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Category: Tutorial (Page 1 of 3)

The Lato Font

October 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A few years ago I needed to print a manuscript of over 300 pages on my laser printer. The choice of which typeface, size, and weight have a big effect on toner consumption and legibility. Making the type smaller, lighter, or both saves toner (or ink) and paper, but one usually pays a price in poorer legibility.

This manuscript was for editing purposes and would be pored over for many hours so it had to be reasonably legible. The type had to be large enough to annotate with a pencil.

I wanted to have my cake and eat it too so I spent considerable time looking over a myriad of fonts. Since this wouldn’t be the last time this problem would arise, I felt the investment in time and effort was worth it. If a font really solved the problem, I was willing to pay for it. I didn’t limit my search to free fonts.

I searched several sites on the web offering thousands of free and pay-for fonts, concentrating on sans-serif fonts. I wasn’t looking for artistic beauty, I was looking for legibility. After finding nothing that stood out, I eventually tired of this and stopped. Then I tried different tack. An ordinary web search for “most legible font” led directly to what I wanted.

The Lato font family is fairly new. I had never heard of it. It was specifically designed for maximum legibility. The family is comprised of many variations, each carefully hand-tuned by the font’s creators, including a “light” variation and a “hairline” variation. Lato Hairline was exactly what I was looking for. It’s very light, composed of thin lines, but isn’t faint. It remains perfectly legible to my old eyes.

Since then, the whole family has become my standard san-serif / Helvetica style font that I use for everything instead of Liberation Sans, Arial, and Calibri that I used to use. You’re looking at it right now.

If you need a versatile, highly legible sans-serif font, you might give it a try. The Lato family is free to use for any purpose. You can find it at the link below or from Google, or Adobe.

https://www.1001freefonts.com/lato.font

Disclaimer: I have no relation to the above web site, Google, Adobe, or the creators of the Lato font.

Provisioning for Thanksgiving

September 15, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Are you planning to host a Thanksgiving dinner? Do you know how much food to buy? Planning out a Thanksgiving dinner can be challenging. Since the Thanksgiving holiday is about plenty, you want to avoid running short. This can lead to making way too much food and eating leftovers for two weeks. Below are a few tips to help you.

I’m a retired engineer. I switched to the food preparation business ten years ago and can’t help but bring my engineering mindset with me. I study and learn every technique I can and study the chemistry of cooking. While I frequently cook things that I make up on the spot, for anything serious I like to have numbers and measurements. Below are some numbers you can use.

A Thanksgiving Spread

Turkey: 1 pound of bird (uncooked) per person, and you will have leftovers.

Dry mix stuffing like Stove-Top: 1 ounce dry mix per person

Potatoes for mashing: 6 oz (raw) per person or 3/4 of a large potato

Sweet potatoes: 6 oz (raw) per person

Canned cranberry sauce: 4 oz per person

Pie: 1 piece per person

Butternut squash: 7 oz (raw whole squash) per person

Brussels sprouts: 2.5 oz (raw) per person

Green beans: 4 oz (canned) per person

Extending the Above to 40 Persons

To extend the above numbers, multiply by the number of guests and round up to the next package size. Thanksgiving usually involves a lot of baking. If you try to prepare all the food on Thanksgiving day, you’ll need several ovens. Remember that cooking the turkeys will occupy your oven(s) for much of the day. Prepare as much as you can the day(s) before and reheat it.

Of course, you don’t have to do all of the items below. Just pick the items you think your guests will like. You don’t have to do squash and sweet potatoes, or offer three different vegetables. These are just examples.

Turkey: 40 pounds. So four 10 pounders, three 14 pounders, etc.

Dry mix stuffing: 40 ounces dry, so seven boxes. A lot of people go heavy on stuffing and it’s cheap and easy, so having extra won’t hurt. I’ve found the in-house brands like Walmart are just as good as the big name product and cost half as much.

Potatoes for mashing: 240 ounces raw. So 15 pounds of russets, peeled, cooked, mashed, and prepared as you like with milk, butter, salt, pepper, garlic, etc.

Sweet potatoes: 240 raw ounces. So 15 pounds prepared as you prefer.

Canned cranberry sauce: 160 ounces, so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. These could be split between cranberry jelly and whole cranberry sauce. Some people like one and not the other.

Pie: 40 pieces. For big pieces you’ll need seven pies, smaller pieces, 5 pies.

Butternut squash: 280 oz raw whole squash (17 pounds)

Brussels sprouts: 100 oz raw (6-1/4 pounds)

Green beans: 160 oz (canned), so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. When cooking raw whole beans, I figure six beans per person. A pound of raw beans is 35 to 40 beans. For 40 guests you need to cook about six pounds.

Conclusion

You can save money by buying larger cans. In supermarkets, verify that the larger container is actually cheaper. Many times I’ve seen a gallon jar of mayonnaise or other product priced higher than buying the same amount in several smaller jars.

Larger towns have stores that sell wholesale foods to churches and other organizations, and sometimes to the public. Here you can buy Number 10 cans (institutional size) that contain around 115 ounces, and save even more money.

“Fine as Kine” not “Finest Kind”

November 23, 2021 / / 0 Comments

“How are you today?”
“Fine as kine!”

“Fine as kine” is a common expression in the State of Maine. Those who are not from there often hear it as “finest kind”, “fine as kind”, “fine is kind”, or something similar, which doesn’t make any sense.

The word kine is an Old English word that means cattle. The expression “fine as kine” has a nice ring to it and it implies “in good health” or “strong as an ox”.

Some fine kine

The word kine appears rarely in English literature. However, one of those cases is the King James Bible. Avid readers of the King James Bible would be very familiar with the word kine because it appears in 20 different verses of the Old Testament:

Genesis 32:15 Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls, twenty she asses, and ten foals.

Genesis 41:2 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.

Genesis 41:3 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.

Genesis 41:4 And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.

Genesis 41:18 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow:

Genesis 41:19 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness:

Genesis 41:20 And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine:

Genesis 41:26 The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.

Genesis 41:27 And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind shall be seven years of famine.

Deuteronomy 7:13 And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

Deuteronomy 28:4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

Deuteronomy 28:18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

Deuteronomy 28:51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

Deuteronomy 32:14 Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.

1 Samuel 6:7 Now therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there hath come no yoke, and tie the kine to the cart, and bring their calves home from them:

1 Samuel 6:10 And the men did so; and took two milch kine, and tied them to the cart, and shut up their calves at home:

1 Samuel 6:12 And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh, and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Bethshemesh.

1 Samuel 6:14 And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Bethshemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt offering unto the LORD.

2 Samuel 17:29 And honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to eat: for they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the wilderness.

Amos 4:1 Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink.

Now you know.

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