Stoke your grills, summer's coming. We're already taking our spots at the grill, flipping meat like there’s no tomorrow. But over the winter, grilling skills may have gotten rusty along with the grill grates. With these guides, you’ll be ready for a summer’s worth of grilling in no time-whether you're an old pro or just starting out. Chicken satay? Got it. Whole grilled lamb? Check. Soft shell crabs? Bingo. If there was a definitive centerpiece to the grilling bookcase, it would be Steven Raichlen’s How to Grill. This book is essential just for its visual walkthroughs for almost every grilled technique and meat. From teaching a simple, mustard-rubbed T-bone steak to a primer on making skewers out of sugarcane, Raichlen runs the full grill gamut. Don't stoke a fire without reading this first. After cooking at fine dining establishments like NYC's Le Cirque and Daniel, Adam Perry Lang hung up his Rocket Chef’s whites for black t-shirts and backyard barbecue. In this book, Rocket Chef an Epicurious staff favorite, he shows off some innovative and-let’s just say intense-methods, like nestling meat directly on the fire’s coals.

A parasitic blight has woven itself into the fabric of our tools. With godlike precision, it tracks our behavior, learns our preferences, and anticipates our weaknesses. It knows everything, and it follows us everywhere. If we stray too far from its influence, our Happy Boxes dispatch reminders to Consume. Potent videodrugs lull us into mental anesthesia, then milk us for all we're worth. Our eyes kinda hurt. A familiar bitter flavor is faintly detected; this Content has been laced with something. The Algorithm looks on as additive advertisements steep in our subconsciouses. Maybe I should buy another mechanical keyboard? Our thoughts have been planted, and our carts floweth over. Were we moving too fast? Did we break too many things? Was putting profits before people really the wrong move? And, uh.. can this thing be undone? Twenty-six years ago, two technologists envisioned a different kind of future: one where humans and quiet, unobtrusive computers comfortably co-existed. In their prophetic 1996 essay The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown spoke of a time when tiny, Internet-enabled computers would be embedded in everything from clocks, to toys, to microwave ovens.

In Weiser and Brown's ideal future, our information systems would be deeply integrated into our physical environment. Subtle peripheral cues would clue us in when our attention was needed, but fade into the background when it wasn't. Contrasting the attention-leeching tools of today, Calm Technology promised to inform without overburdening. But where is this "Calm Tech", anyway? Weiser and Brown said its time was coming, but an ETA might have been nice. Maybe we should wait for our corporate overlords to build it for us? Or, perhaps, Calm Technology is something we must build for ourselves. In a previous experiment, I dumbed down my smartphone by permanently removing all but four essential applications. The result was certainly calmer, and even freeing, but vestigial user-interface elements, designed with the It Only Does Everything paradigm in mind, routinely got in my way. If I wanted to do this thing right (and I did), I knew that eventually, I'd have to rebuild my phone's operating system from the ground up.

Whetstone is my answer to this problem; a calm Operating System that informs without overburdening. This project actually started two years ago, when I developed a minimal launcher app called forte. Building forte was a breeze, but once I finished, I couldn't decide which problem to tackle next. The Whetstone project nearly drowned in development hell because I didn't have a plan. Actually, wait.. does this mean I'm done? Okay, wow. I really thought of everything. In an effort to find a path forward, I've gathered a messy pile of scribbles and scrawlings from two years of journals and sketchbooks. There's a lot here to go through, but, like the prospectors of yore, we'll sift through the silt till we sniff out some gold. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. I. Whetstone will be open source and free in every sense of the word. If this software is to be of maximum use to its users, it is imperative that the freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software be guaranteed from the get-go.

With this guarantee, I aim to remove as many barriers to entry as possible, so that any interested party may use the software however they see fit. To remove another barrier to entry, Whetstone will not cost anything. II. Whetstone will respect your attention. The software will be designed to help you do what you intend to do, and then be put away. Your attention is a scarce resource, and Whetstone will be designed to use as little as possible. III. Whetstone will respect your privacy. The software will collect no information from you, and be designed to protect any information stored on your device from collection by third parties. IV. Whetstone will be experimental. Weiser and Brown did say we'd have to "radically rethink" things, after all. In this digital playground, weird ideas will be welcomed with open arms. V. Whetstone will be personal. Out of the box, two phones may be identical, but over time they grow to be uniquely ours.