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Showing posts from 2017

I MADE YOU SOME BREAKFAST

Everyone who knows me, knows I love me some breakfast. Even if I wake up at 4 PM, I like to start with some breakfast-type food. Unfortunately, this conflicts with my desire to stay in bed as long as possible on workdays. My solution is to bring portable breakfast items that I can eat between the time the bus drops me at work until the time I have to be on a desk. My go-tos are Quaker Real-Medley oatmeal cups and Jimmy Dean Delites breakfast sandwiches. The only problems with them are that they are 1) full of preservatives and stuff, 2) OK, but make you dream of better food, and 3) kind of rubbery from the microwave in the case of the sandwiches. I'd been trying to find a breakfast sandwich recipe for a long time, but trying to make good eggs for a bunch of sandwiches just seemed really intimidating. I've just mastered making scrambled eggs a few years ago, and they require careful watching to come out right. Then, this article appeared in Lifehacker. The sheer g

I MADE YOU AN INSTRUCTABLE

Steampunk Gear Earrings So, since my work got a makerspace a year and a half ago, I've been making more things than ever. One of my favorite sites for making ideas is Instructables . I've made LED bracelets , laser-engraved rubber stamps , and drawstring pouches . My felt cameos are a little different, but this  is where the idea came from. I even became a Pro member to support the site and because I like being able to download .pdfs to consult while making stuff. Youtube videos can be great for showing techniques, but nothing can compare to a step-by-step guide (although Instructables can have video, so best of both worlds, really). As a librarian, I make a lot of those, so I know of what I speak. Since I now have the fancy camera for taking good macro pictures, I wanted to try my hand at making an Instructable. The editing interface is pretty intuitive for anyone who's blogged or added content to a web site. If you make stuff, definitely give it a try. If you w

I GOT A NEW CAMERA

So, I decided it was finally time to get me one of those fancy cameras. My point & shoot had finally died from being dropped one too many times, and I went to see Chris Isaak only to have him appear as nothing but a big white blob on my phone. Since I take a lot of pictures already, it seemed a good use of my annual fun spending. We have a DSLR camera at work, and I liked the pictures it took, plus it has that good old-fashioned "clickity-click" sound when you shoot. My main worry was actually the size of the camera. I went to a photowalk once and people seemed to be competing in a who-can-lug-around-the-biggest-Cyclops-beast-around contest. My tiny hands and achy shoulders can't handle that sort of thing. When I did a Google search on "small DSLR cameras" I learned about mirrorless cameras . My photography class teacher said that the lens is actually more important than the body of the camera for taking good pictures, so why not get a small camera th

JFRO AIRWAVES TAKEOVER 2017!

It's Reunion time again, and I was back on the wheels of steel. The theme for my radio show this year was Cyberpunk, a musical soundtrack from the 80s to today for movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell , or books like Neuromancer and Synners .  Here's my archived radio show: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fl9era6cgmnpg56/Andrea%20Herman%20-%20Nicecast%20Archived%20Audio%2020170602%201304.mp3?dl=0 T racklist: "Making Of Cyborg" - Kenji Kawai "Ghosts" - Japan "Vienna" - Ultravox "Morningstar In A Black Car" - Ashbury Heights "Crash" - Mesh " Kingdom" - VNV Nation "Neon Lights" -Kraftwerk "Big Electric Cat" - Adrian Belew "I Want You" - Cabaret Voltaire "Driving The Dynamite Truck" - Breaking Circus "Burning Inside" - Ministry "Headhunter" - Front 242 "Self Control" -Raf "Guardian Angel" - Juno Reactor "

HOW TO MAKE A MIX/PLAYLIST

Some of my old mixes from back in the day. Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR . I've been making mix tapes since high school in the early 80s when my best friend spent a year in New Zealand. It kept going in college for high school friends, then it kept up when college buddies went their separate ways. As friends got older and had families, it became my go-to New Year present, as it is a way to show you value your friends while spending minimal cash & not obligating them to buy you anything after spending all their money on presents for family members. I've gone from tape to CD to online playlists, although I still do CDs for presents so people have something tangible. In the old days, when my only computer was a TRS-80 model 100 , I went to Kinko's with some art to copy and cut up and the song list hand-written in large type to reduce to fit a cassette case. Now I have DiscLabel software for that, or I can just upload songs and screenshots to 8tracks .

PLEASE CONSIDER WATCHING THE 100

I meant to do this before the 4th season started, but oh well... Post-apocalyptic media has had a field day lately, which I couldn't be happier about. Where else can you depict issues such as resource allocation, the nature of leadership, environmental devastation, the consequences of war, etc, AND have people in face paint fighting each other with kung fu and bizarre weapons? When I found out we finally would have a straight, non-zombie post-apoc show (I tried The Tribe , but it was just too low-budget for me), I was was a little excited, but my expectations were low, since it was on the CW, the network to watch white teens get mopey about their crushes on (even their superheroes spend way to much time mooning).  Parenthetical rant time: When will TV creators of action/detective/fantasy/science fiction shows realize that less is more with romance? Especially when stakes are high - it just makes the characters seem to have really bad priorities. There's a reason wh

JFRO'S 2016

Jfro's 2016 from ash966 on 8tracks Radio . Although a lot of sucky things happened in 2016, I'm going to focus on the good stuff. Format once again ripped off shamelessly from the  Librarian in Black :   Books --  Swing Time, You, The Secret History of Wonder Woman,  Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s, Frog Music Comics  -- Patience, The Flowers of Evil, Ooku Movies -- Arrival, Dr. Strange, Green Room,  The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened,  Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, The Big Short, Crimson Peak, Deadpool, Amy, The Man From Nowhere TV Shows -- Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Better Call Saul, Bojack Horseman, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Archer, The Americans, The 100, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Brooklyn 9-9, Broad City, The Expanse, RuPaul's Drag Race, Powers, Orange Is the New Black, unREAL, Billions, Penny Dreadful, The Walking Dead, Person of Interest, Orphan Black, The Path, The Knick, Veep, High Maintenan