Nearly a wholesale lift from this recipe, my version contains about half the ground black pepper compared to the original. Love that site for inspiration! Even with 25% extra pork fat added into the mix, these dry out quickly if you let them go too long on the grill. Continue reading Garlic & Paprika Sausage
The weekend before last was the Mundart Festival in Regensburg. Apparently this is something that happens here, periodically, but we’ve never noticed it before.
Check out the announcer guy in the video below: this is the flavor of Bairisch native to Regensburg. That’s what you hear at work (to a certain percentage) and what you hear on the street, at the markets, and among neighbors. It sure ain’t what you learn at the Volkshochschule. Continue reading Celebrating the local dialect
Fans of the Bayern-Ticket (a Deutsche Bahn group ticket: up to 5 people, all day, all Bavaria) might need to read up on the new rules before traveling on it. Ostensibly to discourage scalpers or free-/cheaploaders, as of June 10, 2012, DB has started requiring that you state how many people will be traveling on the ticket at the point of purchase to determine price. The base price is 22€ for a single rider and an additional 4€ per additional rider.
So people looking to tag along on a stranger’s Bayern-Ticket will need to find someone with an extra, pre-purchased slot. Conversely, purchasers of the Bayern-Ticket looking for Mitfahrer will need to purchase the extra slots at 4€ each; if this is your joint, go scrounge your train buddies before making the purchase. You are still not allowed to spontaneously add riders after you get checked on the train. Another bummer about this is the higher price for 3-, 4- and 5-person tickets (30, 34 and 38€, respectively), but it’s still a better deal than full-price tickets for all.
There is one improvement: you are now allowed to pre-purchase slots on a ticket and pick people up at other train stations. The lack of this permission on the Bayern-Ticket was something that always annoyed us, particularly when picking people up from airports.
If you read German and want all the ins and outs of the new rules, go to the DB New Bayern-Ticket Rules Overview. And if you live in Germany but outside of Bavaria, I don’t think any of the other Länder-Tickets have changed their terms, but be sure to check!
Here’re the results of our experiments with the basic no-knead pizza dough. Continue reading Experimental Pizzas: Barbecue Chicken & Indian Spice
Warning: this post is intensely technical, bordering on arcane. It’s about improving your user-experience as a command-line user on remote Unix-like systems. As such, it’s probably not intended for you, but my hope is that someone else will find it useful. The usual geeky stuff (food, travel, language, etc.) will follow again soon.
If you ARE the someone else, score!
Ours is a pretty geeky apartment. But we don’t always just stay there at home; often our geekery needs to travel with us. Continue reading Command line on-the-go with mosh, the mobile shell
I’ve been bitten by the pizza bug.
We’ve tried making pizza from scratch before, but never were really satisfied with the crust (Sarah’s sauce is awesome, however). It was always too flimsy, messy and difficult to move around or bake completely. So we stopped trying for a while.
But then we got inspiration from Food52. Continue reading No need to knead pizza dough
I enjoy puns, and I have as long as I can remember. I’m not ashamed of it. I revel in groaners.
I like to think that if I get the humor in a foreign language — even on par with a grammar school student — I’m doing OK. I ask my native speaker pals to explain the ones I don’t get (just a few of the ones below) — even though I know everyone hates to have to explain a joke — and I add them to my word treasury. Continue reading Can you hold your own with a six year old comedian?
Information security is a PITA. But less so than not having any. What measures do you take to keep your online stuff safe?
I’ve written about some simple steps I’ve taken to improve the security of my online stuff before. The video below describes an extra step you can take if Google is a provider of a service you use (Gmail, Google Documents, Google Maps, etc.). 
My thanks to @Yellifers for tweeting about this article, which called my attention to these options. Apparently Google has offered these for over a year, but I’m just now hearing about them. I’m using them now to try to reduce the odds of nightmarish Google Mail filter manipulation to hide someone’s nefarious online activities about me from me. Continue reading 2-step verification for Google Accounts