Two weeks ago we headed to Barton Hills Farms at the suggestion and accompanied by the Aguilars. I was skeptical: what the hell do you do in a farm in the middle of nowhere?
Turns out there’s much to do. Besides photo ops with pumpkins, which people seem to really like, they have lots of games and activities including Ilan’s favorite: little trains you can ride.
This post is a bit late: they’re closed since November 5th. Make a note for next year.
The ever growing and ever good looking staff of The MKX® wishes all our numerous readers around the globe a sweet and happy and prosperous new year.
I bought my second Apple Watch with a white sports band. Recently I noticed strange staining / discoloration on the strap:
It didn’t occur to me until today, exactly a day before the warranty expires, that Apple had a similar problem a long time ago: White MacBooks suffered from palm rest discoloration, and Apple fixed that free of charge! (my dad’s had the issue, but mine didn’t).
So I took it to the store… not covered.
Then I remembered the tip floating around back then for the MacBook issue: use Mr. Clean Magic Eraser! I’m happy to report that it truly is magical and it worked like a charm. Hopefully this tip helps someone around the internet one day.
Have you read about the Impossible Burger?
I have, and I was terribly curious about it: a California company using high-tech to create a vegetarian burger that looks, feels, and tastes like the real thing. Sound familiar? Yes, because we covered in 2015 we talked about the Beast Burger. This is different. They somehow made plants produce tons of heme which is abundant in meat and allegedly is what gives the hamburger it’s taste.
The only problem is that the list of places that carry it is very short. Recently, popular local burger joint Hopdoddy was added to that list.
When my grandmother and aunt came to Austin for an unrelated event, I took them to try it (they only eat kosher meat, and this is meatless).
But they were sold out.
Not one to be easily discouraged, I tried again by myself. This time they had it. This is what it looks like:
Visually, it’s striking. It looks like a real hamburger. They make it red and stringy like a real hamburger. According to them, the secret is adding plant-mad heme which is abundant in blood thus meat – except this heme is somehow produced from plants.
Taste-wise: it’s pretty good. You can tell it’s not a real hamburger, but when mixed together with the bun / cheese / lettuce / tomato / etc. then it doesn’t really matter that much.
Verdict:
Due to recent life circumstances I didn’t plan to go see today’s total eclipse. I did manage to borrow sun filter, check it out and snap some iPhone photos.
Lame.
Yesterday morning at 8:08 AM officially marked the end of the few slivers of free time I could hope for when my second boy was born. I am glad to report that I’m mostly doing great, except for being a little bit sleep deprived. Shlomit is also doing amazing, and seems to be a real pro at this whole popping children business. But the kid has us all beat: he is good looking, alert, active, hungry, and well behaved. Takes after his brother.
We might be able convince Ilan to pose with him later.
I took a quick trip and attended the presentation of Thelma Sandler’s new book: “Anclas para la Memoria” (“Anchors for Memory”); a compendium of scripts for theater written by Mexican writer Thelma Sandler.
The presentation was at Centro Cultural Plaza Fátima, where around 200 spectators gathered to see dramatic reading of several of the plays included in the book. It was a very nice event. I highly recommend buying the book.
Disclaimer: Author is my mom. But I paid for my copy of the book in full.
Update July 31, 2017: Newspaper article about the event
I’m a newbie to Workflow, the super powerful automation app for iOS that was recently acquired by Apple. I’ve known for a while that there’s some useful things I could do with it, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and play around with it.
Today I did, and my workflow required getting the contents of a URL that uses Basic HTTP Access Authentication. Since it took me a little while to figure out how to do it and didn’t find much help online, I decided to write a post and help the next poor soul to run into this.
The way Basic Access Authentication works is that the client (usually a web browser but in my case the Workflow app) sends the user name and password as part of the HTTP headers.
The nice little explanation on HttpWatch also has a handy little demo. You go this URL and use “httpwatch” as user name and anything you want as password. It displays an image containing the info you entered.
I created a workflow that hard codes the user name, asks you to enter a password, and then gets the image and shows it. It should be easy enough to use a starting point for your own workflow. You can download it here:
Shlomit took me last week to see Chris Rock at the Bass Concert Hall. I expected the show to be very good, but it exceeded my expectations.
I find it interesting to see how the topics of his jokes have changed as he (unlike me) has aged. Lots of stuff about raising kids, divorce. He spent a good twenty minutes on jokes about… mortgages! Less than what’s considered average nowadays about politics, a good thing.
You will see zero photos about the show because they had the most extreme no-phone policy I’ve ever seen, forcing everyone at the entrance of the theater to put phones and smart watches in an opaque pouch that you can only open with a magnet, no unlike the security tags on clothing at stores.
