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Rachel Barker

@rachelplusplus.me.uk

Software witch, environmentalist, and amateur musician. This is my non-worksona side, where I like to do things from scratch to learn how they work then tell the world about it. Blogs at www.rachelplusplus.me.uk

Posts Replies Media

Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 02/09/2026

I love old-timey book covers (from today's Tasting History: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK8I... )

A very old-looking, yellowed page, printed in many different fonts to show off how many fonts the printer could afford. It reads:

APICIUS REDIVIVUS;
or,
THE COOK'S ORACLE:
Wherein especially
THE ART OF COMPOSING SOUPS, SAUCES, AND FLAVOURING ESSENCES
IS MADE SO CLEAR AND EASY, BY THE QUANTITY OF EACH
ARTICLE BEING ACCURATELY STATED BY WEIGHT AND
MEASURE, THAT EVERY ONE MAY SOON LEARN
TO DRESS A DINNER, AS WELL AS THE
MOST EXPERIENCED COOK ;
Being Six Hundred Receipts,
THE
RESULT OF ACTUAL EXPERIMENTS
INSTITUTED IN
THE KITCHEN OF A PHYSICIAN,
FOR THE PURPOSE OF COMPOSING
A CULINARY CODE FOR THE RATIONAL EPICURE,
AND AUGMENTING
The Alimentary Enjoyments of Private Families ;
COMBINING ECONOMY WITH ELEGANCE;
AND SAVING EXPENSE TO HOUSEKEEPERS,
AND TROUBLE TO SERVANTS.

There are a couple of pencilled-in additions: William Kitchiner (presumably the book's owner) and the number 4825.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 12/08/2026

Went to water my plants after the eclipse, and look who I caught trying to eat my turnips!

Three caterpillars hanging out on a turnip leaf. The caterpillars are quite long, yellow with black spots, and covered in tiny hairs for defence. They've chewed massive holes in the leaf they're on and the other adjacent turnip leaves.

Intermixed with the turnip leaves are long, narrow leaves from a different species of plant (Salsify) which they have not touched at all.

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 18/07/2025

You know, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there might be something wrong with my graph (correct version coming soon!)

A graph which is supposed to compare the performance of four different video encoders, but with wildly incorrect numbers: instead of expected numbers like +20% file size or 0.1 times a reference runtime, it has +3200% file size and 0.<forty zeros>1 times a reference runtime

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Rachel Barker @rachelplusplus.me.uk · 21/05/2025

Lil' teaser for an upcoming blog post, building on my last post (www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2025/03...): This graph compares compressing an image at a single fixed resolution (dotted curve) vs. encoding at multiple resolutions, netflix style (solid curve):

A graph comparing the size of a compressed image file against the image quality. There are three pairs of curves, comparing libaom version 3.12.1, jpegli 0.11.1, and tinyavif 1.1. Each pair has one solid curve and one dotted curve, with the dotted curve representing the size vs. quality tradeoff for encoding at a single size, and the solid curve representing netflix-style multi-resolution encoding.

The curve for libaom is the leftmost, and the curves for jpegli and tinyavif cross over as each one does better at different quality ranges. The curves for multi-resolution encoding break away from the single-resolution curves and go further to the left at lower qualities, representing better compression due to switching to a smaller resolution.

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