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1. [...] this is not a travel post. A year ago I wrote my yearly review and it’s time to write a new one. Looking back at this year I feel disappointed. It [...]

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Recently, for a moment, I couldn’t imagine myself working on web in ten years time. Since I am quite passionate about it and its development, the obvious question was why?

Why wouldn’t I want to be a web developer anymore?

Popularity of Facebook comes to mind. It is no secret that I am not a fan of Facebook and similar networks. Yet I do have an account there and on some of its brethren. By the way, my Facebook account is for testing purposes, so if I haven’t befriended you, it almost certainly wasn’t personal.

Anyhow, Facebook and ilk are easy to criticize. Anything of that size will certainly gain much to be critical about. I also sometimes feel nostalgic about old web, before the gold rush of last millennium. That too probably says more about my age than anything else.

After some pondering I came to conclusion that I am longing for a sense of openness, equality and control I used to have. Few of us had our own server, but in principle with investment of little time and a bit more money, you could run all services that mattered.

Few actually did, since on the whole we didn’t do much. We do more now, some of which we don’t want public. I may not like Facebook’s walled garden of information, but I would have to be mad to argue for open access to all that private information. Even with existing restrictions in place people tend to trip and reveal? information to unintended audience.

If sharing our lives is what we want to do, which clearly is the case, then rise of brokers like Facebook feels as an unavoidable consequence. However that doesn’t mean natural development of a domineering agent should also be welcomed.

If at some point Facebook becomes a conduit for most of our digital lives, what happens if they revoke our account? To whom can we appeal? Who has access to the history of all our actions and what happens to it if we do decide to leave? Is it ever really gone? How do we know that our answers to this questions are true?

It’s a clich? that technology is changing societies faster then they are able to adapt. It is a clich?, but that doesn’t make it wrong. We are changing long before we are able to understand what those changes will bring down the road. It can be argued either way, but it is your outlook on world that will largely form your opinion on desirability of end result.

I am not an optimist.

I like building things and I enjoy it even more when others use them too. I am sometimes lazy and perpetually busy, so I avoid building things which not even I asked for. I always tried to incorporate a reasonable amount of security in services I have built, but I have never added transparency and accountability to the system without outside pressure. I don’t know many who would and that pressure tends to come from legal requirements. It’s a subject too dull to care about without painful personal experience.

Another reason for uneasiness comes from the other side of web connection – web browsers. Last few years have brought an incredible amount of development and most of us aren’t well acquainted with new technologies yet. HTML5 , CSS3 and Javascript will trounce Flash and Silverlight, right?

They might, but they all might not matter. Two raising trends I find interesting are mobile web access and mobile application platforms.

iPhone and Android have more than 100 000 applications between them and my impression of these ecosystems is that many of them are not much more than platform specific clients to web services. Even if most of them might not have much to do with web (games, books…), it’s not difficult to imagine a future, where most of us would access web through mobile devices and developing native clients for a new service would have a priority over access through browser.

I can’t say this would necessarily be a bad thing, since web development can be quite messy and frustrating. It probably would be less egalitarian and less sharing environment and I would certainly miss that.

At the end of this long self-indulgent post I confess I have no answers. I barely have questions and I had to write this far to get to them. It is for me the most introspective part of the year, so I might be thinking about a non-issue. Time will tell. Eventually.

Rok requested a post about making peanut butter and since he does such a stellar job taking care of technical side of wwwh talks , I thought it would only be fair to grant his wish. My butter looks like this:

If this doesn’t look to you like the best peanut butter ever, look again. And again.

Before I go on describing how I make peanut butter, let me spend a moment or two talking about why. After all it can be bought in practically any grocery store in Slovenia and visiting a few will even give you a limited selection. My first reason was to limit my intake. Peanut butter is incredibly delicious, but not exactly healthy and since I noticed that how much I eat is proportional to amount available, I wanted to avoid 350g jars that would be the death of me. My second reason was to have a better control of what goes in it. Like with sausages you can’t really tell what was used and in what condition it was. I certainly didn’t want to eat hydrogenated fat ^[1] added to your stock? peanut butter and were suspicious of a thick layer of oil on top of organic ones too. When I got better at making it, I also found out I really dislike bought ones.

As it happens the only thing that is absolutely necessary to make peanut butter are peanuts themselves. However you will probably want to use some oil, a sweetener like sugar or maple syrup and salt.

I use roasted peanuts. You can buy already roasted (but unsalted) or roast them yourself. To do that you heat up your oven to 175? C and put them in until they are done to your liking. Turn them around every couple of minutes so they don’t get burned. Next step: chopping.

But first a side note to all my American friends. Reports that Slovenians don’t eat peanut butter are simply false. We just hide it well. It’s kind of like masonry, but instead of discreet regalia and a secret handshake, we, peanut butter connoisseurs, recognize each other by a subtle nutty odor and small brownish stains in corners of lips. Slightly crazy and distracted look in presence of a peanut butter jar might also be a hint.

So, chopping. For small amounts, 200g or less, I use a hand blender with chopper accessory. I also use it because it’s the only blender I own. It tends to overheat and since I melted its predecessor my chopping amounts to mostly waiting pierced with short chopping episodes. Bigger blenders are certainly more resilient, but they also tend to have their blades raised higher from the bottom which makes them unpractical for chopping small amounts of nuts. Spend enough time doing this and dust will turn into a fudge-like paste. Do it more and it will become more liquid. If you like to spread butter thick, it might be even liquid enough.

I don’t so I add a bit of oil. I use peanut oil , but any edible with neutral flavor will work fine, just don’t add too much. You can always add more if you find butter too thick, but it is difficult to correct too liquid one. I add about a tablespoon of oil for 200g of peanuts while they are still pulverized and rarely need to add more later.

On recent vacation in Nepal I also tried their peanut butter. It tastes very much like ours at this stage; right taste but like most food in Nepal not salty enough for western taste.

Salt is not the only thing missing. Peanut butter is like tomato sauce, it needs a bit of sugar to get a more well rounded flavor. I used powdered sugar with some success, but maple syrup recently won me over (a tip from Ale? whose many culinary talents include baking great cakes ). How much salt and sugar to use is again down to personal preference. I use about 1-2 teaspoons of maple syrup and slowly salt while mixing until I am satisfied with result. Blender warms butter and spoils tasting somewhat, so I stop spicing butter when it is a bit less sweet and slightly more salted then I would prefer. This results in just the right taste when cooled.

That’s it. You should now have peanut butter good enough for gods. A few tries, to find the right balance between ingredients and you will end up with one fit for you too. It took me longer because I also eat it with spoon, hence it’s easier to notice its mistakes and more difficult to balance different uses (I prefer more salty butter on bread).

My next goal: cashews and cocoa spread.

[1] Hydrogenated fat is used for the same reason as oil, to make butter easier to spread. Added oil doesn’t actually react with peanuts and if you leave your butter long enough, it will eventually separate and form that unwanted oily layer on top. Hydrogenation solidifes fat and prevents that from happening. Downside is that you can’t tell how much additional fat was added unless it is specified in ingredients list and it’s even more unhealthy.