The Lego Mirror - Life

Cannoli Crawl in the City

2025-02-03T02:34:00+00:00

Editor's note: the following is a guest post from my sister, Rayna, about the "Cannoli Crawl" we did this past weekend. —Kunal

My friends are often surprised to find out that cannoli are one of my favorite desserts. In their defense, I talk about ice cream far more frequently. Still, I'm always on the lookout for cannoli when eating at Italian resturants and am often left disappointed. I had some fantastic cannoli in Philadelphia last November, so it was fresh on my mind when planning out this weekend's visit to New York City.

I spent the last week searching different Reddit threads and food blogs to compile a list of the most-loved cannoli in the city. I was naively expecting most of them to be in Little Italy, but the recommendations included one place in The Bronx and a few deep in Brooklyn. We only made it to four of the places on the list, which means there are still more places to visit next time.

The rating system is not as detailed as Kunal's Boba Quest but we did our best to detail our likes and dislikes. Along for the journey were Kunal's girlfriend, Kajol, and her sister, Mannat. Unfortunately, while all of the places we tried had nut-free cannoli options, they wouldn't guarantee that they were nut-allergy safe because of possible cross-contamination. As a result, it's mostly thoughts from myself, Kunal, and Mannat.

Our first stop: La Bella Ferrara in Little Italy, which had a good selection of mini- and regular-sized cannoli. Flavors included tiramisu, cookies and cream, red velvet, and more, but we started with the original to keep it simple.

Rayna: 8/10 I liked the sweetness of the filling and the variety of the options available. I appreciated that the chocolate chips were spread throughout the filling, but wanted more of them.

Kunal: 8/10 My biggest complaint was that the shell fell apart in my hands as soon as I took a bite.

Mannat: 9/10 My first-ever cannoli, I was very happy with the new dessert. I also wanted more chocolate chips.

Overall, a really promising start to the Cannoli Crawl!

One block over: Caffé Palermo, which advertises itself as the home of the "Cannoli King". They had lots of cannoli themed decor, including a giant plastic cannoli. We went a little off-script, getting some non-original flavors.

Rayna, hazelnut flavor: 5.5/10 The hazelnut flavor was good, but the pastry shell was unimpressive. There were also not enough chocolate chips, but they get half a point back because the cannoli were served with powdered sugar. Kunal is unhappy I am awarding half points, but it's my blog post so I make the rules.

Kunal, original: 6/10 The flavor was eh and the shell broke while eating.

Mannat, cookies and cream: 6/10 It just tasted like cream with crushed cookies on the outside — the flavor wasn't consistent. The shell also wasn't good, but the powdered sugar was nice.

Overall, we were unimpressed. :(

Around the corner was our third stop: Ferrara Bakery and Cafe, where they only had regular and chocolate dipped shells, so we all chose the former. Kajol took a bite of this one, so her review is included too.

Rayna: 8/10 I liked the cream and the pastry shell, but this one was severely lacking in chocolate chips — I think I got four in my entire cannoli. They also only had one size, unlike the previous two places which had mini and regular options.

Kunal: 7/10 This was the best cream so far but the shell broke apart too fast.

Mannat: 7/10 Agreed that this was the best cream so far but I wasn't a fan of the shell — it was too crumbly and needed more flavor. It also needed more chocolate chips.

Kajol: 9/10 The cream and shell were both pretty good but they lose a point for not having enough chocolate chips.

For our last stop, we went to Pasticceria Rocco in the West Village. These were the only cannoli to be filled fresh, the effect of which is easily apparent in our ratings 😅. With only one size available, they had two options for the ends: dipped in chocolate chips or crushed pistachios. We all opted for chocolate chips.

Rayna: 10/10 The flavor was fantastic, along with the amount of chocolate chips on the ends. The shell was also the right texture and didn't fall apart. It would have been nice if the chocolate chips went throughout but the fresh filling was the star and made up for any shortcomings.

Kunal: 9/10 This was easily the best of the day; the cream was fresh and the shell didn't instantly fall apart in my hands.

Mannat: 10/10 This was great but I still liked the first one best.

At this point we were out of time and also cold, so we passed on the original plan of also visiting two spots in Brooklyn and one in Astoria — we'll save those for next time.

All in all, the Cannoli Crawl was a success. Pasticceria Rocco is our clear favorite, while Caffe Palermo was the biggest letdown. I am extremely content with how we spent our afternoon and my cannoli craving has been satisfied, for now.

Wiki burnout

2024-05-31T04:48:29+00:00

Yeah, I burned out from wiki things. I flew too close to the sun, tried to take on too many projects and cool ideas and then crashed and let people down. I'm sorry.

I participate in wiki communities because, aside from believing in free knowledge, etc., it's really fun. And then it stopped being fun, so I just...stopped. In some aspects it was nice, I spent my time doing a lot of other IRL things (I bought a bike), but I also missed doing wiki things.

And so I'm slowly starting to get back into things. I'll try to get back to everyone...eventually. I'm not really sure what's next in my queue. I'm trying to not jump back into what I was doing previously because that doesn't really solve the burnout problem but also I owe people some work.

I'll be at the "All-Day Hacking Sunday" this weekend in New York City, it should be fun and hope to hang out with people there.

Tracking my book reading online

2023-07-08T01:00:00+00:00

I tend to spend a lot of time reading. When I was a kid it was as many books I could carry home from the library; later it would become newspapers, blogs and online things.

I never bothered to track what I was reading, because there was so much of it and re-reading something you enjoyed isn't that bad. It also felt invasive (in a privacy sense), but that was mostly because everyone was using the Amazon-owned Goodreads. For a while I used the perfectly named "Badreads" app, but I never felt comfortable with it.

Anyways, this is all to say that I now have an account on bookrastinating.com (also perfectly named!!), which runs the ActivityPub-enabled BookWyrm software.

You can follow me as: @legoktm@bookrastinating.com. I've been posting everything as followers-only, and I'm planning to only approve people I know well (my current vague criteria is that we've met in real life). The actual federation from Mastodon is pretty meh, you can see when I add books to my "to read" list and when I start and finish books, but can't read the actual reviews I've been writing. I'm curious to see if it's better for people who are federating from other BookWyrm instances. If I end up writing something brilliant that I want public I'll probably publish it on my blog.

In any case, I'm fine with those limitations for now, this is largely an exercise in tracking what I read rather than trying to be uh, social about what I read. I appreciate that BookWyrm seems to have some actual privacy controls in place instead of Mastodon's "everything is public".

One year in New York City

2023-03-03T05:03:12+00:00

The first time I heard the song Welcome to New York, my reaction was something along the lines of "Eh, decent song, except she's wrong. West Coast Best Coast."

I would like to formally apologize to Taylor Swift for doubting her and state for the record that she was absolutely right.

Today is the one year anniversary of me touching down at LGA and dragging two overstuffed suitcases to Brooklyn, woefully unprepared for the cold. My sister came up on the train the next day to help me apartment hunt and mocked me for questioning why she wasn't zipping up her jacket given that it was "literally freezing" outside (narrator: it was not).

It's been a whirlwind of a year, and nothing describes New York City better than "it keeps you guessing / it's ever-changing / it drives you crazy / but you know you wouldn't change anything".

I mostly feel like a "true New Yorker" now, having gotten stuck in the subway (I love it though), walked across the Brooklyn Bridge (also love it), and e-biked up and down all of Manhattan (very much love it).

I met and photographed Chris Smalls, spoke at HOPE 2022 and rode a bunch of trains. I have tried at least 25 different boba tea shops and somehow the best one is literally the one closest to me.

New Yorkers get a bad reputation for being unfriendly, but my experience has been the opposite. From my friends (and family!) that helped me move my stuff here and find an apartment to the Wikimedia NYC folks who made me feel at home right away, everyone is super nice and was excited that I moved. (Also couldn't have done it without the cabal, you know who you are.) I'm very grateful and hope I have the opportunity to pay it forward someday.

I still miss California and the West Coast mentality but I miss it less and less every day.

2022 goals, revisited

2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

I set some goals for myself at the beginning of the year.

Here's how it went:

Move out of my parents' house.
✔️ I live in New York City now. This was definitely my biggest goal and accomplishment of the year.
Contribute something meaningful to SecureDrop.
✔️ I think so. I need to writeup some of the stuff I worked on in the past year.
Contribute something meaningful to MediaWiki.
✔️ Slightly more mixed because I contributed a lot less this year than in the past, but I still consider myself having contributed in a meaningful way.
Not get COVID.
❌ Got it in June :(
Continue contributing to Mailman.
❌ Didn't really find the motivation this year. I'm hoping to spend more time on this in 2023, Wikimedia's Mailman install is showing that it needs more love.
Continue working on mwbot-rs, while having fun and learning more Rust.
✔️ I posted updates on the News page.
Get more stickers (lack of in-person meetups has really been hurting my sticker collecting).
✔️ Definitely. New stickers include FIRE, California poppies, Pacific Northwest, Qubes, HOPE 2022, Pinnacles National Park, a corgi, and very nice yellow and blue bird that says, "There is more power in peace than in violence".
Port the rest of my wiki bots to Rust.
❌ Still running in good old PHP. I don't really think this is worth it anymore, people are too used to the current bugs that introducing a different set of bugs would be more disruptive than helpful.
Make progress on moving wiki.debian.org to MediaWiki.
❌ No real progress :(
Write at least one piece of recognized content (DYK/GA/FA) for Wikipedia.
✔️ I racked up 4 DYKs this year, List of United States Supreme Court leaks (May 2022), Eleanor Bellows Pillsbury (June 2022), 2022 University of California academic workers' strike (Dec. 2022), and Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (Dec. 2022). Hitting the DYK threshold feels pretty straightforward now that I should probably aim for a GA!
Travel outside the US (COVID-permitting).
❌ I probably had the opportunity, but just didn't feel comfortable because of COVID. Planning at least two international trips in 2023!
Finish in the top half of our Fantasy Football league and Pick 'em pool. I did pretty well in 2020 and really regressed in 2021.
❓ Too early to say. Currently doing well in the Pick 'em pool, but not in Fantasy.
Keep track of TV show reviews/ratings. I've been pretty good about tracking movies I watch, but don't yet do the same for TV.
❌ Started, but didn't finish.

Publicly publishing a list of goals was nice, every few months I'd re-read the post to see if I was on track or not. But I don't intend to publish my 2023 goals, I expect they'll be more personal than these were.

2022 goals

2022-01-11T08:05:04+00:00

New year, new job, new goals. In no specific order:

Move out of my parents' house.
Contribute something meaningful to SecureDrop.
Contribute something meaningful to MediaWiki.
Not get COVID.
Continue contributing to Mailman.
Continue working on mwbot-rs, while having fun and learning more Rust.
Get more stickers (lack of in-person meetups has really been hurting my sticker collecting).
Port the rest of my wiki bots to Rust.
Make progress on moving wiki.debian.org to MediaWiki.
Write at least one piece of recognized content (DYK/GA/FA) for Wikipedia.
Travel outside the US (COVID-permitting).
Finish in the top half of our Fantasy Football league and Pick 'em pool. I did pretty well in 2020 and really regressed in 2021.
Keep track of TV show reviews/ratings. I've been pretty good about tracking movies I watch, but don't yet do the same for TV.

I'm hoping that 2022 will be better than the previous two years, the bar is really, really low.

Legoktm, B.S.

2020-11-24T07:23:23+00:00

Photo by Jesus Tellitud and Blue Nguyen

The Trustees of the California State University
on recommendation of the faculty of the
College of Humanities and the Arts
have conferred upon

Kunal Mehta

the degree of

Bachelor of Science

Journalism

So this makes me a scientist now, right? I used to joke that I was putting in all this work for a piece of paper, but now I'm actually very proud of this piece of paper.

I want to thank all of my family, who really kept me going and supported me no matter what.

Thanks to my professors and teachers at De Anza and San Jose State for giving me the opportunity and platform to explore and grow my love for journalism. I'm proud to be an alum of La Voz, Update News and the Spartan Daily.

Of course, the real treasure was all the friends I made along the way. But seriously, I'm so glad I met all of you, and I will treasure our relationships.

Thanks to my colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation for their furthering my professional development, assistance with networking, and just constant support. Also for indulging my sticker addiction.

To the IRC cabal: thanks for being the group of people I can turn to for help, no matter what time of day nor location. And for all the huggles.

I hope to celebrate in-person with you all ... soon.

P.S. Here are some more photos.

Yes, you can send a potato through the US mail

2019-03-17T07:13:39+00:00

A while back, a friend mentioned to me that you could send potatoes through the mail. I was pretty skeptical at the time, but basic Internet research confirmed what they told me.

So a little bit later I had the opportunity to send them something, and decided to test it out. If I sent them a potato, and just a potato in the mail, would they get it? As a wannabe journalist/fact checker/Wikipedian, how could I not!

Yep.

I took a raw potato, washed it, and wrote a short message with a marker.

Then I printed out an address label (because the potato wasn't large enough for me to handwrite it) and struggled with sticking it on. Clear tape didn't work, and neither did packaging tape. Duct tape to the rescue!

I went to the post office by SJSU, and the clerk there said it would take 2 days to be delivered. They also said they had been asked to mail plenty of other "weird things", and a potato wasn't that unusual. I got a receipt so I could "track the status of my potato". And someone in line commented that I should also be sending along some sour cream :P

And then I waited, tracking online. Two, three, four days passed, and it hadn't been delivered. The recipient was in San Jose, so it just needed to head to the sorting center and then go out for delivery.

That was when I lost hope, and deemed the potato lost. Some things just sound too good to be true.

...except a week after it was supposed to be delivered, it showed up! I assume it got lost at some point, but USPS is 👌 and got it to its destination.

BuzzFeed conveniently has a list of 20 other things that we can supposedly mail. What's next?

P.S.: PHP still considers "a potato" to be a valid time. MediaWiki won't let you though.

My letter to the Boy Scouts of America

2017-07-26T01:51:00+00:00

The following is a letter I just mailed to the Boy Scouts of America, following President Donald Trump's speech at the National Jamboree. I implore my fellow scouts to also contact the BSA to express their feelings.

25 July 2017

Boy Scouts of America
PO Box 152079
Irving, TX
75015-2079

Dear Boy Scouts of America,

Like many others I was extremely disappointed and disgusted to hear about the contents of President Donald Trump’s speech to the National Jamboree. Politics aside, I have no qualms with inviting the president, or having him speak to scouts. I was glad that some of the Eagle Scouts currently serving at high levels of our government were recognized for their accomplishments.

However above all, the Boy Scouts of America must adhere to the values of the Scout Law, and it was plainly obvious that the president’s speech did not. Insulting opponents is not “kindness”. Threatening to fire a colleague is not “loyal”. Encouraging boos of a former President is not “courteous”. Talking about fake news and media is not “trustworthy”. At the end of the day, the values of the Scout Law are the most important lesson we must instill in our youth – and President Trump showed the opposite.

The Boy Scouts of America must send a strong message to the public, and most importantly the young scouts that were present, that the president’s speech was not acceptable and does not embody the principles of the Boy Scouts of America.

I will continue to speak well of scouting and the program to all, but incidents like this will only harm future boys who will be dissuaded from joining the organization in the first place.

Sincerely,
Kunal Mehta
Eagle Scout, 2012
Troop 294
San Jose, CA

Building the Lego Saturn V rocket 48 years after the moon landing

2017-07-20T21:14:00+00:00

Full quality video available on Wikimedia Commons.

On this day 48 years ago, three astronauts landed on the moon after flying there in a Saturn V rocket.

Today I spent four hours building the Lego Saturn V rocket - the largest Lego model I've ever built. Throughout the process I was constantly impressed with the design of the rocket, and how it all came together. The attention paid to the little details is outstanding, and made it such a rewarding experience. If you can find a place that has them in stock, get one. It's entirely worth it.

The rocket is designed to be separated into the individual stages, and the lander actually fits inside the rocket. Vertically, it's 3ft, and comes with three stands so you can show it off horizontally.

As a side project, I also created a timelapse of the entire build, using some pretty cool tools. After searching online how to have my DSLR take photos on a set interval and being frustrated with all the examples that used a TI-84 calculator, I stumbled upon gphoto2, which lets you control digital cameras. I ended up using a command as simple as gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download -I 30 to have it take and save photos every 30 seconds. The only negative part is that it absolutely killed the camera's battery, and within an hour I needed to switch the battery.

To stitch the photos together (after renaming them a bit), ffmpeg came to the rescue: ffmpeg -r 20 -i "%04d.jpg" -s hd1080 -vcodec libx264 time-lapse.mp4. Pretty simple in the end!