Maëlys McArdle

Blog

  • TVO Axes Signature Shows

    TVO Axes Signature Shows

    It was announced today that TVO, the provincial public broadcaster, will cut up to 40 jobs and cancel the shows Allan Gregg in Conversation and Big Ideas, as well as its ad-free Saturday Night at the Movies. The movies were always good picks, but the first two shows in particular represented some of the best in quality Canadian programming. We’re talking about content that challenges the mind by exposing it to new ideas, with a bias to issues that mattered to Canadians.

    These cost-cutting measures are part of a new reality in this age of austerity, and follow the CBC’s own axing of such well-regarded shows as Dispatches. What’s particularly unfortunate about all of this is that these programmes have no substitute of equal merit in the audiovisual medium or beyond. They have intellectual content that private broadcasters will never embrace, as shows that cater to the lowest denominator simply earn more. Meanwhile, the underground podcast scene primarily lacks the access that comes with significant fiscal resources and established journalistic credibility.

    It’s not that I have an attachment to television in this age of Netflix. In fact, both TVO and the CBC have been very adept at embracing shifting media consumption patterns, releasing their shows as podcasts and on YouTube. It’s that these departures leaves a void that is being left unfilled. We as Canadians are being deprived of the means through which to gain a better understanding of the world around us, and we’re the poorer for it.

    The sad thing is, I don’t believe this trend will reverse any time soon, if at all.

  • Pulled Pork Sandwiches

    Pulled Pork Sandwiches

    This was a day alone for me, and I decided to treat myself with a pulled pork sandwich. I turned on the slow cooker in the morning and threw in tenderloins, chopped up onions, BBQ sauce, tomato soup, basil, garlic powder, a bit of water and some salt. Basically, what I had laying around.

    I also made a loaf of whole wheat bread. The pork tasted great; I think next time I’d butter the bread and toast it a bit before serving.

  • School Update: Made it half-way the first semester!

    School Update: Made it half-way the first semester!

    I’m now in my second month of school and past the half-way mark. Things are going much better than a month ago. For one, I no longer feel like I’m drowning. School work is more or less under control. A big cause of stress at the job is nearly resolved. I’ve also started to participate in university events, tapping into communities I ignored during my first foray. Life is looking up, if only for a bit.

    I’ve also kept baking. My interest in other hobbies are hibernating by circumstance. Programming because of work, reading because of school, same with writing, etc. I appreciate that baking is unlike anything else I do.

    Among my recent adventures I made ice cream (without a machine), baked tons of doughnuts, produced snickerdoodle scones, whipped up some home-made Reese’s Pieces, improvised peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, accompanied those with maple cookies, and made sweet buns. That’s about half of what I made, and that’s just in the last few weeks.

    It’s gotten to the point where I’m telling myself to tone it down. I have this rule now to only bake weekends. I’ve been very bad at following it. I keep stumbling on recipes, they look so good, and I always invariably have the ingredients on hand. Oh and a side note about the ice cream: it turned out surprisingly well. That recipe is a gem.

  • Ubuntu 12.10 Mini-Review

    Ubuntu 12.10 Mini-Review

    I installed Ubuntu 12.10 on my laptop. I was previously running 12.04, which was released this past April. Unfortunately, the upgrade broke the system. I could log in, but was stuck at seeing the wallpaper and nothing else.

    What happened was that there was issues with the proprietary drivers (fglrx) I was using for my graphics chip and this new release. Looking forward, it looks like support for my graphics chip (Radeon HD 4200) is being dropped entirely, which is rather unfortunate given it’s only three years old. Anyways, I didn’t realize that that’s what was happening, so I did a fresh install.

    Everything worked out of the box. Display. Sound. Wifi. Even my network printer. The installation was a breeze, because my home folder for my previous install was in a separate partition, and Ubuntu’s software repository is quite vast. It took me hours to go from a fresh installation to a system that had all my old documents and all the software I had been using ready to go.

    As for the graphics drivers, the new installation put on the open-source drivers. The upside is that they work beautifully. The downside is that they lack features of the proprietary drivers developed by AMD, especially relating to power consumption, reducing my laptop’s battery life. Given that the proprietary drivers had a few niggles around things like handling multiple monitors, I’m going to stick with open-source. The lesson for the next laptop purchase is to avoid AMD entirely, and use only Intel-based graphics.

    Onto Ubuntu itself, I ditched its Unity desktop environment in favour of Cinnamon. I added a Mac OSX style dock with the installation of Docky. I also traded in Ubuntu’s rather dark theme for a lighter one in the form of one called Elementary Leon. I find the end result both more usable and pleasing to the eye.

    Now that’s a computer I want to use. There’s much to like about this new release. The software selection is great, and I must say that Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu have the best mechanism to install software out there. Way better than Windows, or even Android. If you want to use a graphical approach, it’s one click. Or if you know what you want, you can install twenty complete programs at a time from the command-line. You just type one line, and it does the rest.

    There’s been some controversy about Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, putting in ads for Amazon inside. They get a cut from every sale derived from these ads. Fortunately, this is easy to remove. If this commercialization continues, I may switch to another distribution like Linux Mint, but I’m not at that point yet.

    As compared to the previous release, this version of Ubuntu has more up-to-date applications and libraries, a more mature desktop environment by way of Unity (which I ditched, but it’s there), and a newer kernel (more features.) From my end, the hardware works, the applications and libraries I need are all there, and there’s a solid interface to interact with these applications. That’s all I need from an operating system.

  • Baked Cinnamon Roll Doughnuts

    Baked Cinnamon Roll Doughnuts

    I’ve continued testing out baked doughnut recipes. Now there was this one recipe I came across a while ago, but at the time I lacked the doughnut pan required to try it out. I stumbled on it again the other day, and decided to give it a shot. The results were quite good.

    I made my own brown sugar for this one, and substituted the expensive cream cheese frosting for a simple icing sugar and milk glaze. The end product is definitively reminiscent of the taste it aims to emulate. Texture-wise I’d say it’s somewhere in between a cupcake, a doughnut, and a cinnamon roll.

    Cinnamon Roll Baked Doughnuts

    Overview

    Credit for the recipe goes to the blog Top with Cinnamon. I used a simple glaze instead of the cream cheese frosting that was on the original, and made my own brown sugar. The whole thing takes about 35 minutes to do, start-to-finish. You’ll need a doughnut pan, though Top with Cinnamon also has an entry on how to make your own.

    Ingredients

    You’ll need sugar, icing sugar, molasses, butter, cinnamon, milk, cornstarch, all-purpose flour, an egg, nutmeg and vanilla extract.

    • 5 Tbsp Sugar
    • 2 Tsp Molasses
    • 6 Tbsp Butter
    • 2 Tsp Cinnamon
    • 1 Tsp Milk
    • 1 Tsp Cornstarch
    • 1 Tsp Vanilla Extract
    • 1 Egg
    • ½ Cup Milk
    • 1½ Cup All Purpose Flour
    • ½ Cup Sugar
    • 2 Tsp Baking Powder
    • ¼ Tsp Salt
    • ¼ Tsp Nutmeg
    • ¾ Cup Icing Sugar
    • 2 Tsp Milk

    Instructions

    Put six tablespoons of butter in a sauce pan, and put on low heat to melt.

    While the butter does its thing, mix the five tablespoons of sugar with the two teaspoons of molasses, to make brown sugar.

    Pour the quarter cup of melted butter from the sauce pan into another bowl and set aside. Add the home-made brown sugar to the sauce pan and mix.

    Add the cinnamon, milk, vanilla, and cornstarch. Combine them.

    When the mixture starts to bubble, take it off the heat and pour a spoonful in the bottom of each mold of the doughnut pan.

    Set the oven to 350° F. In a clean bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg.

    In the bowl you poured that quarter cup of butter, whisk in an egg and add the half cup of milk. Mix well, then add to the flour concoction. Fold whatever’s wet into the dry. Don’t overdo the mixing here; stop as soon as the dry powder is pretty much gone.

    Add a few tablespoons of the mixture to the mold. I then push down around with my fingers so that the prod that creates the hole in the middle is visible. I don’t bother trying to get the batter to the edge, it’ll expand into it as it bakes.

    Put the doughnut pan in the oven for 8 minutes. As that bakes, prepare the glaze. Combine the icing sugar with milk. I also added some vanilla here.

    Pull the doughnuts from the oven. I immediately take them out with a small spatula.

    Once cool I use a spoon to place the glaze on them.

    Then drop your cellphone into the doughnuts while taking photos, cracking the pretty glaze you made. You’re done!

    Critiques: The glaze I made is sub-par. The original cream cheese frosting called for by Top with Cinnamon would definitively be better; but its main ingredient is too expensive to have on hand (special occasions aside.)