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Endorsements from Thumbs Readers

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I’ve been enjoying the endorsements at the end of Important if True episodes. The kind of sincere advice informed by recent personal discoveries. They never come off as charlatan wizards dispensing misinformation on cooking implements.

 

I believe everyone here has something in their life that assists in their journey. Something unique--at least to the rest of us. Be it #content, tools, or lifestyle suggestions. To be clear, I’m not trying to cheapen the endorsements section of the podcast. I just think everyone here has something worth passing along. It would be wrong to use affiliate links or try to benefit personally from this thread, so please don’t do that(unless it’s benefiting Idle Thumbs).

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My endorsement today is the reel lawn mower. I got one after seeing a neighbor peacefully mowing his grass with something I’d only seen before in cartoon strips or 1950’s sitcoms. It was so quiet. Only a faint “click” of the reel completing a rotation was audible. I’d never seen someone so happy cutting the grass. He looked like a smiling Buddhist monk walking across his lawn. After I ordered mine and put it together (10 minute assembly) I took it for a test run.

I don’t meditate, but mowing grass with this device has been the most mindful experience outside I’ve had. Ever. I enjoyed it so much I ended up cutting the neighbor's yard as well. I’ve cut grass before, but never like this. I know many of you live in apartments/condos, but if you have a yard I can’t recommend it enough.

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I've recently picked up knitting, and I highly recommend it. It's a a very fun, soothing repetitive action that manifests into something usable. I just bought a learning to knit kit that came with needles, some accessories and a book and taught myself how to cast on, knit & purl from the book in about an hour and am working on scarf. When I get more comfortable and better at it, it'll be a fun thing to do while I have the tv on in the background or listen to podcasts while I do it. For now it takes my full attention, but I'm very much enjoying it!

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Learn to make miso soup. It doesn't take very long and unless it's something you grew up with, it feels like one of those things that is reserved for a restaurant experience--but it totally doesn't have to be! It's fun, inexpensive, and not difficult to make. It's a great hot comfort food.

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If you're interested in making cocktails at home but don't have a big budget for it, it's easier than you think to shop around for cheap versions of fancy liqueurs. Not knockoffs, not really, but less storied competitors to the "great" labels out there. For instance, a bottle of green Chartreuse costs at least $60, but Dolin Genepy des Alpes is quite similar (a little less bitter and vegetal) is less than $30. Even with more affordable aperitivi like Campari and Aperol, Luxardo makes Luxardo Bitters and Luxardo Apertivo that are five or six bucks cheaper and just as good. The best part is that—unless they're wine-based like Cocchi, Dubonnet, or vermouth—these liqueurs functionally last forever, with only a little crystallization, and make any liquor into a cocktail with a splash of soda and lime or lemon juice.

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9 hours ago, Chris said:

Learn to make miso soup. It doesn't take very long and unless it's something you grew up with, it feels like one of those things that is reserved for a restaurant experience--but it totally doesn't have to be! It's fun, inexpensive, and not difficult to make. It's a great hot comfort food.

 

Bonus: Try red miso paste. It's a different flavor from what you generally get in restaurants, and a little stronger.

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If you listen to a lot of music on your PC I can really recommend investing a few bucks in a low end cheap "audiophile rig".

Most enthusiast audio hardware is absurdly expensive, and in my opinion suffer severely from diminishing returns. But just getting a cheap pair of headphones with neutral levels and a simple DAC (digital-to-analog-converter, essentially a usb soundcard) so you don't have to deal with the super garbage soundcard that is integrated on most motherboards makes an enormous difference. The difference between investing 0$ and 50$ is way bigger than the difference between investing 50$ and 3000$.

 

I use this DAC: https://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCA202-BEHRINGER-U-CONTROL/dp/B000KW2YEI

And these headphones: https://www.amazon.com/Superlux-681-Dynamic-Semi-Open-Headphones/dp/B002GHIPYI

 

And I'm super happy with them. I used to borrow my roommate's expensive AKG's just plugged right into my PC's 3.5mm jack and honestly just this basic junk sounds much better. Not having the output garbled by whatever agressively corner cutting soundchip motherboard manufacturers tend to use makes such a huge difference. 

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Oh man, it's nice to have recommendations on IIT, and it's also pretty great to read what other people are recommending here. I may just buy that DAC, @Fingus! Also, @Gormongous, I really wish that I knew the best way to start a nice liquor cabinet. I assume that there are books or websites that describe this, but as of now, as a person who doesn't have a super sophisticated liquor palate (but who wants to have liquor on hand for entertaining, perhaps), it'd be great to know where to start in developing a collection. (I suppose you just pick up some of everything, starting with what you like)

 

I have a recommendation, which is an annual book series that I've enjoyed since college: The Best American Nonrequired Reading. While it used to be edited by Dave Eggers, in the last three years they've shifted to different guest editors. Each year, this guest editor gets together with a group (or a few groups) of high school students, and together they meet weekly and collect articles, poetry, comics, and short fiction together into one anthology. It's designed to reflect diversity and be a more representative sample of current writing. Each edition is wonderful, and perfect if you're "someone who doesn't have a lot of time to read", because you can keep the book by the bed and read a bit and put it down and forget about it for a month or so and then read something else. Also, the entries are funny, and insightful, and sometimes very sad, and generally always enlightening. If you're someone who likes longreads on the internet, and wants to expand their worldview to be more encompassing, I think that this is a good addition to your life. You can find a lot of the back editions for pretty cheap used online, and I'd recommend just picking a year and trying it out! 

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@RubixsQube An invaluable resource I had when building a bar was the cocktail apps developed by Martin Doudoroff: http://mixologytech.com/

 

The great thing about them is they allow you to check off ingredients you have in your bar, and you can then see what drinks you can make with what you currently have on hand, what drinks you can make with what you have plus one other ingredient, and what drinks you can make with what you have plus two ingredients. It will also tell you, based on what you currently have, what the next most useful ingredient you don't already have would be, in terms of letting you make new drinks.

 

Each ingredient has a selection of examples of specific brands of that ingredient (whether it's a spirit, a liqueur, a non-alcoholic ingredient, whatever) as well, and all the apps developed by that guy will sync their inventory across each app, so if you add a particular ingredient to one, the others will recognize it. I first got Beachbum Berry's Total Tiki, and then added Modern Classic Cocktails, Martin's Index of Cocktails, and Shaken and Stirred. Although it's the last one I've acquired, I'd probably recommend Shaken and Stirred as a good first choice, as it's the most "generic" of all—unless there's a specific cocktail angle you're interested in, such as tiki.

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On 3/31/2017 at 5:23 PM, RubixsQube said:

Oh man, it's nice to have recommendations on IIT, and it's also pretty great to read what other people are recommending here. I may just buy that DAC, @Fingus! Also, @Gormongous, I really wish that I knew the best way to start a nice liquor cabinet. I assume that there are books or websites that describe this, but as of now, as a person who doesn't have a super sophisticated liquor palate (but who wants to have liquor on hand for entertaining, perhaps), it'd be great to know where to start in developing a collection. (I suppose you just pick up some of everything, starting with what you like)

 

On 3/31/2017 at 6:43 PM, Chris said:

@RubixsQube An invaluable resource I had when building a bar was the cocktail apps developed by Martin Doudoroff: http://mixologytech.com/

 

The great thing about them is they allow you to check off ingredients you have in your bar, and you can then see what drinks you can make with what you currently have on hand, what drinks you can make with what you have plus one other ingredient, and what drinks you can make with what you have plus two ingredients. It will also tell you, based on what you currently have, what the next most useful ingredient you don't already have would be, in terms of letting you make new drinks.

 

Each ingredient has a selection of examples of specific brands of that ingredient (whether it's a spirit, a liqueur, a non-alcoholic ingredient, whatever) as well, and all the apps developed by that guy will sync their inventory across each app, so if you add a particular ingredient to one, the others will recognize it. I first got Beachbum Berry's Total Tiki, and then added Modern Classic Cocktails, Martin's Index of Cocktails, and Shaken and Stirred. Although it's the last one I've acquired, I'd probably recommend Shaken and Stirred as a good first choice, as it's the most "generic" of all—unless there's a specific cocktail angle you're interested in, such as tiki.

 

I'm on Android, so the options are a bit more limited in terms of an app. As far as I can tell, there are three solid options on Android: Mixology, which is an uncurated database of thousands of cocktails and is largely unusable in my experience; Liquor Cabinet, which shares most of the functionality of the apps Chris recommended but is overproduced and glitchy; and MyBar, which comes with only a hundred or so cocktails, too many of which are party drinks like Alien Brain Freeze or whatever, but had the most solid system of the three for adding ingredients and cocktails between the three, so I stuck with it. If you're willing to read instead of swipe, I can't recommend Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails enough, which is now thirteen years old and far from the cutting edge but was one of the foundational books of the vintage cocktail revival. It gives a little history behind each drink, including its evolution over the years, and usually recommends substitutions if you don't want to spend the next year tracking down that bottle of Amer Picon. It also rarely asks you to infuse your liquors or make exotic syrups, which is something that bugged me with the books from Death & Co. and PDT. If you want to get even closer to the metal, facsimiles of the Savoy and Waldorf cocktail guides, from the twenties and thirties, are available for cheap on Amazon, too.

 

But all of that is stuff that I found after the fact. I mostly built my shopping list of ten bottles to start out my bar from three websites: "The Nine-Bottle Bar" series from Kitchn, "How to Build a Strong Home Bar" by Scout Magazine, and the recommendations at 12bottlebar.com. They've all got strengths and weaknesses: Kitchn snubs vodka for no real reason and favors citrus flavors in drinks over bitter or spicy, 12bottlebar.com has terrible taste in gin and vodka (I laugh every time at Gordon's being their budget gin and Absolut being their budget vodka) as well as speciously pushing genever, and Scout Magazine, being Canadian and also written by an active bartender, has rarefied and sometimes weird tastes that don't always make for good advice. Still, I ended up getting Tito's Handmade Vodka, George Dickel Rye Whiskey, Plymouth Gin, Paul Masson Grande Amber VSOP, Flor de Caña Extra Dry (which I later replaced with a bottle of El Dorado), Lazzaroni Maraschino Liqueur (which I'm planning to replace with Luxardo), Luxardo Triple Sec (which I'm planning to replace with Pierre Ferrand), and Martini & Rossi Extra Dry and Noilly Prat Red Vermouth (I got these mixed up, Noilly Prat is best for cheap French vermouth and Martini for Italian, although I'm fonder of Noilly's red than I probably should be) for just over $200. With that spread, you're able to make most classic cocktails, given the requisite bitters and mixers, so you can rest on your laurels there or start buying more bottles to make cocktails that share the flavor profile of your existing favorites.

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I can't endorse enough my favorite little productivity tool, Clipboard History.  It just stores the last X things you copied, and lets you permanently save a list of text entries to paste at the press of a key.  It default binds to Caps Lock, which takes a convenient key I never use and makes it one of the most valuable keys on my keyboard.  I keep all my stock customer service and troubleshooting answers saved in it, which cuts hours out of my week replying to customers. 

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I'll just paste over my "things you'd recommend everyone to try, those things that not many people have experienced, but everyone should" post from Size Five a few years ago:

 

Films - A Goofy Movie, Tremors, Man Bites Dog (C'est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous)
Albums - Sneaker Pimps, "Splinter", Soulwax, "Too Many DJs", Salad "Drink Me"

TV shows - Woindershowzen, The Sarah Silverman Program, Black Books

Book - Hugh Laurie, "The Gun Seller"

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I'd like to recommend a great 2 player boardgame, 7 Wonders: Duel. It is a two player card based strategy game that can be setup and played in ~45 minutes. It really does a good job handling the "feeling" of BEING two adjacent cities competing over a period of time. There isn't a lot of direct interaction, but there is heavy competition for resources which makes the turn-to-turn strategy pretty interesting. 

 

There is a bit of esoteric iconography, but my wife (who isn't really a huge board game fan) was able to pick it up in about 5-10 minutes using the included reference card, and then she destroyed me with her military. 

 

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Music: pretty much the entirety of the Daptone Records catalog. It's throwback retro soul/funk/groove jazz stuff. Some stuff you might have heard include the late, great Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley (for those of you into the "with vocals" end of things). The Dap Kings (Sharon Jones' backing band) also did the backing instrumentation on Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album. The real gold, IMO, is in the instrumental stuff though: Menahan Street Band (who are Charles Bradley's backing band), The Budos Band, The Olympians, The Mighty Imperials, and the Sugarman 3 (which, oddly, is way more than three people).

 

Books: hardly an out of left field unknown, but Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has long been a favourite author of mine (though I've only ever read him in translation). My favourite of his is probably The Black Book which is a meandering meditation on identity, particularly Turkish identity against the influence of the West, wrapped in what is nominally a detective story about the protagonist searching for his missing wife. One of his earlier books, The White Castle features

 

a "twist" done in such a way that I almost thought it might have been possible to miss it. In retrospect, I think it was sneakily done so that you feel clever for not having missed it, but that it would have been somewhat unlikely to actually miss it. Still, it stands out as the only instance in reading fiction where I can recall having scrambled back to the beginning of the book to make sure that what I thought had happened had actually happened.

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Oh another book recommendation: Roberto Bolaño. His Savage Detectives was my introduction to him and is probably a more approachable starting point than his magnum opus, 2666, which is pretty easy to bounce off of (though IMO worthwhile if you find you like Savage Detectives).

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My endorsement is gardening - and in addition I'd like to suggest a gardening thread.

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On 8-4-2017 at 7:29 PM, xchen said:

My endorsement is gardening - and in addition I'd like to suggest a gardening thread.

I'm considering getting a sheep because I'm so fed up with mowing the lawn if that counts.

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1 hour ago, osmosisch said:

I'm considering getting a sheep because I'm so fed up with mowing the lawn if that counts.

 

It's a never ending battle... but there are a few companies in my area that rent goats for weed control and land clearing. They drop the goats off with a herding dog and pick them up at the end of the day. 

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I'm going to endorse one of my favorite websites/utilities/apps, Ninite (Windows only).  In a nutshell, Ninite is a service that lets you download and install a lot of free, really useful software.  You pick the software you want and Ninite will create a portable app that will not only install everything for you, it will skip all the dialog boxes (declining any additional software such as browser toolbars and reboot requests) and automatically pick either the 32 or 64 bit version depending on your system.  In what is probably my favorite feature and the reason I love the service, if you run the app again it will download and install any updates.  This includes any software you already had on your system when you first ran it.  I usually run the installer/updater once a week just to keep everything up to date.  Whenever I build a new computer or help someone set up their own, Ninite is one of the first things I run.

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Ninite is great. Especially if you're like me and format your system drive bi-annually. 

 

I've actually graduated to a different but similar tool. It's called Chocolatey. It's a package manager for Windows, and it's awesome. 

If you're familiar with Linux it's essentially the same as apt-get, though of course more limited in scope. You just type "chocolatey install vlc" in your command line and it will grab the latest version of VLC and install it for you automatically. You can have multiple applications in the command too so for a fresh install of windows I just have a text file in dropbox that is the command to install all my basic applications, and then I just hang back and grab a cup of coffee.

 

It's also great because you can use it to update all your stuff too with a simple "chocolatey update all".

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I'm going to endorse baking your own bread. It's both enormously simple and enormously satisfying. You start with a flour and water porridge, let it develop into a starter over a week and then you're set. We've not bought bread for several months now and we're very smug about it.

 

I've mostly been using Dutch language resources so I can't help you much there but there's a crapton of resources out there. A lot of the joy is in the experimentation anyway. Go!

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10 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I'm going to endorse baking your own bread. It's both enormously simple and enormously satisfying. You start with a flour and water porridge, let it develop into a starter over a week and then you're set. We've not bought bread for several months now and we're very smug about it.

 

I've mostly been using Dutch language resources so I can't help you much there but there's a crapton of resources out there. A lot of the joy is in the experimentation anyway. Go!

 

I'm going to try this!

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12 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I'm going to endorse baking your own bread. It's both enormously simple and enormously satisfying. You start with a flour and water porridge, let it develop into a starter over a week and then you're set. We've not bought bread for several months now and we're very smug about it.

 

I've mostly been using Dutch language resources so I can't help you much there but there's a crapton of resources out there. A lot of the joy is in the experimentation anyway. Go!

 

Only caveat is that if your starter turns a funny color (which is basically any color) you should definitely throw it out and start over.

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13 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I'm going to endorse baking your own bread. It's both enormously simple and enormously satisfying. You start with a flour and water porridge, let it develop into a starter over a week and then you're set. We've not bought bread for several months now and we're very smug about it.

 

I've mostly been using Dutch language resources so I can't help you much there but there's a crapton of resources out there. A lot of the joy is in the experimentation anyway. Go!

 

I recently baked a loaf of bread based on this recipe and while I may have broken my kitchenaid mixer (oof), the bread came out fantastic. Like, it made for super delicious sandwich bread, and later in the week I used it to make some really wonderful french toast. I second this recommendation. 

 

 

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I've actually been trying this for a week or so now. Weird to see it pop up out of nowhere like this. Can't seem to get a starter to take. I want to get one going without storebought yeast, but it's giving me trouble. Any tips?

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