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Tortilla burgers recipe

In September 2023 I had a delicious tortilla burger in a restaurant called Burger Berg in Děčín, Czechia, after a via ferrata experience on the Shepherd’s Wall. Since then I’ve occasionally fondly remembered the dish, but I’ve never before or since seen such a dish in any other restaurant. This week I finally decided to just go ahead and make my own tortilla burgers.

The following recipe serves two adults (two tortilla burgers each) and two kids (one tortilla burger each). The dish is great for small kids who might often struggle to keep all the ingredients inside a normal burger, but this one wraps them into a nice package. Here’s a photo of the original dish I had:

Tortilla burger in a restaurant.

Ingredients

The meat

  • 400 g minced meat (beef or mixed)
  • 1 small brown onion
  • 1–3 garlic cloves
  • 2 tablespoons of mustard
  • pinch of salt
  • pinch of pepper
  • powdered red pepper (or smoked paprika)

The other stuff

  • 6 large tortillas
  • 6 slices of cheddar cheese
  • 1 large tomato
  • burger sauce (mayo)
  • ketchup
  • some lettuce
  • pickles
  • some oil for cooking
  • fries
  • (Coke Zero for drinking)

Instructions

  1. Remember to put the fries into the oven at some point according to their specific cooking instructions.
  2. Chop the onion and the garlic fine.
  3. Mix with the minced meat. Add the salt, pepper, red pepper, and mustard too.
  4. Divide the meat into six equal pieces, then flatten them into steaks about 1 cm thick.
  5. Fry the steaks on a pan for roughly 8 minutes or until looking good.
  6. Slice the tomato.
  7. Apply burger sauce on the center of each tortilla, then circle the sauce with ketchup.
  8. Insert a steak on top of the sauce, rub it slightly against it to spread it evenly.
  9. Add a slice of tomato, a few pieces of lettuce, pickles, and a slice of cheddar.
  10. Wrap the tortillas snugly, then heat them on the pan for a minute or so to give them color and warmth.
  11. Serve immediately with fries and ketchup, and an ice cold Coke Zero.

This was a hit and I’ll be making these again. You could conceivably use many other ingredients too, besides the ones mentioned, but I wanted to keep this one simple. I imagine red onion, coleslaw, bacon, nachos, salsa, and pineapple would all fit nicely into a tortilla burger as well.

Finally, as a bonus, here’s a photo of me on that via ferrata:

Nice view.

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Star Wars trivia

I’ve got a couple of little Star Wars fans at home, playing lightsaber fights and making LEGO Star Wars stop motion films. As such, I’ve recently been subjected to a lot of Star Wars trivia. This can happen at any time, like at the breakfast table (Star Wars is currently a banned topic at the dinner table). Here’s just a small sample of all the SW facts that I’ve recently learned:

So, that’s a few pieces of Star Wars trivia you’ll most likely never need, but who knows. Hopefully the links above didn’t send you too far into any rabbit holes – or rather any worm holes.

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Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones in 100 words

In my previous post I suggested that fewer words is always better. This is, of course, only true to a certain point. You should absolutely use as many words as necessary to deliver your message, just not much more. And even then, you can always count on Wiio’s Laws, the fundamental one of which goes “Communication usually fails, except by accident”. So, no matter what you write, someone will still, anyway, understand it wrong, so you might as well just relax. But, here goes the summary for the Attack of the Clones:

Amidala’s assassination attempt has the Jedi chase the assassin, who is assassinated herself with a Kaminoan dart. Obi-Wan goes to Kamino where a clone army has been commissioned for the Republic. Clone template Jango Fett escapes to Geonosis. Obi-Wan follows, sees separatists, but is captured by Dooku. Anakin visits Tatooine due to nightmares about his mother, who dies. Anakin kills a Tusken tribe in revenge. Anakin and Amidala go rescue Obi-Wan but are almost fed to beasts, when other Jedi and the clone army intervene. Dooku escapes after lightsaber fights. Anakin and Amidala marry. Dooku presents superweapon plans to Sidious.

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Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 100 words

Happy May the Fourth! Here’s a 100 word summary of the first Star Wars movie of the prequel trilogy, The Phantom Menace (1999).

This is the third such summary I’ve written. Writing a 100 word summary is a really quick thing to do, so where the time is actually spent is when I’ve finished the initial version that’s exactly 100 words, and then I notice I’ve missed or misrepresented some plot twist and fixing that would require an additional five to ten words. Then I just need to go through what I’ve written and try to think of synonyms or other ways to say the same things with fewer words.

This reminds me of a pattern I’ve encountered at work: when I need to send an email (largely replaced by Slack nowadays) to someone I often read and reread my message a couple of times so that I can remove unnecessary words and make the actual subject more clear. Contrary, you can often tell if an email was written in a hurry if it’s a long and rambling one, when two or three sentences would’ve been enough. Key takeaway: prefer fewer words. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal even has a famous quote about this.

But, I digress. The point was (or was it?) to just summarize a movie:

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan attempt negotiations at the Trade Federation blockade over Naboo but are attacked. They meet Jar Jar and save Queen Amidala. Running the blockade R2-D2 saves them. They land on Tatooine where slave boy Anakin with Jedi reflexes wins freedom in a pod-race. Moving to Coruscant, Amidala pleads Naboo’s case. Jedi Council denies Anakin’s training, but Qui-Gon disobeys. Senator Palpatine becomes Chancellor. Returning to Naboo, the Jedi face Darth Maul. Qui-Gon dies but Maul is cut in half by Obi-Wan. Meanwhile Ani accidentally launches in a fighter. He destroys the command ship, shutting down the attacking droid army.

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 100 words

I recently watched Rogue One for the first time again after seeing it in a theater in 2016. Needless to say the details were a bit fuzzy in my mind already, but here’s a 100 word summary I’ve now written about the plot – full of spoilers:

Flashback: Empire captures scientist Galen Erso, daughter Jyn escapes. Present: rebels find Jyn to reach extremist Saw Gerrera in Jedha. Saw holds a defected Imperial pilot with a message from Galen, whom Cassian is ordered to eliminate. Jyn sees the message, revealing Galen sabotaged Death Star with a hidden flaw. Death Star destroys Jedha City, Jyn and Cassian escape to Eadu where Galen dies. Rebels mount an attack to Scarif to retrieve the Death Star plans, managing to transmit the plans to Leia’s ship after blind monk Chirrut saves the day. Scarif base is destroyed, attacking rebels die, hope survives.

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Kevätpörriäinen

In Finland we have this thing called Kevätpörriäinen (“Spring Bee”). It’s an annual maganize that publishes stories, drawings, jokes, and puzzles by the Helsinki-area elementary school pupils. The magazine was founded already in 1949 so there must exist families where three generations have already contributed to it. The magazine represents a great tradition and is held in high esteem. You can only buy it from the pupils of the participating schools (or online) and the profits go towards the schools' benefits.

Sometimes the jokes in Kevätpörriäinen have even been read aloud in the Finnish equivalents of late night shows on TV. I figured I’d now do the English-speaking world a service and translate a few jokes from this year’s issue:

What’s a robot’s favorite genre of music?
Metal.
—Frida 1B

Big brother told his little brother:
“Look, a dead seagull.”
Little brother looked at the sky, screaming: “Where, where?!"
—Lauri 4B

What did a ghost say to another?
“Do you believe in humans?"
—Anni & Erika 4C

How do pandas get to a hospital?
With a bamboolance.
—Lumi & Selja 3B

Which birds fly higher than the tallest skyscraper in the world?
All of them, because skyscrapers don’t fly.
—Oliver 3A

A teacher went to see a doctor.
“When I push my index finger on my shoulder it hurts a lot. What’s wrong with me?”
The doctor replied: “You have a broken index finger."
—Kristiina & Taimi 2B

What’s a snake’s favorite subject at school?
Hissstory.
—Luka 3A

A snake asked another:
“Are we poisonous?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because I just bit myself on the lip."
—Isabel 1A

“Doctor, my hearing has got really bad. I can’t even hear my own farts anymore."
The doctor writes a prescription.
“Will my hearing improve with this medicine?”
“No, but your farts will become louder."
—Niilo 4C

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Random Things Sunday #4

Just a couple of things this time. Not going to force it if I don’t have something worth sharing. 🤷

  • A live-updating version of the ‘What a week, huh?’ meme: source code and documentation at github.com/dnlzro/tintin or just see it live here: tintin.dlazaro.ca
  • Patrick Trainer (ab)used the DuckDB RDBMS by creating a Doom-like game engine where SQL queries do all the rendering logic. Kudos and hats off to this amazing (and utterly impractical) hack: www.hey.earth/posts/duckdb-doom
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Trip to LEGOLAND

Last week, April 16-20, my family and I did an Easter holiday trip to LEGOLAND in Billund, Denmark. The kids had never been on a plane and Denmark is not too far away from Finland, so it was an easy start, plus LEGO bricks are close to our hearts, so it was a good match of new experiences.

Read More →

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The Best of Finnish TV in 2025

I don’t watch a lot of Finnish dramas, but 2025 will be written in history for me, as I’ve already seen three great shows this year, which is about three more than I can remember from the decade before.

First, there was Konflikti, aired by MTV3. Technically it was late 2024, but I’ll include it here anyway. In the series unmarked green men attack and take over the Hanko peninsula in the very southernmost point of mainland Finland. The show follows several different people or groups of people. A group of conscripts were practicing in the area when the incident started and are now trying to survive in the middle of an actual enemy; special forces are conducting a reconnaissance mission to the invaded area; the president and the prime minister have very different opinions on how to resolve the situation; and some more.

The very first episode caught me by surprise with some professional military slang that was not explained – you just had to know or deduce it from the context. So the dialog is well written and the budget has been big for a Finnish show, with tanks, ships, and fighter jets zooming around. The show lasts for just six episodes, so there is not too much space for character development, but the characters are different and believable enough. 💥

The next show I watched was Queen of Fucking Everything by Yle. This show follows Linda, a middle-aged woman who is accustomed to a pretty wealthy life with his perfect husband. However, the man turns out to be a scammer, leaving Linda drowning in debt. Linda tries her very best to cover her misfortune and sudden loss of credit records from her coworkers — the kind of people who buy expensive coffees from baristas and then might just abandon them if a meeting comes up – which pisses Linda off, naturally, if it was her turn to buy those coffees with the money she just got from a pawn shop.

The show gets increasingly unhinged in the best way. Eventually Linda, who turns out to be extremely resourceful but also very ruthless if need be, even gets involved with organized crime.

When watching the show you never know where it’s going. Sometimes it takes on some very dark tones, and sometimes the viewer can rightfully think that Linda is quite a bitch, but at the same time you still root for her, as she never asked to be dropped into a blender of social shame and financial ruin. 💸

The last show I’d like to highlight is Kurjen kirous by Nelonen. In this one the main character is an actor named Aki Kurki (played by Kari Ketonen). Aki is stuck in forgettable mediocre supporting roles. He’s convinced he’s meant for greater things and can’t understand why he’s never cast in anything significant. At one point he tells his manager Hannu (the great Antti Holma) that he doesn’t want to do any “crazy neighbors” anymore, which is a fun nod towards Kari Ketonen’s role as a crazy neighbor in another great show called Luottomies.

Anyway, Aki is cast as a fortune teller in some show. The role is very small, but being the serious actor he is, he prepares diligently by booking an appointment with an actual fortune teller. The man offers to do a reading for Aki and finds out that Aki has a curse on him. Being a rationalist Aki walks out from the session – only to witness a smaller prediction by the fortune teller come true.

This offers Aki an explanation for his stalled career: it’s not that he’s had bad luck or anything, but he has been cursed! So, he embarks on a side quest to find out who cursed him, and whether that person could lift the curse, allowing his career to finally take off.

Aki, like Linda in Queen of Fucking Everything, is a multi-faceted character: he is often arrogant and self-important, but at the same time he’s trying to mend his relationship with his teenage daughter and to maintain other relationships too. And of course he takes acting very seriously – just not always the productions he’s in if he doesn’t think they have the artistic value he’d deserve. 🎭

So there you have it: three good Finnish TV shows that might some day even make it abroad as adaptations. Watch these if you get the chance. 📺

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Zero peach thought 💭

For a “zero peach” drink this one is surprisingly peachy. 🤔🍑📸

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Tiny Experiments

I’ve been listening to the Hanselminutes podcast for some eight or nine years already, and it is in fact the reason I created myself a Micro.blog blog in the first place. Scott is an empathetic and knowledgeable host and the guests and topics are diverse. Furthermore, I find the half an hour episode length just perfect for commutes when I listen to the show at an ever so slightly increased 1.1x speed. 🎙️

In a recent episode #991 Scott had a chat with Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff about her new book Tiny Experiments. What resonated with me in the show was when they discussed that people are being too absolute about the things they want to do or be. Way too often someone announces that they, say, will start going to a gym, then buy a membership for a year, and then slowly find out it’s not for them after all after the first couple of months. This is then considered a failure and will negatively affect their self image.

The better way to do this would’ve been to think that I think I might like going to a gym, then buy a membership for a month, and then just try it out. If you didn’t like going to a gym then fine, you tried, your hypothesis proved to be wrong, you learned something without losing too much time or money. It was a learning experience instead of a failure.

In a sense this entire blog is a tiny experiment for myself. I have no idea if I’ll still be blogging in a year, but so far I’ve been enjoying it, and it’s certainly not too expensive when Micro.blog plans start at just $1 per month (which is the plan I’m currently using).

So, that’s something to ponder about. If you have children, you tell them that it’s alright and indeed encouraged to just try, you don’t need to succeed. At which point does an adult switch to a mode where it’s not OK to “just try” but you’re expected to commit and succeed?

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Random Things Sunday #3: Color

This time there’s a common theme with the links: color. 🎨 I’ve recently been subtly tweaking the colors of my blog, so I’ve (re)discovered these resources:

  • WebAIM accessibility checker. Check that the contrast between foreground and background colors is big enough. You don’t even need to be old or have bad eyesight to benefit from good contrast, as sometimes the external circumstances like a glare on your screen make the text hard to read if the contrast is not there. There’s really no excuse for bad contrast.
  • Name all the colors at Color Names.org. This is a fun effort to name all the 16,777,216 colors in the RGB color space. Almost a quarter of the colors have been named as of writing this. No need to register, just pick a color and think of a name for it! For example, the dark mode background color of this blog is called Oriental Popcornflower. 🍿💐
  • macOS has a built-in utility app called Digital Color Meter with which you can pick the color code of anything on your screen.
  • Finally, an infuriating optical illusion: these two faces are the same color! The illusion is based on a phenomenon called color constancy, where the surrounding context tricks our brain.
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Quote of the day

So much of cybersecurity is “We must secure the Orphan Crushing Machine so that unauthorized people do not crush the orphans,” and not “Why the fuck are you building an Orphan Crushing Machine in the first place?”

–evacide@hachyderm.io

The replies to this thought are also golden, check them out by following the link above. 💎💬😄

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Terry Pratchett: The Light Fantastic

Finished reading: The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett 📚

The Light Fantastic picks up exactly where The Colour of Magic left off: the wizard Rincewind and the tourist Twoflower are in serious trouble. Beyond their personal predicament, it turns out the entire Discworld is facing an existential threat.

While dodging both general and personal dangers, Rincewind and Twoflower encounter trolls and join forces with the legendary Hero, Cohen the Barbarian. Tales of Cohen’s heroic deeds have been told for decades, so naturally, the man himself turns out to be 87 years old. Still, he gets a bit offended if fewer than five enemies attack him at once — after all, life gets boring without a challenge.

In this book, Sir Terry Pratchett seems to have reined in his ideas a bit, resulting in a more coherent story than the first one. That said, I still preferred The Colour of Magic, since the whole “saving the world” plot in The Light Fantastic felt a bit tacked on. Still, it wasn’t a bad read by any means.

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Random Things Sunday #2

Three random things!

  • Something to listen. My brilliant colleague Annika Madejska, who is something of a thought-leader in the ethics of AI, was recently interviewed in the Creative Leaders Unplugged podcast. Listen to the episode where she shares not only her thoughts about ethics and AI, but about having ADHD, or being “neuro-spicy”, as she puts it! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.
  • Something to read. I don’t use Facebook a lot, but one of the best groups there is the Dull Men’s Club®️. People make long posts with images about mundane stuff they’re excited about – think parking lots, drain covers, and envelopes – and the general vibe just is so supportive compared to your usual toxicity of the internet. As an inside joke, the images are often expected to contain a banana for scale. 🍌
  • Something to watch. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is an American half an hour long news satire late-night talk show with British sarcasm. Oliver delivers commentary and deep dives into all kinds of topical matters, often about the government, big companies, or public figures. It’s my main source of information into what’s wrong with the USA. You might want to start with, say, the episode about data brokers , which explains that if you’re using a free product, then you are in fact the product.
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Saalo's Law of Software Development

When you’ve been long enough in the software development business you start to notice patterns. One of those patterns recently surfaced again when someone in my team floated the idea that our system should be able to read or write Excel files. I’ve seen and implemented this particular request so many times that I got inspired to write it down as an adage. I’ve dubbed it Saalo’s Law of Software Development and it goes as follows:

Every piece of enterprise software eventually evolves into either reading or writing Excel files.

I originally posted this just to the company Slack where my peers unanimously agreed that yes, this is exactly what happens. There’s something about spreadsheets that makes them the universal translator of the business world – no matter how sophisticated your system, someone always needs that Excel import or export function.

So there you have my humble observation on how enterprise software works. My law may not be as well known (yet!) as Hofstadter’s, Brooks', or Parkinson’s laws, but maybe one day. 😁

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Are you really using AI?

Yesterday I was scrolling through my feed when I came across a short video by Allie K. Miller, who’s something of a thought leader in the AI business space. She mentioned that you probably use AI already, but asked if you’re really using it? AI can enable so many novel use cases that merely enhancing your old processes is kind of wasting its full potential.

It made me stop and think. Like many, I’ve been using AI tools here and there - asking ChatGPT to help with writing, generating some ideas, maybe summarizing content. But am I actually reimagining how I work?

Allie mentioned how after 10 years of creating AI content (7 of those without AI tools), she completely rebuilt her workflow. Now she dictates to Otter AI while walking, runs her content through multiple AI systems, and formats everything in Beehiiv with auto-links. More steps, but apparently 80% time saved. That’s not just enhancement.

I wonder if most of us are in that “scratching the surface” phase with AI that Allie mentions. We’re asking AI to help with tasks we already do, rather than rethinking what tasks we should be doing in the first place.

I’m obviously not using AI to its fullest potential either. My current workflows still look pretty much like they did a couple of years ago, with some AI assistance sprinkled in rather than built around them. There’s something to think about there.

(By the way, I don’t often subscribe to newsletters, but I do follow Allie’s work. If any of this piqued your interest, you might want to check out her newsletter at AI with Allie.)

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Vibe coding an ant colony simulator

When it comes to household chores, ironing is one of my favorites as it often allows me to shorten my “Watch later” playlist (771 videos there as of writing this…) in YouTube. Last time I did ironing I watched this cool video of an ant colony simulator:

The fun thing is that it creates fascinating emergent behavior from a few simple rules. The ants walk around randomly, leaving behind a trail of pheromones like breadcrumbs pointing back home, and when they encounter food, they pick some up and follow the pheromone trail back to the nest. While carrying food they leave behind another type of pheromone that point the ants to the food source.

This seemed like an interesting exercise in vibe coding where you just describe your need in your own words and let an AI do the actual programming for you. Vibe coding seems to split the opinions sharply: some find that it makes coding more equal and available to anyone, others loathe the idea of an influx of AI-generated trash.

Read More →

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Terry Pratchett: The Colour of Magic

Finished reading: The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett 📚

According to a legend, somewhere on the far side of the Disc, beyond the great sea, lies the Counterweight Continent. Since it’s assumed to balance the Disc’s other landmasses, yet appears relatively small, it’s believed to consist largely of heavy gold. Few sane people, of course, believe this story — until one day, a ship sailing up the smelly Morpork river brings a Tourist to the shores of Ankh-Morpork.

The locals don’t understand what a “tourist” is, but quickly deduce it means roughly the same as “idiot”. The man dresses oddly, acts strangely, and carries an absurd amount of gold — whose value he doesn’t seem to grasp. He’s also accompanied by a sentient pearwood chest, the Luggage, which is generally docile but turns into an unstoppable, murderous beast if its master is threatened.

Rincewind, a wizard who failed utterly at wizardry and is mostly a coward — though otherwise fairly clever — finds that he can speak the tourist’s language. The tourist, Twoflower, hires Rincewind as his guide. Soon, Ankh-Morpork is entirely ablaze, and Rincewind and Twoflower are fleeing by land, sea, and air.

The Colour of Magic launched the now-famous Discworld series in 1983, and over thirty novels have followed. Quite the achievement, especially considering this book alone is so packed with ideas and events that it feels like Pratchett wanted to include every concept he had.

I originally borrowed the book for my second grader, but after he found it too confusing after the first couple dozen pages, I ended up reading it myself. I’ve probably read it long ago, but Pratchett’s absurd British humor still hits the mark for me — and presumably for other fans of Monty Python and Douglas Adams as well.

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List(s) of Random Things

About a week ago I was exploring other random blogs when I came across the 7 Things This Week [#172] post by Jarrod Blundy. What caught my eye was the number on the title: Jarrod has been persistently listing seven things each week for more than three years already! In this day and age of single-click fire-and-forget retweets I find it admirable that someone can resist that urge to share the links immediately and do instead a little bit of curating, even adding a sentence or two of their own justifying why a particular link is interesting.

It surprised me too that literally just a random collection of links had this effect on me, so I dug deeper using Gemini’s new Deep Research feature. (And this time I mean that Google AI, not the Gemini protocol.) I must say Gemini is impressive: it formed a research plan according to my ramblings, then went away and crunched the internet for maybe ten minutes or so, and eventually returned with a convincing full report of the history of “lists of things” in print and online media.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but I learned, for example, that the Time magazine started a Potpourri column of random things already in 1923. For the online world, an early example of something similar is Dave Winer’s DaveNet newsletter that started in 1994. I looked it up and found the DaveNet archive – and oh boy isn’t it a treasure trove if you’re interested in the early world wide web! Dave covered, for example, the browser wars that I also recently referred to, and the rise of the new and exciting programming language called Java. Dave wrote his newsletter for ten years and posted between one and a dozed emails each month, so check it out!

As for myself, I won’t dare to commit to posting a regular list of things, but I’ll keep the concept in mind and start now with a very short list. Specifically, it’s a shout out to a couple of my favorite YouTubers and their most recent work.

Random Things Sunday