I like Chrome Remote Desktop for ease of use and for the ability to get to all of my machines no matter where I am. Great when using Chromebooks, too.

I have never done this myself either, as I love cooking with very salty water and then draining the excess. I like how if allows just the right amount of saltiness in the pasta itself. And that doesn’t work the same way, if you keep all of the cooking water.

But I know that this is a popular technique that has been around for a good while now. I personally haven’t felt the need to add it to my repertoire, but I don’t think it’s wrong per se. So, yes, go ahead and give it a try. If you like it, keep cooking that way. If you don’t like it, then at least you understand what you enjoy about your current way of making pasta dishes.

It’s not just shareholders that have to be concerned, it’s end-users too.

I have lived both in the US and in the EU and move back and forth every so often. It’s surreal to see how far the EU lags behind in technology and userfriendly services. The internet feels completely different from the US – and not in a good way.

Lot’s of things that can be done very easily from my computer while in the US are completely impossible or at least extremely limited when living in Europe. Companies are very afraid of regulatory restrictions (rightly or mistakenly) and simply don’t offer the same online products. It feels very backwards. In fact, even Google search is very different and a lot less useful while in Europe. Subjectively, European web services feel like what the internet was like in the US in the early 2000’s. That’s 20 years behind.

I fully understand why the EU wants to regulate online behavior, but the politicians making these decisions don’t have a good understanding of how technology works; and in the interest of making populist policy choices, they regularly throw out the baby with the bath water.

Just to give an example: I lived in Europe during the lockdowns, and my kids weren’t allowed to send their teachers e-mail, because the school was afraid that doing so would violate my kids’ rights. They couldn’t articulate exactly what their worry was, but there was a lot of fear mongering about EU regulations and punative penalties that they’d expose themselves to. The upshot was that once a week, written letters on paper (!) would be exchanged with the teachers. This completely brought all learning to a standstill.

On the other hand, our US school made sure that all teachers were availably by Zoom conference at any time that the kids needed to talk to them. When we told the European school, they said that this was horrible and would certainly never be allowed in any civilized country…

That sounds like an accurate summary. It’s not a particularly fancy or technical dish, but it’s not meant to. Instead, it’s a good recipe to get people started on cooking basic recipes and not be scared by ingredients. It also encourages you to experiment, and it’s fast and easy, so you can make it on a weeknight.

These are all good things. If you already know how to do all of the above, you probably won’t even need a recipe and you can improvise dishes like this very easily. You probably also already know a bunch of different techniques and can decide when they are appropriate. But everybody has to start somewhere, and this particular recipe wouldn’t be a bad idea to do that.

it was weird to take photos on a smartphone once upon a time.

Really?! I don’t recall that. If you wanted good photos, you had a (D)SLR and a couple of lenses. It was perfectly socially acceptable to do that; it just took considerable dedication thanks to the bulkiness of the equipment.

If you wanted basic photos and mobility was more important, you used a point-and-shoot. Everybody owned at least one, and many people carried them around with them at (most) times. And if you were an early-adopter but didn’t mind the lower quality, you used your phone to take photos.

Nobody really cared much when you did that, as the form factor of the phone looked very similar to a point-and-shoot. If anything, they rolled their eyes thinking that you couldn’t afford a second device and settled for the cheap-looking blurry pictures. Early cameras in phones were honestly pretty pathetic.