Darkoshi

Ahhh...... Petrichor!

2026-03-06T20:56:27Z

It's feeling/looking/sounding like spring.

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some foods don't slide down well

2026-02-09T02:18:07Z

Swallowing applesauce is sometimes like swallowing french fries that have gotten cold.
I wonder why.

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keyboard usability

2022-11-22T18:27:56Z

Well, no wonder I've always found this laptop keyboard so hard to type on. It's not that the Insert key is in a different position on the top row than I'm used to. The top row doesn't even *have* an Insert key. It is only present on the zero key at the bottom of the number keypad.

Surely I must have noticed this before (to paste, I end up pressing Ctrl-V instead of Shift-Ins), and yet it feels like a brand new discovery.

In contrast to this one, my work laptop is relatively easy to type on.
The work laptop keys are much easier to read, a thick white text on a black background.
This laptop's keys have thin black text on a grey/silver background, along with light blue alternate text. I always think if I peer hard enough, that light blue text will say "Insert" somewhere but it doesn't.

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one letter differences

2022-09-14T03:49:39Z

While checking Task Manager..
"Animalware! Did it just f'n say 'Animalware'??"

::Looks again::
"Oh, Antimalware, ok."

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chickpea blondies

2022-05-08T19:27:46Z

Random thought:
Why are all the brownie and blondie recipes I find online only enough for a little 8x8 inch pan?

That only makes 9 reasonably-sized pieces, which can be gone in no time at all. Even quicker, if you share them with anyone else. (And could you imagine living with a family of multiple sweets-enjoying people? Goodness gracious!) I want enough batter to fill up the 9x13 inch pan, and while it's not hard to double the recipe....

WHO are all these people who think it is fine to go through all the trouble of finding the ingredients, measuring, mixing, pouring, baking, cooling, cutting, etc., AND washing all the dishes, to only get 9 little pieces of goodness out of it, of which surely you will eat at least 2 before they even finish cooling off?

..

This is an interesting recipe:

7-Ingredient Peanut Butter Chickpea Blondies [Vegan, Gluten-Free, Refined Sugar-Free]

I'd wanted a sweet treat I could share with my mom today.

I was constrained to certain recipes due to being out of my usual egg-replacer.
I didn't have enough maple syrup, so I used mostly brown rice syrup instead.
I used tahini instead of peanut butter, since I have a lot of tahini.
I omitted the strawberries.
I don't have a food processor (maybe I should finally get one), so I used my blender instead, and it turns out that my blender leaks, so maybe I need a new blender too.

One reason I chose this recipe is that it uses buckwheat flour, which I have! I got it when I was eating gluten-free several years ago, and still haven't used it up.

After mixing all the ingredients up, the batter was not very sweet, so I added 3 left-over packets of sugar and some old coconut creamer powder I'm trying to use up. And then I baked it.

It didn't turn out like I had hoped. (I'd been thinking of blondies I had made when I was a kid. Sweet, butterscotch flavor.) It tasted... healthy! (With the main ingredients being chickpeas and tahini, why wouldn't it be healthy?) But after eating two pieces, I wanted more. I continued thinking about them, after going to bed. Today, I'm considering making another batch before heading over to my mom's. I could try the peanut butter in it this time, and could put more sugar in it maybe, and some vanilla.

I also want to try this recipe, as I have chickpea flour too, and using it sounds a lot easier than pureeing a can of chickpeas:
Chickpea Flour Brownies

But it's probably too late for any of that now. Sigh.

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flavors / stevia

2022-04-24T00:52:02Z

random thought:
I wonder if anyone's ever put ranch dressing in a milkshake.

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Per the ingredient list, Kroger's Simple Truth Chocolate Oat Milk contains cane sugar. I don't see any other sweeteners listed:

OAT BEVERAGE (FILTERED WATER, OATS), CANE SUGAR, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: HI OLEIC SUNFLOWER OIL, COCOA PROCESSED WITH ALKALI, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, POTASSIUM PHOSPHATE, CALCIUM CARBONATE, SEA SALT, GELLAN GUM, NATURAL FLAVORS, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, ERGOCALCIFEROL (VITAMIN D2), RIBOFLAVIN, CYANOCOBALAMIN (VITAMIN B12)

Yet it has an intensely sweet flavor like an artificial sweetener or stevia. I dislike it. It doesn't taste good to drink on it's own, so I've put it on my breakfast cereal for the last few days. Today I've put it in a milkshake. Yet even that way, the unpleasant flavor is still unpleasant. I will throw the rest away, which is quite unlike me.

Per this page: Guidelines for Natural Flavor Labeling with Stevia,
stevia can be included as a "natural flavor" in some cases without being listed by name.

So I strongly suspect this oatmilk product contains stevia. I am contacting Kroger's customer support to find out.

Updated to add more links:

How would you list Stevia on a supplement facts panel (Oct 2018)
We just recently received a letter from the FDA saying that Stevia is not approved as a food additive and states "It must be one of the approved forms (rebaudioside A, for example)."...

Stevia doesn't have to be listed as an ingredient now? (July 2020)

New stevia extract ingredient can be labeled as natural flavor (May 2019)
...have introduced a glycosylated stevia extract called Zolesse that may be labeled as a natural flavor under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition.

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spam goes on, in spite of war?

2022-03-04T07:52:59Z

An old post of mine got three linkspam comments today. The comments were posted by a Ukranian IP #, and include the URL of "Custom Software Development Company RexSoft".

Per Norton SafeWeb and Google, the site doesn't have unsafe content.

Per the Wayback Machine, the site has existed since at least 2017.

Per the web site itself, the company has locations in the USA, the UK, and Kyiv, Ukraine.

It seems the entity that left the comments was unclear how to make their URL get posted as an HREF link on my journal, as the 2nd and 3rd comments, posted several minutes after the first, had only the URL. So I'd guess it was a person posting the comments, not a bot.

It seems an odd time, during a war, for someone in Ukraine to post linkspam. That's why I checked if the site might have malicious content.

It also occurred to me that maybe Russia, not that Rexsoft company, could be behind the linkspam. As this page says, "not only are Google getting better at devaluing spammy links, the repercussions from Google can be devastating if caught."

Linkspam like that could hurt the company rather then help it; maybe Russia wants that. It seems an implausible action, but who knows. I will delete or screen the comments eventually.

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Random thought from yesterday, regarding how some of the Russian soldiers were told Ukrainians would welcome them, and were surprised by the resistance:
Maybe Russian (and other national) intelligence agencies have a hard time gauging the sentiment of people due to all of their own (and other) disinformation campaigns that they've been waging. Maybe they can't easily tell which and how many social media posts are by their own disinformation agents versus the actual population.

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Another random thought from yesterday:
Take your kid to work day must be very boring for kids whose parents work from home.

Out of curiosity, I looked into that Rexsoft linkspam some more.

There have been several recent and similar linkspam posts and comments on other sites. These were all posted with a user name of "ann2022":
forums.tarot.com
kboards.com
vivecraft.org
ragezone
cracked.io

Four of those same pages also have linkspam for another site, develux.com. That is a company with locations listed in Kyiv, Ukraine; Malta; and Kissimmee, Florida.

Here's another page with posts from last year that link to both sites:
caclubindia

So it seems there may be a relationship between those 2 companies, or in the people posting the spam for them.

The Kissimmee, Florida address is referenced on other pages as "Devellux Inc".
The same address and Devellux name is used on this site: essayservice.com.
Amusingly, they have a page that discusses their "Honor Code". Given all the things that (as I would expect) go against their listed honor code, I wonder if there are any situations for which someone could honorably use an essay writing service for?

Rexsoftinc's NYC address (347 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1009) is referenced on other pages as N-IX USA INC, and Hoshovsky Law Firm ("Mr. Hoshovsky has practiced law in Ukraine...".

This xing.com page says that "Alexander Volt" is a vice president of rexsoft.
This Alexander Volt fellow is also listed as working at IntellectSoft. IntellectSoft is a company with locations listed as in the US, the UK, Norway, and (you guessed it) Kyiv, Ukraine.

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evolution, planet

2022-01-11T22:32:47Z

Random thought:
It could be argued that humans aren't the pinnacle of evolution on earth, but rather the one branch of evolution here which so far has turned out very very badly.

(in terms of damaging the planet and wiping out other species, causing destruction, pain, and death, etc.)

Context of thought:
Bright yellow sun setting towards the far end of the street as I walk back from the mailbox,
a small airplane flying from that direction, catching my eye so that I follow it as it slowly curves towards the north,
a small flock of birds also flying by overheard, chirping, towards the north,
(me thinking of how carefree the birds seem).

Why the birds flew north, I don't know. Probably not going far in that direction.

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isn't it nice

2021-11-17T21:35:04Z

when you hear a noise
and look out the window
to see 3 military helicopters flying by
not to have to worry
about the imminent possibility
of missiles and destruction

not to have thuggish soldiers in the streets
ordering you out of your houses
rifling through your belongings
taking people away
to unknown destinations, unknown fates

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the madness of the world

2020-07-09T05:39:32Z

(Like everything else) It's a disease that is slowly running its course, and in the end will either kill its host, or won't.

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pretense

2020-06-20T22:36:49Z

random thought: The people who pretend they're pretending aren't pretending.

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red sheep blue sheep

2015-04-23T05:09:09Z

Random thought today: Let's not count our sheep before they hatch.

I keep seeing little red mites running across my laptop. I threw a few outside but it is futile. Last year there were tons of them in this room for a number of days... I don't recall how long. Later on there were tons of tiny spiders. That is the main reason I caulked along the edges of the floor last year - hoping that would keep it from happening again. But they must still be coming from somewhere else.

I actually happened to get a USB microscope photo of a mite last week as it was scurrying under the lens. But I didn't realize that the microscope application re-used the same file names each time it was restarted, so the photo got overwritten. Phooey.

Anyway, I haven't seen any mites in the last couple hours. Maybe they went to sleep.

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errantries

2014-03-09T08:14:22Z

My eye is back to looking nearly normal again. It took a bit under 2 weeks for the blood to clear up.

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Sometimes at 1am, you just have to make a pot of noodles.

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Some people are driven to go snorkeling in the frigid antarctic ocean, to take photos of vicious predators.

Some people are driven to spend 3 hours trying to get a single line of a SQL script to work right. And to spend yet another hour or two trying to get that Bluetooth adapter to work.

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Chia seeds really turn gelatinous when soaked in liquid! Chocolate soymilk + chia seeds = an almost effortless dessert. (Forestfen gave me a bag of chia seeds as a gift.)

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9th of March. And I haven't had time since my xmas vacation, to get back to my cassette -> mp3 conversion project.

I've been wanting to go back and watch all the prior seasons of Doc Martin. Maybe. So far, I've watched the movie that introduced his character, and 1 of the 2 movies that were prequels to the series. That's it. During the same time period, Qiao has watched about 5 or 6 whole seasons of Star Trek:Deep Space Nine.

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This brain-teaser intrigued me: "You are standing at a train station when a train goes by at 60 mph. At the back of the train there's a person who throws a baseball at 60mph out the back of the train. What does the ball do and how fast does it travel?"

The answer was "it drops to the ground, barely moving at all." That's sort of what I was guessing, though it was hard to visualize.

So if the person instead throws the ball at a lesser speed, then the ball falls towards the train, even though it is thrown in the other direction. At least, it would appear that way from the stationary observer's perspective.

And if you were wanting to toss the ball from the train to the person standing in the station, you'd have to throw it straight out from the side of the train, before you were even with the person, as the ball would continue moving in the train's travel direction even as it moves out away from the train.

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temporal babblings

2011-10-20T03:32:54Z

If someone says "Oct 19 at 12am", I suppose that means the first moment of the day, not the last. Time goes from 11pm to 12am to 1am. 11am to 12pm to 1pm.
12:00 noon isn't really am or pm. It's m; meridian.
12:00 midnight is sort of both am and pm; in the middle.

When the clock strikes twelve is the new day started.

Noon is infinitely small, infinitely short. The moment noon happens, it is past. So I suppose 12 noon is pm. And 12 midnight is am, and is the first moment of the day.

The day ends at midnight, and begins at midnight.
The day begins in the middle of the night.

The night doesn't begin in the middle of the day.

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