December 24

How to Get Rid of the Gutenburg Editor

It’s been a rough couple of days with my blog. WordPress installed an editor they call Gutenberg, which is deigned to allow users to easily make impressive-looking posts. Unfortunately, it’s not for writers. As Nathan Ingram writes,

The days of sitting down and composing in the post window are gone (of course there is a question about how many people do this anyway).

Call me old fashioned, but that’s exactly what I do. I’m a writer. I’m not a coder, programmer, graphic designer, visual effects editor, or any other variety of technical creator.

I write words.

And I know how to get stuff done in what they now call Classic Editor. (I get it: “Classic” means old fashioned. I can live with that.)

So I tried the newfangled Gutenberg. I did a couple of posts on it. And yes, it makes designing a simple post easy. But designing a simple post was never hard.

The problem came when I wanted to embed an audio file to my post. Gutenberg’s description says there’s a “block” for that. Maybe there is, but I couldn’t find it. What should have been a 90-second post turned into an hour of frustrated failure. On my one and only Christmas post. Merry freakin Christmas.

Take Two: If I can’t work with Gutenberg, maybe I can get rid of it. That, fortunately, was a little easier. It took several searches, because the older solutions don’t work any more. But there is a free, simple plug-in called Classic Editor that returned my life to manageability.

 

Category: Writing | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 14

Review: Aroma Rice Cooker


I love to cook, but I’m not much on kitchen gadgets. Tomato corer? I use a knife. Egg steamer? What’s that even for?

But when it comes to rice, I really love a rice cooker. I had one that went in the microwave, and it worked okay. It was better than cooking it on the stove, where I always seem to either burn it or make it soggy.

When the old one died, my wife and I went shopping for a new one. We wanted it to be simple, small enough for a family of four (and easy storage), easy to clean, and cheap. You can easily spend over a hundred bucks on a rice cooker, but that’s not my price range.

We settled on the Aroma Housewares 8-cup model.  They also have 6-cup and 20-cup models, but 8-cups is about right for us, plus this model offered a steamer basket.

We were a little concerned because it claimed to do so much and yet cost so little.  We were pleasantly surprised!  It does everything it claims.  It’s easy to use and easy to clean.  And it makes perfect rice, every time.

It has settings for white rice and brown rice.  I’ve used the brown rice setting on Sri Lankan red rice, also called red samba rice, and it works just fine.  It also has a delay timer, so you can set it to start cooking later in the day, perfect for use along with a crock pot, for example, for a dinner prepped before I leave the house.

When it comes to kitchen gadgets, it takes a lot to impress me.  The Aroma rice cooker is one of the few I’ve gotten excited about.

Category: cooking, Food, Product Reviews | LEAVE A COMMENT