Hey gang, sat down to write a post today and pictures were busted; sorry about that. Post tomorrow, got us a fix for uploading pictures today. Enjoy.

Work is currently underway on support for adding alternative text to any image, whether in a post or in a comment. For comments this involves a bit of a design overhaul, so it may be a Minute.

Hi gang,

I saw a couple of friends coping in a DIY way with a possible bug today (tough to say at this point), and it prompted some thoughts about how little attention I've given the platform in a long time. My last push to the server was... cough... two and a half years ago.

In a way this is not such a bad thing. Hey, it works!

But there's a lot that could be improved, and long-running bugs that haven't received attention (notifications for your own replies, anyone?), and believe it or not I'm still interested in the question of whether I did everything I could to make it easy for folks to onboard and, yes, grow the site.

But of course there's very little time.

Meanwhile... recently in another context I was facing pleas to do more in a space that's outside of my more essential responsibilities from day to day. I am very well supported at work. But as in any workplace there are gotta-haves, wanna-haves and really-oughta-haves and it can be tough to juggle them.

So I struggled to organize this really-ought-have stuff as a Project. But a Project implies a Budget and Time and there is no budget or pre-scheduled time for that particular thing right now (darn those pesky gotta-haves). That meant everything I was writing felt like a recipe for stress.

I felt stuck, and anxious.

Then I noticed a kanban board feature in our internal wiki and deliberately created an itty-bitty kanban board to track progress in that particular arena.

When I was asked if I wanted to turn it into a Project instead... I said "nope!" Because the medium is the message. Project = Milestones. Schedule. Release Dates. Time Pressure. All of which are appropriate when resources are available, and needlessly stressful when they are not.

But a kanban board says "hey... this is the art of the possible! Nibble at it. Bash at it. Occasionally really go at it. You'll get there."

My kanban board at work turned out very well and I'm still using it to nibble away at the oughta-have thing I can only work on occasionally.

So in the same spirit, I plan to set up a kanban board for One Post Wonder.

And today, in that kanban spirit, I did three itty bitty things to move the ball forward:

1. The "submit a bug" button just sends me a damn email. It used to post an issue to my github project, which was too clever by half. I didn't get any notifications, I didn't pay attention and you probably felt neglected. I'm sorry about that. This should be better.

2. I fixed an issue that caused gmail to reject some emails from One Post Wonder. There are services you can pay to deliver your emails reliably. Cost aside, I feel it's important that we try to maintain independence in this area. Even though it's a pain in the ass and an ever-moving target.

3. I changed the welcome message you see when you sign up from "each day, post a carefully curated sonnet concerning the state of world affairs or you will be punished with lasers" (*) to this:

"It doesn't matter if it's a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri."

I think this is way more welcoming, and I hope it will encourage people to feel like it's OK to just chill here. Lord knows I do. Shitpost away, everyone. You just can't do it more than once a day.

(*) It didn't really say that. It was far more well-intentioned but still kinda intimidating.

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.