There's a type of bread in Germany called „Laugengebäck“, literally “lye bakery”.
Before baking, the dough is dipped in a sodium hydroxide solution.
We have been getting some „Laugenstangen“ (“lye sticks”) from time to time, and Yvonne has developed a particular taste for them. But they're not
always available. We've seen that before with normal German bread, and I've been baking my
„Eigenbrot“ for over 15 years. Why not Laugenstangen? How hard can it be?
Problem: I need food grade sodium hydroxide. Since it's not used for anything else, it's
almost unobtainable. I could, of course, use commercial sodium hydroxide, which is readily
available. Is that safe? After all, the dough is only dipped in it. But it looks like
another long search.
The deep fryer that I ordered
from Harvey Norman has
arrived already, after less than two weeks. Only I can pick it up, nobody else! Why? Their SMS also didn't give me the order number, so I
had to copy it to present on pickup.
Off to Ballarat. Harvey Norman
are interesting in that there seems to be nothing like a cashier. Finally I found somebody
who was completely confused by the idea of a deep fryer and online purchases. “Would that
be electrical?”. Maybe. But finally I picked the thing up. Receipt? Oh, we'll email it
to you.
Not the best (see below), but it shows the deep
fryer with my handbag on top of it at bottom left. And below that were other desirables of
some kind or another. So: when I pick up my handbag and deep fryer, somebody from the shop
could ask me to produce my receipt. “Sorry, you haven't given me one yet”. And of course I
could have taken two boxes instead of one. Somehow they haven't got their act together with
online purchases.
How do I get to Harvey Norman? I know of course, but I always get Google Maps to work out a route. While
I was there I also went to the Fruit Shack, which is just round the corner. But the route that Google Maps chose
blew my mind:
Stop on the side of the road (Howitt Street) and walk across the car park to the main
entrance. Even when I added a destination directly in front of the entrance (the route to
the north and west starting at Howitt Street), it wanted me to stop, walk to the entrance,
presumably return and then drive to the entrance.
And then after leaving the Fruit Shack I had to drive west along Howitt Street. But no, not
across the car park. Head off first south, then east behind other shops before joining
Howitt Street 120 m east of where I should have, a total of 270 m instead of 70 m. I didn't
even know that you could go that way, but I confirmed that I could.
The main reason I bought my 7Artisans 4 mm
f/2.8 fisheye lens was for quick wide-angle photos when I was in town. The 65°
horizontal of a typical mobile phone or wide-angle lens? Why not 220°? But my experiments
with panoramas have been somewhat frustrating. Today I tried with individual images.
Yes, that's not as straight as a rectilinear image. But there's no way to represent this
view as a rectilinear image: it's too wide. So I need to choose another projection. Here
I've tried cylindrical and Thoby:
The crop of the cylindrical image is too high, mainly to show my handbag, but on the whole
it looks acceptable. The Thoby is interesting for two things: firstly, it's more “bent” at
the edges, and secondly the image size is enormous, 62 MP. That can't work, of course: the
camera sensor has a resolution of only 16 MP, and the area covered by the lens is about 9.4
MP. By comparison, the resolution of the cylindrical projection makes sense: about 3.6 MP.
Also, it's clear that the resolution of the lens, as processed, fails greatly towards the
edges. So it's interesting, but it's not suited for high quality photos.
Another thing that I discovered: in the Fruit Shack I took two images.
Second, a view from one corner:
It took me a while to understand that that just can't work. The area in the middle is so
much closer than the edges, and the fact that I was pointing downward didn't help. The best
I could do was:
Oh. I didn't know that that worked. It even works for what passes as the Bourne Shell under FreeBSD. I've been using Unix for nearly 40 years, and I had never
known that.
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