Matthew's Journal

Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...?

A while ago I acquired a proper round-bottomed carbon-steel wok. It needs seasoning before use, and has thus sat unused for a while now while I fail to commit to doing so (in my usual "I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll screw it up" manner of failure).

There seem to be a number of opinions on how to do this.

Ken Hom says[0] to scrub the protective coating off (water and cream cleaner), dry, put on a low heat and rub 2tbsp of oil onto the inside; heat for 10-15m, wipe thoroughly (paper will blacken). Repeat wipe, heat, rub off until the paper comes clean.

The bag the wok came in says fill with water and boil for 10-15m then scrub off the coating (water and detergent or cream cleaner), wash and dry. Put a couple of tbsp of oil in the wok and heat - when warm, rub the oil round the inside of the wok with a paper towel, then heat gently for 15m. Or look up videos online.

The internet has many theories, including:

• repeated baking with low smoke-point oil in a very hot oven (I think the wooden handle could be removed on my wok)
  
• School of wok do a dry 'burn', then add a high heat oil for the second burn
  
• Serious Eats apply oil to the hot pan with a sacrificial dish-cloth (about 3 times)
  

...all of which is has left me confused as to the Right Way (and hence stuck not doing anything, which is daft); even WP is unclear. One blogger swears by flaxseed oil(!) and also repeated hot-oven baking.

Cleaning-wise, Ken Hom says to wash with water and no detergent, dry on the hob before putting away.

The wok bag says clean water, don't scrub. If you have to scrub, re-season

School of wok boil water in the work and scrape with a ladle, then dry on a hot hob.

Please provide advice, opinions, ...? [Please don't say "oh, just use a non-stick pan" :-) ]

[0] Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery, BBC books, 1984

We have a 3rd-generation Kindle, which I mostly use to read the Hugo shortlist each year; I find myself thinking it might be useful for novellas and other odds and ends I'd like to read without necessarily wanting to own a dead-tree copy of.

A recent half-price offer on a Kindle Paperwhite caused me to wonder if having an e-reader each might not be such a terrible idea, which then made me think whether the Paperwhite was the right e-reader or if I should consider alternatives. 30 seconds googlingDetailed research led me instead to the Kobo range, which seem to offer larger screens & storage (and more waterproofing) for less money.

Any opinions? I like the real buttons on the existing Kindle, and the fact I can just mount it as USB mass storage and put ebooks on it thus. I don't care about the lack of light (and like the fact it doesn't give off light, IYSWIM). I dislike that page-turning is a bit slow, that it's not running Free Software, and the tie-in to Amazon (though the fact I can feed it books over USB ameliorates that).

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to make an android app (basically, a dealing sheet - a friend has an online one, but I'd like one that would work offline and that could do simple things like keeping the display on for long enough for me to deal ;). I'm aware that the default way to do this is writing java (a language I've mostly avoided so far, and that seems to love boilerplate), but I'm wondering if there are plausible alternatives (I spotted Kivy via WP which seems python-based - any good?) and/or if anyone has useful pointers. Vague desiderata:

1) I can use my regular text editor to write code
2) As Free as is possible given mobile OSs :-/
3) Plausibly portable to iOS should someone feel like it

I expect to end up with something to distribute via F-Droid.

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S II, but it is now damaged beyond economic repair[0]. So I need a new one. Desiderata:

• Not much bigger than my current phone (125.3x66.1x8.49mm) so it still fits in my pockets!
  
• Android or similar (see below)
  
• Decent camera
  
• Easy to transfer files to Linux (Kies Air works quite well; jmtpfs isn't bad in Debian squeeze)
  
• Not vastly expensive
  
• Available unlocked
  
• Will get plausible updates
  

The apps I make most use of currently are the web-browser and email clients, the Met Office app, the torch, and the camera. I also use google maps (and navfree when abroad) and the ssh client, gstrings (a tuner app), the wifi analyser, a metronome, UnTappd, and the Good Beer Guide. After an initial flurry of game-playing (I played a lot of PvZ, and some Archipelago), I seem to have largely stopped.

The things that have annoyed me about this phone are mostly the google apps that you can't remove, and then have filled up some special storage for updates so I can't download updates any more, even though I have loads of space on my SD card and have moved all the apps I can there. The lack of an Android update (it's still on 4.1.2) recently leaves me a bit concerned about security, too.

I don't want to go iOS, which I think means I'm stuck with Android if I want anything resembling enough apps? Although presumably I could install cyanogen-mod (is that plausibly safe these days?). There are Ubuntu phones, but I think they don't really have apps to cover my use cases?

The obvious replacement would be a Galaxy 6 or 7, although they are a bit larger. Any other things I should be looking at?

[0] screen is cracked, and repair is about £150, which for a 4-year-old phone is daft (I could get a new S 2 for that!)

Dear Lazyweb,

On the way home, I probably have a few hours in New York, specifically Newark International Airport (I'm due to arrive (by air) at 13:59, and my plane home leaves at 19:30); should I be attempting to get into New York in that time window (bearing in mind missing my plane home would be Really Really Really Bad (TM)) given I hate buses? If so, what should I be trying to see? It'll be a Thursday afternoon...

A while back, a friend gave me some chilli plants. Sadly, they came with free aphids. I've tried moving the plants outside, bring them in with a ladybird on, and a fruit-and-veg bug-killer spray (which contains Pyrethrum). There are still aphids. They had a bit of a field day while I was away, but while spraying seems to kill most (all?) of the obvious aphids, if I wait a few days, they appear again.

I'm not quite sure what to do - should I try spraying more often even if I can't spot any aphids in the hopes that'll kill any small ones before they reproduce, or move on to other approaches? To be honest, I'm less looking for control and more for maximum deletion, as the Cybermen would say...

Anyone know a good way to get oil off a brick driveway? Our car isn't keeping the oil in as well as I'd like[0], and the mess needs clearing up. Assume for the moment that I don't have a pressure washer or a desire to spend £££ on the problem...

[0] yes, I'm trying to get that fixed...

Is there a standard warm-up / set of warm-ups for singers? I mean more for a group than for an individual.

I know how I like to warm up, but I think I'm rather odd. When I've directed choirs in the past, I've just sort of made something up (scales, some easy music with lots of good vowel sounds, that sort of thing), but presumably someone has thought about this in a more systematic way?

I used to be pretty on top of new early music releases, since I did a radio show and had access to quite a good music shop. Now, though, I'm very out of the loop, and Coventry has no shop where I may browse new early music recordings :(

So, can anyone recommend a good website / blog where I might seek inspiration for new CDs to aquire?