"Every Grain of Rice" is my favorite cookbook ever. Its emphasis is home cooking so the recipes are pretty practical and it covers more than just Sichuan or Hunan cuisine so there is a lot of variety. The amazing part is that almost all the recipes are delicious. I've made over 120 of the recipes and the percentage of hits vs misses is amazing, probably 90% are things I would make again and a couple dozen have become essential.
The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.
I'm a big fan of Buckaroo Banzai but it seems odd that you credit BB when the linked Wikipedia article is about the original source of "Yoyodyne"
> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.
Try the Mala Market 0]. They have really good Sichuan products that are hard to find in the US. The quality is really good as they are a low volume business and travel to China to pick specific items. They definitely charge for this, but the quality for some things is well worth it.
I use them for things I can't get locally like rapeseed oil (caiziyou) or where the quality is wildly better like Sichuan peppercorns, Facing Heaven chiles, extra aged Pixian Douban Jiang. They used to be the source for Yibin Yacai, but now you can find that on Amazon and finally one of the local Chinatown grocers started carrying that for about 1/4th the cost.
I don't think your comment about a breaking abi change on a minor point release is fair. Perhaps you have misunderstood the release number scheme? Every year around the first quarter they have one major release, ie 3.9, 4.0, 4.1, and now 4.2. A minor release would be like 4.2.1. There is no significance to the major digit, ie 4.0 was just the release a year after 3.9 and not otherwise special.
I'm not affiliated with the project, but I think would be unfortunate if someone was turned away using or contributing to the best or only opensource tool chain for a number of processors (eg the paduak family) because someone claimed the project was terribly run.
If you are interested on programming something like a 6800 or 6502, but would like to make a practical device and not just run in simulation, take a look at the STM8. It's a very widely used 8-bit embedded controller and architecturally very like a cleaned up and improved 6800.
The STM8S discovery board for this is $8 and in stock at ST and Digikey.This includes the target system and the ST-Link programmer. There are free commercial tool chains and the open source SDCC toolchain.
> The project itself is terribly run--the maintainers recently pushed out an ABI change which broke everyone's code, but released it as a minor version bump.
Most gas stove tops in the US are not great for cooking with a wok anyway as they are underpowered and the flame comes out the edges of the "sealed burner".
I use an Iwatani 35FW tabletop butane burner for wok cooking which works much better than my gas stove. It claims 15,000 Btu vs my stoves 7,000. I suspect both claims are inflated, but the Iwatani will boil a pint of water in 1/4th the time of the stove. The wok is acceptably stable on it and the flame pattern is usable if not ideal. The butane cans are well under $2 and will make several meals per can. It's a bit pricey ($100-ish now) but mine has lasted six years of frequent use.
After watching "Fitzcarraldo", be sure to watch "Burden of Dreams".
Another director would have used practical special effects (models) to film dragging the steamship over the mountain and riding it down the rapids. Herzog dragged a real steamship over the actual mountain and he and the film crew rode it down the rapids.
In "Aguirre Wrath of God" the conquistadors war party lose half of their equipment when a flood sweeps one of the rafts away. This was not part of the script, during on location shooting an actual flood swept one of the movie crews rafts away with a lot of the equipment and props.
This set of blog posts that turned into a book is a great history of the underlying technologies that ultimately led to the computer, from the discovery of electricity onward. It's not a complete history of science, as it focuses on just one area, but it really brings out the nature of the interaction of discovery and practical development within their social context. I found it fascinating and enlightening.
> Can you explain the 'thinner spokes are better' bit?
The rim deflects inward as it contacts the ground. This is controlled by the stiffness of the rim. The deflection untensions the spoke. The cycle of tension/untension as the wheel rotates causes fatigue and also if the tension reduces to near zero allows the nipples to unwind. A thinner spoke elongates more for a given tension, so the rim deflection reduces tension proportionally less.
For example, given a thin spoke that elongates 5mm under tension, and a thick spoke that elongates 2mm, a 2mm rim deflection reduces tension 40% on the thin spoke and 100% on the thick spoke. So the thick spoke will fatigue and fail faster.
Ideally use the thinnest spokes that can deliver the desired wheel tension. This is not commonly done in cheap wheels because thin spokes have more windup and more spokes interact when truing so the build takes more time and care.
If you want a more modern microcontroller that can actually be used to make things, take a look at the 8 bit STM8 series. They are widely used (you may have a few already, toasters, rice cooker, car etc). They definitely have that 6502 flavor, although even closer to being MC6800 improved, (eg 16 bit index registers), plus a good set of timers, ADCs, UARTs, SPI, I2C etc.
Official "Discovery boards" from ST include a programmer and debug connection for under $10, and cheap dev boards are plentiful. Open source C compiler SDCC, and free tools from ST.
There is also a very good Forth [0]. Even if Forth is not your thing the site has a lot of good information on STM8.
Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler, by Niklaus Wirth and Jurg Gutknecht.
Oberon is a beautifully simple language and the Oberon System was amazingly creative and fresh. The ideas and code in the book are a model of clear thinking and exposition.
Perl is not generally faster than awk. Obviously there are cases where perl is faster, but for the text smashing that awk is meant for, perl usually much slower, particularly than mawk or recent gawk versions. mawk in particular is shockingly fast.
> dealers parked cars in the spots for charging, had them in locked off areas, had them turned off or otherwise inaccessible, etc
That has caused me a few anxious drives in my Spark EV, finding charging at dealers that was available on the way there but blocked on the return trip. Also, sitting in a car dealer lot for half an hour is not anyone's idea of a good time.
The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.