I can relate to being a picky eater and not liking the taste of things. I go through hundreds of cookbooks and it’s difficult to find recipes I like. Forgetting an ingredient is normal. I’ll often forget baking soda at the end of the recipe and the result will be flat. You may want to double check the recipe after you’ve done anything to make sure everything’s there. I’ve also been having trouble lately making sure all the ingredients I took out are put away in the refrigerator and often find something that went bad when it was accidentally left out. What I like about cooking is that most flops are still edible and at their worst, if you don’t like it, someone else might.

You mentioned you like fruits and vegetables. You may want to go to the local farmer’s market or vegetable stand and see if there are some more unusual fruits and vegetables to try. I’ve been experimenting with making squash as a side dish. If you can get the squash open, it’s fairly easy to make. Asparagus is another quick option. I’ve been using a microwave steamer. It’s great for reheating vegetables or certain leftovers. If you want to avoid the plastic varieties, I just found a silicone based one by Cuisinart. Also, if you’re making pancakes, waffles might be another option to try. Crepes are another possibility and you can also use them as egg roll wrappers or in lasagna or manicotti dishes to replace store bought versions. Pasta is fairly easy to cook. I’ve been boiling lentil or lentil/rice pastas a lot lately. A nori roll with rice and/or vegetable filling is another easy option. I’ve also been experimenting with collard greens as a wrapper lately. Another nice cooking tool I’ve found is a rotary slicer. It’s useful for grating foods or making baked french fries. I have a Vitamix, but I’ll frequently just use an inexpensive coffee/nut grinder to grind flax, seeds or grains. The Vitamix is good for making ices from frozen fruits and making seed/nut or fruit butters though. I’ve even used it in place of a stand mixer when I make a crepe batter.

If you want to enrich what you’re making, there are ways to sneak healthy things into a recipe without altering the taste. Most recipes that include sugar have too much and you can lower it gradually without missing it. There are tricks like the Cornell triple rich formula. Substitute part of the flour in the recipe for healthier ingredients like that formula or just add a spoon of healthy ingredients like flax, etc. Add more vegetables to dishes. If you’re having a pizza, add a lot of vegetable toppings. I like to use unbuffered vitamin C powder as an acid that works with baking soda. Heat might destroy a lot of the C, but you’re still getting some that you might not otherwise get. It depends on your goals but you can usually alter recipes you like in small ways to make them more nutritious.

I really like Nicolette Dumke’s books. She uses very basic ingredients and explains how you can substitute ingredients for ones that you’re more comfortable with. You can find some of her recipe books on archive.org or possibly at your local library.

I use HTML for my formatting and wkhtmltopdf to create documents instead of latex. Some people prefer markup for document formatting. Plain text has a lot of benefits and is very portable. It’s useful for notes, todo lists and there’s no reason one can’t store recipes that way.

I read tons of recipes books and I feel lucky if I find even one I like. However, I do find something useful that actually tastes good once in a while. So, I feel like it’s worth the effort to keep searching for new ideas. Good luck in your own search. If you come across any useful recipes along the way, I hope you’ll share them.

That’s why we specifically mentioned Fediverse and FOSS alternatives to get the word out about Software Freedom Day here: https://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/SFDMarketingSites The DFF board discussed this topic and wants to continue to reach out to people who don’t know about FOSS and the Fediverse. So, we are trying to meet them where they are and let them know about the benefits of using FOSS. Also, one of the groups did a talk on switching from X to Mastodon: https://mobilizon.fr/events/1ab64af3-b99e-473d-87da-7ad07497ab41 If you have suggestions for the web site, please join the SFD discussion mailing list and add your input. The new DFF board will be redesigning the entire site for next year, but did not have time to do so for the 20th edition of Software Freedom Day. Their main goal was making sure that we still had a Software Freedom Day this year after the old board stepped down.

I would love to find a cohousing project in my area. Have not found any good ones. Most of them seem like money making schemes. We had a group (not specifically ND) try to create a cohousing project locally. They went bankrupt and the developer bought out the property and made a profit selling regular homes. Most of the housing situations I’ve investigated geared to autistic people were very expensive. If there was a decent option in my area or anyone wanted to help put together a group to do this, I’d definitely want to get involved.

I’m also a programmer by profession. Haven’t been as lucky as you with finding friends through programming even though I’ve probably been to every computer related Meetup or group in my area. Speaking of computer science, anyone doing anything for Software Freedom Day in September? I’ve tried the past few years to hold an event for it online and no one showed. Would love to do something for it, but it’s really not much fun doing it alone.

I liked the Interlac alphabet Easter egg in the Legion of Super-Heroes TV series DVD. I also really like the cat game in certain versions of Android. Accidentally stumbled across it when looking through the Android code.

Workrave is usually mentioned most often as a break timer. I know prevrsi has short and long breaks, but you’d need Wine to run it on Linux. The other break timer software I’ve located so far are xwrits, stretchly ( https://github.com/hovancik/stretchly ) and breaktimer ( https://github.com/tom-james-watson/breaktimer-app ). Always looking for other interesting options.

This is one of my favorite RSS readers.

Wasn’t thrilled with CMake when I was unable to build it without having to have a working copy of CMake already installed to build it with. It’s also now so complicated to build, it won’t build on older versions of some compilers. Directories it searches for libraries and includes are always wrong on my systems and I’m always having to override that information. Personally, I really like CDetect and use that in place of CMake and GNU autoconf/configure any time I can.

I’ve been doing some experiments with sixel: https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/24382.html

I’ve tried pdftotext and a few others. So far, my favorite is the pdftxt program I’ve mentioned.

Wondering if imagemagick or graphicsmagick would be useful. They can be used as libraries instead of just programs. libmupdf has some interesting graphics routines. As to boundary detection, might need to look at machine learning libraries for that. Some C machine learning libraries that deal with image detection include ccv ( https://github.com/liuliu/ccv ), yolo ( https://pjreddie.com/darknet/ ) and vlfeat ( https://www.vlfeat.org/ ).

I’ve been searching for and collecting a list of machine learning source code in C/C++. One project I came across was this one: https://github.com/GHamrouni/Recommender