I’ve been running the Apple WatchOS 7 beta for a while now, and when updating, my watch face lost the “date”: it was no longer showing the date and day of the week (i.e. Fri).
Quite annoying — but it’s a beta after all. I shouldn’t complain. I did what every good beta tester would do: I filed a bug (it’s still unanswered from what I can see).
Beta updates came and went but the date did not come back. Would I be unable to use my watch to figure out the date?! It’s when you lose a feature that you see how often a day you use it.
And then, out of the blue, the big stable release. Apple Watch OS 7 is released to the general public. Surely, I thought, they must’ve fixed it now.
But alas, I was to be disappointed.
I updated Shan‘s watch (that never ran the beta) to see if she had the same issue — but her watch was fine. Sooooo… What was I doing wrong? Why me, Apple Overlord?
I started fiddling around with my language and regional settings (nope, not it), and was contemplating a factory reset (argh, re-adding all my cards to Apple Pay)…
And then…
An epiphany.
They wouldn’t?!?! Would they??
Something only Apple would dare to do.
I deleted the Apple Calendar app (on my iPhone) — as I use the Google Calendar app. Would that somehow be related?
And guess what… Installing the Apple Calendar app via the App Store resolved it:
Check Apple Watch and the option is back!
That’s one way of forcing people to use your apps.
I rarely use Bluetooth on my RPis. I’m already facing enough issues with my iMac and Mac Mini (it lags, it randomly disconnects in meetings, etc).
My pwnagotchi on the other hand is counting on a BLE network to connect to the internet: for now I am using my iPad, and while that works, it causes my iPad to disconnect from WiFi (because of course, it can only do tethering from a mobile network, not from its WiFi network).
I wanted to explore if I could set up bluetooth tethering/internet sharing from my RPi4 server… But for that BLE had to work! And for some reason BLE was not working on Liana.
[bluetooth]# power on
No default controller available
For some reason no controller was available. The drivers were definitely installed…
apt install bluetooth pi-bluetooth bluez raspberrypi-sys-mods
but hcitool dev ; hciconfig -a weren’t returning anything.
After quite some extensive Googling I found the solution…
# make a backup
cp /boot/cmdline.txt /boot/cmdline.txt.bak
# edit the file
nano -w /boot/cmdline.txt
# edit the first part from
# console=ttySerial0 to console=ttyAMA0
# the line should be something similar to but do NOT blindly copy paste it as you won't be able to boot due to your PARTUUID being different
console=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=6c586e13-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait
reboot
The last (and only time) I posted a recipe here, was 7 years ago. Wow.
As we’re trying to eat less meat in general, we‘ve (Shan and I) been experimenting with vegetarian dishes.
This lasagna has been eaten by a few people now and every time the reviews are pretty damn good. 🙂 It comes rather close to the original taste while being entirely vegetarian.
First off — we’re mostly just swapping out the regular minced pork/beef mix with Beyond Meat. There are other brands out there (i.e.: Omnimeat), each with their own taste — try to see what works for you.
The Beyond Beef is also slightly sweeter in taste — keep this in mind as I know some people (i.e.: my dad) wouldn’t like it that sweet.
This dish feeds 3 to 4 people.
Ingredients
Good olive oil
Lasagna pasta sheets (whatever suits you, we often use the wholewheat ones)
Tomato sauce (1 to 1.5 can). Can use fresh tomato of course
80g of butter
0.5L milk
80g plain flour
Fresh basil leaves
1 (red) onion
2-3 cloves of garlic
Beyond Beef
You’ll need a pinch of (sea) salt, some pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper, nutmeg and whatever else you’ll want to spice it up with
I add some extra veggies: I use (1-2) fresh carrots, but these can easily be swapped out or mixed with peas, mushrooms, aubergine (eggplant), corn, etc.
Cheese! I usually use grated mozzarella cheese, but Emmental and sorts works as well
Prep work
Dice/chop up an onion
Slice the carrots (or whatever vegetable you’re adding)
slice up the garlic
Wash and chop up the basil
Prepare 2 pots and an oven dish
You can let the Beyond Beef defrost, or add it as a frozen block and just let it simmer a bit longer (until entirely melted and broken down into small bits)
Pot 1: the sauce
Add olive oil to a big pot and heat up
Once hot, add in the onion and carrots and let it stir-fry for a moment. I like my carrots a bit crunchy but you could technically boil or steam them until entirely soft. Whatever you do, don’t burn the onion
For this one I had some carrots, peas and corn.
Once the onion gets translucent add the garlic, Beyond Beef, tomato sauce and basil
I usually add a tiny bit of milk (especially in case the tomato is a bit sour)
Stir and let it simmer on low heat. Make sure the “meat” breaks down in small bits
Spice it up (paprika, cayenne pepper, pinch of salt, (black) ground pepper)
Take a spoon and taste it. It should already be damn good. 🙂
Pot 2: béchamel sauce
This one is easy to mess up so pay attention. Clumps are bad!
Stir and whisk and stir.
Add the butter in a pot on a low heat and let melt. Do not burn the butter.
Slowly add the flour while whisking
Once the butter and flour is nicely mixed up, slowly add the milk while whisking. I usually turn off the heat at this point
Whisk, whisk and whisk
Finish it off with a bit of white pepper and nutmeg
Don’t worry if you have no nutmeg — it tastes perfect without as well.
In case it’s too watery, just add a bit of flour — but do that extremely slowly, as adding it at this stage will easily clump up.
Dish it up!
Now we’ll create the actual lasagna. You can also pre-heat the oven now (200°).
Your dish and the lasagna will definitely not be the same size… And we don’t want to have two lasagna sheets on top of each other… So gently break them off into smaller pieces, and nicely fit them together. It’s puzzle time.
puzzling is hard, yo.
Add a thin layer of olive oil at the bottom of the pot. This prevents the lasagna sheet from sticking.
Add the lasagna sheets (see puzzle note above)
Add a layer of tomato/Beyond sauce
Add a layer of béchamel sauce
Layer up with lasagna sheets again
Rince and repeat
Most dishes fit about three layers. End with the béchamel layer. So [lasagna, tomato, béchamel] x 3.
And the last, top layer, would be the grated cheese. Don’t over do it, create a nice thin layer.
Oven
The oven should be hot (200°) at this point. The total cooking time is roughly 25 minutes.
If your oven allows to choose the baking mode, use the top and bottom heat (without fan).
Put the lasagna on top of a grill/wire mesh tray.
Set timer for ~15 minutes
Once timer is over, use a fork or skewer/satay stick to feel the pasta sheets: you want them to be soft. At this stage they should still be a bit hard, so set timer again for 5 minutes and check again. Take this opportunity to make sure the top layer of cheese is not burning.
Optionally: you can use the grill mode at the end of brown up the cheese, but this shouldn’t be needed.
After roughly 25 minutes, the lasagna should be done.
Beyond Beef Lasagna
Let it cool down a bit, cut it up and serve.
Nom nom nom. This was a picture from the previous lasagna and the cheese could have been slightly less grilled.
Right. With the pandemic and all none of us are going to travel much but still…
About a year ago I purchased myself an OpenWRT router to use on the plane and in hotels.
And so far I really like both the device and the Hong Kong based brand (launching new and updated products, and releasing relatively regular updates for older products). Pick a device that fits your needs (USB powered? LTE? Small form factor?).
The GL-AR750S aka Slate is fully customizable but runs a few nice things out of the box: WireGuard (with a physical button to turn it on or off), OpenVPN, shell access, Tor (requires the latest firmware), IPv6, DoH (Cloudflare only for now), multiple SSIDs (i.e. Guest WiFi), and more.
Oh and I specifically picked this version (compared to other or cheaper ones) because it had both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, as well as 3 Gbit ports (1x WAN, 2x LAN).
Pick whatever works for you…
I use the device on flights, where I connect to the network once in the air, purchase WiFi or use iPass “for one device” and then connect to the interwebs behind my NAT-router from my iPad, phone(s), laptop(s), and even Shan‘s devices if she is travelling with me.
In hotels, I either connect it to the wired ethernet, if still available (tends to be more stable), or connect it to the guest WiFi and then connect my devices to the router: saves me from connecting to a new network and typing the room number and login/password/family name on every device. And once again hides the true number of connected devices; quite handy trick for those pesky hotels providing free access only to two devices.
Sure it takes a bit of setup every time: find a working USB port, sign in to the web interface, search for new networks if this is a new hotel or I haven’t travelled on this airline, connect to said network, sign in with iPass, and optionally enable VPN)…
And once in a while some fiddling with VPN or DNS that’s borking up or being blocked by overzealous firewalls.
Also, some in-flight entertainment USB ports don’t provide enough power (and/or are often broken — looking at you Lufthansa in economy) so be sure to carry a couple of these (US-plug works best) — I’ve already forgotten one on my last flight from MUC-SIN on LH, but luckily I have pretty easy access to these.
