A new theory about Longlegs

There are many theories out there about Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. One of them is that Oz Perkins really can’t be bothered to give his movies a proper name. I mean, just look at his previous movies. “The Blackcoat’s Daughter”? What does that mean? The father famously does not show up in the movie so we have no idea what color his coat is, or the relevance to the whole story. I really liked the movie but the title kinda bugs me.

However I think there can be a good case made that “Longlegs” is actually the perfect name for this movie, for several reasons.

One of them is that it’s difficult to take Longlegs seriously. There’s a distinct lack of anything that’s really threatening there. This guy’s a loser, always was, always will be. He’s just this puffy-looking guy who seems to be about a year away from dying himself.

Now part of the threat he represents is the “normal” level of threat that people like me — straight white cis guys — don’t usually experience. It’s coming under the attention of some weirdo. And that’s something that has to be recognized.

But I think there’s a more pernicious dynamic at play here.

There’s an obvious source for killer’s monicker. It’s “daddy longlegs”, an insect (not a spider! this will be relevant later!) which tends to live in unseen parts of your habitat. I mean, these things are harmless. Contrary to all the silly urban legends you may have heard they effectively have no venom and cannot hurt any reasonably mobile human being.

And that’s the assumption that is essential to Longlegs’s success. He looks, acts and talks like a dingbat.

But the scary thing is, it apparently didn’t take much more than that to keep the FBI fooled back in the mid-90s. I mean, there are plot holes here that could encompass the entire LA area. There are obvious pitfalls for crime fighters back then who were still essentially working by phones (only recently made mobile!). There’s no internet. There’s no huge pool of data from which one could have made inferences. Although part of that is due to mind control — Lee Harker is clearly held back until her doll is destroyed — there are also a number of unforgiveable, almost comedic blunders. I mean, the murders are all connected to one particular birthday, and it didn’t occur to anyone to check what Harker’s DOB was? Or, for that matter, her boss’s daughter’s DOB? REALLY?!?

But that’s exactly the situation in which the viewer is put, in part by the very name. Daddy longlegs aren’t a threat. They’re not even proper spiders (whose bodies have two segments). They have 8 legs but that’s about it. Frankly a single house centipede would easily win a battle of fright with anyone over that goofy thing.

But therein lies the rub. Those little critters are just allowed to thrive, and they do, in attics and crawlspaces, frankly you probably don’t even know that you have them most of the time.

And likewise Longlegs literally lives in Lee Harker’s mom’s basement.

But that’s how evil propagates. It doesn’t do big political rallies. It is a way of life for so many people, just by being the “normal thing”. It just quietly drives wedges between people. Even between investigators. At the FBI. Who clearly should have been taken off the case were it not for some hidden force that has kept them there.

All of it was really easy to see, once you have the power of that force no longer bearing down on your judgement.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The strange allure of “realistic” simulator games

I never understood the point of The Sims. It’s already difficult enough to live one’s life without then coming home and living another one on a computer, really. Second Life seemed to somehow make it worse by inventing the concept of “virtual jobs”, “land” ownership and virtual corporations.

So I was rather surprised to find myself hooked on a game I’ve been playing for the past  couple of months: Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. It’s on Steam, and it’s one of those games I can in fact play on Linux. Basically you start out with a small garage, you do jobs, earn money, expand, and eventually you start doing things like buying cars, fixing and tuning them and then sell those cars for big profits.

So, great. It’s a video game that’s essentially a watered-down version of… a job. It’s a game sector that’s enjoyed considerable expansion in recent years, basically simulations of common place jobs. The biggest one of these is probably Farmer Simulator, but there are lots around covering everything from driving a bus to lawnmowing and even power-washing (!). They’re usually based on the template that you’re an entrepreneur starting a new service, and you grind your way to making that business a success.

Well, I’ve found that on several occasions by the time I shut down the game I look outside and the sun is coming back up. It’s very addictive — it seems to scratch an itch I haven’t had in a long time — the love of work.

If you asked me if it’s normal to want to work, my instinct is usually to say no. There are so many other ways to occupy one’s time! and yet I find myself constantly telling myself “ok, let’s renovate one more” whenever I play the game. So clearly I can take pleasure in work, in doing repetitive things for “credits” (which in this case do not convert to actual money, sadly.

In a way I’m reminded of a previous job I had as senior technical writer at Actional. I knew my stuff. It was in 2011-2012 and I was working mostly from home. I remember putting in work sometimes until 4am near release time as we had to produce docs for last-minute additions and make sure the online help worked correctly… then the test-and-repeat cycle.

Thing is, I didn’t mind doing this. To me this was part of the job. I and our other writer were producing the documentation, and my job was now to make sure everything worked, and I just did it, even if I was tired. That was work, but it was rewarding work.

And then it was all for nothing as in 2013 the company was sold to a VC firm that stripped everything down, getting rid of me and the other writer — as well as a bunch of other employees — and then, well, that lead to a bunch of other events in my life. And then I could never quite be coaxed into the idea that work (as a concept) was a positive thing, because the moment this started happening for me, the rug was pulled from under my feet like that and I ended up with nothing. I have no idea whether Actional is even a thing anymore, it’s at that level.

So, what makes this silly little sim game seem like what was really the most satisfying work experience in my life? Well, it’s the underlying “meta-mechanics” of the game. This is my “garage”. When I grind I earn credits. And also in-game achievements (I got all 46 of them). There was a progression. More work earns more money.

This is the way work is supposed to work.

So, this is not a very realistic representation of work. I mean, this is a computer simulation of manual work so there’s an obvious limit there. I don’t have to wash the grease from under my fingernails after playing, and I did start with a non-negligible sum of money by default, which starts you out on a fairly easy path. But the point remains. Hard work can be fun as long as it keeps being rewarded. Maybe it would be more realistic if, periodically — say, every year or so — a tornado ripped the whole garage out of the ground, a bit like the tech industry’s yearly spring wave of layoffs, and landed you there with zero credits, zero achievements, and no real way forward.

Which is kind of how I feel right now as someone who’s unemployed in the tech field despite 25+ years of technical documentation experience. And certainly this little note can help explain why I’m playing a mechanic in the first place. Right now I have a lot of time and nothing to do. I want to work hard and earn. But through a mix of job eliminations due to the promise (and not current capabilities) of AI, plus the glut of tens of thousands of tech workers having been recently laid off, it’s extremely difficult to find any job right now. And even if I do find something, how long before the company just “reorganizes” and lays me off as an employee with very little seniority? When is the next rug-pull coming?

So, that’s how it is. Sadly even my enjoyment of this game can best be seen as something driven by negative events and trends. It’s possible to enjoy work, and I have in the past, but it’s not something I’m likely to experience again in my life. And that’s pretty depressing.

A short trip through dependencies hell

With my recent embracing of Linux for my desktop PC, and my tendency to want to install various software that’s not necessarily ready for primetime, it was inevitable that I would run into the dreaded “dependencies hell” situation where something gets broken and ends up breaking other things. Well, I’m still typing this on my now-fixed Linux desktop, so this is definitely not one of these “screw Linux, I’m going back to Windows” post, and I’ll walk everyone through this incident in detail so that if by some chance you find yourself having a problem such as this, you will not panic and be able to repair things.

So yesterday I was going through some of my old archives and saw a big fonts package. We’re talking 1000+ fonts. I don’t want to install all of those, but I wanted to have a fonts manager app so I can have a visual preview of all of them and enable/disable some of them without wanting to move files around directly. One of the apps I saw listed as available for Linux was fontbase, and from the web site I thought it looked really interesting. It is distributed as an appImage, which I don’t like — we Linux users have to deal with multiple software packaging methods already — but it’s supposed to be a way software can be installed without requiring a separate app (like apt, flatpak, etc.) so I gave it a try.

Usually the way to install an appImage file is to make it executable and double-click it, so I do that… and nothing happens. I bring it up in Nautilus (“Files”), right-click and select run, and again, nothing. So I grumble and open a terminal from my Downloads folder and run it (with ./[file]), and get an error message:

dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2

AppImages require FUSE to run.
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage
if you run it with the –appimage-extract option.

This error occurs because Ubuntu switched from FUSE2 to FUSE3. A long time ago. However I did not know that, and foolishly did not research this ahead of time. So I assumed that FUSE was not installed at all, and that’s how this all started.

Naturally I went to a terminal and entered “apt install fuse”. Apt warned me it would have to install a lot of packages and, more importantly, remove a lot of packages. However I was in the middle of playing a game and was not paying sufficient attention. If I had been paying attention I would have noticed that the packages to be removed included things like “ubuntu-desktop”, which is pretty important on a working Ubuntu desktop system!

Unfortunately I just hit enter to start the process. This did not have any impact on running applications so I kept doing what I was doing, playing the game (it was “Car Mechanic Simulator” on Steam, if you’re curious), and then I watched the Japanese Grand Prix, and went to bed.

When I woke up is when I realized how badly I had screwed this up. I woke my computer from sleep, but I couldn’t enter my password. So, I reluctantly did a hard reboot on the system — hold down the power key for 5+ seconds, then restart — and that’s when I became aware that I had made a huge mistake.

I made a huge mistake

So the computer restarts, I get the initial Ubuntu screen… and then it disappears and shows me the console output of the system startup. That’s not a good sign. Also the last message I saw was that gdm had failed. That’s really great, I thought sarcastically. And that’s when it hit me that installing the “fuse” package was the origin of the problem. I looked up whether the apt system has a rollback system, and it does not — maybe that’s why Ubuntu now uses snap. However it gave me a starting point. Fortunately I still had my phone working so I looked up fuse and realized that I had inadvertently rolled back FUSE3. So I switched to a terminal in text mode by pressing “Alt + F2”, logged in, and reinstalled FUSE3. However I also noticed that it didn’t involve installing a huge number of other packages but one thing at a time. I rebooted.

Of course I was still left in the system console after rebooting, with gdm loading but me not seeing a GUI. So again I switched to a terminal, and thought about what my next step was going to be, and fortunately I found that apt has a flag you can use to reinstall some parts of the system (–reinstall). So at that point I started looking for a “desktop” meta-package and immediately saw “ubuntu-desktop”, so I went for it with this command:

“sudo apt install –reinstall ubuntu-desktop”

and this operation took care of all the dependencies. I crossed my fingers, rebooted, and Hallelujah! I got my desktop back, and my first thought was “I gotta write this down”, that’s the technical writer in me I guess.

Fortunately Ubuntu has the ubuntu-desktop metapackage available. Had this happened with another distro I think recovery would not have been nearly as easy  And fortunately I remembered exactly what I had done at the system level which could have caused this problem. Because, make no mistake, I am the only person who caused that problem.

However it might be a good idea to “blacklist” the fuse package from getting installed by apt, as this really shouldn’t be done by anyone who’s running the Ubuntu desktop. I’m not exactly sure how this could be done, but it’d be a good idea.

That being said, and even better idea is to be careful AS ONE SHOULD BE when installing packages using sudo and apt, and to not just breeze through stuff because of a foolish sense of self-assurance that “I know what I’m doing”. And that’s ultimately the lesson from this — sudo as a tool is powerful, and the way it works on Linux is to add a step (authentication) that’s literally there to stop you from doing something stupid. In Breaking Bad the expression “respect the chemistry” keeps coming up. Well, if you’re using Linux, remember to “respect the permissions”. But, if you do get yourself into trouble, at least Linux is made in such a way that it’s possible to walk back your errors and get back to a working system, which is more than I can say for Windows.

BANNED! Kinda

Those of you who follow me on, and communicate with me using, Facebook will notice that I’ve been very quiet on the platform for the past three weeks or so. Well, I was suspended for simply re-sharing a joke that had already been shared by someone else on FB. I have no idea if the other sharer was also suspended because, well, I’m suspended.

It was a screenshot featuring someone making a joke response to the story about the Colombian sex island resort where guests are offered sex and drugs — the person basically said, “where is that island so I can go and tell them how terrible they are in person” or something like that. Classic joke redirection. Anyway the brain donors at FB — who recently spent EIGHTY BILLION DOLLARS on remaking Second Life but worse and way less popular — decided that I was encouraging drug use by resharing that image.

So I clicked the “Appeal” button on my suspension notice. It’s been over 2 weeks now and I’ve received no update whatsoever on that. It really doesn’t take very long for a human being to review posts, so I have to assume that the FB space cadets shadow-banned me, because that’s the kind of limbo I’m in, indefinitely.

And that’s fine, because frankly as a platform FB is generally a waste of time. I do miss the dog pictures and the Snapmaker U1 support forums on FB where I was a frequent contributor, but I do have better things to do these days than to prop up a dying social media platform so I’m officially giving up on Meta and its various virtual properties now. I also frequently bought stuff from Marketplace but obviously that also stopped.

There’s still the issue of people who used to communicate with me using Messenger. Well, I’ve been on Signal for a while, but now I’ll make it my primary means of communications. It’s a privacy-first messaging platform used widely by journalists to communicate with confidential sources, so it’s much better than Messenger — I mean how many times have you communicated to someone on FB about a particular subject and then saw that the ads you were served after that reflected the contents of that conversation? Signal isn’t a social network, so no risk of that there.

My username at signal is eltopo71.40, or you can use my current phone number in the signal app to reach me.

A tool for file recovery cleanup

If you’ve ever run file recovery tools on a disk, you know that you can end up with multiple copies of recovered files. Well, I made a little script that can help reduce the number of duplicates for you to clean up.

https://github.com/eltopo1971/file-duplicate-nuker

fileDuplicateNuker takes a directory as an argument, then recursively goes through that directory and takes a hash signature from the files in it. When it encounters a file with the same hash signature, it deletes the file.

Does this take care of all the duplicates? Oh heavens no. That’s a feature, not a bug — call it erring on the side of safety. The script has no idea what kind of file it’s dealing with. All it does is take a hash signature and base the decision of whether to delete the file on that. If there is so much as one byte of difference in the file it’s examining, it’s counted as a unique file and not deleted.

That being said, from my testing it does delete a good number of files, and when you have thousands of files to wade through, any little bit helps.

Running a Windows virtual machine on Linux using an Existing Windows Installation

I’ve been a Linux user for years. At home I’ve kept a file server which runs off Linux, but that was “classic Linux” — without a graphical user interface, using the command line, and doing things the “hard way”. My main desktop PC was still running Windows, and had to because the one game I play regularly, Fortnite, was not available on Linux.

Well, someone recommended that I check out GeFORCE NOW, which is a virtualized environment you can use within Linux to play a large number of games in the cloud. I’ve always been skeptical about that type of play, largely because the capacity of the system to provide a good gaming experience had not previously been available. However since I live alone and have a good broadband connection I tried it out and loved it. It’s indistinguishable from playing the game from your own computer.

So, since most of the apps I use are open-source or otherwise available for Linux, I decided to switch from Windows to Ubuntu 24.04. My PC has two hard drives as well as a NVME drive which hosts the Windows system, so I decided to delete and transfer what I could from a 1TB drive and installed Ubuntu on there. It was a breeze and I was quickly up and running. Ubuntu has very good hardware support so most things just worked, and the only thing I had to hunt down was a driver for the Logitech G13 gamepad I constantly use. I’ve been running this for about 3 weeks now and I have no desire to go back.

However, today I came up against an obstacle. On Windows I used Bitvise SSH client to connect to this server, and Bitvise saves its files in its own binary format. I found myself in a situation where I would have to go back to Windows to use Bitvise to connect to my server. Also while my current situation does not require that I have access to a Windows machine, that can change all too easily. So I decided to create a Windows virtual machine (VM from now on), but instead of using a virtual hard drive file, I would simply use the disk on which Windows is already installed. That makes a lot more sense. It’s just more efficient.

I found one set of instructions to help me do that, but it dates back to 2021 and hasn’t been updated more recently, so I spend some time figuring out the more current way to go about it.

How to run a Windows VM from an existing Windows disk

For this you will naturally need a computer running Linux, preferably something Debian-based like Ubuntu. You will also need to install VirtualBox on that computer (downloads here). You should also disable Bitlocker encryption from your Windows drive before proceeding. I didn’t have it enabled on my drive so I don’t know how that would affect the installation.

Set up your user

Your user will need to be part of two groups: “disk” (to enable raw disk access) and “vboxusers”.

sudo usermod -aG disk,vboxusers [user]

Also let’s create a folder “vms” in your home directory in which you will keep your VMs:

mkdir vms

Set up your Windows disk

First, find out where your Windows drive is mounted. By default when you install Ubuntu on a computer with FAT32 or NTFS drives, they will be accessible to Linux.

lshw -short -class disk,volume

This will show you a list of your hard disks and their partitions. Look for a disk that contains a “Windows FAT volume”, a “reserved partition” and one or more “Windows NTFS volumes” and note the entry in the Device column for the disk (not partition). Usually this will be “/dev/nvme0” (if you have a NVME disk) or “/dev/sda”.

Next, we’re going to create a special file that points to that disk using a utility that is installed with VirtualBox. Enter this as your regular user (not root):

VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename=vms/[disk file].vmdk --variant=RawDisk --format=VMDK --property RawDrive=[Windows drive]

This file points at the location of the Windows drive.

Create a VM

Now we’ll start using VirtualBox itself. But before we do, let’s install the VirtualBox Extension Pack (download from here). To install the file just double-click on it on the file. It will launch VirtualBox and the installation will take place.

In the VirtualBox dashboard, click on the Create a new virtual machine (VM) link.

  1. In the VM Name field, enter a name for the virtual machine
  2. The VM Folder should be “/home/[user]/vms”
  3. In the OS field select Microsoft Windows
  4. In the OS Version field select the version of Windows installed on your Windows disk.Win12
  5. Click on the Next button at the bottom right of the New Virtual Machine window.
  6. Under Specify virtual hardware, adjust the Base Memory and Number of CPUs. Bring the Disk Size slider to the lowest value. Note that using 16GB (or more) of RAM is highly recommended otherwise you’ll find the VM experience very taxing, but keep in mind that this memory will not be available to your Linux apps while the VM is running.
  7. Select Use EFI
  8. Click on the Next button.
  9. Click on the Finish button.

Attach The Windows Disk to the VM

Now we’ll attach the pointer file we created in step 1 to the VM.

  1. In the Machines tab of VirtualBox Manager, right-click on the new VM and click on Settings.
  2. In the [VM]-Settings window, select the Storage tab.
  3. You’ll see a .vdi file which we won’t be using. Click on the Add Attachment button at the bottom right of the Devices box (see below) and select Hard disk from the dropdown menu. Attach Disk
  4. In the Hard Disk selector window, click the Add button.
  5. Select the .vmdk file you created earlier in the file selection dialog box.
  6. With the .vmdk file selected, click on the Choose button.
  7. In the [VM]-Settings window, select the .vdi file, and click on the Remove Attachment button (next to the Add Attachment button).
  8. Click OK to save your VM configuration.

Run Your VM

Nothing left to do but to run the VM and make sure it works, so in the Machines tab of VirtualBox Manager, right-click on the VM you just edited and select Start > Start with GUI.

You should be able to log into your Windows installation.

If you have tried in the past to install Linux and modified the UEFI partition of your boot disk… well, you will then have to navigate around the disk using the GRUB CLI to fix your boot sequence. This is beyond the scope of this particular tutorial, but instructions are easily found online. I had to do this myself.

Something else that came to mind as I was writing this was to try and see if I can do the same thing using QEMU instead of VirtualBox, which I will also write a tutorial for if I can manage to do it.

Keep in mind that virtualization at the local level can be a bit tricky and resource-intensive. It’s also one of the rare things that can completely freeze up your system and force you to reboot it — that’s called a kernel panic.

A song about Jeffrey Epstein

I ain’t no songwriter, me. However this idea popped up in my head to make a song about the Jeffrey Epstein story, and even without using the word Trump at any point! Because, well, Epstein hosted pretty much everyone in the Who’s Who of high society. I purposely composed this to be sung to the tune of The Village People’s YMCA, a song hilariously co-opted by Trump. I’ve only done one stanza and the refrain so far so feel free to contribute in the comments!

JEFF (to the tune of YMCA)

[Stanza]

RICH MAN, there’s no need to feel down, I say
RICH MAN, you want to screw around, I say
RICH MAN, don’t you fear getting found
While you’re raping tons of young girls

RICH MAN, there’s a guy you should know, I said
RICH MAN, you can even bring blow, you can
Stay there in the lap of luxury
But smile for a pic with Jeffrey!

[Chorus]

It’s time to go and see J-E-F-F
It’s time to go and see J-E-F-F
You don’t need no flowers,
You don’t need no pearls
You can hang out with all the girls…

 

PEACE WAS NEVER AN OPTION!

PEACE WAS NEVER AN OTION!
PEACE WAS NEVER AN OPTION!

PLA, printed on a Snapmaker U1 printer, steak knife by Dollarama

On the passing of Scott Adams

Scott Adams passed away earlier this week. He was the author of the Dilbert cartoon strip which used to run in newspapers everywhere who, once the heyday of his creation started to fade, let his life spiral into a cesspit of bigotry and hate so awful that it completely ruined his reputation and, to some extent, his existing work.

Sometimes success goes right to someone’s head and causes an interesting feedback loop — “if I am successful then it must be that I am much more intelligent than everyone else”. I mean, we pretty much get told all our lives that the reverse is true, so it’s not necessarily outrageous to believe that. The problem comes when that person then uses that logic to validate beliefs they have for whatever reason, but which are extreme and socially unacceptable in nature.

Most successful people would take a cue from the social reaction and see that there’s a problem with the beliefs. But some of them do not. Some of them think that no, they’re right and society at large is wrong. Not only that, but because they’re clearly so intelligent — society has already validated this by making them successful! — they see it as their duty to reform the world, to set them on the right path by being as open and offensive as they can be.

And boy did Scott Adams take that duty seriously. His descent into racist, sexist, transphobic madness is well documented here if you’re not already familiar with it:

YouTube player

That I think is what happened to Scott Adams.

And it basically caused his death as well — he was too smart to go to an ordinary person doctor. Those people treat losers! No, he was the vanguard, the illuminati! He was too intelligent to get chemo and radiation or maybe have a tumectomy or whatever else was possible medically. No siree. He went straight to the old panacea, ivermectin, a veterinary dewormer. It was just as effective for prostate cancer as it is for anything but getting rid of worms.

Scott Adams lived by his own rules, and he died by his own rules. Truly he was the architect of his own downfall.

My daily bread

I haven’t contributed a recipe in a while, so here’s something I make almost every day.

Naan. I didn't take this myself but these look just like mine.
Print Recipe

Fluffy, tasty naan

Naan so delicious you'll want to just eat it by itself
Prep Time2 hours
Cook Time15 minutes
Total Time2 hours 10 minutes
Course: Snack
Cuisine: Indian
Keyword: bread, butter, naan
Servings: 3 people
Author: tony
Cost: $5

Equipment

  • 1 Cast iron pan

Ingredients

Yogurt mixture

  • 1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
  • 1 extra-large egg
  • 1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Yeast

  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
  • 1 1/4 tsp yeast

Dry ingredients

  • 3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
  • 2 tsp table salt

Other ingredients

  • 1 tsp Avocado oil
  • 1 tbsp melted butter

Instructions

Blooming the yeast

  • Add the 2tbsp of honey into a small bowl.
    2 tbsp honey
  • Add the hot water to the honey and mix well to dissolve.
    1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
  • Sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix it into the honey solution.
    1 1/4 tsp yeast
  • Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes while the yeast blooms. The yeast will rise to the top like foam.

Mix the other wet ingredients

  • Pour the yogurt in a separate bowl.
    1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
  • Add the egg and mix together.
    1 extra-large egg
  • If you added the yogurt and egg straight from the fridge, you will need to bring up the temperature of the mixture to room temperature. This will prevent the butter from re-hardening into clumps when you pour it in.
  • Once your yogurt mixture is warm, pour in the melted ghee/butter and mix.
    1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Prepare the dry ingredients

  • Put your flour in a medium-large mixing bowl.
    3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
  • Add the 2 tsp salt and mix well.
    2 tsp table salt

Mix the wet and dry ingredients

  • Once your yeast has bloomed, pour its contents into the yogurt mixture and mix them well.
  • Pour the wet ingredients into a little "well" in the flour mixture.
  • Mix everything together. Use a spatula at first, but when all the liquid has been absorbed just knead the dough with your hands. You need to get the point where the dough ball is slightly moist to the touch without sticking to your hand. Add additional flour if needed.
  • Put the avocado oil on top of the dough, just enough to make sure it stays moist. If it's very humid where you live you may not need to do that, but in my well-ventilated Montreal apartment in the winter it's needed. I use an avocado oil spray for this.
  • Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.

Divide the dough

  • After the dough has risen, knead it lightly again to get the excess air out.
  • Divide the dough into individual pieces. How many pieces is really up to you, I used to make 8 pieces but now I make 6 because I like my naan relatively thick and chewy.
  • Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.
  • Warm your cast-iron pan while the dough is resting. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is done at a fairly low temperature, on an electric range use 3/10. My range uses a weird system that goes from "low" to 7 so I use small element setting 2.

Stretch out and cook your naans

  • For each of your little balls of dough, stretch and roll it out as large as your pan will accept. It's never going to turn out exactly round, but that's the beauty of naan.
  • Put the naan in the pan and let it cook for 90 seconds.
  • Flip the naan over and cook it for 1 minute. As a tip, I usually use that minute to roll out the next naan, it's pretty much perfect timing for doing this.
  • Brush the melted butter on the top side of the naan and let it cool for a couple of minutes.
  • Put your naans away into a container that doesn't let moisture escape. Your naans will be good for about a day, after that they tend to dry up and not be so good.

Notes

This is not a diet naan. I deliberately use butter because of the taste and texture. The original recipe called for vegetable oil which would be healthier but not as delicious. Any oil with a neutral taste should do the trick, I would recommend avocado oil if you're made of money. You may be tempted to use hemp oil figuring that its nutty taste will complement the bread taste, but I tried using it just to keep the dough moist and I found it distinctly unpleasant for reasons I don't quite understand.
I got the idea of using honey to bloom the yeast one night when I wanted to add a little sweet taste to the bread, and it worked so well I never bloomed the yeast with just sugar again. You will taste a difference between different honeys. 
It's important to use fine salt in the flour, as opposed to coarse salt or kosher salt. Fine salt distributes evenly through the flour with mixing, but larger grained salt doesn't, and that makes naans that have weird salty spots.