Author Archives: Craig

Homemade Chocolate/Toffee treats—try some today

We just enjoyed some of these homemade Heath®-like treats, and you should, too.

Saltine crackers
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
6 oz. chocolate chips (or better/darker chocolate, if you prefer)

Preheat oven to 350°F
Lay saltines flat on cookie sheet until it’s completely covered. Set aside.
Boil the butter and brown sugar together in a saucepan for 3 minutes.
Quickly pour the butter mixture over, and spread to cover, the crackers.
Bake in 350°F oven for 5 minutes.
Remove pan from oven and sprinkle with chocolate chips. Wait a couple minutes for chips to soften, then spread evenly over bars.
After they’re completely cooled, break apart and serve.

We used a combination of semi-sweet chips and Trader Joe’s 72% chocolate.

In Defense of Food Review

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Pollan. Non-fiction. This is an expansion of Pollan’s essay “Unhappy Meals” (which I talked about some time ago), in which he gives some reasoning that I find rather compelling for why we’re in the diet/health mess that we (the western world in general, but especially Americans) are in, and some suggestions for getting out of it. The latter are summarized (as in his earlier essay) as “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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JPod Review

JPod, Coupland. No. While I didn’t hate this book, and indeed by and large enjoyed reading it, it’s ultimately so masturbatory that I don’t believe I gained anything from the reading. I should note that my librarian insisted I read it, despite suspecting I would not want to have read it. Turns out my librarian knows my taste pretty well.
On a technical note, the only error I noted was where the book read, “North Korean president Kim II Sung.” This error is hard to spot in a sans-serif font (I’m letting the lack of a hyphen slide), but the book was not set in such a type. I suppose I have to thank whoever made the error, though, in that I likely would not otherwise have learned that—despite his death—Kim Il-Sung is still the president.

Things I didn't know #536: Flash keeps cookies

If you follow this link, you’ll see a control panel (you can also get to it by right-clicking on the Flash player (when you’re visiting a site with a Flash component) and selecting “Settings…”). You will likely be surprised at how many sites are listed there, and you may be somewhat alarmed to find them there at all (as I was) if you have instructed your browser to clear cookies on close, or you otherwise remove persistent tracking information. This site information is, in every way that matters, a persistent cookie. I discovered this cache of data after wondering how it was that Pandora knew who I was after I cleared all offline data. Adobe doesn’t exactly hide it (and once you’re on the page where you can make the adjustments, there’s a decent explanation of what they mean), but they sure don’t make it easy to find, and they absolutely don’t do what I would consider the right thing; i.e., to respect my browser’s privacy settings and delete site-specific data per my instructions. There’s another page in the settings manager where you can deny any or all sites permission to save information, but Pandora (at least) refuses to operate without the ability to save data on my machine, so the only way I’ve found to keep my machine clear of Flash-based tracking cookies is to manually clear them using the control panel (which I have bookmarked for convenient access).