John Cox

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Bon Appétit

Bourbon Caramel Apple Pie Recipe | Bon Appétit

A caramel apple pie recipe with a lattice top, built on a cream cheese and butter dough that gets two rounds of rolling and folding for flakiness and can be frozen a month ahead. The filling is Honeycrisp apples cooked down in a deep amber caramel spiked with bourbon, lemon zest, and cinnamon, then thickened with cornstarch and cream and chilled before assembly. The lattice strips are coated in sugar before cutting, and the pie bakes in two stages (375° then 350°) and must cool at least four hours before slicing.

Permalink recipesdessertsbakingapple

Bon Appétit

A Diwali Menu That’s Full of Joy (and Sticky Chicken Wings) | Bon Appétit

A personal essay and menu for hosting Diwali, in which the writer recalls the women of her family leading Navratri and Diwali with abundant food and open-door hospitality, then explains how she recreates that for her chosen family in New York. She favors make-ahead dishes so she can enjoy her own party, and the five recipes she recommends are Japanese sweet potato chaat, tamarind-glazed grilled chicken wings, a make-ahead chicken kari, a creamy mushroom and green bean masala, and a brûléed kheer served with mango sorbet.

Permalink recipesentertainingdining

Allrecipes

Pumpkin Chocolate Dessert Cake Recipe

A pumpkin chocolate bundt cake recipe from a reader-submitted collection, built on cocoa, pumpkin purée, pumpkin pie spice, and applesauce for moisture, then baked about 40 minutes in a 9-inch fluted pan. What sets it apart from other pumpkin-chocolate cakes is the glaze: a boiled brown sugar, butter, and heavy cream mixture whisked with confectioners' sugar and poured over the warm, unmolded cake, where it sets into a firm, sweet coating. It yields 12 servings at about 613 calories each, and it has 136 reviews and 226 home cooks who have made it.

Permalink recipesdessertsbaking

www.amazon.com

New Echo Show 16 (newest model), Kitchen command center and productivity hub, Built-in Fire TV and night vision camera

This is Amazon's product page for the Echo Show 16, a wall-mountable or stand-mounted smart display with a 13MP camera, built-in Fire TV, and a dashboard for smart home devices and Ring cameras. Its main pitch is Alexa+ (free with Prime), which it says handles multi-step requests, remembers context across conversations, and gives step-by-step help, especially for family scheduling, meal planning, and recipe storage. It also covers streaming across rooms and privacy features such as a physical mic and camera off button and the ability to delete voice recordings.

Permalink entertainmentkitchensmart homeelectronics

StellarDock

StellarDock — Image the night sky on research-grade telescopes

This is a really cool use of Claude. Excited to see the progress!

StellarDock is iTelescope's new browser-based remote observatory platform, now in beta for current iTelescope members before wider release. It lets users plan and run sessions on professional telescopes across six dark-sky sites in the USA, Chile, Spain, and Australia, then download calibrated FITS files and calibration frames minutes after a session ends. Pricing is a fixed hourly rate per telescope with one credit equal to one US dollar, upfront charges refunded when a session fails, and subscription credit pools, with iTelescope point transfers promised but not yet active. It's aimed at both astrophotographers (LRGB and narrowband imaging, mosaic planning) and citizen scientists doing photometry and discovery work, backed by claims of 20+ years and over 531,000 sessions.

Permalink photographyscience

YouTube Music

Mental Floss

Every Season of 'The Twilight Zone' Ranked From Best to Worst by Rotten Tomatoes

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from Google until you press play.

Rotten Tomatoes' season-by-season scores for the original Twilight Zone (1959–64, 156 episodes) show a steady decline: Seasons 1 and 2 each earn a perfect 100%, Season 3 gets 90%, and Seasons 4 and 5 tie for last at 86%. For each season the piece sketches the opening episode and lists other notable ones, such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," "Eye of the Beholder," "To Serve Man," and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." It also quotes the site's critics' consensus, which praises Season 3's superb writing despite an uneven structure and faults Season 5 for unfortunate clichés. The whole series holds a 92%.

Permalink televisionthrillerscience fiction

YouTube

The Civil War | Ken Burns | PBS

The Civil War | All Episodes Now Streaming | Ken Burns | PBS | The Civil War | Ken Burns | PBS

This is the PBS landing page for Ken Burns's nine-episode documentary *The Civil War*, which premiered in September 1990 to about 40 million viewers and won 40 major awards, including two Emmys and two Grammys. It describes a five-year production covering the war's causes, battles, homefront, and aftermath, and notes the fully restored version that aired in 2015. Most of the page is a hub of companion resources: timelines, casualty facts, primary documents like the Gettysburg Address and the Sullivan Ballou letter, biographies, battle maps, archival photos, an episode guide, and pieces on the 4K restoration from 16mm film and on the music, including "Ashokan Farewell."

Permalink historyfilmdocumentarymilitary

NYT Cooking

Coconut Chicken Curry Recipe

This is a recipe for a Cantonese-style chicken curry, in which marinated chicken thighs (paprika, turmeric, salt) are simmered in a pot with slowly cooked onions and garlic, coconut milk, fish sauce, and a little water. Madras curry powder and cayenne go in at the end, and it's served over rice or noodles with cilantro and lime after resting 20 minutes. The reader comments are much of the value: one cook found it bland as written and rebuilt it with extra garlic, ginger, red curry paste, lime zest, and stock. Others debated listing ingredient amounts inline with the steps and wanted onions measured by weight rather than size.

Permalink recipescookingchicken

NYT Cooking

Mushroom Bourguignon Recipe

This is a vegetarian take on boeuf bourguignon built on two pounds of mixed mushrooms, browned in batches and then simmered with pearl onions, leeks, carrots, tomato paste, red wine, broth and a splash of tamari for depth. It's finished with crisped chanterelles or oyster mushrooms and smoked paprika, and served over polenta, egg noodles or mashed potatoes. The reader notes add useful shortcuts: frozen pearl onions to skip the peeling, dried mushrooms for extra savoriness, and roasting the mushrooms first and then braising the stew in a 350-degree oven for an hour to concentrate flavor with less stove time. One cook said the vegetable-broth version tasted convincingly like it had beef in it.

Permalink recipescookingvegetarian

I made a super cool addition to Athenana this week. When you save one of the man...

I made a super cool addition to Athenana this week. When you save one of the many lists on the internet, like "Top 10 Shows" of all time, Athena will grab that list and allow you to save the individual show later to watch. Same with books / movies / podcasts.

cover

I also built in the recommendation engine to find shows / books / movies / podcasts to look at the likes and dislikes to find new things to watch. It's very similar to the music recommendation engine that was built last week. Next up is to find where the show is streaming, or whether you can watch it for free online as well.

I have 22 years of notes, pictures, blog entries and bookmarks that I have imported into the system which is about 5000 notes / links to build my own personal taste engine and find things I have missed.

Fun stuff:)

Permalink booksmoviesathenanawyome

Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News

A Tiny Forest Sauna Makes Room for Rest Without Major Excavation - Yanko Design

Sauna Zaježová, a roughly 269-square-foot timber building by Guča arch. at an educational center in Pliešovce, Slovakia, replaces an earlier sauna that wasn't comfortable enough. It gives changing, heating, resting, and cooling their own spaces: a central vestibule, a compact sauna room downhill, a larger glazed rest room uphill facing the forest, and a terrace with a cooling tub. The piece praises the design-build approach and the exposed larch frames, whose rhythm echoes stacked drying timber. It also praises the raised footing that avoids regrading the slope and the generous space given to post-sauna rest. It argues the project is no backyard template, since it's shaped by its site, and that the transferable lesson is to plan how people move through a place before worrying about the exterior. The old sauna is slated to become firewood storage.

Permalink designwellnessarchitecture

Consequence

Director James McTeigue on How the V for Vendetta Mask Became a Global Symbol of Protest

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from Google until you press play.

In a interview timed to the film's 20th-anniversary re-release, director James McTeigue explains how the Guy Fawkes mask was made to work on screen (lighting tests, glossy versus matte finishes, and Hugo Weaving acting through voice and body with no visible face) and why it spread beyond the movie into the Arab Spring, Occupy, Hong Kong, and anti-Scientology protests. He credits the film's box-office reach with turning Lloyd's comic design into a symbol of collective anonymity, and argues it was an "anti-superhero" film ahead of the genre's saturation. The piece also notes the irony that Warner Bros., and now Skydance, profits from a protest emblem.

Permalink historyfilmmovies

Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News

This Tiny Home Wraps Its Living Room in Glass and Keeps the Main Bedroom Downstairs - Yanko Design

Vagabond Haven's Leah is a 12 by 3.45 meter modular tiny home (about 52 square meters including a loft) that sleeps four, with a glazed living area, a separate downstairs bedroom and bathroom, and a low-ceilinged loft reached by stairs. It's a wheel-less timber-on-steel-chassis build that needs a low-bed truck and crane for delivery, and it's well insulated with 20 cm of mineral wool and triple glazing. The piece's main point is that putting daily living and the main bedroom on the ground floor makes the loft optional, and it flags that the $66,300 unfurnished price (versus $77,500 furnished or $93,100 off-grid, excluding VAT) doesn't cover the furnished interior shown in the illustrations.

Permalink designarchitecturehomeinterior