Month: January 2025

Categories
Esoterica

Should you use the ‘Popcorn’ button?

Recently my local grocery store made a change to their store brand microwave popcorn. The new packages have different packaging design on the outside, and the popcorn bags inside are clearly being provided by a different vendor.

The new ones include the ominous ‘Do not use the Popcorn Button!’ warning, which wasn’t on the old packages. I’ve seen this on the instructions for other brands of microwave popcorn, and have often wondered why. I’ve also consistently ignored them ever since I’ve gotten a microwave with a popcorn button, with no ill effects.

This YouTube video provides a pretty good answer to the whole issue — the manufacturers have no idea which microwave you have, so they take no chances and tell you to babysit things and turn off the microwave when you hit 2 seconds between pops.

Of course, this is overly cautious. Some dumb microwaves just have a fixed time on their popcorn setting, so you do risk burning if you aren’t listening. Others, however, use moisture sensors to detect the steam that is released when the bag bursts its seams, then time out the rest of the way. Top-of-the-line models use accoustic sensors to actually detect when the popping slows down.

But the best advice from this video doesn’t require a 15-minute explanation, and comes at the very beginning: Orville Reddenbacher may not know anything about your microwave, but you do, so just push the button and try it out. If it’s trying to run too long, shut it down. Problem solved.

Categories
Blog

(Meta) Talking to oneself online

There’s a certain liberation to having a blog nobody really reads. I’m mostly documenting things I’m setting up just to understand it better as I go and maybe help others, but I’m not really thinking about an audience per se.

I’m in that age range where I’m old enough to remember Jerry Pournelle’s columns in BYTE magazine, though too young to have read his books, which seem to me to be more a thing of their time. I ended up reading more Robert Silverberg, who was a mainstay for short stories in magazines like Omni and Playboy. The one thing I remember about him was he co-wrote the infamous “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay. His work, as I say, was of a certain time.

Pournelle’s columns were basically him documenting how he was using computers and software as writing tools. He’d go on about updating graphics cards, new versions of WordPerfect, or whatever he was using at the time, building out new machines, etc. He’d talk about handing down hardware to his son, setting up a work machine for his wife, and other mundane tasks involved with keeping home computers running. He’d give all of the computers names. I think they were mostly custom-built from off-the-shelf hardware running CP/M, much of this was before the IBM PC came out, let alone luggables and compatibles.

It was interesting to read, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t a software professional, but this was a fair amount of activity just to support his day job of writing. Overall there was this philosophy of not letting the tools get in the way of the work, to keep your eye on the end product.

So, that’s kind of what I’m going for. It’s a side-quest, though Jerry Pournelle probably got paid pretty well for his columns, which no doubt helped pay the bills between books.