Pizza dough, for the most part, is comprised of only a few basic ingredients. But there’s no doubt that some crusts are just way better than others. So what’s the difference between the good and the bad? It’s all in the technique.
In this video from the ChefSteps YouTube channel, Joe Heffernan of Seattle’s Independent Pizzeria reveals the right way to make perfect pizza dough every time. Start by mixing bread flour with some salt in a large bowl, and mixing cake yeast into a bowl of room temperature water. Make a well in the flour and salt, then add your water and yeast mixture to it. Mix it up a bit with a wooden spoon, then have a stand mixer work it with a dough hook at medium speed until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Now dust a flat work surface with flour, work the dough into a ball, and let it ferment for five to eight hours in a covered container.
When it’s done fermenting, divide the dough into portions, and gently knead it into a ball shape. Once you have a few balls of dough, pour a little olive oil into the palm of your hand, and lightly cover each one with the oil so it can retain moisture. Cover the oiled, dough balls, and let them rest in the refrigerator over night. When they’re finished resting, you can stretch and shape your perfect pizza dough into pizza pies (but let them rest for about 20 minutes at room temperature before you do), or keep them in your fridge for up to three days. You can find Heffernan’s complete pizza recipe here.
Always make sure the federal agencies that send mail to you know where you live. A short list of places you will want to inform of any changes would include the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Next, you will want to make sure you forward your mail from your old address, but also be proactive and directly contact people and organizations that regularly send you mail. Letter carriers are not perfect, and you get substitutes on routes that can cause forwards to be ignored. Not only that, but the forwarding period generally ends after a year (it’s typically only good for 60 days on periodicals), and then your replacement in the old homestead will be getting your mail, or it will be left in a public space if you live in an apartment building.
Again, it’s important to keep your info secure all the time, but this is a useful reminder to make sure you notify all banks, credit card companies, bill providers, etc. of your address change and keep an eye on any regular mail. Over at Credit.com, Levin lists some common entities that should be notified. Check it out at the link below.
Klaus Teuber is a name that’s probably not immediately recognizable to you but might ring a bell in the back of your mind because as the inventor of Settlers of Catan, his name graces every box. Surprisingly, board game design was originally Klaus’ hobby, but after selling 25 mil copies of Catan, he no longer has to work in a dental laboratory—or really ever again.
Great Big Story recently traveled to Germany to meet Klaus, and his family, and picked his brain for some gameplay strategies. His advice? Don’t waste your time chasing the longest road early in the game. You might think it’s your secret weapon, but it will end up hindering the growth of your settlements.
The entire video is a charming look at the mind of a legend, so dig in.
You probably can’t get away with watching movies at your desk all day at work. But since most websites are still totally acceptable, warm up your scrolling finger, and go to town on this incredible fan tribute that sees the entire original Star Wars: A New Hope turned into one long scrollable schematic.
The site’s making of is even more incredible. The artist, illustrator and graphic novelist Martin Panchaud, created 157 images in Adobe Illustrator that together measure over 400 feet in length.
Panchaud didn’t skimp on the detailing, either. Every last line in the movie is included, as is every last nook and cranny on ships like the Millennium Falcon. The site is as much a Star Wars reference tool as it is a way to while away the hours on a boring Tuesday afternoon.
Don’t bother reading the news this morning, it’s just full of pranks and awful jokes. A much better use of your time would be spending seven minutes watching Ben Tardif’s eight-foot tall marble maze mountain that features 25 different themed sections that connect to create one massive kinetic sculpture.
Look closely and you’ll spot a miniature roller coaster, sections of the Great Wall of China, San Francisco’s famously twisted Lombard Street, Times Square, and even a skatepark hidden on the mountain. It took Tardif three years to build, and if we had a front-row seat it would probably hold our attention for a lot longer than that.
What winter lull?
Central Ohio’s housing market continued building on a record-setting start to the year, with 1,610 homes sold last month – an all-time high for February.
Sales of homes and condos grew 6 percent from January and were up 5 percent compared with a year ago, according to a monthly report from Columbus Realtors.
“Spring isn’t on its way – it’s here,” Columbus Realtors President John Royer said in a press release. “Spring is when the housing market traditionally heats…
Over a dozen “eclipse chasers” hopped onboard Alaska Airlines Flight 870 from Anchorage to Honolulu not to pick up spam musubi for dinner, but rather, to intersect the path of a solar eclipse. Astronomer Joe Rao captured the action from seat 32F, and I’ve never heard a man so excited about anything in my life.
According to Alaska Airlines, Rao is associate astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, so this sort of thing is his life’s calling. His excitement for the natural occurrence is beyond contagious as he delivers a breathless play-by-play of everything that’s happening with the eclipse.
Per the airline, Rao discovered a year ago that Flight 870’s path would intersect the eclipse’s path of totality on March 8, where the moon creates the darkest shadow on the Earth. Only problem: the flight would be 25 minutes early to catch the eclipse in all its darkest glory.
After Rao called to let the airline know about the eclipse, Alaska bumped the flight back and adjusted its flight path so that Rao and other astronomers could watch from onboard. What better in-flight show than one provided by Mother Nature? Fellow eclipse chaser Dan McGlaun even brought special glasses for the entire plane so that passengers could safely watch the sun.
One semi-retired astronomer on the plane, Craig Small, caught his thirty-first eclipse on the Flight 870. He explained the appeal to Alaska Airlines:
I’m not one for hyperbole, but you don’t just see an eclipse, you experience it with every fiber of your being. It is the most spectacular naturally occurring event that anyone could witness in their lifetime.
Rao’s narration was pretty spectacular, too.
According to Alaska Airlines, the plane was flying at 500 mph at an altitude of 35,000 feet when it intercepted the eclipse’s path 695 miles north of Honolulu. The eclipse lasted for almost two minutes.
So you’ve wanted to see African wildlife in its native habitat, but the prospect of booking such an expensive trip makes your bank account weep. What to do? Google can help. It just introduced the Mzansi Experience, a virtual visit to South Africa that uses Street View to give you a sense of the country’s grandiose landscape. On top of seeing elephants, leopards and other fauna, it’ll take you to everything from Cape Town’s Table Mountain through to Durban’s Golden Mile. While this still won’t be as awe-inspiring as a real safari, it’ll require much less effort… and it might even inspire you to go when your finances allow.
You played with it for hours on end after it was first released, but by the time The Force Awakens hit theaters months later, you had probably lost interest in your Sphero BB-8. But don’t bury the little droid in a drawer just yet, because a free app will make your BB-8 even more exciting than the day you first opened it.
The biggest fad in the toy industry right now is the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math education) movement, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was started as a clever way to introduce kids to intimidating educational topics through the use of fun toys and games. Kids have the opportunity to discover that challenging fields of study can actually be quite enjoyable, and it’s led to a boon in educational toys.
The problem is that many toymakers have latched onto STEM as merely a buzzword to throw around in marketing materials, when in reality the toy has little educational value. Is a preschooler really going to learn how to code by connecting the pieces of a giant rolling caterpillar together? That’s debatable.
But Sphero, makers of BB-8 and the original remote controlled ball that the droid toy was built on, have wholeheartedly (and properly) embraced STEM with an impressive app environment revealed a few months ago. The SPRK Lightning Lab app (available for Android, iOS, or other devices) allows anyone to write custom programs for Sphero’s rolling ball with an impressive amount of control and access to the toy’s capabilities, but with an approach that won’t frustrate amateurs, or limit experienced developers.
Back in August of last year the Sphero SPRK Edition—a clear version of the rolling ball toy that reveals all of the electronic components that power it—was announced and made available to schools who wanted a more engaging approach to programming through robotics.
But here’s the not-so-secret about the SPRK Lightning Lab app: it works with all the toys that Sphero currently sells—including BB-8—and it’s free for anyone to download and use.
You can still control and steer BB-8 around using touchscreen controls in the SPRK Lightning Lab app, but you won’t have access to all the sound effects or other special features that are included in its own app. That’s OK, though, because those will all soon be forgotten once you start playing around with the powerful drag and drop programming capabilities of the SPRK app.
When it comes to robots, Sphero and BB-8 are admittedly limited in terms of what they can actually do—at least compared to something like ATLAS. But thanks to an array of sensors (including a gyroscope and accelerometer) packed inside the plastic balls, and precision-controlled motors, there’s a surprising amount of control and flexibility within the SPRK app when it comes to not only programming how Sphero, Ollie, and BB-8 move, but also how they react to their environment and obstacles.
The whole point of a STEM toy is not only foster learning, but to also allow a child’s skills and knowledge to grow while they play. The graphical drag and drop interface of the SPRK Lightning Lab app is a tried-and-true approach to introducing someone to the intricacies and logic of coding, but at some point it will become limiting. So the app also allows users to manually edit the OVAL code which is the underlying programming language that powers Sphero, Ollie, and BB-8.
Users can quickly jump back and forth between the raw code and the graphical layout of their program, which can often help make it easier to understand what’s going on, and sometimes even what’s going wrong.
The SPRK Lightning Lab app will even appeal to those who have no desire to learn how to code or program, but are looking to squeeze some more replay value from the BB-8 they spent $150 on. The app provides access to an ever-growing community of Sphero hackers who have uploaded and shared their custom programs for anyone to download, dissect, and modify as they see fit.
The programs vary in complexity. Some simply give BB-8 the ability to liven up a party as a rolling, flashing disco ball, while others turn the droid into a color-coded Magic 8 Ball that can detect and make a prediction whenever it’s thrown into the air, using the built in accelerometer. The community is a great way to discover new ideas and techniques for programming BB-8, and can be a valuable resource if you’re stuck on a problem and need a little inspiration, or a different approach.
If you need any other reason to download and try the SPRK Lightning Lab app with your BB-8, just remember that Sphero designed it to be an educational tool for schools to help introduce kids to programming. So every time you upload a program you’ve tweaked to perfection, you can feel good about helping the children of tomorrow learn a valuable skill—in addition to having a great reason to play with BB-8 again.