Sandy Bridge

Oh, it's not completely true that I haven't dug into the internals of my system for several years. I took apart a decent amount of my desktop last summer to oil a few fans that had started rattling. Added storage the year before that, a PCI Express expansion card a year or two before. And the most surprising thing about my laptops right now is that they do have the screws, that certainly wasn't something do be counted on for quite a while. I've taken apart my older laptop twice in the past 9 months, but both times to swap out the screen, not the "main" internals. The CPUs, it's true, have pretty much stood the test of time. Actually... make that three times, I used it as a test subject when teaching a friend laptop maintenance last summer. But my interests have also diversified over the years, which has meant less time thinking about or implementing computer hardware projects. If it's just working, there's a good chance I'll leave it just working. I guess I got fortunate that MSI put a good cooling system in my laptop; actually I know I did because one of my friends had a different MSI and you could fry an egg on it or go deaf listening to its fans; it really did need thermal paste re-applied. But it was a relatively thin one with a 2070; mine is a thick one with a 1050. Much less GPU heat, much more space for cooling. Wouldn't be surprised if I do need to re-paste the original before long, but so far... *knocks on wood* it isn't throttling.

I think the real cultural differentiator is those who grew up without, and with always-accessible information in their pockets. Yes, it's 2022, so 2000 is a good dividing line for being obviously young if your year or birth starts with 2 instead of 1. But I suspect the real difference is when phones, and especially smartphones, started becoming ubiquitous at younger and younger ages. I don't know exactly when that happened; it was after I graduated high school by a few years, but by less than a decade. Now you do have a calculator with you all the time so you don't need to know math, GPS navigation so you don't have to know how to actually navigate, Google so you don't need to memorize any facts, social networks and video chats as a poor but easy substitute for in person interaction. And perhaps most of all, a great source of distraction in the Internet - both in being able to scroll mindlessly, and if you aren't careful, get notifications constantly. Not that being old enough to remember the time before that necessarily innoculates one against it, but it made math class both more practical and less prone to distractions. The other differentiator I see, probably more specific to the U.S., is those who graduated high school before and after the start of the Great Recession. I see a lot more economic fatalism among the latter. Thoughts of never paying off student loans unless the government does, for example. What's interesting is the change seems to be those graduating high school, not college - those who graduated college directly into the Great Recession seem to have a more pre-Recession mindset of the economy has ups and downs, they had bad luck with hitting a down but things will improve. Maybe it's just the difference in messaging that people heard when they moved out on their own and became adults - if you graduated high school in 2005, the message was life is good, and that carried through even when you graduated college in 2009, whereas if you graduated high school in 2009, the message was the economy stinks, and perhaps it did for long enough for that message to sink in. It certainly isn't universal, but IMO the Great Recession did have an impact on the cultural psyche. Which probably shouldn't be surprising; the Great Depression certainly did, but again more so on those who were more affected by it. Pre-9/11 world... that's one I didn't experience as an adult, but aside from the obvious air travel, and the eventual Vietnam-like impact on the American political psyche from the resulting overseas adventures, I wonder if it really made that big of an impact? Or maybe it doesn't look as big to me because I never worked/lived in an area with big skyscrapers until 15 years later, by which point the concern had died down. I mean, sure, I remember the events of the day (although our school continued with the regularly planned lessons) and the TV news that evening, but I'm not sure it had a major impact on "people who grew up before vs after". A milestone, yes, but on the scale of, say, Vietnam or Watergate?

Originally, Apollo13, joined May 2007. Don't remember what my post total was, but pretty sure it was in the 4 digits. Fairly active until probably end of 2012, beginning of 2013. Intentionally made my password hard to access so I'd quit spending so much time replying to posts. Eventually lost the password. Re-joined with my current username probably 2018 or so... which was also the year I bought my new laptop, so that makes sense. Couldn't find my old password, and the e-mail it was associated with had went defunct. Oh well.

There's always a part of me that wants a superlaptop, you know, one with a Ryzen 9 5900X desktop processor and gobs of memory and storage and a beefy GPU. But it really doesn't make a lot of sense for me right now, so I probably won't.

Pirate radio! I remember seeing the trailers for that, looks like it got a decent reception, added it to my watch list. I liked Craig as Bond, but as with any of the Bond actors, they're limited by the writing, which can vary significantly. Quantum of Solace in particular suffered there; I guess a writer's strike affects writing quality after all. Even Connery could deliver an underwhelming film when the writing was bad enough; Diamonds Are Forever is perhaps my least favorite Bond film despite having Connery, as the writing and supporting cast are just bad. Overall though, I like Craig's grittier, tougher take, and it's a huge improvement over the Brosnan era. Most recently, A Night at the Roxbury. Pretty meh. I've seen worse, and it might be my new favorite Will Ferrell movie (I'm not a fan, so the bar was pretty low), but SNL should have just stuck with Wayne's World and maybe Wayne's World 2 and called it a day. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates did much better in their 40-second version:

There are two archives; the Internet Archive made an archive, and a few of us from NBR (myself included) made one as well, which is at https://www.nbrchive.net . @Aaron44126 is its librarian, and is making improvements to the site and styling based on the data we archived, which includes nearly all the non-off-topic threads (a few were only partially grabbed). The Internet Archive one appears to be complete/fairly complete, and likely includes a good chunk of what we didn't grab. But we didn't know if they were succeeding in late January, and didn't have time to wait to find out, so we kept going. You probably are using the default theme, and can't see the react-to-post icon, which blends in with the default theme. If you see an post where someone has already reacted, put your mouse over the area to the right of the reaction symbol, and you should be able to do so.

More than 50 wireless devices? Wow! That's a lot! I have 500/50 ISP service; like Custom90gt I upgraded because of the faster upload speed, not the faster download speed. But my modem, a Zoom model from 2014, is only DOCSIS 3.0, so effectively it's more like 300/50. I haven't been bothered to upgrade it to increase the download speeds yet, although faster uploads would have been nice in late January. Router, I have the Asus AC66U. No complaints. Triple-antenna for 450 Mbps 802.11n, for my triple-antenna laptop with a Wireless N card. It also does 802.11ac, for my newer 802.11ac laptop that only has one or two antennas (haven't bothered to memorize it; if I need faster web access on it, I use its Ethernet port). Mostly wired up with Cat6 cable because Monoprice had a great sale on it in 2020, although none of my devices actually benefit from having Cat6. Still use Cat5E once in a while, too. I'd like to upgrade my Ethernet, but I'd have to get cards for both my laptop and my desktop, and a router/switch that supports it, and the cases where it would save a noticeable amount of time are rare enough that it hasn't been worth it. I see you can get a brand-name USB 2.5 Gbps card for $30 now, I think that's about $10 less than when I checked a year ago, so maybe we're getting there. I also have Zigbee for my Philips Hue system. Works pretty well. I have one non-Philips product on it, but it's still in the Friends of Hue family. Basically went with Hue/Zigbee because you can run everything locally, no dependencies on the cloud like with Nest themostats, and no qualms about security like with the no-name brands. I rent, so no major infrastructure projects, just a thin Cat6 cable running along one of the baseboards and another couple behind some furniture.

So I checked my history, and my old laptop, with a Core 2 Extreme, is using Arctic Silver 5, last applied in mid-2017. My desktop's CPU paste is even older, probably the same that I applied when I swapped to a 212 Evo in 2014, and also probably Arctic Silver 5. By that time, whatever I'd applied in 2011 was obviously failing as shown by fans and temps. Dunno if it was what shipped with my Intel CPU, or the CoolerMaster Unspecified Type paste I still have laying around somewhere. In 2014, the new ArcticSilver 5 setup hit 53C at stock, full CPU, 58C overclocked to 3.8 GHz. Now, 7.5 years later, at 3.6 GHz, I'm maxing out at 60C, with 1520 RPM fans instead of 1230 RPM in 2014 (it's also a different physical fan on the CPU heatsink). Other changes include more hard drives to impede airflow, and that I haven't done a good dusting for a while, as I had when testing in 2014. I also failed to note the ambient temperature in 2014; it's 67F currently. I'm pretty happy with that longevity. I could probably get improved performance by re-pasting with the same type of paste (AS5 has a thermal conductivity of 8.9W/mK according to my search results), and I'm sure I could get even better with more powerful paste. But why bother? If I need more performance at this point, I'll rebuild the system with a CPU that isn't a decade old. (Apparently Arctic Silver and Arctic aren't the same companies, either... I thought they were until looking them both up tonight) I have wondered if my Core 2 Extreme laptop could hit 3 GHz on all cores with better thermal paste, and it's plausible. But again, it would kind of being doing it for the sake of doing it. Props on the detailed comparison chart in the first post, definitely a good reference.

Howdy folks! I don't know if I'm ever going to be a Linux-first user, but I do have a desire to have a good, responsive Linux desktop in VirtualBox. Maybe if I like it enough it'll eventually become my primary, but for the time being it would be really handy to test software I am writing on Linux in VirtualBox without having to reboot into a native Linux install. However, I've noticed that my Bionic Beaver VM is not very responsive like my old KDE 3.5 VMs were. Programs take awhile to open. The GUI doesn't react very quickly. It's kind of like Windows 10 in that regard. During the last days of NBR, I fired up some XFCE Linux Mint 20 machines, and they were noticeably snappier. I tried Mint 20 MATE, but it's not as responsive as XFCE (although natively on my Core 2 Duo, it's good enough, and noticeably better than Mint 18 MATE). So what I'm wondering, is what's the best balance of responsiveness in a VM (with VirtualBox's graphics), with a MATE/KDE 3.5-level feature set? I've used XFCE professionally for a year (in 2020), and while it is sufficient I'd prefer slightly more creature comforts if possible. Recommendations could be a distro (please keep it easy-to-use-out-of-the-box), a free VM software that will give snappier graphics (does VMWare have such an option these days), or a desktop environment that strike a good balance.

You are in luck! There are options for viewing Gopher on the go. I've personally used PocketGopher for J2ME (https://felix.plesoianu.ro/mobile/pocket-gopher/) on my Symbian phone, but it should work on other phones supporting J2ME as well, including some Blackberries and non-smart phones. There's also an Android project (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.gmail.afonsotrepa.pocketgopher/) of the same name that provides an Android Gopher browser. Or you could use the Gopher proxy at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw on any HTTP-supporting Web browser. Floodgrap (gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/) is a good place to start for discovering sites. They've got a list of public Gopher servers as well (gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/new). The Super-Dimensional Fortress (gopher://sdf.org/) is another good place to discover contemporary Gopher content. It's a testament to the progress in modems that Gopher seemed slow then; it seemed blazing fast compared to the web on my Symbian phone in 2018. But I suppose the number of bits to load a Gopher page is about the same as 30 years ago, whereas the number of bits to load a web page has increased by several orders of magnitude.

They're not going to end Windows 10 support early. If they operated like that, they wouldn't still be supporting 8.1, with its much smaller market share. Besides, they've got a reputation to uphold. Businesses care a lot about long term support, and ultimately most of Microsoft's money comes from businesses, and they cater to that market. Pre-release previews of graphical WSL is a completely different category. That was never released outside of "insider releases", and previews are no guarantee of future support - look at all the features of Longhorn that never made it into Vista or its successors, or only did in very different form. But once something is released, especially if it's a business feature or Windows version, Microsoft does an admirable job of supporting it long-term. Windows 1.0? 21 years. Windows 9x? Was going to be discontinued in 2004, they extended it until 2006. Windows XP? Extended until 2014 for free, or 2019 for the Embedded edition, 18 years. Compatibility for 16-bit Windows applications from the 80s? Still exists, if you're okay with running 32-bit Windows 10, which means there will be support for roughly 44 years from when you may have first developed them. And Raymond Chen has written about some patches that Microsoft made in the 2010s to fix compatibility for some of those ancient '80s programs. They might send out a few notifications saying, "Hey, you can upgrade to Windows 11", and might not make the "No thanks" button very prominent. But they're not going to drop support for Windows 10 early.

iPhone SE (2016), with no plans of switching. I went iOS instead of Android because by the time I dropped Symbian in 2019, I didn't really trust Google to not be evil with my data, and had already migrated away from Google for most products. So, while I still looked at what e.g. Sony offered, in the end it was an easy choice once I realized how inexpensive used iPhones were at the time. I paid something like $130 shipped, couldn't really go wrong with trying iOS at that price point. I'm probably going to stick with it, even though I have no plans to add any other iDevices. The screen size is great, I've had no issues with the software (first-party or third-party), the camera's pretty good, and it's more than performant enough for what I need. Only thing I don't like is the lack of SD card support. Hadn't heard of Unihertz, interesting to see that somebody is still making small phones, and with sizeable batteries to boot. I'm hoping that catches on again.

Gotcha! That's a lot of machines. But those 100 aren't all personal machines stashed in your soon-to-be-laptop museum, it sounds like? But the "almost that many" might be? If you do launch a museum someday, be sure to share the news! I've been to the Early Television Museum and want to go to the Computer History Museum someday. The codecs... I can definitely believe that, although I've never used Remote Desktop from anything earlier than XP. Nowadays I only use it on a LAN, an XP's codecs are good enough with that high-quality of a connection. I can imagine 2001's technology wasn't ideal for higher-latency, lower-bandwidth situations compared to what we have today, though. Cascading is pretty cool! We used to do that at a place I worked a decade ago. Remote into your machine from the conference room to present, then someone else goes to present, half the time they forget to close the remote session and thus remote in from an existing remote connection. We never figured out how many times you had to cascade to bring things to a screeching halt. Pretty sure we were on Windows 7 at the time. I kind of liked that setup, all the computers were desktops so my 2011 work computer was the fastest work computer I had until 2018, and you just left everything at work at the end of the day, no lugging laptops around. You could even connect remotely via a VPN and boot your desktop via Ethernet if you really needed to access it remotely, like if there was a really bad snow storm. But it saved the company money on hardware, gave developers better performance, and encouraged leaving work at work. But I'm still fairly certain that while I can remote from my 1520 when it's running XP, and often have, I can't remote into it with Remote Desktop. Although checking some sources for this, it appears I might be able to use a client from Linux as well, which would be nice.

Thanks for posting the links to the thread in both archives. For a couple reasons. First of all, it's great to see that archive.org's efforts appear to have been largely successful. We'd seen that they were doing something, and later had some archive files that resisted our efforts to open them, but this is the first time I've seen concrete proof that what they did largely worked. With a little bit of missing CSS, but the content's there, which is the key, and navigation between pages seems to work too. Second, I was able to determine that while I did the Sager and Clevo main forum, and was able to go through my logs and figure out which threads were incomplete (or to be precise, failed for a reason we'd identified as a cause of failure), I did not do the Sager and Clevo Owner's Lounges sub-forum, and thus couldn't run it through my error detector at 3 AM on the 31st. Thus, it is indeed one of those that falls into the "if we'd had another day or two and say, 'We think we might have it all, what are we missing?', what would we have found" category. It might be possible to re-integrate it, but at this point I'm still in the step-back-and-do-some-other-things mode (one of which is trying to encourage forum participation by starting threads here). I thought I'd caught up on rest, but when I woke up this evening I felt noticeably more refreshed than I had when I woke up this morning. And I hadn't really planned to fall asleep in the afternoon, so I must not have been fully re-rested at that point!

How many systems do you have? It sounds like a lot! At least if you need a spreadsheet to keep track of them... You'd need XP Pro to remote into the machines though, right? I'm on XP Home on my Dell since that's what I upgraded to from Vista. But I'm a bit confused about how it would help for graphics, wouldn't it still be slower graphics over remote desktop than running them natively in XP? Would've been handy to be able to remote in when my laptop's backlight was dead though, although once I realized that was the problem connecting to my monitor via VGA worked pretty well, too.

An IDE drive? Now I'm curious. I probably could add one of those to my desktop with a PCI Non-Express IDE adapter card, but is this a semi-recent computer with both SATA (and a lot of them!), and an IDE drive?

I haven't let the fact that laptops are work laptops stop me when it comes to RAM. I've upgraded three of them. The first time with the company's knowledge, and they reimbursed me for the RAM, but it was a small company. The second time was a big company, so I didn't bother asking, just added the RAM and a couple days before my last day swapped back in the original RAM, and made the RAM I'd used to upgrade the work laptop an upgrade to my personal laptop. The most recent time I also just did the upgrade, but that time I forgot to swap back in the original before returning it. Oops. Somebody wound up with more RAM than they expected. Probably a lucky buyer on eBay since it was at the end of its corporate lifecycle and due to be replaced. But they probably didn't notice, and if they did they didn't care, which I know because they've reached out to me about re-joining the company if I want to. One of my mates has a PowerSpec laptop, it's a solid machine! His is a 1070, so not as powerful, but it's been nothing but reliable since he got it, and it was a great deal. Probably a Clevo/Sager base model, IIRC? ----------- Wireless cards! I knew I forgot a category! Funnily enough, it's even a category that I have personally upgraded, from 802.11g to 802.11n on my Inspiron 1520. Most laptops only support two WiFi antennas; I've read that's because more antennas = more power usage. But that one supports three, so I get a full 450 Mbps theoretical max speed, better than one-antenna 802.11ac laptops. 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet is still usually faster in practice (and yes, I wish Dell hadn't been so cheap and had spent the 5 cents for gigabit Ethernet), but at least when I'm on WiFi I'm getting the best 802.11n speeds I can in a laptop. @Aaron44126Fascinating that you've done the antenna size mod! I looked at putting 802.11ac in my 2007 laptop but that the sizes of both cards and antennas had changed and was like ehhhhhh... not sure it's really worth it. But I'd only seen that it theoretically could be done via eBay, not read an account by someone who had done it. Still probably isn't really worth it from an effort standpoint given my typical use case, would be more of a "push the bounds on the Ultimate Upgrade possibilities" item.

Just now, I was trying to link to a recipe in the Cooking thread, where the recipe is hosted on a Gopher server, and learned that sadly the Invision Community Board software we're running doesn't support Gopher links. So, no recipe link for you! But then I realized, that could be a topic of its own. Who's still running Gopher? I was a latecomer to Gopher, and didn't start surfing on the Gopher net until 2015. But since then I've occasionally checked out the latest Gopher sites at the Super Dimensional Fortress since then, and have found a few worthy of bookmarking. The recipe site I was trying to link to (gopher://sdf.org/1/users/sanjuro) is good enough that I wrote an archival program to grab them all in case the Gopher server went down... thankfully it's stayed up since then, and OMG it just added a new Soul Food category! (And yes, I may have a penchant for writing archival programs...) I kind of like Gopher though, it's not commercialized like the World Wide Web is. There's more of an old-school, personal feel to it. No ads, no flashy graphics, just content through the medium of text, and maybe an attached file in some cases. Anyone else using Gopher? Any favorite browsers for it? I've been using SeaMonkey with the OverbiteFF extension on my main machine (although Firefox with OverbiteWX is probably the easier for trying it out), and Netscape Navigator 4.08 on my old-school machine, which supports it natively.

I'm probably the only person in America who didn't bake bread in 2020, unless you count banana bread. Haven't made pizza either, but that does look good, especially with the red onions. I have made crepes, one of the first perceived "fancier" dishes I learned to make, but it's been quite awhile. I ought to make those again. Looks like my orange liqueur is strong enough that I could try crêpes suzette again... hmmm... *makes note to do that on the counter without wooden cabinets above it* Guanciale is the Italian term! My understanding is that it is typically not smoked in Italy, although pork cheek is typically smoked in the U.S. south. I've used smoked pork cheek or jowl in Italian recipes and it's turned out just fine, though; until recently I didn't know of a local source for the Italian-style, non-smoked version. I've also substituted pancetta when that was more readily available. Carbonara! I love the dish when eating out, but it's the one of the four Roman quadrifecta I haven't made at home yet. I really ought to, it's an obvious omission. The others of the quadrifecta being Gricia, Amatriciana, and Cacio e Pepe. Cacio e Pepe = pecorino cheese, with olive oil and black pepper. Subtract some pepper, add guanciale, you have Gricia. Add some tomatoes, you wind up at Amatriciana. Go back to the Gricia and add eggs instead of tomatoes, there's the Carbonara. Add all of those ingredients, save most of the black pepper, and also add sausage, and you wind up with Zozzona, which you've reminded me about with the smoked sausage. I usually make it with a medium-spiciness Italian sausage from the local Italian market. You'd probably like it as well; you're already a good part of the way towards having made it! (And yes, that Italian blog I linked for all those recipes is great. Just tried one of her pesto recipes as well, and turns out that's pretty easy to make at home, too. Who knew? Not the author when she moved to Italy, either!)

I still have one, but it's as much because I've got an XP computer that I still use from time to time as for my main one. What's it done? Well, a few times it has flagged suspicious sites I'm unfamiliar with that showed up in search results. And when I was browsing the GeoCities archive a month or so ago, it found a few trojans in the uncompressed files. If I do download something I don't entirely trust, sometimes I'll scan the download before running it, though I could probably do that with malwarebytes. In general it's more likely to flag things that I wanted, typically as Potentially Unwanted Applications or Potentially Unsafe Applications. WirelessNetView, a cool utility for viewing details about nearby wireless networks, or Process Hacker, which admittedly does sounds suspicious but is not nefarious. Jokeware, too, e.g. a Blue Screen of Death screen saver, or a program that will set the clock to random times, often is flagged. I see why it flags the jokeware in particular, but sometimes I want a BSOD screensaver. I'm not sure it's actually caught anything on the XP machine though. I tend to be careful in general though, and more so on that machine. But it does still get virus definition updates for a 20-year-old operating system, so I can't complain too much about support. I run ESET NOD32 now. Used to run Kaspersky. Both are pretty light on resources, which is a must for me. Kaspersky is cheaper but while I don't believe Kaspersky themselves has reason to infiltrate systems, especially after SolarWinds I don't have enough trust in the Russian government to install that low-level of Russian software. But I'm not passionate about it. From probably about 2011-2015 I didn't really run anti-virus. It's more of an insurance/supplement to lack of security updates on older system item for me at this point. ---------- Bought a FLAC/mp3 album last night. Yeah, I know most people have Spotify nowadays. But I buy 3-8 albums per year, which without a subscription that saves me money, and I get to keep the music forever. I'd say it more directly supports the smaller bands too, but in reality the one I bought last night is one of the few that's actually from a smaller band.

That is correct; I ran queries to identify threads that needed re-run on the 30th and 31st, but only had the archives I had made. Unfortunately, there likely were a few in forums that I didn't download as well. For the most part, I was the one archiving a lot in the early days, and by the time we had more people archiving several of the errors that had formerly caused the archiver to give up no longer caused it to give up, but I don't doubt that there were some edge cases that slipped through. They are also more likely on longer threads. If there's a 0.02% chance of each post causing an archive to give up (hypothetical figure but in the right ballpark), it's a lot more likely to happen across 2000 posts than across 20.

It definitely requires some time. For that reason, I prefer dishes that make enough to have leftovers, and if it's a few meals worth of leftovers instead of just one, all the better. Lunch today was leftovers from Wednesday, dinner will be either more of the same or leftovers from yesterday, and whichever I don't choose can be lunch tomorrow. Although yesterday's cooking was "quick and simple". But I also have relatively free weekday evenings, especially in these days when a lot of people still aren't back to their pre-pandemic social schedules. No kids is probably the biggest single thing ensuring I have time in the evenings. I might have to start a cycling/hiking/outdoors thread. I got a hike in today, 2.7 miles which is shorter than usual, but it finished off a much longer trail in one direction.

The last groceries before the ice-and-snow storm that's going on right now. Fontina cheese, orange juice, a couple other things. I forgot the milk though. Might have to see if French toast still works with cream instead of milk. I half suspect it might wind up being even better.

My main two non-tech-related hobbies are cooking and outdoors activities, specifically hiking and bicycling. Cooking is just great for quality of life, not to mention being able to eat deliciously without spending a fortune. I've always enjoyed cooking and have gradually become better at it, but about the only good thing to come from 2020 was that cooking almost all my meals at home took my cooking to the next level. Italian is my specialty, particularly making homemade sauces. But I'll make a variety. In 2020 I learned how to make good cream sauces and how to make my favorite Americanized Chinese dishes at home to replace take-out; in 2021 I expanded my repertoire of chicken dishes, especially marinades; this year my goal is to increase my proficiency in Indian cuisine. Hiking and bicycling have also been great for quality of life. I've been bicycling some during the warmer months for years, but broke my annual record five times over last year, clocking in at over 1500 miles (2500km). A friend convinced me to try hiking in the Appalachians, and I caught the bug for that, too. So I got into the habit of taking short-to-medium length trips to go hiking and/or cycling in a new locale last year; also a fun way to discover new, often smaller towns and cities. For any Parks and Rec fans, Jerry wasn't wrong about Muncie being a great place to go on vacation. They've got some amazing restaurants and breweries, and are located along the longest recreational trail in Indiana. Now that it's winter I haven't really been cycling, but hiking in the snow is fun.

Now that the Hobbies thread has informed me I'm not the only one who enjoys cooking, what have you been cooking? Yesterday I made paneer jalfrezi. Often I order chicken jalfrezi at Indian restaurants, but I wanted to try cooking with paneer. My Indian cooking isn't quite up to restaurant quality yet, but it still turned out pretty good. Living close to an Indian grocery store has been clutch to procuring the proper ingredients, and you get way more bang for your buck in spices than at mainstream American grocery stores. Tonight it was time to make a dessert, in this case chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. Tried a new recipe with rye and walnuts, turned out great.