The "10 games you can play in your head by yourself" book looked interesting enough to me that I've purchased it. I tend to daydream a lot anyway, so hopefully it'll provide some interesting focus for me.
> Assuming that you are not a Nazi in real life--and if you are, pal, then I've got a knife I'd like to introduce to your throat--it's probably a tough idea to empathize with such a character.
Air fryers seem to be all the rage these days, so I’m curious to hear from a no-BS crowd like HN: is there a meaningful difference between a small convection oven and an air fryer?
No, not really. I personally find a regular non-convection toaster oven to be good enough (and much cheaper).
Here's the technical aspects I see no one talk about:
(1) Air fryers have much higher air flow than a convection toaster oven and the chamber is more aerodynamic resulting in better air flow around the food.
(2) Air Fryers have a basket, convection toaster ovens may or may not have one and buying an aftermarket one is surprisingly not cheap.
(3) Air fryers have a hair-dryer design, with a fan blowing onto a heating element. The convection oven has normal top and bottom heating elements with a fan blowing the air around on the side.
I find that the air fryer does do a better job at reheating (refrigerated or frozen) fried foods such as tots, fries, fish sticks and chicken tenders. But the trade off is that it's not as good at toasting and roasting things like waffles, bread, quesadilla, pizza or vegetables.
I saw this argument over on Twitter earlier today too, and I’m not sure where’s its originating... frankly, does it matter? Buy the one that has the form factor you want and cooks the way you want to cook. When I see “counter-top convection ovens” they are large things that take up a ton of counter space, but have limited functionality and capacity. Meanwhile, the “air fryer” I bought is a lid on my Instant Pot, which means I’ve got 6 quarts of space to “fry” things they way I want. It’s been a fantastic addition for us to quickly whip out fish and chips without gallons of oil and mess.
Edit: Suppose I should mention I have an in-wall convection oven in my kitchen as well. It does “fine” but frankly sometimes I’m cooking for a large enough group that I need both the convection oven and the Instant Pot air fryer going at the same time. Plus, my convection oven takes forever to come up to full heat, so often the “Air fryer” is a better choice in terms of capacity and time.
I would say it matters insofar as anyone wants to apply understanding of the fundamentals of cooking to new tools.
Should I expect to use an 'air fryer' to do things I can already do with other tools—like toast bread or roast/bake something small, even though none of those is 'frying'? What are important considerations / differences relative to the small convection oven I already have?
If air frying is a fundamentally new cooking technique, then I may not be able to apply a wealth of cooking knowledge & intuition when using it, other than basic food chemistry. If it's a rebranded convection oven, then I can decide if a different form factor is worth it for things I already know how to do.
> “Air fryer” is a better choice in terms of capacity and time.
These are exactly the features that make it so effective for me. I love convection ovens but the air fryer is almost always more convenient with better results for the kinds of foods I'm cooking with it.
I thought there wasn't, so on a recommendation from wirecutter, we bought that cuisinart toaster oven that is also convection. It toasts up our tater tots nicely, faster than the instructions on the tater tot bag. But if air fryers are actually different I'd like to know.
We roast Brussels sprouts in our air fryer (instant pot add on) and it takes much less time than using our convection oven. Perhaps a smaller convection oven would be faster, but it makes a huge difference for us. Cleanup is a little more burdensome though — the slits in the basket are tricky to clean thoroughly.
120 extra calories a day is an extra 12 pounds a year. Combine that with your metabolism slowing down as you age and as the years pass you might find yourself expanding.
Also, the amount of oil you avoid by moving from deep frying to air frying, depending on portion sizes, can be much more than a tablespoon.
(Obviously, metabolism is more complex than this. I'm discounting the effects of adding fat on satiety, absorption rates, etc.)
I returned mine. In my opinion, it did exactly one thing, and one thing poorly. You're supposed to be able to write "like paper" but it's heavier than a notebook, has exactly the one feature, and doesn't even have a backlight.
Originally I was excited for the "hackability" but that doesn't exist on the latest model and when I looked into it, all the "hacks" were pretty useless like getting the front page of the NYT on the home screen? Like I have a phone and a notebook and both are way better at all the things they do.
1. i love drawing, but notebooks and whiteboards don't easily allow me to edit what i've done. software tools like remarkable allow me to move and resize what i've drawn, or click undo and try again, or perfectly erase. i can turn on the grid template to do lettering and then turn it off so the grid isn't in the finished product. i can't overstate how clutch moving/copying/cutting/undoing are for visual communication. i don't have to redraw that chart to make it more legible or the words fit better. i don't have to go over the pencil in pen to make it more visible when i take a picture and share it. editing visual communication is just as important as editing text, and software is just so freaking good at that compared to paper and whiteboards.
2. i use remarkable for multiple things. one of those things is drawing comics and sketches. sure, when they get complicated or i need to be more professional i'll import to clip studio and use my wacom cintiq, but being able to sit anywhere and pull out the remarkable like i would a sketchpad means i draw way more often. it's a joy.
3. i make planning documents for work projects that easily sync as pdf's so i can keep colleagues up to date. sure, when it comes time to spec details i move to google docs and spreadsheets, but especially these days where we don't have a shared whiteboard in an office, having an easy-to-share notebook has made my design/planning communication more effective and faster. (remarkable has folders and notebooks, so i keep one notebook per ongoing project)
4. one of my remarkable notebooks is "Todos". it's so cool to have one physical "notebook" for all my different notebooks. it's like a kindle but for creating! the internal organization works really well for me. ps - did i mention that digital writing can be edited and doesn't suffer from getting messy and disorganized like paper? such joy.
5. there are just enough features like pens and line widths and "smart vector based selection" to be useful, while still being simple and getting out of the way. i've never had a tablet or ipad. i don't want more screens in my life. i have an old iphone i try not to get attached to. i use a neo for writing stories and journals ;-p
i dont get excited by technology. BUT to me the remarkable is a single purpose tool that works beautifully well.
ps - to me the purpose is to create. i don't need a phone todo app or anything more prescriptive than a futuristic notebook.
pps - i used the remarkable outside today, for example, and didnt think twice. eink is lovely.
yes there are differmented between the remarkable and high quality paper and analog art tools, as well as high quality digital tools (there's some parallax in remarkable among other issues that simply cannot compare to the cintiq, to say nothing of professional art software) but those tools aren't life changing the way the remarkable fills it's particular niche.
totally cool if it's not your cup of tea, i just love it and recommend visual communicators and visual note takers check it out.
pppppps - oh yeah, the scribble to text transcription is on point. that's not my main usage, but i'm impressed it can read my actual-not-lettering scrawls, which sometimes i can't even read.
i can't share examples of most of what i've created, but for fun i've started making comics out of work charts and graphs: https://twitter.com/staycalmcomic
The first link "The Octopus: An Alien Among Us" is a good window into the world of animal intelligence research. I am going through a phase of listening to audiobooks on this topic. I can recommend both "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith and "The Genius of Birds" by Jennifer Ackerman if you want good audiobooks that give a whirlwind tour through animal intelligence research into cephalopods and birds, respectively.
Two entries stood out to me. The first is the book "UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernigan", and the second the blog post "A Constructive Look at TempleOS".
That blog post [1] along with "A Language Design Analysis of HolyC" [2] inspired me to try out TempleOS for myself. I'm so glad I did, since I got hooked on developing programs in HolyC, and thus learned C in the process. There's something about building a piece of software for a system and knowing that nothing like it has ever existed on that platform before!
I've been working in HolyC for over a year, but I just finished K&R tonight, which has me wanting to read more Kernigan, so I'm glad the UNIX book showed up on my radar.
(PS feel free to ask me about TempleOS development; email is open)
That is awesome. I've never understood how much criticism the creator of TempleOS got.
What stood out to me was that it was always mainly criticism on his technical ability. Is it really productive to harshly technically criticise a man that is plagued by mental illness?
Instead of being elitist and shooting down his contributions, the computer science crowd could have focused on getting this member of the community the help he would have needed concerning other parts of life.
Having all of that said, I aknowledge that he said pretty extreme stuff as well, I am not saying that any of that is legitimate.
I think I tried out TempleOS once, it really reminded me of old teletext in how colorful it was. Now I would love to look at its source code though!
HolyC does seem like a cool way of learning C because of the real time results, like coding in Python interactively.
> What stood out to me was that it was always mainly criticism on his technical ability.
I do remember that kind of discussion amongst the fringe OSdever crowd but honestly I always found Terry's work motivational and technically solid. I think a lot of the criticism for him was bourn from the fact that he had a complete hand-made kernel, OS, and toolchain and almost everyone else had a copy-pasted bootloader -- and only half of those even enabled the a20 line.
> I've never understood how much criticism the creator of TempleOS got.
Terry Davis was very mentally ill, much moreso than I think some people realize. His schizophrenia made him think that he was married to a Youtuber, that Larry Page was watching his videos, and that he had a telepathic connection to Elon Musk. There's a good video about him and TempleOS by Fredrick Knudsen. [1]
> Instead of being elitist and shooting down his contributions, the computer science crowd could have focused on getting this member of the community the help he would have needed concerning other parts of life.
I think a lot of the CS community enjoyed seeing his contributions, especially here on Hacker News in the later days of his life. I know that people wanted to help him, but I'm not sure how much could've been done beyond what his family was doing, honestly. Some people tried to help and ended up making things worse.
> I would love to look at its source code though!
I want to make some more videos about just that, but in the meantime, the source code is included in the operating system (since everything except the boot code is JIT), and if you ever want to develop inside TempleOS, you'll be referring to it a whole lot I can tell you that :D
(Terry Davis mirrored the OS online with a DolDoc -> HTML tool, you can browse the source code / system files on the archived site [2])
Now while the listed Mark I FORTH computer is pretty cool, I don't see how it relates to 2020 (last update of the blog entry is of 2006). Was 2020 beneficial in that it allowed us to dig deeper in the web?
Are they though? I’ve had both. I really liked the convection oven a lot. It was glass, so I could see the food cooking. It didn’t get quite as crispy results, or cook as quickly as the air fryer. It also didn’t have the basket design which makes crisping certain foods very convenient.
I agree that it’s a convection oven but I think there’s more to distinguish them. Maybe I’m wrong though. I haven’t seen new convection ovens for over a decade.
Maybe this is true, but the one I got is a lid on top of my Instant Pot. At that point I have one device (read: fewer things to store) that can be everything from a slow cooker, pressure cooker and now dehydrator and fryer. It was a great addition to an already functional device.
