What we’ve got planted so far in these containers:

1 x Tiny Tim tomato (Australian variety, small bush, no staking, heavy crop of cherry tomatoes)
1 x “Black Krim” tomato
basil along with the tomatoes
3 x zucchini
Thai chillis (several)
Jalapeño peppers (several)
Rainbow chard

Plus a bunch of herbs that are kicking around from last year. We still want to plant some cucumbers and more greens, and we’ve got the containers to do it in, but we need to acquire more soil to do it with. We found a place that’ll deliver bags of potting mix/compost/etc, but I need to check their prices.

Also note the weeds all through the paving. I generally don’t mind weeds (especially the edible ones) but we’re meant to be maintaining this rental property to a decent standard, and the paved paths and driveway are a constant battle. Lately I’ve tried pouring boiling water down the cracks, and it seems to do a good job at killing the weeds and not letting them come straight back, which is more than I can say for trying to pull them up the old-fashioned way. Plus, you can do it any time without getting your hands dirty, so it doesn’t feel like work, really. Not sure where I got that tip from, but I pass it on for anyone else who has the same problem.

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The ricotta called to me.

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:29:28 GMT

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Hey, for once my timing’s right, so I’m submitting this post to Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this week by From Kirsten’s Kitchen to Yours. If you want more pasta recipes this week, that’s the place to go.

Meanwhile… for the past few weeks at Preston Markets my housemate Connie and I have gone to this one deli to buy cheese, and every week I’ve looked at the huge mounds of fresh ricotta and thought, “I need to make something with this.” This week, finally, I did.

What we have here is a vegetarian pasta bake with ricotta, zucchini, mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes. You can substitute other veg, of course, and we had a few ideas for that which I’ll mention below. I made a baking tray full, which you can see in the pics below, and it came out to about six serves. This is easily adjusted to serve more or less, though, so just use my quantities as a guideline.

I had mine with a green salad, but there’s nothing stopping you from nomming it just as it is.

A quick note about ricotta: the kind of ricotta widely available in America, that comes in a tub and is kind of spoonable and slightly gritty in texture, won’t work for this recipe. You want the kind that’s firmer and sliceable, and probably displayed in a moulded cake in the deli, like this. In Australia, this is available pretty much everywhere. Elsewhere, you might need to go to a good cheesemonger or a specialist Italian grocery to find it.

Anyway, onward! You will need:

pasta — penne, spirals, bowties, elbows, anything you like, really — see below re: quantity
about 500g/1lb fresh ricotta (the firm kind, see note above)
1 large brown onion, diced
a slosh of oil for sauteing, and some to grease the baking pan
generous pinch of salt
about 6 sundried or oven-dried tomatoes
1-2 medium sized zucchini, grated
some mushrooms, sliced (we had a couple of cups, sliced, but could have used more)
pesto – 1/2 to 1 cup, home-made or bought
grated cheese (parmesan, cheddar, whatever you’ve got) for sprinkling on top

First boil the pasta in salted water. How much pasta? Enough that, when dry, it comes up a little less than halfway in the pan you’re going to bake it in. It’ll double in size after it’s been boiled, and you don’t want it to overflow the pan. This is literally how I measured mine, from the big jar we use, so I don’t know how much it was in weight or cups or anything, and even if I did, telling you wouldn’t help.

Now, while that’s boiling, get the onions sauteing. I like to get them so they’re starting to caramelise, so I’ll let you in on a tip. I do this lots for different dishes when I’m using the onion-and-dried-tomato combo. First, get your onions moving around in a pan with a pinch of salt over a lowish heat. As they get translucent and start to take on a little colour, get your kitchen scissors and start slicing slivers of dried tomato into the pan. Every so often, put a tiny splash of water in (just a couple of tablespoons), and as it boils and evaporates, it’ll take some delicious caramelised brown stuff off the bottom of the pan, and you can mix it around with the onions and help them brown faster. At the same time, the water will soften the tomatoes a bit and help their flavour spread around.

Once the onions are brown, throw in the sliced mushrooms and grated zucchini and give them a bit of a stir around. They don’t really have to be thoroughly cooked, because they’re going to bake in the oven soon, but it’s good to get all the vegies mixed well together. Set this pan aside.

The pasta will probably be done sometime soon. You want it to be al dente, with just a bit of bite to it, as it’ll soak up a little more moisture from the vegies in the oven. Drain it in a colander, but don’t fuss too much about getting every last drop of water off it. Throw it back into the big pot that it boiled in and add the pesto. Stir it around until the pesto is coating all the pasta evenly.

Now toss in the vegie mix, and give that a good stir too. Finally, add the ricotta, cut or crumbled into chunks about 2cm (a bit less than 1″) across, and mix it through. Don’t be too violent at this point — you want there to be delicious lumps of ricotta hidden in the baked dish, so don’t break them up too much.

All mixed up and ready for more cheese.

Finally, up-end all this into the baking dish (which, if you’re better at these things than me, you will have remembered to oil beforehand). Spread it around, then top it with some more cheese (I used a blend of parmesan and aged cheddar) and pop it in the oven at about 180C/350F for 20 minutes or so, til it’s hot right through and the cheese is nicely melted on top.

Cheesy goodness.

We’ll be doing this again next week, hopefully with more mushrooms.

I mentioned other vegetable combinations earlier, and here are some we thought would work well:

Maintain the pesto base and the ricotta, but substitute butternut squash and spinach (or similar greens) for the zucchini and mushrooms.

Drop the pesto; instead, toss the pasta in a simple tomato sauce (I’d use passata from a jar), then use eggplant, zucchini, and peppers alongside the ricotta.

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Crochet time

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:29:06 GMT

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

The other day I had an urge to crochet. I guess it was too much of the mitred square blanket that did it. It’s not exactly challenging, and I felt the need to learn something new. I’ve crocheted on and off since I was a kid, but never very well. Sure, I can do a granny square, or add a border to a knitted item, but I don’t really know how to follow a crochet pattern or do anything complicated.

I retreated to my bedroom with some music, a few hooks in likely sizes, and the ziploc bag that holds the cottony party of my stash, and here’s what came of it:

The pattern is the Amikomo lace doily by Pierrot, a Japanese company that has lots of cute free patterns. It was my first charted crochet pattern, and I have to say I like working off a chart for crochet!

I made the first one in Knitpicks CotLin (a DK weight cotton/linen blend) and I have to admit I don’t like it all that much because it’s kind of floppy and a bit fluffy and the yellow isn’t really something I’m that into. But I’ve stuck it under the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and I guess it’s serving a purpose of sorts.

The second one was done in a mystery red cotton crochet thread, much lighter weight but without a label so I couldn’t tell you what weight exactly. It felt about equivalent to a 3 ply/light fingering knitting yarn. I used a 2mm needle. The overall effect was much tighter and firmer and I am much fonder of this one than the yellow one.

So, I learned to read patterns and to crochet in fine thread with a small hook. Feeling pretty good about that!

Later, I decided to make some Christmas decorations for the tree, and had a shot at this crochet snowflake/star using the same red thread. It came out at about an inch in diameter, too tiny to use as a hanging decoration even on even our small tree, but I thought it was cute so I started to make a chain of them.

After I finish each star I chain 30 stitches, then loop back over the last 6 to form the starting circle for the next star.

Belatedly, I’ve realised I’m actually missing the last round of the pattern (duh!) so I’m not sure if I’ll ever finish this chain or whether I’ll go back and make slightly larger snowflakes that work better as hanging decorations. Anyway, I thought it was kind of cute so I posted it in case you think so too.

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No, I still don’t want to work for Google.

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 09:16:48 GMT

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

You think those Google recruiters would know not to contact me, but the other day I got another perky “Opportunities at Google” email from one of them, telling me that they’d found my “online profile” and that based on my experience they think I “could be a great addition to our team!”

Riiiiight.

Since I just deleted my LinkedIn profile, I emailed them asking where they’d found this “online profile”, since it was obviously outdated. Oddly enough, it seems they’d found a page about me on the Geek Feminism Wiki, and were using the rather sketchy outline of my open source background there as justification for trying to recruit me.

The recruiter admitted that the page was out of date, and asked me to let them know what I’d been up to lately so they could add it to their records. Below is a copy of what I sent them. I’m posting it here, lightly edited, for anyone who’s interested, and in the hopes that the next Google recruiter (I have no doubt that there’ll be one) might use that web search thingamajig to find out whether I’m a suitable candidate before emailing me.

Here’s what I’ve been up to for the last couple of years, since you asked.

In July 2010 the startup I was working for, Metaweb, was acquired by Google. I was brought in on a 1-year fixed term employment contract, since the group we were acquired into (Search) didn’t really know what to do with a technical community manager. I attempted to transfer my role over to Developer Relations, but was told that I “wasn’t technical enough” for the job I’d been doing for 3+ years, presumably because I didn’t have a computer science degree and believed that supporting our developer community was more important than being able to pass arbitrary technical quizzes.

Around the same time, Google started to develop Google+. As a queer/genderqueer woman, victim of abuse, and someone who was (at that very time) experiencing online harassment and bullying, I was very vocal within Google for the need for Google+ to support pseudonymity. Google decided not to do that, and instead told people they should use “the name they are known by” while in actual fact requiring their full legal names, in many cases requiring people to provide copies of their government ID when challenged. (Extensive documentation about this is available on the Geek Feminism wiki, if you’d like to read it. See Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy? for starters.)

When I walked out the door of Google’s San Francisco office on July 15th, 2011, I was very glad to have left a company I thought was doing evil towards any number of marginalised and at-risk people. My first tweet on leaving was to criticise them for it.

Less than a week later I got my first email from a Google recruiter — not first ever, of course; I’d been spammed with them for years, but first since I quit working for them. Here’s the blog post I wrote about it. In case you can’t be bothered clicking through and reading it, here’s the money shot:

If you are a Google recruiter, and you want me to interview for SWE or SRE or any role that has an algorithm pop quiz as part of the interview, if you want me to apply for something without knowing what team I’ll be working on and whether it meshes with my values and goals and interests, if you want me to go through your quite frankly humiliating interview process just to be told that my skills and qualifications — which you could have found perfectly easily if you’d bothered to actually look before spamming me — aren’t suitable for any of the roles you have available, then just DON’T.

The very day after I blogged about that, my Google+ account was suspended, for using the name I was almost universally known by. Over the next couple of months, I campaigned tirelessly for Google+ to change its policies, working with the EFF and other advocates. My work was covered in Wired, The Atlantic, and a number of other mainstream press outlets. Obviously this was to no avail as Eric Schmidt (at the time, CEO of Google) described pseudonymous users like me as “a dog or a fake person” and no substantive change has ever been made to allow pseudonymous use of the service, despite promises to do so.

I returned to Australia and went back to school. I did a semester of Sound Production at TAFE, but it turned out that the sound engineering course I was enrolled in wasn’t really my cup of tea, just like I’d previously decided, back in the ’90s, that university wasn’t for me. Like so many others, I quit my computing degree because I was more interested in the Internet and open source software than in fixing COBOL applications for banks who were worried about Y2K. But then, I’m sure Google’s HR system already knows all about that — if I’d had a degree, you might have considered me worth keeping on last year. Instead, Google’s reliance on higher education credentials causes it to weed out people like me, even though I have a track record a mile long and buckets of evidence to show that I’m good at what I do.

In the end, I’ve spent most of the last year lying in hammocks reading books, working in my garden, going to gigs, hanging around recording studios, doing the odd bit of freelancing, and, over the last few months, travelling around Europe. It’s given me a good opportunity to reflect on my previous work.

Since I’ve been out of the Silicon-Valley-centred tech industry, I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the wellbeing of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I’ll say “people” in general, since it’s wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don’t — we’re all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical wellbeing. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that.

Over time, I’ve come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we’re going to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and relate to each other. Geek toys like self-driving cars and augmented reality sunglasses won’t fix it. Social networks designed to identify you to corporations so they can sell you more stuff won’t fix it. Better ad targetting or content matching algorithms definitely won’t fix it. Nothing Google is doing will fix it, and in fact unless Google does a sharp about-turn, they’ll only worsen the inequality and injustice there is in the world.

I guess you’ll want to know what I’m working on at the moment. My current project is an open source, open data project called Growstuff, which helps food gardeners track and share information about what they’re growing and harvesting. It is built on principles of sustainability, including a commitment to a diverse and harassment-free community, to actively supporting developers rather than excluding them based on misguided ideas of meritocracy, and to funding the project through means that will never put the people running the website in opposition to our customers. That means no ads, in case you’re wondering. We’d rather our members paid us directly; that way, we’ll never forget who we’re meant to be serving. I’m working on Growstuff from home, where I can be myself and feel safe and comfortable. I work with volunteers from all round the world, and get to teach programming and web development and system administration and project management and sustainability to all kinds of people, especially those who’ve previously been excluded from or marginalised in their technical education or careers. We get to work on things we know are wanted and appreciated, and we don’t have to screw anyone around to do it.

Let me know when Google has changed enough to offer me something more appealing than that. If you don’t think that’s likely to happen, then please put me on whatever “Do Not Contact” blacklist you might have handy. I know you must have some such list; I only wish you regularly referred to it instead of spamming people who not only don’t want to work for you, but have nightmares about it.

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