In alt.hackers, Buzz McCool <
buzz_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Pickle prices *IN* my area also keep rising.
>
> ObHack:
> I save the pickle juice and jar after I'm done eating a jar of Claussen
> brand dill pickles. Then I buy some carrots, peel them, cut to half size
> and then slice into quarters to make thin, pickle jars sized carrot
> spears. I pack them back into the jar and top off with some white
> vinegar if they are not all covered by the existing juice. I give the
> jar a shake, refrigerate, and in a couple of weeks or less I have
> delicious pickled carrots. Note I tried this with those small "baby"
> carrots and it didn't taste as good as the spears.
Real pickles can be made with just salt and water (and something to
pickle). I do it that way: salt, water, spices, vegetables. I do
typically save some water from the previous batch to add to the new
batch, but that's not necessary.
Here's a recipe I've used a few times:
~ 1.6lb cukes, quartered
~ 1 head garlic peeled, cloves halved
~ 600ml water w/
5 teaspoon grey salt
~ 300ml water from previous pickles
2 teaspoon whole coriander
2 teaspoon whole black pepper
1 teaspoon whole cumin
Put in water-sealed crock, leave for 3 to 4 days, transfer to
mason jar in fridge; eat within a month.
"Grey" salt is basically the raw stuff you get from letting sea water
evaporate. It has sodium chloride and other salts (in the chemical
sense of "salt"). Unlike plain salt or refined sea salt, it looks grey
and it looks damp. I don't think grey salt is strictly necessary, but I
do think it helps.
ObHack:
I wanted to renumber a bunch of sequentially numbered files, but not
all the way back to 0, so that I could add some more in there. So,
reproduced here in psuedo code, I wrote a script to do:
with eachfile in directory:
if eachfile matches /^(\d)(-.*)/ ; then
number = match.capture(1)
rest = match.capture(2)
if number >= startmove ; then
number = number - startmove
tomove[number] = rest
endif
endif
# rename from end back down because some files with consecutive
# numbers do not have uniquely "rest" parts
while number >= 0:
newnumber = number + shiftamount
oldname = join( number , tomove[number] )
newname = join( newnumber , tomove[number] )
rename( oldname, newname )
number = number - 1
The hack is using the numbers, with startmove subtracted, as indexes in
the array, so I could self-sort the array. Which I needed sorted so that
I could avoid clobbering files which have the same name execpt for the
number.
Elijah
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the files are supposed to be in (subjective) complexity order