nuxx.net – Page 247 – Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

…

April 22, 2005

Well, I’ve determined that adding an auxiliary input to a 2005 Subaru Forester XT (well, the Subaru six-disc changer) is possible, but will be complicated. It appears that with the info and software on this page I could build just such an input.

It would then be possible to have a single cable running to the iPod’s dock connector to provide power and take a line-out. This would then be fed into the head unit and selected with (I believe) the AUX button. Or it might be whatever button selected an external CD changer…

There is also some interesting info on interfacing to Panasonic head units – essentially emulating CD changers – to be found here, but I think the first page is more along the lines of what I’m looking for.

So, I think for around US$75 or so, plus a bit of work, I could have a module which would connect into the head unit’s power and CD changer connections and happily allow my iPod to play. Then maybe another $30 or so to get everything mounted nicely…

Dishes…

April 15, 2005

When brewing beer, I wash up my beer brewing tools and gear with the sodium percarbonate-based Oxyclean. This is because it is a non-surfactant detergent which does a really good job. It leaves absolutely no residue, is a great degreaser (soap residue and oils will kill all signs of head in a beer), and just cleans really really well.

Well, I’ve also been washing my beer glasses with Oxyclean as well, because then the glasses are as absolutely clean as possible.

What I’m wondering is… Well… Can anyone see any harm in using Oxyclean for all my dishes?

I don’t believe there are any products I normally use in cooking which it could damage, and it seems like it’d do a great job cleaning… And yes, it would cost a little more per load of dishes, but the cleaning capabilities don’t seem to degrade as much as with soap once the dishwater starts to get a bit dirty. Oh, and even better, Oxyclean doesn’t have any fragrance…

around the house beer moved from livejournal

Whee!

April 14, 2005

Local system status:
3:01AM up 369 days, 14:15, 0 users, load averages: 2.88, 1.18, 0.73

Woo! bornslippy.nuxx.net (the webserver that I host bunches of people on) has been up for more than a year…

Oh, and those loads are because this uptime was emailed as part of the daily jobs running at 3am. I get a bit of a load spike there.

If things go according to plan, I’ll be replacing this server within the next few months. I’m just taking my time to ensure that the new one is stable.

The newer machine should be a considerably faster dual-CPU machine. This would speed things up bunches when using things like… Gallery v2 and the image transforms (rotations especially) from v1. (The one I currently run, like at my gallery.)

For what it’s worth, that well-performing webserver that currently hosts… Oh… 17 domains and a number of subdomains and pushes out ~2GB of traffic per day is a Pentium II 450mhz (development sample running at 5x 100) with 384MB of RAM. As of right now, that motherboard/CPU has been powered on for all but six months since November of 1998.

Not bad… Once it’s retired, that motherboard will definitely go up on the wall as a piece of memorabilia.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

…

April 7, 2005

Well, there it is… Beer #4 is bottled.

It seems that because my basement is so cold, I ended up with a cask conditioned beer already. It had about one atmosphere of carbonation in it, so it fizzed and foamed a bit if agitated.

Also, I’m worried about it carbonating… There was a good thin layer of very fine yeast sediment in the bottom of the carboy after secondary fermentation (bulk aging). Sort of like what is left in the bottom of a bottle of good beer… I just hope that this stuff carbonates. :\

Then again, that’s always a concern of mine…

Well, we’ll see.

beer moved from livejournal

Server…

April 7, 2005

So… I’m trying to figure out what disks to use in my web server when I upgrade/replace bornslippy.nuxx.net.

I’m going to do RAID 0+1, so I need four disks. 80GB disks are $60/ea. 160GB disks are $89/ea. (Both prices are for Western Digital Special Edition 8MB 7200RPM 3-Year warranty disks.)

So, for $240 I can have 160GB total space, or for $356 I can have 320GB. The 320GB option would allow me to back up all the data I have to the webserver… Plus $44 for the pair of disk controllers and a few dollars for some brand new round cables.

This could potentially be good, because it’d give me space for absolutely completely offsite backup.

That said, do I really want to shove all my personal data up to what’s essentially a public server? I guess it’d be all right if I did it via an encrypted filesystem that I mount only when doing backups… That would get the data backups completely out of my house.

This space is definitely not used for the existing content of the site, which I believe currently clocks in at around 15GB – 20GB.

Ideas? Ideas?

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce

April 6, 2005

Click for huuuuge!

Tonight’s dinner is going to be some Morningstar Farms Buffalo Wings. While they are spicy enough on their own, it’s nice to have something else to dip them in.

Well, a few days ago I picked up the bottle of sauce displayed above, Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce. I first had this wonderful sauce at Satay Ria, a truly excellent Thai / Malaysian food shop in the Great Lakes Crossing food court. Not only does the food taste good, but the owner is always working, and he’ll make me veggie spring rolls specially upon request. They really are great.

Anyway, this chili sauce is an excellent almost plum sauce, but with a really good kick from pickled chilies. I’m especially fond of using it to accent any type of asian roll, and I’m certain it’d be good any place a sweet kick is desired.

Oh, also, one can purchase this chili sauce at Meijer and Cost Plus. It’s typically under US$3/bottle in either place.

Want to see stills from the commercial and listen to it’s theme song? Then click here.

food moved from livejournal

…

April 4, 2005

With gas prices on the rise, I figured I should top off my tank tonight. I bet they’ll jump tomorrow… Almost US$20 later, I had ~7.5 gallons of mid-grade gas. Uggh.

En route to the gas station, I decided to use the car’s trip meter to clock the distance I just ran. Well, it came up with 0.6 miles. Hmm. I swore it was longer than that last year when I walked it with a GPS. So, when I got back to my house I re-ran it with the GPS in my back pocket.

Unfortunately the GPS doesn’t work so well in my pocket, so it only logged a few scattered points and 0.6 miles. I guess I’ll just have to walk it again tomorrow, GPS held high in the air (or at least out in front of me) to establish the true distance.

Regardless, I ran the loop around my neighborhood non-stop again.

I’m satisfied. I think now I deserve a beer.

health mapping moved from livejournal

!!!

April 4, 2005

Wow, so I just ran 1.1 miles straight. No stopping to walk… That’s the furthest I’ve ever run at once in my life.

And to think that a week ago (exactly) the same run took be about five stops to walk. And I hadn’t ran any distance AT ALL for at least six or seven months prior to that.

I think I might have figured out the breathing thing… I found that if I concentrated on my breathing I seemed to get an extra boost of energy.

This whole thing seems odd to me because I’ve always been able to skate a lot, but not run much.

health moved from livejournal

Ugh.

April 2, 2005

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
26731 root       4    0  2828K  2220K crydev 0   5:26  0.00%  0.00% openssl

Nothing like watching openssl get unexplainably stuck, and seeing others report similar issues with, what appears to be cryptodev. This is when running openssl speed -engine cryptodev in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE with a Broadcom BC5805-based crypto accelerator.

computers moved from livejournal

Breakfast…

April 2, 2005

Click for huuuuge and detailed…
Click here for the food gallery.

This morning (well, afternoon) I made myself a rather tasty breakfast of porridge and coffee. So, per usual, I snapped a picture of it.

The coffee is just the standard beans that I roasted and ground myself. Really nothing too special, just good coffee made in a coffee press.

The porridge, though… Wow. For all the stories I heard growing up which alluded to porridge tasting like glue, being bland, or just otherwise being awful simply aren’t true. A good porridge seems to taste like an oatmeal cookie without the raisins and sugar. It’s extremely tasty and considerably better than standard instant oatmeal. It’s also really rather healthy. That bowl right there is right around 300 calories and 6.3g of fat. 280 for the oatmeal, then right about 20 or so for the blueberries.

See, I’d never thought to give the stuff a try, but when helping and move apartments, I came across a can of steel cut oatmeal and asked about it. Les said that it is extremely good, but takes a while to cook.

A few weeks later I was watching an episode of Good Eats, and during a section where Alton Brown was discussing oats, he mentioned pinhead, (also known as steel cut) oatmeal and how good of a porridge it can make. Hmm… Maybe there is something going on here, I think…

Skip ahead a few more weeks and I find myself at Cost Plus poking around the food area, and I come across a 500g can of pinhead oatmeal from Hamlyn’s Oats of Scotland for $3.49. It’s not quite the stuff that Les uses (McCann’s), but it was a bit cheaper, and it’s a purely non-GMO Scottish grain, so I figured I’d give it a go.

Well, I must say, I’m very happy with the end result. It took a little bit of experimenting to find an exact combination of cooking time and adjuncts so that the porridge polishes off the flavor so that it suits my palette, but I did, and here’s the recipe I seem to enjoy using:

Click for recipe…

food moved from livejournal