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To someone with functioning eyes, this must seem rather difficult. I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high
by ctoth 3y ago
To someone with functioning eyes, this must seem rather difficult. I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses.
As a blind person who fancies myself as a bit of a cook though, being able to smell, feel, and interact with the food as I'm cooking really does make up for a lot. Also, you just kind of have to get over the initial fear of heat :)
The article mentions this and it's absolutely true: a high-sided pan makes all the difference. I use my 6 qt cast iron Dutch oven for browning meet and this completely avoids spillage.
Also if you ever wondered who buys those weird "smart" kitchen devices, anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances. It's way easier to set the air fryer or instant pot from the phone, which reminds me I've been meaning to try and reverse engineer the protocol that my Bluetooth instant pot uses before the unmaintained app
is removed from the store.
- vjerancrnjak 3y agoI guess that explains why Leonhard Euler got better at math after he went blind.
- stacktrust 3y agoThe Instant Pot ecosystem would benefit from open-source firmware, so it can be integrated with Home Assistant and voice controlled systems like Alexa, Siri, Google. The company is under PE management and in bankruptcy, but for the sake of the millions of repairable devices out there, will hopefully find a second wind. If not, perhaps the internal controller can be replaced with a RPi. Teardown photos: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Instant+Pot+Smart-60+Disassembly/103983 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Instant+Pot+Smart-60+Disassembl... Disassembly video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l4D8sLPZ3G0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=l4D8sLPZ3G0 & https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPrezDskchs https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPrezDskchs Instant Pot also made a $100 cooking blender clone of the $1500 Thermomix, https://www.wired.com/review/instant-pot-ace-multi-use-cooking-and-beverage-blender/ https://www.wired.com/review/instant-pot-ace-multi-use-cooki.... Surprisingly, there are no affordable cooking robots? Bosch Cookit is above $1000, https://foodcook.net/kitchen/thermomix-tm6-vs-bosch-cookit/ https://foodcook.net/kitchen/thermomix-tm6-vs-bosch-cookit/
- pathartl 3y agoHonestly I love Home Assistant and rely on it daily. That being said, I'm not sure I'd trust it controlling a pressure cooker.
- danielheath 3y agoI mean, the network instructions should really not be able to do anything the buttons on the front couldn’t, but I see your point all the same.
- tass 3y agoThey have a failsafe via a pressure relief, 2 of them, so I wouldn’t worry too much.
- isilofi 3y agoEven as a sighted cook, I do rely on the noise a pressure cooker makes when relieving pressure at the red line. There is usually a visual pressure indicator, but on most models it is rather "binary" anyways, either the knob is out or in.
- kevinmchugh 3y agoAgreed for a gas-heated pressure cooker, electric would be fine.
- akira2501 3y agoI wonder why there wasn't a bigger market for home cooking devices integrated with Alexa. Even things like bluetooth temperature sensors would be highly useful, and you could conceivably use Alexa to monitor these devices and let you know if they go outside of your desired thresholds.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stacktrust 3y agoTemp-based automation is not (yet?) possible with Alexa Routines, besides Amazon making an exception for the inaccurate temperature sensors in some Echo devices, https://old.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/xbz5f6/how_to_add_wifi_thermometer_to_alexa_routine/ https://old.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/xbz5f6/how_to_a... Home Assistant supports some meat thermometers, e.g. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/meater/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/meater/ & https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/govee_ble/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/govee_ble/ Even Amazon killed their much-loved (30K reviews!) Alexa Microwave, https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Microwave-Small-Works-Alexa/dp/B07894S727 https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Microwave-Small-Works-Al... Anova $200 sous-vide cooker has Alexa integration, https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/anova-voice-integration https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/anova-voice-integration run status temp raise or lower timer elapsed, remaining or change stop
- metadat 3y agoIf you can't see well, what is the most effective way to ensure the pan gets super sparkly clean afterwards?
- jolmg 3y agoI'm not blind, but the way I wash dishes, when I rinse I press my fingers against the surface and slide with a bit of force through as much surface as I can. If my fingers don't skip across, it's not clean enough. It ideally should make that audible squeaky-clean sound. I also identify minuscule stuck pieces of food through touch rather than sight. I need to not feel those for it to be clean.
- supportengineer 3y agoSame. My fingers tell me when the dishes are clean, not my eyes.
- buttercraft 3y agoYes, this is the only way to clean by hand. Your fingers feel things that your eyes could never see.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoA water break test[1] is even more sensitive, but requires vision. Total overkill for cooking though, even your skin oil left by touching the pot will cause it to fail the test. [1] https://www.astm.org/f0022-21.html https://www.astm.org/f0022-21.html
- VBprogrammer 3y agoHehe, that reminds me of one of the Applied Science videos where he's trying to get a coating to adhere to glass by various extreme cleaning techniques. Afterwards he says something like "washing the dishes is basically just scraping off the big lumps of food."
- sva_ 3y ago> anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances. As a person with pretty good sight (140% with glasses), I have to say that these sort of devices tend to be difficult to use even for me. For example, my father has an inductive stove with a touch interface, and I commonly fail to properly use it on the "subsequent first tries". When I see a touch screen interface that is completely static (same "buttons" at the same positions), I often wonder what led to the decision to utilize them instead of just using hardware buttons/knobs. Is it a cost-saving measure, or just some managerial person who decided they needed to use something more modern?
- speed_spread 3y agoCost saving. They can reuse the same part with a different firmwares on different models.
- dotancohen 3y agoIt is also replacing a multitude of parts with what is essentially a single part from the perspective of manufacturing and inventory.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eimrine 3y agoSince we are talking about kitchen, sensor buttons on anything are easier while cleaning from fats than all kinds of moving buttons/switches.
- molloy 3y agoMight possibly be easier or more fun to dump the app when it’s loaded into RAM then repackage it and run it on your phone.
- makeitdouble 3y agoAs realtime OCRing from a phone is getting better, I wonder how hard it would be to have a glass mounted camera paired with the phone to read aloud any text that is pointed at by the user's finger. No fancy object recognition or trying to be smart, just fast and solid reading aloud.
- stacktrust 3y agoThis is an accessibility feature in iOS 17! "Point and Speak" in Magnifier. Only on LIDAR iPhones. https://www.slashgear.com/1409409/apple-point-speak-feature-explained/ https://www.slashgear.com/1409409/apple-point-speak-feature-...
- zubairq 3y agoThanks, I like this take on sight. Sometimes I close my eyes and all my other senses seem to come alive
- User23 3y agoRemember pantelligent? That was the saddest casualty of the patent troll kitchen wars so far.
- VBprogrammer 3y agoAs someone with a colour vision deficiency I sometimes struggle with things like "this meat is in date but smells a bit iffy." I can't even begin to imagine how much more of a struggle being blind would be in the kitchen. I remember as a child we had someone visit us in school, I remember we talked about how they made a cup of tea, which seemed difficult enough, I never stopped to consider how they would make a Bolognese!
- Mezzie 3y ago> I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses. I'm visually impaired/low vision with some neurological visual issues but I pass as sighted and this is really it. Vision takes so much work - I'm definitely going to describe it as a 'greedy' sense + steal your bandwidth analogy.
- stacktrust 3y agoThe neural cost of vision is relevant to those who wear vision-correcting glasses, e.g. what's the neural impact of choosing to have non 20/20 vision in some daily situations? Or altering the duty cycle of the eye? https://www.imagethink.net/true-or-false-vision-rules-the-brain/ https://www.imagethink.net/true-or-false-vision-rules-the-br... > when our eyes are open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain – a full 2 billion of the 3 billion firings per second – which was the finding of neuroanatomist R.S. Fixot in a paper published in 1957 .. half of all neural tissue deals with vision in some way. > According to John Medina in his book Brain Rules, in the fight for more neural real estate that’s going on between our olfactory cortex and the visual cortex, vision is winning. He writes: “about 60 percent of our smell-related genes have been permanently damaged in this neural arbitrage, and they are marching toward obsolescence at a rate fourfold faster than any other species sampled.”
- looping8 3y agoForgive me if this is an insensitive question and feel free not to answer, but do you care about the way your food looks when it's done? I mean to say that many restaurants put a lot of time into how the dish looks, the way they put things on the plate. Do you completely disregard it or do you put the ingredients in a particular way that is convenient to eat?
- stacktrust 3y agoSecondhand observations on plate layout, not aesthetics: - red plate can increase contrast with food - non-slip mat to reduce plate movement - food bumper or edge to push food onto utensil - food type by compartments and/or clock face location Tableware design for low-vision users, https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/24/see-eat-through-tableware-visually-impaired-people-design-academy-eindhoven-aurore-brard/ https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/24/see-eat-through-tableware-... > most of the products available for visually impaired people are functional but not aesthetic .. I was quite shocked at how some solutions can become stigmatising objects, like a beeping electrode that is attached to a glass that gives off an alarm signal when it is full," .. "I wanted each functional feature to become part of the aesthetics in this tableware set. So that it is really integrated and the collection can appeal to people without vision problems.. > "With five per cent vision, pouring a glass of water is like pouring something invisible into something invisible," .. "Visually impaired people can, however, perceive colour contrasts," she explained. It was an exciting puzzle for me to try to use colours and the refraction of light into water to give a visual signal when there is enough water in the glass." Food service plating in healthcare settings, https://gfs.com/en-us/ideas/perfect-plating-creates-a-positive-healthcare-dining-experience/ https://gfs.com/en-us/ideas/perfect-plating-creates-a-positi... > The color of the plate makes a difference, especially for people in memory care or with vision and depth-perception issues. “A red plate can help foods—especially light-colored foods like poultry, pork, potatoes and corn—stand out,” .. plates with rims or raised edges.. help diners scoop up food.
- looping8 3y agoThat's really insightful, thank you! I didn't even consider that pouring a glass of water would be a challenge or that the common solution is an electrode.
- rst4455 3y agoSide note, I couldn't help notice that both your comment and the article at one point spell the word "meat" with a double E (as in meeting) - we can tell it's a speech-to-text mishap given the context here, but it makes me wonder how often this happens, and how much of an issue this is when the tool is used on a daily basis. It's not a voice recognition issue as presumably both pronounciations are identical - so it's up to the software to infer the right word from context cues or grammar rules. I've noticed quite a leap in the quality of dictation/STT over the past 10 years or so, and I really hope this and other features can continue to improve at this pace.