This morning, indieblog.page on Mastodon pointed me to You should write deliberately bad tools from Qword and I had to chuckle, as it exactly describes why I treated myself to about 50 minutes of tomfoolery yesterday, though at a considerably lower level than Qword’s.

A lot of people are down on tools like ChatGPT for reasons I fully understand. Heck, I’m down on it myself as a substitute for a human writer. But to help my amateur programming efforts, I find it insanely useful.

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Phew! What a scorcher! Seriously, August was hotter for longer than I can remember. Almost impossible to go for a walk at any reasonable hour, and although I managed a few early morning rides, they got pretty hot pretty fast too.

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Monochrome photo of a person kneading bread dough on a wooden countertop. The hand and dough are in motion and blurred.

What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.

I say that as if there will be another, but all I’m really doing is leaving the door slightly ajar. I’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot. I hope you have too.

For a f...

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Root profiles of wheat types. Annual wheat is on the left. It's root system is relatively sprase and short. Kernza(tm) is on the right with muvh bushier and deeper root system. Photo by Jerry Glover.

Wheat is an annual plant; it dies after setting seed. Each year, the farmer has to prepare the land, sow seed, fertilise and protect the plants. When the ground is bare, between crops, wind and water can erode the soil. The shallow root systems of annual plants fail to exploit the resources of the...

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A man wearing a white cowboy hat and a checked shirt stands in the middle distance with his hands on his hips in a field of ripe, yellow Soft Svevo durum wheat that stretches away up to the horizon. Photo from USDA.

Durum wheat is only about 5% of the total wheat harvest around the world. For those of us who like our pasta, that’s a very important 5%. Different gluten proteins make a durum dough stretchy rather than elastic — perfect for pasta. The kernels are very hard and need dedicated milling machinery, w...

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