Ingredients

In the pan

2 14 oz bricks extra firm tofu, chopped into 1/2" cubes or so

8 white button mushrooms, quartered

1 medium tomato, cut in eighths

Dressing

2 carrots, peeled and chopped in chunks

1 stalk celery, chopped in chunks

1/4 cup almonds

2 tsp balsamic vinegar

1/4 cup chopped cilantro and basil

1 cup water, or so

1 tablespoon curry powder or paprika

Place the tofu, mushrooms and tomato in a broiling pan. Don't use pyrex. It'll go BOOM. Maybe not the first time, but eventually. Ask me how I know.

Start preheating the oven to 425 degrees fahrenheit.

Puree the dressing in a food processor or vitamix blender. I use the smoothie setting on the vitamix.

Pour the dressing evenly over the contents of the pan, taking care not to spill over the edges. You might wind up setting some dressing aside for salad purposes.

Shake a little more curry powder or paprika on top.

Bake for 30 minutes at 425 degrees, then broil on high for 20 minutes, or until the tops of the tofu have a bit of yummy black char. Be prepared to placate your smoke detector.

I know, I know. Banh mi literally means "bread" in Vietnamese. But we mostly steer clear of bread as a staple food, and we love banh mi. So I came up with this.

I've read that in Vietnam banh mi sandwiches are stuffed with all kinds of things. Even ice cream. Whereas I'm sure the usual filling, served as a salad, has a name of its own. But I don't know it, so.

Whatever, this is delicious.

Ingredients

• 2 heads lettuce, chopped
• 3-4 stalks of green onion, chopped
• A chopped garlic scape (green stalk) or two, if you have 'em
• 1 sliced carrot
• 1 14 oz box firm tofu, cubed
• Sliced mushrooms
• Fistful of arugula
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• Fresh basil, if you've got it
• 1 red bell pepper
• 6 tablespoons rice vinegar (it matters)
• 2 tablespoons Bragg's liquid aminos (or a smaller amount of soy sauce)
• 1 date, chopped (to balance the acid; or use hoisin sauce and ditch the Bragg's)
• A generous shake of paprika
• Black pepper to taste
• Toss in some sesame seeds

Combine and serve.

Rice vinegar seems to be the real "I am eating Vietnamese food" taste signal here, along with the cilantro.

Feel free to sub in actual onions, actual garlic, jalapenos, etc. according to your digestive capabilities.

The above would also be bangin' on actual baguette I'm sure, particularly with a little mayo. Also I haven't tried cucumber yet, which is definitely canonical.

The Kilobyte's Gambit is a lovely mashup of a chess engine in 1K of JavaScript, plus awesome CGA retro pixel art. I love it.

Kicked my ass immediately, I’m not good at chess. A friend of mine in college used to say, regarding vegetarianism, that he wouldn’t eat anything that could beat him at chess. I found this worrisome.

It also reminds me of this:

Atari 2600 Video Chess! This was chess in 4K of 6502 assembly language, on a machine with only 128 bytes of RAM that was only really capable of displaying three, maybe six objects per line on the screen, and that only with tricky programming. If you look closely, you’ll see that the chess pieces are drawn on alternating lines to get around this limitation. Apparently it played decent chess.

Before we hand the OG Atari developers the tiny-chess-program crown, though, the author of the 1K JavaScript chess engine has also written a 326-byte chess game for DOS, as well as... a 1K chess cartridge for the Atari 2600. Yes, it flickers a lot, but hey.

So many props given. Two summers ago I wrote an AI checkers game of my own, using the minimax algorithm. It wasn't terribly good at checkers and it sure wasn't 1K of JavaScript. To be fair, it was also readable code.

I just renewed onepostwonder.com for three more years. 🎂

Every few years I reach out to the guy who owns onepo.com. He always says no. I have made some credible offers. That's cool, the man likes his domain.

I should really take "beta" off the site, huh.

• Three roma tomatoes
• Two carrots, peeled
• Two green onion stalks
• Two stalks of celery
• 6 small mushrooms of varying kinds
• 6 ounces tomato paste
• Goodly shake of MatoZest
• Goodly shake of italian seasoning 
• 1/2 tablespoon nutritional yeast

Chop everything. Chuck everything in a vitamix or good blender. Add enough water to get the blender to cooperate. Blend until it looks right — no huge bits but still texture, mostly from the carrots.

Simmer and serve over zucchini noodles.

The carrots lend it a meat sauce texture.

I have tried both Google's my maps and scribble maps and boy, it is a pain in the ass to just... make a map of an interesting route. With some waypoints and some connecting lines. it's not impossible, it's just so fussy that I say forget it. Is this always so bad? Is there a tool that everybody swears by? should I just give up on the idea that I should be able to do this on my phone?

Oops, I forgot to take a picture before enjoying.

Ingredients

1 red rose black tea bag

1/4 teaspoon fresh-grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon fresh-grated ginger

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2-3 cloves

1 scant handful almonds

A few raisins

1 teaspoon brown sugar

Instructions

Bring a mug's worth of water, less an inch or so, to a boil. Steep the tea for a few minutes.

Pour the tea and everything else into the vitamix.

Run a smoothie cycle.

Pour into mug.

Enjoy.

Notes

Tastes as good as a "chai latte" and who the hell knows how much sugar (and perhaps fat?) is in those.

If you haven't worked with whole nutmegs before, the "small holes" side of any grater can handle it just fine. Ditto grating fresh ginger.

Mnemonic

Cinnamon and ginger, nutmeg and cloves

That's what gave me this shiny red nose.

A helicopter on Mars?

Sounds crazy - the atmosphere is so thin! - but apparently if you don't mind spending a lot of power, there's no reason in principle you can't just spin the rotor a whole lot faster. And the goal isn't efficient travel, it's to reach places a rover can't, in short hops.

Neat.

Destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical starting at 5am because they can't believe they will get fed at seven.