2026-07-04 21:00:00
Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids ( review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Family"). But the new app doesn't work for watch-only accounts like ours yet, and they're still saying they're going to turn off the old app on July 6th. Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts).
I first got the notification that Gizmohub was going away as an email on 2026-06-10:
Since Gizmohub is not a very good app, I was initially pretty excited about this. Unfortunately, when I tried to switch over I got an error that my phone number was "ineligible":
If instead of using a Verizon login I used the "social" login (which some people online reported success with), it tried to send a text to my Google Fi account to verify me, which wouldn't show up.
On 2026-06-17 I talked with Verizon support's virtual assistant for a while, and then an associate for half an hour. They were not able to resolve the problem, and said that Verizon Family does not yet support cases where you have Gizmos as your only Verizon lines of service. They said they'd follow up with me by email when they sort this out, but I never received anything.
The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise this up the chain: they need to push back the deprecation date.
I called again on 2026-06-19, and the rep said this was their third or fourth call today from someone who had a gizmo but not a Verizon smartphone. That seemed high to me, and I might have misheard. They said they're working on fixing the problem, it will be at least 4-5 business days, and they won't take down Gizmohub until Verizon Family is working.
I called again on 2026-07-02, and the rep said this was a known issue. They took my information, gave me a ticket number, and assured me that someone higher up in the Verizon support system would reach out to me within 24hr. (Later I got an email saying 48hr.) Unlike the previous two reps they wouldn't commit to this being fixed before Gizmohub would stop working.
It's now been 48hr, and I haven't heard anything. While normally I would be understanding about longer response times over a holiday weekend, here I am not. It was entirely Verizon's decision to set a deprecation date immediately following a holiday. The new app still doesn't work for me, the reps say it's still not working for many others, and on Monday morning we'll lose the ability to text our kids.
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2026-06-29 21:00:00
Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs. Five years ago I played around with trying to make it eggless with aquafaba and xanthan gum. It didn't work, but now that we have vegan egg white protein, can we do this for real?
Nope. I gave it several tries over vacation, and wasn't able to get it to puff properly. Here's the closest I got:
As with standard choux I heated the water, milk, butter, and sugar to a boil, then added the flour. I mixed it well, let it cool a little, and then gradually added the egg (replacement) while beating will in between additions. The batter looked just right:
But when I baked it, it didn't inflate. I tried again, and this time took advantage of the AirBnB's nice oven to observe that there were little bubbles on the skin. Video:
My hypothesis for why this isn't working is that eggs normally have a range of proteins that set at different temperatures. The most common (~54%) is ovalbumin which sets at 176–183F, and this is what the precision-fermented egg white is made out of. But there's also ovotransferrin (~12%) which sets at 142–149F, and I'm guessing this early setting is why choux made from normal eggs forms a thin flexible crust in time to capture steam and inflate. Whereas in my version the steam just leaks it out.
Models think I should try either potato protein isolate (149F) or methylcellulose (gels at 140F, reverses on cooling). Thoughts?
2026-06-28 21:00:00
I keep my recipies on my website, and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed. A couple years ago I added some progressive enhancement that puts checkboxes on the ingredients, and today I added a rescaler:
Here's tripling it:
This is another project, like adding transposition to my solstice songbook, where I wouldn't have put in the time if I couldn't delegate to an LLM. It went very quickly, and the code seems reasonable.
Implementation notes:
As you go up and down it converts teaspoons to tablespoons to cups. Yes, I still cook volumetrically.
It handles numeric ranges, like "3-4 cups".
It handles fractions: half of 1 1/4 C is 5/8 C.
It doesn't handle everything. I wanted something simple and reviewable that handles most cases, instead of trying to make something exaustive (that would then have weird bugs). This means with complex items like "2 eggs (or 2T flax and 5T water)" only the "2 eggs" is scaled. To make these failures graceful, all scaled values are bolded, so unscaled values stick out visually.
2026-06-25 21:00:00
Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter (verses 1 and 2) until his wife reminds him that her own father said the same thing about him (verse 3).
Some others with variations on this pattern:
Don't Take the Girl: fishing at 8yo, mugged at 18yo, potential maternal mortality at 23yo; three senses of "don't take".
Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not: at the first kiss and then proposal the boy is shy; at their wedding he reverses it.
Five More Minutes: playing by the creek, saying good night to a girl, playing on the football team for the last time, then (big mood switch) grandpa's hospital bed; each iteration wanting a little more time.
Skin (Sarabeth): teenage girl undergoing chemo dreams of dancing with her love, wind in her hair; last chorus her hair has fallen out, her boyfriend shaved in solidarity, and they're dancing together.
Cleaning This Gun (Come On In Boy): as a teen he got a lecture from his girlfriend's dad with an implicit threat; as an adult he gives the same lecture to his daughter's boyfriend.
This pattern is definitely not limited to country (ex: Cat's in the Cradle, where he doesn't have time for his kid and then once grown up his kid doesn't have time for him). But it does seem unusually common in this genre.
2026-06-24 21:00:00
I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1]
This means you need some way to heat things up. If the power grid is working then you have lots of options, including immersion heaters and boiling water with a kettle, but in many disasters this is not an option. What else can you do?
Various options with fuel and batteries are possible, but a solar oven is hard to beat. Most would have what they'd need to put one together from tinfoil, cling wrap, tape, and cardboard. It would be worth putting some effort into identifying the best DIY-from-on-hand designs and distributing them. A simple one probably can't get water to the boil, but luckily you don't need that for starch: 180F is enough, and even 160F gets your pasta about halfway bioavailable. You do want to pre-soak, though: as starch gels it becomes less permeable to water, and without stirring or boil to disturb the surface gelling it may not fully hydrate.
The main limitation of a solar oven is, of course, lack of sun. When I look at a place like Boston, though, you should be able to cook a pot of pasta on ~60% of days (~30% in the winter). If you have a mix of foods, including starches that can be eaten without heating, like crackers, cereal, and ramen, you can probably just eat those when there's not enough sun for the cooker. Alternatively a propane stove does pretty well: if you pre-soak, bring to the boil, turn the stove off, and move to an insulated container, you should be able to cook several hundred pounds of pasta with a standard 20lb propane tank.
[1] Now, our stomach isn't the only way to get nutrition out of food:
it can also be fermented in our guts. The best case is that you grind
it and soak it well before eating. The gut bacteria would need time
to adapt to the challenge (replicating to handle the newly abundant
food) and while they're adapting it wouldn't be easy gastricly. You'd
want to ramp up to this, using it to stretch more bioavailable food so
it would last longer while giving our intestines the time to
adjust. Then the caloric content is also lower: half to the bacteria
doing the fermenting (or lost as uncomfortable gas) and half to you in
now-digestible form.
On the uncomfortable gas, it looks like it should be worst initially, and then go down as bacteria propagate that can consume the gas. Whether the gas level (and other gastric symptoms) is tolerable is probably a good gauge for whether the ramp is too steep. It won't drop to nothing, though, and how well it works depends in part on your gut microbiome: if you don't have the appropriate bacteria initially it may never adjust well.
Overall, this really doesn't sound like a good time. Then add in that there's some risk of food poisoning from raw grains that are expected to be boiled before eating, and it seems best to find another way.
2026-06-21 21:00:00
A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some of my recorded music for the dance. Here's a lightly edited and linkified copy of what I sent them:
This is a tricky situation, and I'm sorry you've ended up here. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would not hold a dance with recorded music. Instead I'd:
Have musicians play acoustically and accept that it won't be as loud as you'd like. Until a hundred years ago this was the default. [EDIT: This could be an opportunity to gather a giant open band!]
Get a crash course in running sound. While it's a complex job in its entirety, if you're just trying to make a few instruments and a caller a bit louder there are simple options that are not difficult. Depending on what equipment is available you can plug a microphone right into a speaker, and just turn it up or down until it sounds right. If you wanted to do a virtual training session I could do 9pm tonight or tomorrow night.
Reschedule the dance. If you're worried about losing money I could chip in a bit.
All of these have downsides, some of them big, but overall I think it's very important that contra dance goes to live music.
As a practical matter, if you do use recorded music make sure you listen through it while tracking sections to make sure it's square. I'm pretty sure there's at least one track on the Kingfisher album where we edited it in a way that means it won't work for dancing, and same goes for the Free Raisins album.