Defiant Sloth

Is there any other state in the US with such a breadth of grocery store non-dominance as Minnesota? Great piece by Adam Platt at MinnPost on the state of affairs. Big Kowalski’s fan, even if it’s only 2% marketshare.

We went cruising across Vermont last week for a vacation, staying in a variety of towns (including Burlington, Stowe, Waitsfield, and Woodstock). Lovely place. It's very much a "Wisconsin of the eastern US plus mountains", as we visited a number of dairy farms and tasted our way through a terrific breweries. I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked, but... here are a handful of shots (specifically of the beer and cheese we tried).

The Alchemist’s legendary Heady Topper IPA, tasted off the draft line at the brewery near/in Stowe. Really nice campus there.

Fiddlehead’s IPA, which I saw in a can at just about every restaurant and bar we frequented.

An excellent pack of Plymouth Cheddar. We nibbled our way through this paired with a bottle of Ira Sylvan Trousseau wine, unintentionally good together.

The Waterbury Club Lager, brewed by Prohibition Pig. Apparently they were heavily inspired by signage across the street and “copied it nearly to a T” as much as they could, in all fairness.

A package of the Willoughby Cheese by Jasper Hill Farms. Alas, we didn’t get a chance to visit this farm, but ate this while staying at a farm B&B, so kind of worked out.

For consistency’s sake, I usually always pose a photo of a water bottle. This was taken at the Billings Farm in Woodstock after a short bike ride there. Aluminum bottles or bust.

The people have been talking about Gabriel Smith’s Brat, and after picking it up at a local bookstore on our first day of vacation in Burlington, 30 pages in, I will admit that the people are right — this is a wickedly good new voice in literature. 📚

This guy, absolute connoisseur of north Minnesota/Wisconsin dive bars. A pleasure bumping into his retrospective series of essays, and this one about south Superior’s Ray Bar and tap puppets, is just 🤌.

Ambitious collaboration of companies using “luminescent pigments [from FibreTrace’s tech] into raw cotton when ginning”, whereupon “scanning a pigment, it can be tracked throughout the supply chain, identified and verified on-site”. Love to see this supply chain innovation approach.

Om’s great suggestion for Apple resonates on a number of levels — donate to national park preservation as a backbone to copies of macOS installs (since they keep naming versions after California landmarks and to amplify their sustainability efforts). Win win.

Very pleased to see Christina Nguyen win Best Midwest Chef at the James Beard Awards last night. The other nominees were equally as great, but she’s been up for several years and it’s such a well-deserved win for her restaurant, Hai Hai, a Southeast Asian gem in northeast Minneapolis.

Nothing quite stirs an emotional energy like waltzing into your local bagel shop with “Never Gonna Give You Up” greeting you on the speakers.

This MagSafe, slide-out Nintendo DS-like iPhone game controller is brilliantly conceived, and one of those things you wish you would have thought of first. Best wishes to Josh King in building this out at scale — smart kid! He also built a nice site for it, where you can sign-up to preorder.

Good to hear the use of QR code scanning for restaurant menus is reversing. This has been an insufferable practice that leaves dining too transactional, diluting the experience of interaction with the environment and server.

There seems to be a changing tide to hustle culture — whether it’s the folks I follow getting more mature, or acknowledgement of irrational societal pressures — and a reckoning with slowing down, mitigating distractions, and re-balancing life. Tracy Durnell has a good list in which to adhere.

Kino was released today as a 1.0 — a powerful, fun new video recording app from Lux, the makers of the Halide photography app. Immediate download for me, foremost to just check out their neat intro-to-the-app brochure. Secondly, to record my dog, who just sat there on the couch blinking at me.

As an admitted bandwagoner, it’s been an absolute pleasure watching the Minnesota Timberwolves navigate through the NBA playoffs.

<img <a href=”https://x.com/shahbazmkhan/status/1792382876794949981?s=46&t=RRblB6tLGcoaq7_iJ34Cnw”> src=“https://defiantsloth.com/uploads/2024/2a611d0645.jpg" width=“541” height=“600” alt=“A menagerie of Minnesota Timberwolves images”>

Love this quest to make a mass-manufactured paper bottle (alc bev brands Diageo and Pernod Richard, along with CPG giant P&G, lead the way). Biggest hurdles have been shedding a plastic lining, leaks and retaining carbonation, and weight issues during transportation.

Worthwhile, fun article on the very talented actress Sarah Paulson, whose performance in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story as lead prosecutor comes to mind as most memorable next to her work in AHS. It’s unfortunate I’m not near Broadway to see her award-nominated play.

Love that this is the example of how LLMs working together as teams, called multi-agent systems (mas), hallucinate in an altogether nuttier level.

I just received the email about Five Dials closing shop after a wonderful 16-year run. It’s been a great digital literary magazine, curating a variety of writers for travelogues, reporting, interviews, and stories. Luckily, they posted their entire archive for perusing.

Jason Fried is finding his niche with the Once software` portfolio that 37signals is building out. This recent post of his exemplifies the catalyst for them to do it, to the backdrop of horribly over-priced parking software:

[bad, overpriced software] is a deep well that keeps on providing.

Declaring it here: Dragon Quest IX has the best battle music in the series.

I’m not usually one for randomly invented holidays, but if today is ‘Zipper Day’, I’m here to celebrate. I’ve written, shall we say, extensively on zippers in my bag reviews and my posts on zipper pulls here and here.

My fixation with zippers is mostly about functionality and the usability experience of the mundane: zippers are an intrinsic part of any ‘thing’ they’re attached to, and so, quality zippers are important, and the tactility of using good ones makes a product much more enjoyable and long-lasting. You know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite types of zippers, the YKK #5RC with DWR finish, featured on the Evergoods Civic Access Pouch 0.5 Liter.

Enjoy your zipping today.

The absolute disregard of reasonable proportions in the wedge salad at Manny’s Steakhouse is perfection.

With the new Delta game emulator out for iOS, I decided to invest in a super portable controller to use with a majority of 2D, non-joystick games. Always liked 8BitDo’s work, but never had much of a reason to purchase their controllers.

But I found their Micro controller impossible not to try, and subsequently enjoy:

• At $20, it’s an easy buy.
• It comes in two jolly colors
• Has a battery that lasts an alleged 12 hours on a charge via USB-C
• Thing measures just around the size of an AirPods Pro case
• Shockingly, it’s not cramped to hold and use, and the buttons are very good for such a light, small housing

While it says on most of the product pages it doesn’t explicitly work with iOS, it absolutely does. Set it in Switch ‘S’ mode and add it like you would any other controller via the Bluetooth setting (it’ll show up as a ‘Pro Controller’). Works great with Delta, but haven’t tried it with other iOS games yet.

In summary, a recommended little buy.

Every time I land…. feeling in good hands with Delta. Something about this airline is reassuring from take off to deboarding.

A warm day here in St. Paul to kick off the weekend. Enjoyed a scooter ride up and into Como Park, a walk through the Japanese garden, and some book reading under park trees. Perfect afternoon.

Socks are such a standard attire item that we don’t talk enough about them. But they are some of the the most important things you put on your body (nearly?) everyday, and keep you comfortable during any kind of foot travel.

So let me tell you something — I’ve gone through a lot of different socks and brand over the years, mostly trudging through them with sneakers, fitness shoes, boots, and zero-box shoes. The most comfortable, well-cushioned, and resilient ones I’ve come across (and now use exclusively as a daily driver) are Ministry of Supply’s Atlas Ankle Sock.

While these probably look fairly basic to the eye, these are extremely well-engineered.

• They’re very well-cushioned in all the right areas. Specifically, the reinforced cuff tab is super cushy and wraps you in comfort against any kind of rear-side of a shoe that you might be wearing. It’s genius.
• It’ll likely sit under the ankle and just pop out slightly when wearing lower-cut shoes. Not quite invisible, but I’m not even sure that matters or is fashionable anymore.
• They’re fairly odor-resistant even though these are made of a combo of cotton and elastane. They say it’s also infused with coffee via a recycled polyester, but I have no idea how that works other than that it does seem to deliver on the promise.

Anyway, this isn’t a paid endorsement by any means, just calling out a great everyday item. I’d imagine these work for any gender, and operate best in non-loafer types of shoes, but your usage may vary.