Christine Seeman – Writing tech stuff down so I can it remember later

Aged Eggnog Cocktail Recipe – Dr. Rebecca Lancefield

christine on May 10, 2024

Not at all tech related, but I was sharing the recipe and wanted to be sure to save it off. Especially since the original location isn’t working anymore. Yes, you can age eggnog and it really does get better with time! I do like the Dr. Rebecca Lancefield’s Eggnog recipe but I enjoy adding the dairy later. It makes it much lighter tasting and frothy. Plus, freshly grated nutmeg just taste better. With the below recipe you make the batter, age it, and then use it as a base for the cocktail when you are ready to serve, about 3 or so weeks later.

Recipe via the Wayback Machine and Art of Eating Website

Aged Eggnog Cocktail

The single-serving eggnog cocktail is perfect for intimate holiday parties where the number of people gathered is too small to warrant dragging out a punch bowl. To prepare, the aged base is combined with milk and cream, shaken in a cocktail shaker, and served straight up. You can also serve it on the rocks, but the ice quickly dilutes the eggnog, leaving a less luxurious texture.

Aged eggnog base

1 dozen eggs

1½ cups plus 2 tablespoons(making 340 gr) sugar

12 ounces (1½ cups, 350 ml) bourbon

4 ounces (½ cup, 125 ml) cognac

2¾ ounces (1/3 cup, 75 ml) dark rum

a pinch of salt, preferably coarse gray sea salt

In a large bowl, using a wooden spoon or an electric mixer at the lowest possible speed (a stand mixer set to “stir” is ideal), beat the eggs and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved, scraping down the sides and bottom of the bowl, about 2 minutes (or 5 minutes if you beat by hand). Add the spirits very slowly, about a teaspoon at a time, while beating constantly with an electric mixer on the lowest possible speed or by hand to avoid froth, about 20 minutes — if you add the spirits too quickly, it will curdle the eggs. Finally, beat in the salt.

Bottle in a clean glass jar. Store in a cool, dark place for at least 3 weeks, periodically turning the jar, gently, to mix the contents. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve before using to remove any curdled egg. Makes 5½ cups (1.3 liters), enough base to make 16 eggnogs.

Eggnog Recipe to serve

2¾ ounces (75 ml) aged eggnog base

1¼ ounces (35 ml) whole milk

¼ ounce (7 ml) heavy cream

nutmeg

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add the eggnog base, milk, and cream and shake vigorously for 10 to 15 seconds. Double-strain through a small, fine-mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass. (Double-straining keeps shards of ice from entering the glass: use the built-in strainer that comes with your cocktail shaker, or a bar strainer if you use a two-part Boston shaker, and in addition pour it through a fine-mesh strainer.) Top with a grating of nutmeg.

Bringing together Mastodon and WordPress

christine on October 11, 2023

Just today, WordPress.com announced the release of the ActivityPub plugin on their blogs. I don’t use WordPress.com, but it did make me aware of the plugin, so I decided to give it a go.

I have been on Mastodon (the excellent ruby.social instance) since November 4th, 2022. Coming from the bird site was a shock, but in a good way. But it also had its own learning curve, just like when you had to learn about Git coming from a CVS system like Subversion. One is distributed, and one is centralized.

Now, with the ActivityPub plugin, I can publish my WordPress site and posts to a federated profile and have people reply to that on ActivityPub but show up as WordPress comments. It is it’s own feed! This sounded pretty nifty, but my setup wasn’t just plug-and-play and required more configuration than what was addressed in the WordPress.com announcement.

I am on Flywheel as my WordPress host, and it turned out I needed additional redirects in my .htcaccess because my webfinger kept on 404ing in my site health. But Flywheel doesn’t allow direct .htcaccess file access, but I can add redirects through the Flywheel site. My first attempt at adding a redirect didn’t quite work as expected. I got instead a redirect to “https://wp-json//activitypub//1/.0//webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected]”. Which does not work.

Flywheel’s Add Redirect page for a site, this setup turned out to be not the correct regex.

Trying to simplify the redirect and make sure it hits the proper webfinger for ActivityPub (Mastadon)

This worked! So I needed to add into my source redirect ^/.well-known/webfinger(.*)$ and then for my destination /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/webfinger$1. Now you can subscribe to my infrequent posts from my blog, [email protected], or from me as an author (which umm not so many other authors on my website) [email protected].

Best of luck tying your WordPress and Mastodon/ActivityPub together 😁

How to copy text from one pane – MacOS/Tmux/Alacritty

christine on May 3, 2023

My problem? I only want to copy text from one tmux pane, not across two.

But I was finding that my mouse was failing me, and I knew there had to be a better way than just closing out my panes and only having one open. My journey on understanding terminals, shells, editors, and how to use them correctly has been rocky, but I have been feeling in a good place lately. The current setup that I am using is bash shell (starship shell prompt for that added sparkle), Alacritty terminal, Neovim editor, and Tmux for running multiple terminals. I had gotten this all configured, which probably took too much time. Debugging your developer setup is a considerable learning experience, but developers (meaning me) sometimes (all the time) make it more complicated than it needs to be. I probably didn’t need to throw in attempting to theme everything too, but I like my consistent look.

In my search to figure out how to copy the text on one pane, some Linux solutions were close to what I needed but not 100% the way there. This setup got me all the way there with a solution that should fit nicely in my vim workflow.

The suggested Linux setup is a good start but does not work great for MacOS

 bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
 bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-selection
 bind-key -T copy-mode-vi r send-keys -X rectangle-toggle

For MacOS, add the following onto your tmux configuration (for ex. at ~/.tmux.conf). This solution came from a superuser post from user jeremysprofile.

setw -g mode-keys vi
set -g set-clipboard off
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
# bind y key in copy mode to select and copy to system clipboard
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "pbcopy"
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "pbcopy"

The configuration will add some vi key bindings, and then to supercharge tmux copy mode. For copying and pasting, reach for typical vim keybindings. Start with v to select the text, then y to copy/yank the text. Then the text is in your copy buffer and ready for pasting.

Let’s see our new bindings in action.

Hit your terminal, start up tmux (tmux source ~/.tmux.conf ) and make sure to refresh your config if you already have tmux open.

Split your pane (tmux default keys C-b ")

Load up some text on either side. I am looking at two readme files, one that I loaded up in vim and one that is just cat on the terminal.

Now attempt to use your mouse to highlight some text. You will notice that both sides will highlight.

Frustrating if you want the output from just the right side! Let’s use the new keybindings we added to the tmux configuration instead.

Switch over to tmux scroll mode (C-b [), use your arrow keys to move around, and when you are on the text that you want to copy, use v to make your selection.

What’s this? Only text selected on one side? Perfect! Copy the text using y , and it is ready to put where you need it. In my case, moving to my left pane (C-b then left arrow ), and then pasted (vim p) into my other readme.

Now we have a reusable, memorable solution for grabbing text in a single tmux pane!