adoptedwriter

A teeny-tiny hunk of spiral ham left over from...possibly New Year's, though I can't remember if that's when we last ate it or not. I'd cut it in half after I bought it, then froze the other half. It was a small ham to begin with, so this stretched it to the max.

No one's a huge jumping-up-and-down HAM! YAY! enthusiast here, anyhow.

My only near-regret was after OP almost managed to invite a third person for Easter dinner (a friend of mine from the neighborhood whom he'd just met who has church activities all day tomorrow so declined), in which case there wouldn't have been enough to go around so I would've had to hit the store for more ham and/or some other traditional thing, entirely. Close call.

He bought a head of cabbage so someone will cook that up into something, I guess, and I don't know if grocery stores are open tomorrow but we're out of potatoes, but have enough rice (and enough varieties thereof) to feed the neighborhood (don't tell the neighborhood, as there's not enough ham and cabbage to go around) so it'll work out - in fact, I made baked beans to go with my liver and onions tonight, and really liked them, so maybe I'll just reheat those for the starch.

ETA: This meal was unusual considering the food started off so plain, yet came out so pow!.

So I brined the ham in a mixture I thought up on the spot: starting with a real maple syrup base I added ground cloves, ground nutmeg, ground allspice, brown sugar, fresh-ground black pepper and a few splashes of lightly pulped orange juice, stirred the uh, bedevil out of it and used a pastry brush to coat each side of every slice in the spiral, then dumped the leftover brine over to cold-marinate for a few hours, with the brine rising halfway up the ham in the tin foil contraption I made to hold it all in while it heated up.

This came out better than candied ham, as it had a sort of candied/brandied taste sans alcohol. Loved it - my rating: 8 out of 10 (it could've been more tender and I would've preferred the same flavor in something more akin to a glaze*).

I cooked the cabbage using the first recipe that came up on a Google search for "sweet and sour cabbage" leaving off bacon and adding some bacon grease to impart the same flavor. That was yummy, though I miss the sweet and sour cabbage of my childhood, which was plainer, more sweet and more sour, if that makes sense (and it does, I can assure you).

And I caved before doing any of this and bought potatoes. The organic market was the only store open so ran there for some (I wish that was all I ran there for...my God how I hate what that place does to me).

OP made homemade ricotta while I cooked dinner so I baked the potatoes, then we ate them with his ricotta - pretty damn good, though I still missed the more acidic hit and smoothness of sour cream.

*In retrospect I could've done a few things differently: had I turned the ham halfway through cooking to get the top half back in the brine the whole thing might've been more tender, and if I'd used more maple syrup or added honey it might've made for a stickier glaze. The flavor, though...*floats off on a cloud*

Marketers intentionally enrage social conservatives to promote brands

It's been so long since I last ran it, it might not be working again for whatever reason and blergh, I just can't even deal with it ATM.

Soon I'll also be working with EverNote to create linklists. EverNote on my phone connects to the SmartNews app and syncs what I save to it to the Firefox extension on my laptop. I don't have a way to feed EN into Pinboard, at least not OTTOMH, but I could always try to work that out later or not, as I mostly have Pinboard to collect stuff I bookmark into Firefox, anyhow.

It Takes Two

Tonight's theme, which I wasn't aware of until an abandoned Dreamwidth post in the online editor reminded me, is duplication. Ridiculous, unnecessary, annoying, and perhaps unneeded (or perhaps not - I report: you decide) duplication.

I think the Web has failed, I think it's broken, when you must have two of everything to get by.

Two Password Managers

It's enough of a nod to the need for strong password security to use one password manager. But perhaps not, as then you have a single point of failure, so if you lose or forget your master password or your password manager gets hacked or stolen, what do you do? And what have you lost? Possibly every password, and your bank accounts, and your privacy, and...

As Tom's Guide recently put it:

Using a password manager creates a single point of failure, because if the password manager is compromised, then all your accounts for which it holds the passwords are also compromised.

The solution might be to use more than one password manager. This wouldn't have to cost much.

Heh...right?

Upon reading this much eye-rolling ensued at Chez MM because are they serious? Life's hard enough already so can they just get off our jocks now about needing TWO password managers because OK, seriously?

Two days later LastPass went massively offline. That was when the light bulb went off: "So THAT'S why you might need said 'backup password manager'!". Yes, you can log into LP offline, but my Firefox extension wasn't set up (still isn't, come to think of it) to allow me to, and yes I just about melted down, as LP's never been offline for me before.

Was that a moment - whew, lemme tell you.

LastPass's status page shows the outage (its cause was allegedly resolved the same day it first started, on April 10th, yet another outage hit on April 13th which wasn't reported anywhere I could see that night - not on their Status page, nor on Twitter, though sites like IsItDownRightNow saw it as very much gone after attempting to reach multiple URLs).

And I didn't (and uh, still don't) have a backup password manager, so I shut my laptop down and read SmartNews instead of cavorting with my fellow Dreamwidthians. So while I haven't resolved the problem of "what to do if LastPass gets yanked away from us again" I'm thinking harder on it than I normally would. You all (regardless of which password manager you use) might want to, too.

Since I know someone might be tempted to add: "Make your backup password manager this one, since it has offline database access right from Windows" please allow me to refrain. In reading a password manager security comparison last week that sees LastPass, KeePass, 1Password and Dashlane go toe to toe, guess which one did worst? Yep, that one (also: the interface, as I did use it once, which is discussed at more length in this post).

Two Browsers

To paraphrase this Fast Company article, if you don't want websites you log into to know what you read, watch or search for, then only log into websites from one browser and only do searches and take casual/perhaps anon Web strolls from another (says the femme lead @Chez MM, who's logged into Dreamwidth and has since done a dizzying array of searches from one and the same browser... but no one said change was quick, easy, or like, even possible).

But I could, in theory, do this. Or I could do a lot of things that I want to do but am not doing (which never ceases to amaze me). The problem is, I'd rather be doing any of them than doing this. Does it come down to lax online privacy laws? Would we not need to do such things if only the US was covered under GDPR or similar?

Does separating sites you log into from casual Web strolls and searches protect us from having say, our ISPs know every website we visit, while we're at it? No, and the article covers that, as well (the answer is to get a VPN to block ISPs from seeing what you do. I don't like VPNs because even the fastest ones can be so slooooow, which is really the only thing (besides price, if I want one with a decent reputation) stopping me).

And that's two for two...