Due to Christmas the store in Denmark have had cream on sale. The reason for this is that we both use it in the Christmas sauce and for a special dessert almost exclusively eaten for Christmas. This desert is called Risalamande and you should try it!

Any this enabled my wife and I to purchase quite a lot of cream for cheap! Like roughly 5 DKK (~0.8 EUR) for half a litre. One of the reasons bought a lot of cream was that we have always wanted to try and make butter, and if there ever was a time that time was now. So we decided to use 2 litres of cream to do so.

First of all if you do not have the arm muscles of Hercules, then you will need a stand mixer. Even a electric whisk is simply to annoying to use, as it does take a minimum of 15 minutes to make butter and the time only increases with the volume of cream. Secondly it is good if your whisky and bowl is cold, it helps the fat of the cream solidify quicker and aiding the whipping process.

Also and this might seem a little bit random. But ensure that you have ice cubes, it will be relevant later. Cheese cloth will be an aide, but we did it without. However, next time we will buy some.

Anyways! Now it is time to whip the cream! This will take a while depending on the volume of cream, but essentially what we are trying to do is to whip up whipping cream and then ruin it. If your are used to make awesome soft peak whipped cream, this will feel like a crime against cream. But you will simply have to deal with it and the end result is worth it. So don’t cry. Eh… also go at a medium speed on your mixer as otherwise you will have cream everywhere! I am really happy we had checked different recipes before starting this butter making thing. As the process continue to will reach a step where the cream seems to change colour. It will sort of start yellowing. This is when I recommend you to put on the splash screen of your mixer. Because slowly, okay maybe not so slowly, the butter will separate from the cream. You will get a tiny hint where you will start seeing liquid escape the whipped cream. AND THEN BAM! It will leave the butter there is no tomorrow. I highly recommend that about 1 millisecond before this happen you lower your mixer speed to low. Not saying I got sprayed a little even with the splash screen on, BUT! Next you will see the butter mass assemble within your stand mixers whip. Let it continue to beat for like 3-5 minutes.

Now we stop mixing and take the butter into a strainer and let it sit there over a bowl or something draining for 10-15 minutes. Do not discard the liquid, because technically that is butter milk and we can also use this! No flipping waste if we can avoid it!

Prepare a bowl with cold water, this is where the ice cubes come in. Add the ice cubes to make the water really chilly. Then add the butter to the bowl and wash it. This removes any excess butter milk, the water will go very cloudy. We want very cold water as the butter otherwise would melt. This will take like 3-5 minutes maybe longer depending on how much butter you have. We had a lot so it took me 10 minutes. Oh right, our portion of cream yield 806 grams of butter.

After the butter is washed, you should again place it a place it in a strainer to let it drain. Again roughly 10 minutes. If you just want unsalted butter, this where you stop. But we wanted salted butter, so we continued. Salting butter is actually fairly trivial it is a percentage, just like any good baking recipe. But how much salt? That was actually quit interesting I thought. Because, I could get a straight, straight answer… I even tried chatGPT. But after a while I sort of landed on this 1.5-1.6% will give a french style butter. 1.4-1.5% will give a Scandinavian style butter. Now, we like both French and Scandinavian style butter so we decided to do an experiment. One batch with 1.5% salt and one with 1.6%. I will get into the result later. So like if we have 804 grams of butter then the salt for 1.6% saltning would be 804 * 0.016 = ~12.8 grams of salt.

When you add the salt, flatten the butter, add the salt on top and kneed it into the butter. This should be done quickly so the butter does not melt. You can put it in the fridge for a bit if it is a problem. If you look at the picture right above, you will see our salt looked like powdered salt instead of normal table salt. Well… This was because we where out of table salt and I decided to just pestle and mortar the living daylights out of our salt. This might have had a slight result on the salting of the butter, but I am not sure.

Finally we shape the butter, into the shape we want. We like to have it blocks. So we shaped it into the four blocks you see in the picture to the right. We wrapped the butter in clean film, as that was what most recipes said was best. Some also called for parchment, but I have no idea what is best. But, for us the clean film helped a little in the shaping process.

Now you have made butter. How do you then store it? You can use it immediately and it will last for roughly a week in the fridge. This depends on how well you washed it and the amount of salt. Or chuck it in the freezer, where it will last for quite a while. We chucked three blocks in the freezer.

So what does it taste like? It taste like butter. You might think well of course it does, you dimwit. Well, yes. But I was surprised by how much like butter it actually tasted. Also one thing I found the consistency nicer than store bought butter. Like there was a higher level of creaminess to the butter. I hope that makes sense. We had it both as stand alone and on home made bread and in both cases it was delicious. Though I am curious to see if the flavour developers a little of the next 2-3 days. Now, what about the 1.5% versus 1.6% salting. Personally I do not think that there is such a big difference. But I think that the fact, that I pounded the salt to powder affect the saltiness. I think if we had just used normal table salt or rough sea salt, the end product would have been better. My wife, however, thought that both where a little to salty and maybe we should go with ~1-1.2% next time.

Finally, some notes. Most recipes called for cream with a fat content of minimum 38%. We used 36% and it worked like a charm. Additionally, I did find some recipes for cultured butter I might try that in the future. Finally, flavoured butter. I think home made butter lends itself really well to adding dried herbs and lemon peel. Which I will definitely try later.

I know this blog post is a little outside of what I normally write about. But I found it a really fun experience and I wanted to share it.

./Lars

Background story I have a server where I need some more storage, with the only option being an external hard drive. This means that I need my server to auto mount my volume on system boot. Now this is actually fairly easy… One would think.

However, on Linux to do this in unmaintained mode (no user interaction with the system and no login) you need to edit /etc/fstab. Where fstab stands for File System Table. An entry in this file may look like this:

UUID=5821140f-ac3f-4dff-8969-02c54de796d8 /                       btrfs   subvol=root     0 0

The UUID is an identifier for the device (for shadowing for the chatGPT fuck up). / is the mount point path. btrfs is the file system. subvol=root are options. Finally 0 0 The first 0 is dump and the second is pass. I will not go into details on the different options, dump, and passes in this post. They are not really relevant.

However, I did not recall how to write such a line in the fstab file and to not search the web, I felt lazy. I asked chatGPT to do it for me with the following prompt:

How to edit /etc/fstab to auto mount external harddrive

With the following response.

/dev/sdb1  /home/youruser/mydisk  auto  user,noauto  0  0

There are a few issues in this line and before I blame chatGPT to much this was partially me being stupid and trusting the damn thing to much. I blindly copied this to my fstab file remembering that it was a valid way to do this. I of course update /dev/sdb1 and /home/youruser/mydisk to what fit my needs. I reboot the machine and I could not boot, due to issues with attempting to mount /dev/sdb1.

To bring my system to a bootable state, I need a live USB. Boot into the live image, mount the root partition of the disk and remove the faulty line. Test with mount -a which mounts all systems and also tells you if something is wrong. Then reboot machine. I forgot to run mount -a before reboot. Which makes me a flipping idiot… but we will get back to that.

So what is the problem, is the actual problem with the answer chatGPT gave? Well first of using /dev/sdb1 is very, very old school and does not really work anymore. You have to use the UUID for the device instead. Which you can find by running sudo blkid /dev/sdb1 which for me gave:

/dev/sdb1: UUID="d966687c-91fc-4954-bfe1-f4d7d7a34c87" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="0137f5a5-01"

So I had to replace /dev/sdb1 with UUID=d966687c-91fc-4954-bfe1-f4d7d7a34c87. Next, the file system type auto. That is wrong. From what I have been able to find afterwards. File system type equal to auto has never worked with the default mount command nor in an fstab file. I might not have looked deep enough but at least at surface level, you have to specify the file system type which for me is ext4. Then the option noauto. OH MY FUCKING GODS!!!! From the mount commands manual page:

    noauto
       Can only be mounted explicitly (i.e., the -a option will not cause the filesystem to be mounted).

So using mount -a would not have tested if it actually could mount. I was unaware of this and that is sort of my fault. But it is crazy that chatGPT even suggest it.

Then finally and that is not a mistake in the above, but rather a thing that (in my opinion) always should be added for external drives. That is to add the option nofail. From the mount commands manual page:

    nofail
       Do not report errors for this device if it does not exist.

What this means (amongst other things), is that the system will still be bootable even if the external drive has errors. Thus, again I altered the /etc/fstab file ending up with the entry below. With the exception of nofails are irrelevant. I just found them necessary for what I need to do. The same for dump and check.

UUID=d966687c-91fc-4954-bfe1-f4d7d7a34c87 /home/youruser/mydisk ext4 nofail,rw,user,exec 0 1

So to summarise. I tried to use chatGPT to quickly solve my issue. I failed and caused quite a headache. It generated an faulty fstab entry that caused my system to not be able to boot properly and even not testable with mount -a. Whilst that was at the fault of chatGPT, I should not have taken its answer at face value. I tried to save seconds, which caused an error that cost me roughly 15 minutes of fix time (including downloading the live USB image). I could instead have gotten the correct answer from the Unix and Linux Stack Exchange Question: fstab mount problem. Which took me less than a minute to find when searching online.

This is the second time I have tried where chatGPT caused or would have caused a system. The first time was when I was asking some user permission rules and what I got back I could see was garbage. This is not including where its suggesting for allowing to mount a single USB via usbguard was simply to disable usbguard. Where the correct option is usbguard allow-device <DEVICE identifier>.

In conclusion, I will not be able to recommend chatGPT for Linux system administration tasks. Side note, just for fun I tried Claude and Gemini too. They gave close to the same response as chatGPT. Although with Gemini instead of writing /dev/sdb1 simply wrote UUIDdev/sdb1. I don’t know if this would have triggered me to go a look for what the UUID meant in this case, but still not brilliant. Claude did not have the noauto option and it recommend running mount -a which for Claude would have saved my ass.

./Lars

So, based on my last post, it should not come as a surprise that I am focusing a lot on, well ,improving my focus. I am seeking new outlets for how to do that. Essentially expanding my options and creating routines. When one think and read about meditation it is almost impossible to miss the association with martial arts. In particular those of the far east, like Kung Fu, Wushu, Thai Chi, Judo, Jiu jitsu, just to mention a few. But very few before starting realise that it baked into the these fighting styles. Be it through breathing techniques, focus on technique, or a general state of mind you need to be in when fighting.

Long ago, I practised another martial, Taekwando. But I trained at a very western styled place where these parts where not in focus. It was more the fighting. However, I did remember that I felt a sort of Zen when training due to the focus I naturally put on the techniques. Therefore, I wanted to pick up a martial art again to see how it would impact me. Due to an old injury Taekwando was out, so I sought for alternatives. I was considering Judo mostly, due to the lack of kicks. I ended up talking to a colleague of mine, about my worries on if my body could take it. He suggest Aikido a martial art he had practices for a long time.

The description of Aikido he provided made me very interested. In particular with its focus on both mental and body stability rather than speed, awakened my curiosity. I researched it for a while and after we moved back to Aalborg in February I could wait to start. Thus, in April I did. Now, I am a month in to training, only once a week I have to start slow, and in this blog post I will explain what it has done to my mental state and focus so far.

First of all the mental clarity it gives is amazing. After the first session, I was clear, I had a freedom of clutter in my head for more than two hours, which I have not experienced for a long time. This, effect have lasted after every training and it is honestly amazing. My wife also realised this, I was clearly much calmer. Also, I lied, I do not train once a week. I participate in a training session once a week but train at home 2-3 times a week and then roughly 20 minutes. Which gives me a similar level of clarity and calmness.

Secondly, I find that in the hours after a training session, I have a significantly higher focus. I can completely a lot of complex tax with much less friction and I seem to be able to better keep focus on conversations. With the latter being a very cool bonus.

Thirdly, I find that the day after a session I also have an easier time to focus at work. Which kind of surprise me. I sort of let go into a trance, where I can focus. Although, this is so far only a morning thing. But we will see if I am not able to expand it. I believe I am.

Finally, besides the increased focus. I also experience a much easier time mediating. A thing I have struggled with over the last three to four years. This is an extreme benefit for me as I have always considered meditation, both guided and none guide, to be one of the things that calms me the most.

I hope to share more of my journey with Aikido and the positive effects it has on me.

./Lars

Over the last two years I have attempted to use Social Media less and user my phone less, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I do not like to put to much shit online anymore. In particular due to what we are seeing the bigger companies such as Meta and Alphabet do. Target advertisement, selling our data, build social graphs, and so on. It is not really a surprise, but I do not want to feed this particular machine anymore, or at least at the bare minimum. Secondly, I noticed that my daily screen time was climbing, thank you Apple for the brutal truth, to a level where it hovered around 4.25 hours a day. Which to me was insane. Also, as a consequence of this I could see I was reading less books and painting less miniatures. Both things I really enjoy, and did I really enjoy being on my phone? I am honestly not sure I did, since I had a tendency to get into arguments online.

In this blog post I will describe how I have brought my screen time down. Before we start I am not guaranteeing that my solution works for you. However, I can promise that if you bring down your screen time, you will feel better or at least I do. The times I provide in this blog post is on average.

Reduce access to Social Media on your Phone

Here I am not talking forums like Reddit. But rather Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and so on. The doom scrolling is a really thing and for me it is in particular bad on Twitter and Mastodon style sites. However, I started small, by removing LinkedIn from my phone, just as a test back in December of 2022. This alone reduced my average screen time by 15 minutes a day. Not a lot but quick results. It was kind of barrier that I now had open my browser and then navigate to LinkedIn. Next, I, like so many others, got mad a Elon Musk and quit Twitter. First by uninstalling the App on my phone and logging out in the browser, and now I have delete my account. Whilst, I did replace my twitter fix with mastodon.social. It was significantly slower in terms of how often people posted and it reduced my screen time by further 30 minutes a day. Although it took a while I decided in November of last year, to delete the IceCube mastodon app from my phone. Which brought down my phone screen time by another 10-15 minutes, so roughly an hour saved. In this is include that I started using the website elk.zone for viewing mastodon posts. Which like LinkedIn added the barrier of me having to navigate to the website.

So basically I can already see profits from just removing Social Media. Now lets take a look at a specific application / website Reddit!!!

Removing Reddit and Moving to Hacker News, Daily Dev, and Others

Honestly, I love Reddit, and I consider it more than a social media. Similar to how I view Facebook, due to the simple fact that it also provide news, help forums, and more. I spend an unforgivable amount of time on Reddit, even now.

However, in December of last year I was having a very long Christmas vacation and decide that I wanted to test how much time I spend on Reddit on my phone. So I uninstalled the App. One thing I did want to keep was the technical news. So I started using Ycombinators Hacker News, daily.dev, and others to get my news. Although, I have reduced the news site to the once that do not gamefy the experience (bye, bye daily.dev).

Day one reduced my screen time by 1 hour and that has been consistent since. This is in part because, I have moved to spend 5-15 minutes in the morning, quickly catching up on tech news sites which stops me from doom scrolling Reddit. Also, I no longer randomly pull out my phone to scroll Reddit. I do not even bring my phone to the bathroom at work every time I go anymore. I have no reason, there is no Reddit. Although I will check mastodon via elk.zone once in while.

Removing YouTube

The final thing I removed was YouTube. This was not because I spend a huge amount of time on YouTube. However, after I removed Reddit I found myself spending more time on the YouTube. So it had to go. My time spend on YouTube was climbing to roughly 30 minutes a day. But now it is gone.

Side Quest: Two phones, Work and Private

So even before this main quest I started a side quest. I used to have a combined work and private phone. Which meant I would often open my phone to check work Slack and work Teams in my spare time. Some days it was two hours outside of work.

The only way I found to adequately solve this, was to have separate phones. I cannot emphasise enough how important this has been for me. In particular during weekends and vacation. My option to simply LEAVE my work phone in my bag, has had an immensely positive impact on my mental health. I am aware that not all can do this, but if you can do it!

Next step Changing my phones Home Screen

My latest and currently testing idea is to change my phones Home Screen, this is what it is called on iPhone. So my thought process was this: If opening a web browser cause enough friction for me to not open X. What happens if I move my apps to a second screen?.

So I started by looking at what apps do I use the most?

• Phone, for dialling (thank you Captain obvious)
• Clock, for checking times in other countries and setting timers
• Health Apps, I need to use some of them a lot.
• Home, for the very few parts of my dumb home that is actually smart.
• Music and Audio Apps (Apple Music, Podcast Apple Classical, Audible, Apple Books, Apple iTunes Store)
• Languages Apps (Duolingo and Mondly)
• Apple Photos
• Things
• Calendar
• Signal
• Apple Messages

None of these are really time consumers. I get in, do what I need to do, I get out. Unless I am browsing for books or music but that happens rarely on my phone. So they got to stay on my home screen (see right). The only thing, that can be a time sink for me is photos. But I have to be in a specific mood, to really sink time in into the app.

One might wonder what about Duolingo and Mondly, and why both? Well first of I do a set number of lessons per day/week in either app, so no doom learning… sadly. So I can stop myself. Then secondly why do I have both! Well Duolingo does not have Farsi (Persian) Mondly does. But I prefer Duolingo for Spanish… so yeah…

I also needed to quickly see what was next in my calendar and I like to see my exercises states for the day. So therefore the home screen also got to keep my two widgets for that. I only deep dive twice a day into my exercise states. Once in the morning when I arrive at work, I check my pulse from my morning walk and how I slept. Then around an hour before I go to bed I also check my health stats through out the day. Note to self remember to be better at weighing your self in the morning.

I have only been running with this setup for two days. But so far it saves me 20 minutes of screen time. I am really looking forward to how much more I can reduce my screen time with this.

So that is close to two and half hours of reduction in screen time. A thing I am very pleased with. Next, I will discuss some “why I did not mention X”.

Why did you not mention insert X

Focus Mode: A focus mode is where you set your phone in a custom “do not disturb mode”. Where you control who and what can send you notifications.

This is an epic feature on both Android and iPhone, and I use it a lot! When I get to work I only accept notifications from four people! Everything else can wait! However, I started this before I started keeping proper track of my screen time. So I cannot fairly include it!

Putting your phone in a drawer: YES! I want to do that… I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But I will.

I do actually turn my phone screen down on my desk and that helps to. But I haven’t actually timed the effect of this alone.

Timers?: So I know some people set times and they focus for X minutes and then have Y minutes respite. I simply do not work like that. I cannot handle it, I am not sure why yet. But it doesn’t work for me.

Finally, I will provide some findings.

My findings

Improved Focus: I have found that since I started this journey. My focus has gone up and I can now focus on tasks for longer. Which is really nice.

Withdrawals: I actually experience withdrawals, where I got panicky that I was checking social media X or app Y. However, it let down pretty quickly and I do not miss the apps anymore, with the exception of Reddit.

More Alert: I am more Alert to what happens around me. When I drive on the bus, or sit at a cafe. It is quite nice. I see so much more.

I hope you liked this blog post.

./Lars

So as readers of this blog will know I am an Gnu Emacs and have been for quite a while. In particular I am a huge fan of the features opt in rather than opt out philosophy compared to fully feature IDEs and in some cases text editors. Also I like that I can get Emacs to adopt to my work flow and not the other way around.

Now, this is not to say that I have not dabbled with other text editors. I have had my time with Visual Studio Code, the now dead Atom, Vim, and others. But I always returned to Emacs for the simple reason that I found something I did not like. With Visual Studio Code in particular I have issues with how it splits panes, some of the keyboard bindings are insanely difficult to remember AND TAKE THAT FROM AN EMACS USER!, and the crazy amount of resources it consumes without any plugins (besides the default once) is simply insane.

However, with Vim it was more a case of I couldn’t get use to the default key bindings, which I like to stick with in the beginning of using a text editor and then do the customisation later. Also I had few issues with using in for C++ development, which I find out last year was actually down to me using really bad plugins. But, one thing I could never get past with Vim was the syntax for configuration. I simply dislike it. Whilst Emacs use Emacs Lisp, Vim uses something called Vim Script and I really find it weird and not nice.

However, some years back, I believe it was in 2015 Neovim was released. It is basically Vim but more modern and what is more important is that it use Lua for configuration instead of Vim Script. I do not particular enjoy writing Lua, but I find it more enjoyable than both Emacs Lisp and Vim Script. This alone have actually made me consider neovim as potential to dethrown Emacs in the land of editors for.

So back in 2022, I actually gave it a serious try. At home I would only use Emacs for writing on my books as these at the time was only in Org Mode and I did not have the energy nor the time to morph them into something else, but for everything else I would use neovim. I had the initial issues with the keybindings, but I found a pretty good cheat sheet for it and after about two months I was competent enough to no longer need it. However, I ran into some issues with plugins for C++, C, and Python development with regards to LSP integration. One of the issues was simply that neovim did not seem able to recognise when a file was C++ and when it was C, even if I used .cpp and .c and had this configured recognisable in my configuration.

So why on earth would I reconsider using it? Well after I started my current position, I got a colleague whom is a firm believer in neovim and have helped get over some of the issues. Which now makes neovim usable with Python for me at least, but I still have some issues with C++ which I need to hazel out. But I can see how easy it is for him to develop in C++ using neovim so I believe there is hope.

I may or may not document this. But Emacs be warned!

I still love Emacs and it will take a lot to get me away from it. So neovim will have to put up a fight. But let us see how it will go.

./Lars