Honey Mustard Kebab Recipe

I'm not a great cook, but in order to help out my wife I've been cooking at least 2 days a week for the last year or so. I've found a few recipes that work and pretty much stick to them. Yes, this is quite boring but it works for us. However, when I ask my wife if she likes it, she says she likes not cooking those nights which isn't a big encouragement! Last week I got the idea that I was going to make kebabs and when I went to the store to get ingredients, a bottle of brown mustard called my name.

I went searching for a recipe that had brown mustard in it that met my dietary needs and didn't require me to go back to the store. Unfortunately there wasn't an easy way to take an inventory of what we had and get a recipe, so my searching came up with a recipe that was kind of in the ballpark of what I wanted. I don't experiment in the kitchen and tend to follow recipes, but I decided to go out on a limb and make some modifications. When I cooked the chicken the following night, my wife said it was excellent which was a huge relief to me! I guess I'm starting to understand what ingredients make what flavors and what we like. Who knows, I might take a cooking class one day!

In any case, for my own records here is the recipe I ended up using:

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup honey
• 4 tablespoons sweet brown mustard (no added sugar)
• 1 tablespoon coconut aminos
• 1 tablespoon coconut sugar
• 1 tsp parsley flakes
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp minced garlic (we have a big container from Costco)
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 green bell pepper
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• Other vegetables to grill
• 1 to 1.5 lbs chicken

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients (except for the vegetables and chicken) in a small metal bowl.
2. Whisk ingredients.
3. Cut chicken into chunks.
4. Cut peppers and other vegetables into chunks
5. Put chicken and peppers in quick marinator (not sure this really does anything, but I did it anyway).
6. Pour marinade over chicken and peppers.
7. Completely cover everything with marinade.
8. Refrigerate for 24 hours.
9. Place chunks on metal skewers.
10. Grill to perfection!

Enjoy!

Review: Anker PowerCore 26800 Power Bank

On a recent camping trip, I brought along a few small power banks to charge phones and watches (we weren't completely out in the wilderness and having a phone for pictures and emergencies is quite important). It was kind of awkward to charge the devices using 3 separate batteries. I decided to look for larger power banks that could charge multiple devices at once. Originally I was looking for one that could also power my laptop for a little bit, but decided that the number of times I've had to power it have been few and far between. Since I had good results with Anker products, I purchased the Anker PowerCore 26800 Portable Charger.

This charger is close to the largest battery that you can legally bring on an airplane, but weighs just over a pound. In addition to the 3 USB ports (many power banks just have 2), it has 2 micro USB ports for input to charge it faster. With a battery this large, faster charging is nice to have. The power bank is pretty basic; charge it up with the micro USB inputs (it doesn't come with a wall adapter, so I just use the Anker 6-Port USB Charger to charge it) and then plug devices into the USB ports.

We used the power bank a number of times this past summer during another trip. I put it in my backpack with a few cables and during the day charged up our phones (even with new batteries, our iPhones suck down batteries when using GPS). Being able to plug in 2 devices at once was quite convenient. Also since the battery is so large, I think I only had to charge it once on a 2 week trip.

This battery has performed well and I anticipate using it on camping trips, family vacations, and having it around in case of emergencies. As I've switched to USB charging for as many devices as possible including flashlights, this battery can also be quite helpful in an emergency or a disaster.

Pros

• Largest battery you can take on a plane.
• 3 USB ports for charging devices.
• Faster charging with 2 USB inputs.
• Not too heavy.

Cons

• Some may consider it a bit expensive for a battery.

Summary

This power bank has allowed me to consolidate power banks on trips. While it may not be the smallest, I don't have to worry about it running out of power even if I charge a number of devices. It just works and the 3 USB ports make it more useful to me than other power banks I could have purchased. If you're in the market for a power bank, I'd definitely consider this one.

Never enough charging ports

This past summer my family went on a vacation to the Grand Canyon and a few other destinations in Arizona (yes, it was hot!). For the driving trip we packed a lot of devices. Between the 3 of us, we had 3 iPads, 3 iPhones (my son just uses one for its camera), 2 Apple Watches, AirPods, a mobile hotspot, and an Anker PowerCore 26800 Power Bank. After I bought and reviewed the Anker 5-Port USB charger several years ago, I realized that the Anker 6-Port USB Charger was a better device as it didn't add much bulk to the 5 port and gave me an extra port. Since then I've bought a few of the chargers and put one along with cables in a small bag I take when I travel. While I don't need to charge everything at once, 6 ports just isn't enough to keep everything charged especially since the power bank uses 2 ports to charge faster. After we got back from the trip, I ordered another charger.

With 2 6-port chargers, I think that I'm all set for awhile. If I plug in everything at once (which I'll rarely do), all the devices will use 12 ports! That's kind of sad and amazing at the same time that we travel with some much technology. I just have to remember to bring enough cables to charge what needs to be charged. In my opinion, there is no reason to ever travel with smaller chargers even if they are a little more compact. I travel alone, I'm going to have 6 devices with me. Yes, I'm addicted to my gadgets.

Porting an iOS app to macOS

About six weeks ago (2 weeks or so before WWDC), my client asked me to port an enterprise app I wrote for iOS to macOS. I haven't done macOS work for a long time, but how hard could it be? In the last few years, a number of iOS-like technologies have come to macOS; while they aren't named the same, many things function similarly like NSViewController (UIViewController), NSTableView (UITableView), NSTableCellView (UITableViewCell), etc. All of my iOS apps for this client are written in Swift, so it made a lot of sense to use Swift for this macOS app.

Getting started with the project took about a week to get familiar with macOS again, but then things started moving. The first thing I did after the app ran was to make a version of my framework that I use across 5 iOS apps (models, networking, methods, etc.) over to the Mac which wasn't difficult; I only had to do a few platform specific defines for the files I moved over (I didn't move the UI pieces over). Once the basic app was running, I started the UI and had real data showing up within a few weeks from start. I took a number of pieces of the iOS app, copied the code and pasted it into the Mac app. The number of changes for these pieces were minimal (.stringValue instead of .text on the NSTextField vs UILabel), but I was quite pleased how I was able to reuse the code.

From start to basically feature parity with iOS took about 5 weeks. I'm sure that there are things that I'd change such as doing extensions on classes instead of copying/pasting code as I'll have to maintain both apps going forward, but that could obscure how things work. I am extremely pleased with how well this project is going (it hasn't been deployed, yet).

At WWDC Marzipan was revealed and it looks like it will allow many iOS apps to run on macOS. This, of course, would have helped me get my app up and running, but would it feel like a Mac app? While not every app is as straight forward as the one I ported, developers that want to move their apps to macOS today have nothing stopping them.