Sometime this past summer I made an interesting discovery in the international aisle of the local Food-Coop, Bloomingfoods — Seitan in a can. What is seitan you might ask? It is wheat gluten. And what is wheat gluten? It is the part of wheat that makes bread stick together. Glutinous means sticky, and that is exactly what gluten does in bread. Without gluten, all the carbon dioxide that yeast produces when it is eating the sugars would simply evaporate, but […] (Read more)

Today I stumbled across the LaTeX font catalogue, which lists all available fonts for LaTeX. I am really surprised that I had not been aware of it earlier. I was also surprised at the number of fonts there. While some new projects such as XeTeX are making all open-type and true-type fonts available to the TeX typesetting system, I still use regular (pdf)LaTeX most of the time, and every once in awhile I like to play around with fonts. And, […] (Read more)

I am now trying out the scribefire Firefox extension for xml-rpc blogging, since I have discovered that QTM does not support image uploading, and it seems that scribefire does. It allows one to resize images, but it does not seem to create thumbnails. I will probably stick to posting the old-fashioned way, but it is nice to know that there are some other options.

My friend Bethany Soule, for whom I host a blog, recently asked me if there was a way to write entries using a client program instead of having to login to wordpress via the web interface. I pointed her to the xml-rpc page in wordpress I had run across recently, and then decided to check it out for myself. Since I am on Linux, I looked at the Linux clients, but also wanted to try out a cross-platform option. QTM […] (Read more)

Finally getting around to releasing some more plugins. I started using the Fancy Archives plugin by Andrew Rader about the same time I started using his Fancy Categories plugin (maybe in the reverse order actually). I have been modifying it for some time now, and it seems appropriate to release it as a new plugin. The functionality is best described by simply looking at my archives list on this blog. The default wordpress archives list is a simple unordered list. […] (Read more)