Writing

The HomePod Mini is the culmination of a long hard road for Siri. For those of us loyal Mac-addicts and Apple fanboys it's the fruition of a long slog to the ubiquitous smart assistant that many of us have been hoping for. Finally we have a smart speaker that lives up to the dream and at a price that any Mac aficionado can deploy into their home.

macOS Big Sur was announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 22nd, 2020. It was released on Tuesday, November 10, 2020. This year I decided to pass on using the beta versions, probably due to the trauma of my last beta experience. I installed Big Sur on release night after some rocky attempts to download it from Apple’s update servers. After several days of using it, I have a few thoughts.

The iPhone 12 Pro was announced at an Apple Event on October 13th, with preorders that Friday the 16th. My order was placed shortly after 8am and it arrived on October 23rd. Now that I've had it for a few weeks I have a few thoughts, especially in light of the device it replaced, my iPhone 122 Pro.

Evelyn is the household donut connoisseur. She's the one responsible for getting me out of bed early to go get donuts, and she also usually decides where to get the donuts. She'll tell you the best donuts in Indianapolis are at Long's Bakery, but that Jack's Donuts is closer; and if you want one of the cinnamon twists they're bigger at Jacks, but Long's has the better cake donuts. She's got it all down; this is her thing.

When I made my Pizza Night at the Lemon's post and video I mentioned I would share my red sauce (aka "pizza" sauce) recipe shortly thereafter. Well, here it is! This recipe came about due to the difficulties my wife and I had finding a good pizza sauce for our pizza. Prior to this recipe we also never ate pasta, for similar reasons. It seemed like whenever we found a good sauce we would snatch up as much as the grocery store had and then it would disappear after that, leaving us to experiment and find a different brand. Finally we were doing a stint with Blue Apron and came across a Calzone recipe that had a rather delightful sauce to it. Blue Apron ships their seasoning packets already measured so we didn't know the composition other than the unknown aleppo pepper and italian seasoning (typically oregano, basil and rosemary). So we set out to reproduce this sauce, along with some modifications and came up with what follows. This is our red sauce, we use it for pizza, spaghetti and any other pasta dish we put together. The batch here is more then you need for pizza night, so you can either save the extra for next week or freeze it if you like, we've done both! Enjoy!