nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

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Corn!~

August 27, 2005

So a friend’s neighbor somehow ended up with a pickup bed full of corn. I think it’s from his field…

Well, my friend kindly brought me a large bag of this corn.

This is good, because I *love* roasted corn on the cob.

Well, after roasting up about three ears, peeling them open, seeing the dimples on the kernels and tasting them I realize what is different about this corn…

This is feeder corn.

It’s really, really different. And no, I do not recommend that people eat animal feed corn. It’s very starchy and thick and untasty.

Hmm, maybe this is what corn syrup is made from…

foodmoved from livejournal

PC Needed

August 27, 2005

Can someone help me find a particular PC? I’m looking for an older machine, so long as the CPU is passively cooled. Yeah, I mean one of those giant heatsink things just hanging out there…

I also want to stick a dead quiet hard disk in there and finally have a silent firewall. Mine’s getting old and noisy.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

Yay, Acetone!

August 26, 2005


Click for huuuuuge!

There are few things as gratifying as seeing a project starting to come together. In that picture above are two boxes containing two of the three major components which I had to fabricate for the iSight Tripod Adapters. The top containing 40 cut, cleaned, slotted, and prepped body tubes, and the bottom containing the 40 bottom end caps, drilled and fitted with 1/4-20 tee nuts for connecting to a camera tripod.

Please note that the slightly rough slots in the body tubes are okay. The only part which shows in the end is the top of the rounded hole at the end, so those are consistent and nice and smooth. For the rest of the cut I just made certain that it wouldn’t pinch the cable during assembly.

The third part which I have to make is the other end caps, which need to have a precise rectangular hole cut in them in order to accept the moulded vinyl end of the Firewire cables.

After that, I’ll just have to assemble everything, package the adapters, and they’ll be ready to sell! As of right now I’m thinking of US$29.95/ea, shipped to any US destination.

Oh, and did I mention that the only thing I can smell right now is acetone? It seems that acetone not only removes the blue lettering from PVC pipe, it also dissolves the surface slightly, removing any small scuff marks and generally cleaning the pipe. This allows me to make the bodies a pure dull white while leaving the endcaps a nice shiny pure white. I think the contrast, combined with the black Firewire cables, will look pretty nice.

It would have been nice to have white or grey cables, but for a small run I can’t be too picky.

acquired thingsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Icky Hands

August 23, 2005

Well, I finally got started on the actual production of the iSight Tripod Adapters. That is my hand after removing the labels and adhesive from about 30 of the 85 PVC end caps. At this point I had to run to Meijer and grab some more 99% isopropyl. Once I had three bottles here I was able to do a soaking tank type production line, so it went a lot faster.

Tomorrow I drill holes in 40 of them. Five holes per, in fact. Heh.

I think I deserve to stop for the night. My hand-based digits are kinda swollen and sore right now. (I would have worn latex gloves, but I wanted to be able to feel the surface of the PVC to ensure that it was smooth and free of gunk.)

making thingsmoved from livejournal

Peektures…

August 23, 2005

· The 40 IEEE1394a cables came today, so now I can begin making the iSight Tripod Adapters.
· Cost Plus is a great place to buy good beer for cheap. Their selection swings around, but they always tend to have something that is good. The Arcadia Whitsun was $7.49 for a six pack, and the Bell’s Third Coast Old Ale is underpriced at $8.49.
· Yay! The metadata service in OS X crashed while I was doing the massive sync from nuxx.net. I’m not so sure Tiger can deal with massive influxes of info.

beermaking thingsmoved from livejournal

rez.nuxx.net

August 23, 2005

Just FYI, the websites on rez.nuxx.net will be inaccessible for a brief period of time tomorrow. I hope for this to be in the morning, and for under a minute in time. In short, I have to replace the version of cronolog I installed earlier today. The current version (from ports) defaults to writing all files as root, which isn’t good. Fortunately this patch from 2002 seems to have it flop to whatever UID/GID one specifies before writing the files.

I want to move to this version… This should be a quick, seamless switch. Add the appropriate flags to the Apache config files, stop httpd, replace the binary, set appropriate permissions on existing files so they can be appended, start httpd, done.

I’m just paranoid, and I wanted to give people a heads-up in case things seem slightly amiss for a few minutes tomorrow.

Oh, and yeah, the whole new way of rotating logs seems to work great. Parsing all logs generated since ~5pm today took under a minute.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

No Krausen?

August 22, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]


Click for more…

Maybe it’s just weird to me, but something strange seems to be happening with my vanilla stout. I just walked downstairs to take a look at it, and as you can see from the above photo which is taken looking down at the carboy from the top, the krausen is *gone*. The surface of the beer is sparkling like spilled hot soda, and the surface is swirling as if there is an impeller at the bottom of the carboy, but there is absolutely *no* krausen left.

Have any of you seen anything like this before? It strikes me as very odd.

That said, I haven’t used this yeast before (WLP023) so I’m not sure what to expect. However, no other batch of beer I’ve made has behaved in this manner…

Is it possible that due to the quantity of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient used in the batch (2 tsp and 4 tsp, respectively, per directions on the packaging) that the beer is simply fermenting extremely quickly? Temperature down where the carboy sits is right around 70°F on this wonderfully cool Michigan evening…

beermoved from livejournal

More stuffs…

August 22, 2005


Click for more…

Well, as hoped, I got the wort for the Random Vanilla Stout made yesterday. It’s now sitting down in the basement fermenting away. It seems to be fermenting quite quickly, which I’m attributing to the quart starter I’d made along with the addition of a good quantity of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient (2 tsp and 4 tsp, respectively). It’s not fermenting as foamy / vigorously as last time, but it’s still getting on pretty well.

I missed the target gravity of the beer, ending up at 1.062, which was six points off from the target of 1.068. Hopefully that’s not too bad, though. It should still end up being around 6% ABV if all goes well.

But, yeah… Click that image there up top and you’ll be able to see more peeektures.

—

In case you haven’t tried it before, Google Desktop is freakin’ sweet. I’ve used it before on my work laptop, but I’d run into some problems with it and my antivirus software.

Well, with the v2.0 release this morning, I dove in and fixed those problems. I’d forgotten how much I like it… If you are someone who uses Outlook for your daily mail uses, it makes searching large archives really, really easy.

See, I personally think Outlook/Exchange works really well — better than any other shared email / calendaring system currently available — but it’s search sucks. Hard. And lots. Well, thanks to Google Desktop I can actually find old stuff in my email. Well, as soon as it finishes indexing…. (I’ve got a lot of work email.)

Now, if only Spotlight worked so well.

—

I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally ‘get’ the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Wikipedia Link). It’s just… yeah. A wonderful counterpoint to bible girl at work. I even acquired this piece of wallpaper which I’m currently using on my work laptop (except with the genitals blurred) and made this much more minimal one. Both are available at 1024 x 768.

beercomputersmoved from livejournal