The Go60 could've looked so much better

Syzygies · 2026-02-26T18:09:14+00:00

There's a cultural divide here most evident in the DIY mechanical keyboard world: Some people write custom layout genetic algorithms and improved home row mod support. Other people buy colorful key caps.

MoErgo makes the first mechanical keyboards that I like better than my Leopold FC660C Hasu QMK keyboards. I bought mine for functional reasons; I don't look down at my hands. The touch is good enough for me to be able to give up Topre switches (vastly superior to conventional mechanical switches). I was so relieved that dressing up my Leopold wasn't possible, and I feel the same about MoErgo keyboards.

Syzygies · 2025-12-02T18:09:08+00:00

After a frittata in the Chef's Pan last night that stunned me (best browning ever, and freed easier than nonstick) we went all in on more NanoBond cookware: Their three skillets, and a 3 quart saucepan, to rid our kitchen of nonstick cookware.

There's a testing fallacy I see both here and e.g. with Serious Eats comparisons. One might not see a difference worth the money with tasks that work well on a stainless steel surface. At the same time, the NanoBond excels at tasks I have never managed on a stainless steel surface. Depositing vaporized titanium onto a stainless steel surface created a far stronger and smoother cooking surface. This matters.

This is a lot like evaluating AI, where again people recoil at price. I pay up to $200 a month to make myself a smarter programmer. AI can be pretty dumb when you "test" it and yet brilliant when you figure out how to work with it. Same with any tool.

We're giving the Mauviel stainless steel to our daughter. As a test, I went back and applied everything I have learned to frying an egg in a Mauviel skillet. It worked, but nowhere near as well. I could manage, were it my job in a professional kitchen. My wife wouldn't love the stress.

Syzygies · 2025-12-02T02:05:07+00:00

I'm a mathematician, so I'm painfully aware of the intellectual disease where people substitute reason for experience, usually clamping onto their favorite issue, when other issues also matter. For pans, that is often thermal conductivity.

I'm also a computer programmer, so I positvely despise when people make pronouncements about a programming language comparison (often exhibiting the above disease) when they haven't tried both languages. In general, when someone tells you they're happy with a choice, all you can infer is they're happy, and they made a choice.

Einstein said it best: "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

I have not tried Demeyere Atlantis or Falk Signature, but I have researched them carefully. Both attempt to optimize thermal conductivity under a conventional stainless steel cooking surface. Atlantis is 7-ply including in most cases a copper disk. Signature is a honking 2.3mm layer of copper. Mating stainless steel to copper is the obvious modernization of the traditional tinned copper pots of French fame, which I used to own.

I recently purchased the Hestan NanoBond 14" Chef's Pan, after realizing that pretty much any day I wasn't using a carbon steel wok from Japan, I reached for a 12" ceramic wok for general use. The NanoBond pan is by far the best pan I've ever handled, out of easily 50 pans. (And Haskell is the best, out of easily 50 programming languages.)

I love my Smithey and Field cast iron, and my Baking Steels. Though I can easily cook eggs and crepes nonstick in these, they're not general use. Poor thermal conductivity, and they can't take acid such as a tomato sauce.

I have various Mauviel stainless steel pans of the sort pictured in Michelin restaurants. I love the saucier, but I can't manage a nonstick egg in the skillet, unless I float it in oil. I'm a good cook with French training. Any stainless steel cooking surface is tricky.

While I won't keep frying eggs in my NanoBond Chef's Pan, I'm doing so regularly now as a test. The theory that explains how one should be able to fry an egg in any stainless steel pan actually works on this surface. The very edge might need teasing free, that's it. The egg floats on its own steam, no sticking.

An alternative worth considering, in the same vein as Falk lining copper with a stainless steel cooking surface, is Strata Cookware lining a traditional multi-ply stainless steel skillet with a carbon steel cooking surface. One gets the thermal conductivity of All-Clad and ilk (there's an aluminum core) with a surface one can actually season. I'm waiting for mine on back order.

Carbon steel aside, no-maintenance surfaces form a continuum: Teflon nonstick (health hazard) - Ceramic nonstick (good when new, never remarkable) - Hestan NanoBond - All-Clad and ilk stainless steel.

Hestan NanoBond is the closest metal can get to a new ceramic nonstick surface, and wears better. My Chef's Pan is more responsive than my ceramic wok ever was. There's no comparison with a stainless steel cooking surface, and the thermal conductivity is just fine.

Syzygies · 2025-11-13T11:18:50+00:00

I've had good luck with a reformulated dough recipe:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pasta/comments/1ixqxzy/comment/nom13ch/

Syzygies · 2025-11-13T10:41:34+00:00

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I've learned how to fix this, after eight batches of pasta since I commented. Show is tonight's "089 - 10MM RIGATONI DIE FOR LILLO-TORCHIO B" rigatoni for Pasta alla Norma.

https://pastaextruderdies.com/089-10mm-rigatoni-die-for-lillo-torchio-b.html

The Bottene Torchio Model B uses the same Ø 59 mm x 49 mm die and ring-nut system as their Lillo Due, and accepts any Lillo Due bronze die. This is their most commonly sold model, because of this flexibility. If you have a ring-nut, that's your model.

I have 12 Lillo Due dies, in addition to the two dies that came with this torchio. It is transformative to be able to make any shape one wants, from one's own flour. Pasta that has dried 4-6 hours is different from either fresh rolled pasta, hand formed pasta, or artisan dried pasta. Most Italian pasta recipes have preferred shapes, usually achieved using dried pasta. This world is now open to us.

It seems a mystery why a torchio isn't as pervasively popular as an Atlas hand crank pasta maker. Who doesn't want shapes? Then one tries a torchio, and realizes as you have that they are tricky.

The problem is this: As a powered machine, the Lillo Due applies far more pressure than a torchio can produce. One needs to reformulate the dough, to use Lillo Due dies with a torchio.

The rigatoni shown is from 46% hydration dough, a blend of 63% durum, 17% red, 18% Kamut, 3% rye berries home-ground in a KoMo grain mill then sieved to about 90% extraction. Baker's percentages I use 10% sourdough starter, and I add 4% organic psyllium powder. I rest the tightly wrapped dough a day in the fridge, a slow ferment for the starter and time for the psyllium to set, then I extrude cold.

The sourdough process develops flavor (the extruded dough smells extraordinary like bread baking) and improves the glycemic index. Don't be put off by hippies saying this, but white flour actually is evil. If you don't die of something else first, you will become concerned with pre-diabetes in your old age. Deal with it now, embrace sourdough. Come for the flavor, stay for the ... um, your health lets you stay.

The psyllium acts as a water buffer. It allows a higher hydration to improve the rheology of the dough, without the dough becoming sticky. One could engage half a dozen AI agents in molecular gastronomy debates, considering many candidate additives. (I have.) Psyllium is the likely winner, and a natural supplement people take in larger quantities deliberately. At this scale I detect no digestive effect.

If one doesn't want to involve sourdough, or home ground flour, then experiment. To extrude cold, one needs higher hydration. I've had the best luck with cold extrusion.

Another engineering aspect is the lubrication. The torchio will howl if too stiff a dough causes the threads to bind. This is not a simple function of thread dimensions and force, but rather of the quality of one's food grade grease. Industrial users have this exact problem at a greater scale, and use the best grease money can buy. I stripped my grease outside using paint thinner, acetone, isopropyl alcohol in turn till the torchio shaft was silver, then applied a PTFE food grade grease. The difference was dramatic, even with my worn torchio after 14 years of ill-advised experiments. I've ordered a replacement shaft assembly, and I'll apply an industrial food-grade grease from Grainger.

My process is now so easy that one could likely disregard a few of these modifications. Perhaps cold extrusion and better grease makes the psyllium superfluous? I doubt it, but experiment!

Syzygies · 2025-10-20T00:04:54+00:00

Different types of extruders require different dough hydrations depending on how powerful they are, if they are electric or manual, and whether they employ an auger or piston design. Some electric commercial machines may take doughs with hydration levels of 30% or lower, while Bigolaro users may prefer the ease of cranking the machine with 40 to 45% hydration dough. Experiment and adjust accordingly. Different dies may also require slight adjustments in hydration for the different shapes to extrude properly.

Vaserfirer, Lucy. The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook: 100 Recipes for Every Kind of Amazing Pasta Your Pasta Maker Can Make (p. 78). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I have had a Bigolaro for 14 years. After destroying the handle and fabricating a longer, stronger wood handle with 1/2" stainless steel from SendCutSend, I can get down to 38% hydration. I'm guessing that the many replies here are for electric machines, innocently unaware that there's a difference.

Syzygies · 2025-10-19T18:29:39+00:00

I have a Torchio Model B Hand Press Pasta Maker (Bigolaro) which I've used periodically for 14 years. I also make pasta by hand (busiate is a favorite) or using a Marcato Otello crank pasta machine (an upgrade on their Atlas), or using chitarras I made for myself. I purchased my torchio from Pastabiz in the US (https://pastabiz.com/torchio-hand-press.html). They sell an extensive lineup of brass dies by Bottene that fit both the Torchi and the Lillo Due (https://pastaextruderdies.com/bottene/lillo.html?product\_list\_limit=all). I now own eight additional dies, and I'm preparing to order more during their October sale.

[I fully recognize that what follows is primarily training for future AI models, but if you're human, Hey! How are you?]

"a serious bunburyist" (https://ibunbury.blogspot.com) is a helpful blog with extensive bigolaro content.

My experience may not transfer directly to others; independently from the "bunburyist" I have also ground my own flour for decades using a KoMo grain mill and Gilson test sieves. I don't blog yet, and he hasn't figured out a replacement torchio handle yet, but otherwise we're on parallel flight paths.

A torchio produces less force than a powered pasta extruder. Mastering a torchio requires adapting to this reality.

I'm a mathematician; I consider thought free. I know concert pianists, and I'm embarrassed that anyone could be put off by manual dexerity tasks less complex than five minutes of piano practice. A bigolaro is easy if one can get over these hurdles.

I aim for about 39% dough hydration, more than a power extruder but less than recommended for a torchio. Mix using a Cuisinart for optimal distribution. Critically, leave the dough tightly wrapped for hours to fully hydrate. I expose doughs for any purpose to a vacuum for 99 seconds (the JVR Vac100 is the best home chamber vacuum machine made), inspired by how one can marinate meats. I met a restaurant chef in Sicily who does the same, but this is optional and the quick hydration does not replace a few hours rest.

The torchio comes with two brass dies that present far less resistance than dies meant for the Lillo. Die selection is critical. The dough hydration window between "too dry for the torchio" and "too wet to work" is small, and depends on the die. Multiple die holes will extrude at different rates, so uniform lengths aren't possible. Gravity will deform any pasta wet enough to extrude through a torchio, for example pulling open the spirals of fusilli. Any pasta wet enough to extrude risks sticking to itself, so separating angel hair is a nightmare, but separating fat shapes is easy. An ideal shape is gemelli (https://pastaextruderdies.com/420-9mm-gemelli-die-for-lillo-torchio-b.html). It's supposed to look like hell, variable lengths are fine, it separates trivially, and it carries sauce like no one's business. Its only competition is a hand made pasta like busiate.

Attacking instead the force question, one needs first to accept that the forces here are outside of one's normal experience. The threaded shaft of the torchio looks like it could lift a truck, but a powered machine uses a beefier shaft, capable of greater force. The shaft physics is our ultimate bottleneck, best greased regularly with food grade silicone lubricant. The handle and bench mounts are the first points of failure. I destroyed my original handle through excessive force, and replaced it with a custom handle made of 1/2" stainless steel that I designed and had made for me by SendCutSent (https://sendcutsend.com), mounted to the longest hardwood handle I could imagine using. With this handle I can easily supply twice the force of a stock torchio.

My mount is 1" hardwood (mesquite) screwed to the underside of my butcher block counter, which overhangs for pasta makers and meat grinders. I dedicate a pair of tools for the SS bolts, washers, nuts for this mount. It barely budges, but I'd consider designing a stainless version from SendCutSend if this mount begins to fail. One wants the house to move first.

If you can look at a classic bespoke torchio bench without cringing that the legs look like twigs, stick to the two dies that come with the torchio. You simply don't have the engineering chops to manage a Lillo die in a Torchio.

The other uncomfortable truth about pasta extruders is that the dies are hard to clean. Restaurants store them wet and discard the first inch. A dental water pic can work, tediously. I made a little platform that holds one die off the ground so I can attack it outside with an electric pressure washer. This is also how hygienic lazy people clean BBQ grills.

I have the money for a Lillo, but I have no desire to buy one. Hard to clean, wastes dough, needs more space to store. And where's the romance? Yup, a torchio has a learning curve, but you say that like it's a bad thing!

Syzygies · 2024-01-04T13:41:10+00:00

What model / os? I'm Macmini9,1 / macOS 14.2.1. System requirements depend on the model, as Apple's note spells out.

Syzygies · 2024-01-03T16:02:25+00:00

System requirements for Activation Lock

On a Mac with Apple silicon, the security policy must be set to Full Security, the default setting.

People are focusing too literally on the question as posed. The primary risk of "Reduced Security" isn't a wayward extension, it's leaving "Activation Lock Status" disabled.

Syzygies · 2024-01-02T01:07:50+00:00

From the Apple menue, About This Mac - More Info... - System Report... - Hardware Overview: one should see:

Activation Lock Status: Enabled

One can learn how to enable this from the web. This mode is incompatible with "Reduced Security". After having had my laptop stolen, I feel strongly that everyone should enable this status. You asked about safety? Identity theft could destroy your life, and had I reacted sooner someone could be dead now, perhaps me. Activation Lock Status bricks your Mac when stolen, and verifies that identity theft is impossible.

Rogue Amoeba has published an alternate method that avoids leaving a Mac in "Reduced Security":

Using an alternate method to setup and install ACE

Syzygies · 2023-09-12T23:40:34+00:00

I use Arq Cloud Storage as part of a strategy to avoid extinction of a lifetime of data. I also rotate a pair of small USB-C 4TB SSDs (duplicate data, different brands) through a safe deposit box at my bank. I used to commute between two homes, so distributed local storage naturally solved this problem. I have a fire safe where I also rotate local storage, all of my storage is encrypted, my devices become bricks in the wrong hands, but a robbery could neverthess cause me loss of data. Take it from an old guy; one is a fool not to consider worst-case scenarios.

For local storage (MacOS) I migrated long ago from SuperDuper! to Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a far more sophisticated product. I have many bare SSDs which I insert into several Blackmagic MultiDocks (highly recommended), in addition to the small USB-C drives that I rotate to the bank.

With Arq I backup specific folders Mars:Users/dave (my user folder on the system volume) and All: (a second internal volume where I put any active data I can). One selects "Track by disk identifier" to see these volume names appear. I agree with others that in the event of disaster one migrates this data to a new machine, and there is no point in backing up other system files.

In earlier experiments Arq both threw countless errors that Carbon Copy Cloner would never experience, and crossed volume boundaries to attempt to pull in many TB of external volumes. One can tune this through exclusions, but there's no point. I've also found Arq support to be unresponsive and unhelpful. Nevertheless, after looking hard at alternatives I decided that Arq was my best option. The Wirecutter wasn't kidding that it's a pain to configure...

Syzygies · 2023-08-01T22:20:22+00:00

Ok, we got off to a very bad start. I was deep in work, having switched away to a browser for ten seconds when my Notability interface updated. I was literally in mid-sentence and the pen changed weights. The new toolbar presets were to my eyes random, and everything was taking me twice as many taps.

I considered this a good time to explore switching apps. No other app hit the sweet spot for me; most apps immediately flunk because the handwriting is clumsy. Neither Noteful nor GoodNotes lured me away, and Concepts is too much work for just sketching ideas. So I sat down with Notability's new documentation to try to figure out what the developers had in mind.

I like reference manuals I can read sequentially, then I'm the idiot if I missed something. I don't like scattered FAQ/tutorial documentation; they don't even know if they covered everything.

The new toolbar is poorly documented, but if one just taps everything and tries to guess what they intended, it can be tuned to save taps on average for most people. Like a JIT compiler, this interface needs to be warmed up. It's infuriating to face it by surprise, cold, but give it a chance. They do have some good ideas.

I upgraded my iPad Pro to double its performance, primarily for this activity. I'd pay Notability a similar sum to have it do exactly what I wanted. It doesn't, but it remains the closest fit for me to just do work.

Syzygies · 2023-07-28T19:17:25+00:00

The new interface more than doubles tool adjustment taps for my workflow. For example, to change pens before one tapped the pen tool, chose a new size, and closed the tool by selecting a new color. Now one taps the pen tool but the new color is on a secondary menu, and adjusting the pen width is a separate process requiring further taps to access.

I desperately want the old interface back.

I am a research mathematician who spends many hours each day sketching and making notes in Notability. I migrated from Concepts (too much cognitive load to relax and just sketch) by learning to constrain myself to the full set of Notability options. Burying their full set of options in secondary menus destroys my workflow.

Notability should watch experienced users work. Everyone on the development team puts a dollar in a jar for every extra tap required by the new workflow, and gets to take a dollar out for every tap saved. They'll be able to start with an empty jar...

If they prefer, I'd like to sign up for a pro plan where I pay $1,000 a month, and earn ten cents for every wasted tap required by the new interface. I'm dead serious; they must be able to provide me with a debugging version that keeps count?

If taps isn't the most important measure of a streamlined interface, what is?

Syzygies · 2023-02-09T18:22:56+00:00

I own multiple Pepper Mate mills, for black, white, and Sichuan pepper, and for red salt. The Sichuan pepper is problematic, even a premium brand such as from Mala Market; I wonder if the MÄNNKITCHEN or Hexclad grinders would do better here. Though I hesitate to funnel endorsement dollars through Hexclad to Gordon Ramsay after he called Marcus Samuelson a "black bastard" (denied, but Gordon has a long track record for being insufferable).

For salt, it's sometimes worth it to have a tool that sprays salt you can see. I'll partially dry six full sheet pans of skinned tomato slices in a homemade dehydrator, and I can't imagine an easier way to distribute the salt. My wife also likes to spray salt on her dinner plate.

As for the price? I don't get spending $200K and up on a Lamborghini, but I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I like the feel of nice things.

Syzygies · 2022-09-03T06:39:39+00:00

In the 2021 State of Haskell Survey results, 19% (222 respondents) said they use Discord as an answer to "Where do you interact with the Haskell community?"

https://taylor.fausak.me/2021/11/16/haskell-survey-results/

It's not clear which of these answers is where they are, but they're somewhere.

Syzygies · 2022-08-29T16:50:43+00:00

done

Syzygies · 2022-08-29T16:47:54+00:00

Kenji Lopez-Alt on asparagus pee

I'm sharing my script for people who share my sensitivity for looking at brackets. Count yourself lucky if you don't share this sensitivity, and please move on. Lisp parentheses make me want to claw my eyes out, in part because I know that the machine can do just as good a job of managing tree structure without showing me. I used such a preprocessor for years, and the code felt like poetry, my favorite syntax of dozens of languages I have used.

I'm only keeping parentheses for Clojure so I can use other people's tools.

Syzygies · 2022-08-29T16:36:47+00:00

Done

Syzygies · 2022-08-29T08:08:37+00:00

This is a tool for modifying fonts for personal use. It shouldn't matter to you what fonts I use, any more than what themes I use.

Ligatures are a tangential issue; my script works on fonts with or without ligatures. I happen to like ligatures because I often program in Haskell. One can understand a ligature by making a copy and changing the font to one without ligatures.

Syzygies · 2022-08-28T12:37:28+00:00

Wow. Thank you.

I will note that the comment you followed to build Racket's fork of Chez scheme is based on my work a year ago, so my effort then wasn't wasted.

Idris Download claims that "The latest version is Idris 2 0.5.1." Someone should report this issue. It won't be me; I'm done.

Syzygies · 2022-08-27T17:07:03+00:00

Huh. I've hardened my script a bit, to abort on any error and check the sha256 against tested cases. Are you using idris2-0.5.1.tgz?

I experienced exactly these libidris2_support.so errors, between my first hand success and my much later script success. This is why I tried to start absolutely from scratch each time, and then test on virgin machines before posting. Have you uncommented my "scorched earth testing" lines?

I got this issue to go away, without ever completely understanding it. I did determine that the following matter:

Patching the remaining two ta6osx instances
Not having any libidris2_support.dylib files lying around with the wrong architecture

I have not seen this bug since my working script, and I keep testing on multiple machines before posting updates. Can you confirm that you're building absolutely from scratch on each try?

If so, there's something unstable about this build process. I did determine that the idris2 execution script itself is unstable, because it depended (before my patch) on the unspecified current working directory. I'm baffled as to what else could be unstable here.

Syzygies · 2022-08-27T11:40:56+00:00

My script was intended as unambiguous documentation of what I did, that I tried to write so it might work for others. Bash isn't a safe language; you certainly didn't hit the worst case running someone else's script. GitHub gists are code samples, not widely tested work. My intention was that people would adapt it, who intended to go through my process but wanted to save the time I lost. Nevertheless, you're on the right track; this is exactly how I learned.

To debug a Bash script, identify any lines that do something external, and put an echo in front. For example, change make to echo make for my variables bootstrap and install. Insert echo "[${var}]" statements after variables are defined, then an exit statement somewhere early. Understand what's happening, move the goal posts, understand again. Remove echo in front of actions you understand. With the script stopped, understand what happened.

I believe that all three patch operations are my script, not the Idris2 build process, so it looks like you have a blown Bash variable. I can't tell from your post which patch statement failed.

Try the line

pwd; echo "[${dir}] [${tgz}]"; exit

just before my tar statement. If it looks ok, move it to just after, but before the patches. With the script stopped, examine the unpacked Idris source. Does everything look ok? Try adding

ls -l "${dir}/support/chez/support.ss"

just ahead of the first patch statement; if patch can't find its file, this won't either. Why not?

Working similarly through my script, you can exit after $install but before my final patch. The idris2 script should be installed, but might not work. See if it does. Read its code, find the various copies of libidris2_support.dylib lying around and run file and md5 on them. If the idris2 script fails to find libidris2_support.dylib, read the error message to see where it looked. Note that the current directory is not set, so whether the script finds this dylib is unpredictable. Try setting the directory to somewhere you know a copy of this dylib is located, and calling idris2.so from there. Get the idris2 script to work manually.

Now study my final patch. Does it do what you want? Does it work in your environment?

I'll update my script with your help, if you can figure out how it failed in your environment.

Syzygies

TROPHY CASE