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While taking the trash out tonight I saw worms crawling along the pavement. This is a good sign, as it means the ground is mostly thawed and thus off-road riding will be possible soon.
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This evening I noticed that my latest batch of beer, a vanilla stout, was just barely starting to blow krausen out in to the airlock. To fit a blowoff hose (picture from a previous batch) I began pulling on the stopper in the carboy, and when I did so the whole neck of the carboy tore off. This left me holding what you see above; an airlock stuck into a stopper, along with the neck of a carboy.
I’ve fit the stopper back in along with some foil so it should remain air tight and thus this batch should be fine, but it’s disappointing that I’ll now have to buy another one at ~$40. I’ll also have to be extra-careful when moving the carboy; so much so that I’ll probably just transfer it to secondary right in the bathtub where it’s sitting fermenting.
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After a long winter I think it’s finally going to be time to ride soon. Tonight found a group of us riding along the Macomb Orchard Trail from it’s start at Dequindre up through the bridge at Van Dyke and then back. Total was around 22 miles, but since I’d ridden around the parking lot a bunch beforehand my statistics are a bit off from what the ride itself entailed. Still, it was great to get out and take advantage of the nice weather.
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After a bike ride this afternoon I decided to (finally) update the River Bends trail map so that it’s more usable. Besides adding more asphalt and a better key I cleaned some things up, added the park’s address, and changed the trail lines to dashed pieces. These dashed lines should make the map more readable when printed in black and white, and the addition of the river, railroad tracks, and more road should make it easier to tell where one is when riding along.
In the future I’m going to consider adding in the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal and maybe tweaking the route a bit. Maybe there will even be some more single track to add by that next time, too…
Click the image above or here for a PDF of the map: River_Bends_13-Mar-2011.pdf
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The thinner new pot and super-hot turkey burner flame resulted in a little bit of scalding on the bottom of the boil kettle from beer-making yesterday. However, it’s just a little bit, and I don’t see it causing any issues. The larger kettle with a bigger opening made boiling a lot easier. Foam-ups during hop addition cleared themselves automatically, there was practically no risk of boil-over, and I could keep the heat nicely high (and thus a harder boil) during the whole process.
After boiling and cooling the wort I also did something to save a bit of money on yeast: racking the wort right on to the trub from the previous batch of beer. Since I was making a darker and hoppier (but otherwise similar style) beer this won’t affect the flavor of it, and the extremely large quantity of yeast meant that the batch was fermenting strongly within four hours. Normally the amount of activity seen just a few hours later would take 24-36 hours to occur when pitching (pouring into the wort) the quantity of yeast in a Wyeast Activator pack. Not only did this decrease lag time while the yeast started growing, it also saves roughly $8 on yeast, the time spent cleaning out the fermenter, and is simply less wasteful overall.
As this beer (a dark IPA) is recommended to have two months of aging I’ll probably do another short-aging-time beer after this with the goal of having three full kegs of beer in the kegged beer cooler. If I can constantly keep three different (tasty) beers in there with one aging, I’ll be pretty set for variety, having friends over, and saving money overall.
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Since I’ve been having boil-over problems with using a ~7 gallon pot for boiling ~6.5 gallons of liquid, I decided to purchase this Bayou Classic 36 quart (9 gallon) stainless steel pot from Amazon for future batches. This should cut down on the boilover simply by being larger volume, but I also suspect that the larger surface area will result in less concentrated foaming and again less mess.
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Today I found that Ikea’s Lingonberry concentrated drink mix can easily be combined with some water and one banananuun-flavored nuun tablet to make a decent tasting impromptu electrolyte drink. Having run out of HEED this past winter and wanting to go on a reasonable length ride today I needed something calorie-iffic to drink, but I wanted to be sure it had a few electrolytes in it as well, since I tend to sweat a lot. Well, this did the trick.
I’ll still probably pick up some HEED or possibly an Infinit Nutrition product for normal riding, but at least for the next few rides this should suffice. (During normal riding I like to have my CamelBak full of water and a bottle of something sweet on my bike. I can then sip the water when I’m thirsty and drink the bottle of whatever throughout the course of the ride to be sure that my blood sugar stays sane and I don’t bonk.)
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Today found me home from work a bit earlier than I have been lately, and with the nice weather I patched a flat on the Titus and set out for a ride. Since it was just above freezing and (yet another) big snow fall is still melting, I stuck to a paved route as best I could. Still, I couldn’t help but occasionally run into some slush or dirt left behind by the thaw, or even some mud. At one point on a small neighborhood trail I ended up leaving a few-inch deep rut, so it’ll be interesting to see how well this serves as an example of what not to do on a trail. (More information about damage caused by riding muddy trails in springtime can be seen in this flier from the MMBA.)
The route that I rode ended up on the Macomb Orchard Trail which was quite a bit less thawed than I expected. Most of the route was what’s shown above, with a thawed section in the middle full of muck with slush/snow/ice along the sides, but some portions were completely snow and ice covered. Thankfully it was compacted, almost-slushy which made it very ridable.
I’m extremely happy that the weather is taking a turn for the nice. I hope that I’m able to ride this year after work as I was last year, as being able to get outside in evenings and spend some time by myself watching nature go by is extremely relaxing and just the sort of thing I need most evenings.
(Total for the day was 23.53 miles in 1:43:51, following this general route: Home, 22 Mile, Neighborhoods to Shelby, Mound, 25 Mile, MOT West, Dequindre, School, Neighborhoods, 23 Mile, Mound, Shelby, River Bends Pavement, Home via 22 Mile and Neighborhoods.)
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I recently had a chance to play with one of the last bastions of high-quality analog modem technology, a MultiTech MultiModem II, 5600 series. It’s an extremely high quality device which can do things such as automatically dialing a stored number when DTR goes high. These are quite useful as diagnostic backup devices and are often found connected to enterprise-class equipment to allow tech support another channel in or to allow the device to send emergency error messages.
Since I had access to this I decided to open it up and look inside, since tech like this isn’t too common these days. Photos of the MultiTech MultiModem II (5600 Series) disassembly (such as the one above) can be seen here in this gallery.
In the two photos showing the two sides of the PCB (top · bottom) here’s the components I found most interesting:
Leave a Comment· Conexant SM56D / CX06833-44: This is the heart of the device; the modem itself.
· Atmel ATF1502ASV: EEPROM CPLD (Electronically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory Complex Programmable Logic Device); likely where the front panel controls run and how the modem chip is controlled.
· LM7805 (x3): Three linear voltage regulators which seems to me like an old but very reliable method for getting smooth power.
· Intersil ICL3207ECBZ (x2): RS232 transmitters / receivers.
· Atmel 26C16AN: 16K serial EEPROM.
· Atmel AT49BV040A: 4-megabit (512K x 8) Flash Memory. (Hidden in photo by front panel bracket.)
· Fairchild Semiconductor 74LVX4245: Dual Supply Translating Transceiver. Converts between 3.3v and 5v busses; used to drive 5v logic in LCD display module. (Hidden in photo by front panel bracket.)
· LM386: Audio amplifier for modem speaker.
· Cypress Semiconductor CYIFS781BSXC: Spread spectrum clock generator designed to reduce EMI.
· 28.224 MHz Crystal: Connected to clock generator.
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This afternoon I added a bit of a luxury to the Kegged Beer Cooler, a three-way gas manifold. While not necessary, this will allow me to easily shut off gas to different connectors if I’m needing to play with different pressures for force carbonating beer, soda, fruit, etc.
Since I was drilling from the inside of the cabinet outward without using a guide the external screw heads aren’t quite lined up (picture). This is disappointing because it doesn’t look as nice as it could, but I guess I’ll just have to leave it. To be sure that I didn’t hit any gas lines I first cut small holes in the aluminum liner with a pointed razor blade, tore back the metal with needle nose pliers, then poked carefully through the foam with a plastic tool until I reached the steel outer wall. The foam was then cleared out using a drill bit in my fingers, and then I completed drilling through the outside.
A few days ago I received some desiccant bags purchased from eBay (picture) and those are now in place as well, so the kegged beer cooler project is pretty much finished. I may eventually add external taps, but for now using picnic-style taps inside of the unit should suffice.
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