nuxx.net

Berry Ale…

July 22, 2005

The boiling wort, right after the hops were added. · Click for more…

Well, the yeast is pitched and the start of the berry ale is fermenting. dropped by, and thanks to his help I was able to get the wort ready for fermenting even quicker. And, right around the time he left, we noticed that there were already signs of fermentation, only three hours after pitching the yeast. I think this will definitely be a mighty yeast.

For the record, I saw the first bubble rise from the blowoff tube at right about midnight while I was on the phone with my mom.

I can’t wait to see how it looks tomorrow…

Anyway, if you want to see some more pictures, including a nice close-up of a bowl of whole hops, click either the image above or this link and you’ll be taken to the Berry Ale album.

And now, bed!

beer moved from livejournal

El-Cheapo Water Filter

July 21, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Click for huuuuuge….

So today I was going to brew some beer, and I decided that the best way to dechlorinate my water would be to run it through an activated charcoal filter. Well, ~US$20 and a visit to Home Depot later, and I had what you see above. A 2000-gallon activated charcoal inline water filter for a fridge, garden hose connectors, and enough 1/4″ line to reach easily into the carboy / pot / whatever. It’s really easy to use, and I’d have to strongly suggest that anyone looking to filter their water before brewing do something similar. Or, if you just need a portable filter it works as well.

Now, off to keep this brew going! The water is just coming to a boil now…

beer making things moved from livejournal

Yeasties!

July 21, 2005

Click for more from this gallery…

That’s what happens when the yeast that you use is really, really potent. I’ve got a 32oz starter of a moderate strength wort in a 64oz growler, and the yeast was fermenting so actively that it completely filled the container with krausen^† and spilled over into the airlock!

I have never, ever had a yeast do this… For what it’s worth, this was with a single vial of White Labs‘ WLP530 – Belgian Abbey Ale yeast. Per the description, it appears that this is also used in two of the six remaining Trappist breweries.

Hmm, I’m not so sure how well that’ll pair with a berry hefeweizen, but I guess we’ll see…

^†Krausen: Yeast-laden foam which is created on the top of a beer as it is actively fermenting.

beer moved from livejournal

Power… Control!

July 20, 2005

Rawr. So it looks like the new webserver is having power supply issues. I’ve got six disks in there, and I think the power supply isn’t hacking it. When attempting to sync over data to it, it keeps rebooting.

Time to go purchase something much larger.

I’d think it could maybe be something else, but the machine isn’t dumping core (no vmcore* files found on the box) and this is the first time it’s happened. It’s also nicely reproducable…

Blah.

UPDATE: Also, something seems to have happened when the box crashed, and I have an empty directory that I can’t delete. (It’s part of the set that was being sync’d over.) I need to get the box into single user mode, but I can’t really do that remotely. At least it’s at home…

Well, time to price out power supplies.

UPDATE2: I may have an appropriate power supply at home… So long as it’s not too physically long, and I can fit it inside the case, it’ll definitely power the machine. It’s just meant for a 2U/3U/Whatever case, so I’ll have to build a bracket to hold it. Ah well.

computers making things moved from livejournal

Berry Ale

July 18, 2005

Click for more…

Well, I guess it could be said that I’ve started on my seventh batch of beer. I’m going to be attempting to make a berry ale, and the recipe which I hope to follow can be found here.

I’ve got two kilograms of berries slowly freezing. It’s one part each blueberries, marionberries, raspberries, and strawberries. The first three berries were part of a frozen blend and the strawberries were fresh, all purchased from Costco. I ended up having far more strawberries than I needed (I purchased a four pound container) so I cleaned and stored the rest for another day.

So, hopefully it’ll be good… I’m hoping for a nice reddish beer with some great berry flavor to it. We’ll see…

beer moved from livejournal

…goes to 11!

July 18, 2005

So that explains the few hours of SA eating my server alive with an load of 11 or 12 on nuxx.net. It seems that someone is spamming as cstansfield1@dingleberrypie.com and lots of folks still have bounces turned on.

By bye mx record for dingleberrypie.com and all email… I don’t really use that domain anymore anyway.

computers moved from livejournal

New Server…

July 18, 2005

Somewhere around two weeks from now I am going to be replacing my webserver. I will be moving from the current machine^† bornslippy.nuxx.net to the shiny, mostly-new^‡ rez.nuxx.net.

Because I will have both servers in place for the time being, I hope to make this transition as smooth as possible. If things go as planned, I will be able to move things over bit by bit without anyone really noticing. As usual, notifications about such work will be posted here, and anyone who I’m hosting should know how to get a hold of me outside of LJ if anything really bad crops up.

With any luck, the new server will provide enough of a performance boost that I’ll be able to run v2 of my favorite Gallery software and that image transformations and such will happen much more quickly. Not to mention SpamAssassin filtering and random DB stuff…

Anyway, yeah. I’m excited. Now I need to get the basement clean so I can get it back on the bench and finish testing it. Right now it’s in the rack burning in…

^† Pentium II 450, 384MB RAM, 2x 80GB disks (mirrored), Intel EtherExpress Pro 100 NIC
^‡ Dual Pentium III 1 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 2x 120GB disks (mirrored root), 4x 120GB disks (RAID0+1 data volume), Broadcom 5701-based NIC which hands off IP/TCP/UDP checksumming to hardware.

computers moved from livejournal

Switch from XP to OS X?

July 14, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

So I’ve got some ideas about migrating my parents from Windows XP to OS X, specifically on a Mac mini. I’m really thinking there might be some issues here, so I was wondering how people here would address such problems:

· First, I’m thinking that a Mac mini with all options except a DVD writer would be purchased, and 1GB of RAM installed. With US Student discount, this would run about $1K. Price isn’t huge here…

· I feel that OS X requires a user to have a greater understanding of the concept of filesystems, directory hierarchy, and how to manage storage of things. For example, under XP users typically only have to save things where they default to (eg: My Documents, My Pictures, etc). Under OS X, defaults are often the last folder viewed.

· Installing applications on OS X isn’t as simple as it typically is on Windows. For most applications a user has to just pop in the CD, click through the buttons, and then look for the application somewhere under Start. On OS X a user often has to drag the application to the Applications folder — and the right one at that.

· OS X is (obviously) non-MDI. For those most familiar with a typically MDI environment such as Windows, this is often a huge slap-in-the-face change. However, for someone such as my parents (who this machine would be for) who normally run Windows applications maximized, with the single menu bar at the top which changes with app focus, this might not be such a big deal.

So, yeah, I am babbling a lot here, but I’m really wondering how easy the transition would be. Additionally, I’m trying to determine if there would be any benefit to purchasing a Mac mini for them. I can see the iPhoto integration and such being a good thing, along with the quiet machine and the nice hardware warranty. But the retraining issues outweigh the benefits?

computers moved from livejournal

iSight Car Mount

July 12, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Click for more…

While at work yesterday I decided that I’d build a mount for my Apple iSight for my car. This way I could transmit photos of wherever I’m currently at, do stop motion video of driving, and all sorts of other things which the especially nifty iSight allows one to do.

So, as you can see in the picture above, I’ve got a mount built. This is more of my design test / proof of concept mount. I may build another that has a more polished look to it, as well. Probably some matte black paint, etc.

I’ve posted three videos which are the result of testing of the mount. There are two full motion tests which I took last night, and one stop motion^† of my drive to work. The mount seems to hold the camera very stable, and the full motion videos almost have a video game feeling to them. Perhaps this weekend I’ll do a stop motion driving around highways somewhere Downtown Detroit, in and out of parking garages, etc.

Regardless, it seems to work as desired. Enjoy the videos. They are encoded with QT7 in 512kbps H.264, so you’ll need QT7 or some other compatable player to view them:

· Car Mount Test 1 – At night, on M-59 crossing old Van Dyke, entering the sunken concrete cavern highway area.
· Car Mount Test 2 – Driving through the parking lot on the southwest corner of Hall Rd. and Schoenherr, ending up on Schoenherr heading north.
· Stop Motion Test 1 – My favorite vid. One of the routes I take to work, start to finish. Each frame taken two seconds apart, played back at 15 frames per second.

^† Stop motion footage created by:
1) Use EvoCam to capture a video with no compression, best quality, and best bit depth at .5 frames per second which makes for two seconds between frames.
2) Open resulting .MOV in QuickTime Pro.
3) Export .MOV to image sequence.
4) Open image sequence with QuickTime Pro set to the desired frame rate. In this case I found that 15fps looked best. 30fps was just too quick.

It may be possible to simply change the frame rate at which the QuickTime file is presented, but I was having difficulty figuring out how, so I did it this way.

automotive electronics making things moved from livejournal

Car issues…

July 8, 2005

Well, I was unable to resolve whatever is causing the squeaking sound that I hear coming from my front driver’s side suspension. However, I am able to reproduce it when outside of the vehicle. I think the problem is a worn bushing or something squeaking against some metal, serving only to annoy me. There seems to be no issue with the drivability of the vehicle, but I want this damn noise fixed.

If you’d like to chime in about what the issue might be (please-please-please-please-please!), watch the following two videos. They show the two ways I have been able to reproduce the noise and isolate where it is coming from:

Now I guess I’ll go clean up my office and maybe get to work on an automotive mount for my iSight.

automotive moved from livejournal