Local Conspiracy

How the f**k do magnets work?!?

2012-01-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

I LOVE this excerpt from a Richard Feynman interview (transcribed here) where he responds to a question about the "feeling" of magnets repelling:

Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital. How do you get to the hospital when the hip is broken? Well, because her husband, seeing that her hip was broken, called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her. All that is understood by people. And when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why.

It reminds me of nearly every conversation I have with my older son. Lacking a deep knowledge base with which to form a frame of reference (though he does pretty well for a 3.5 year old), every answer leads to yet another question. Eventually, the chain always ends with something like "well, that's just the way molecules work." He hasn't started asking "What's a molecule?" just yet, but I'm sure that one is right around the corner...

I hope he never stops trying to understand everything!

Social networking is anti-social

2011-12-11T10:45:00.001-08:00

For a brief time, I was bullish on social networking. I blame it on my natural human need to maintain consistency, since I was working at a company that was tangentially involved with social networking (i.e. if you don't make yourself believe at least a little bit in what you're doing, you're going to be miserable.) Before that time, and after, I've been pretty thoroughly anti all things "social networking". My views on the matter are definitely not just a result of being an old curmudgeon - I just read two good articles on this very subject, thought you might enjoy them as well...

What's wrong with the idea of "frictionless" sharing, where every action is automatically broadcast to your network of friends?

Facebook's "frictionless" sharing doesn't enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There's no "sharing" at all. Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. (http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html)

An excellent perspective on the meaning of friendship throughout history, and the tragic direction it's heading these days:

As for getting back in touch with old friends—yes, when they're people you really love, it's a miracle. But most of the time, they're not. They're someone you knew for a summer in camp, or a midlevel friend from high school. They don't matter to you as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your life, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of that texture—read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation—and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your 18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should not know them. (http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/)

Pancakes

2011-08-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, almost every weekend my mom would cook these awesome pancakes for breakfast. They were a little different (and way better) than the standard variety, being made with more eggs than usual, and cottage cheese. She never looked at a written recipe when making them, so I always assumed these were from some old family recipe either from Germany or Lithuania.

When I moved out of the house and was living on my own for the first time, I was looking forward to making these pancakes myself. She read the recipe to me (from memory) over the phone, and I wrote it on some scrap of paper. A year or three later I lost the scrap, and hadn't made them often enough to have memorized the recipe, so I asked for the recipe again.

This time, in the course of the conversation I asked where the recipe had come from, wondering if it had been her own mother. Hilariously, she told me "Oh I got the recipe from the top of a tub of cottage cheese a long time ago."

Secret family recipe my ass!

They ARE fantastic pancakes though; I made them again for breakfast this morning, and thought I should share the recipe with my friends, so here you go!

Aedo Family Secret Pancake Recipe:
1 cup cottage cheese
6 eggs
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Enjoy!

Anonymous fighting for your rights

2011-02-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

This is just plain awesome:

"It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch—the billionaire owners of Koch Industries—have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back."

Read more here: http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/koch_brothers_tea_partiers_union_bashers_anonymous_/

Watching TV

2011-02-14T23:05:00.000-08:00

So as much as I wish I didn't want to watch TV, sometimes I just can't help it (it generally feels like I'm shutting my brain down when I watch TV and sometimes I just need that). We cancelled satellite a few years ago, though we still downloaded a few TV shows each week because quitting cold turkey was just too hard. Back then the system was basically a computer downloading TV shows via bittorrent, and a hacked AppleTV streaming the content on our TV.

It's about time for a quick update on the system, because it's really been pretty great. The only real change since my last post is that we've replaced the first generation AppleTV with a cheaper, more powerful, and significantly smaller second generation AppleTV.

The new AppleTV is easy to hack, and now that the fine folks behind XBMC have ported their software to this hardware, you can do everything you would want to do with the AppleTV.

What's the best new thing I've found? Adding the TED Talks RSS feed. Now we can "flip channels" when we feel like watching TV, and we're NOT really shutting down our brains!

Write me if you have any questions about "adjusting" your AppleTV to better suit your own needs!

Reading

2011-01-03T15:39:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post little links more often, to interesting sites I find or books I really like (instead of saving up for one really big post every few months). This one will be a little bit long just because I've got a few things to note - in the future, most additions to Local Conspiracy will probably be pretty short and consist of stuff like "I just finished this book and loved it! You should read it!"

Before I mention any specific books though, I have got to give a giant shout out to the Kindle. I got my wife one for a late birthday gift, and immediately realized I was going to need to get my own. It's not super fancy, allowing you to play games and watch movies like an iPad, but it is a LOT nicer to your eyes. Keep in mind when you're staring at ANY LCD screen, you're staring into a dim light. Your eyes don't like doing that, so the more time you spend staring a screen (your laptop, TV or iPad), the more strain you put on your eyes. The Kindle uses an e-ink display that relies on purely reflective light (exactly like reading a regular book). It's a LOT easier on your eyes. If you spend much of your day in front of a computer screen at work, and then go home and spend a few more hours staring at your TV, you should do your eyes a kindness and give them a break by reading a book (physical, or digital on your Kindle).

There are lots of advantages to using a Kindle to read books (and believe me, the ability to get a book RIGHT NOW is pretty intoxicating!) One advantage I hadn't thought about until I was using it though was the fact that you can easily hold the book and turn pages without making a sound or shifting around, or even using two hands. That comes in EXTREMELY handy when you've got a sleeping baby in your arms.

OK, enough of that. On to a few books I've read recently, which I highly recommend...

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (by Laura Hillenbrand) - Excellently written, a fascinating story of WWII as seen (primarily) from the eyes of a man who was captured by Japanese soldiers. This book was hard to put down.

WRONG: Why experts keep failing us -- and how to know when not to trust them (by David H. Freedman) - This book should be required reading for EVERYONE. If you're not familiar with how medical studies (or many other scientific studies for that matter) are documented and published, this book will be a real eye opener. There's a ton of useful information in this book, and it goes a long way towards inspiring some necessary critical thinking.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (by Mary Roach) - a fun read detailing a great many of the interesting considerations that go into preparing men (and animals) for space travel.

Google voice, Asterisk, and free US phone service

2010-11-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

In 2009 Google purchased a company offering VoIP phone numbers called GrandCentral. That allowed Google to start giving away US phone numbers. The idea was that you would get this new phone number and you could keep it forever - and any calls to that phone number would forward to the phone(s) of your choosing. It also offers voice mail service, and when you get a message, you can have a transcript of that message sent to you via email (as well as the message itself, as an audio attachment.) One of the most powerful features was that you could set up several phone numbers to forward the call to (your cell phone, home phone and office phone). Any incoming call to your Google Voice number would ring on ALL phones at the same time, and the call would be routed to whichever phone you picked up first!

It's a great idea, but it is kind of a hassle to use it for making outbound calls from a regular phone- and if you're not making calls from that number, it's much less likely people will remember to use that one when trying to reach you. You CAN make phone calls from your computer (right in your web browser when connected to gmail), but not too many people like to do that - and it's certainly not convenient for visitors or others in the house who need to use the phone. There was another company (Gizmo5) that allowed you to connect to your GrandCentral number via "voice over IP", so using the two systems was a good alternative to VoIP services like Vonage. Unfortunately Google bought Gizmo5 and suspended new signups while they worked on integrating their technology.

There were some workarounds that let you use the free open-source phone switching system Asterisk to connect to your GV number from a VoIP phone, but they still required phone service through another provider, so it was going to cost you a subscription one way or another.

Lucky for us, the latest version of Asterisk (v1.8) included a module to connect directly to your GV number, giving you a free phone number, potentially for life!

There is already an "everything included" installer available from NerdVittles, but it has WAY more than you need if all you want is to connect your GV number to a regular phone at home. To that end, I'll outline the steps I followed to get a regular wireless phone connected to my Google Voice number for making and receiving calls.
[UPDATE: The NerdVittles package is pretty much awesome. It's got a lot included, but it's all good. The install is fast and painless, and a little easier than what I outlined... I switched to this one at home, and suggest you do the same if you want to tie your Google Voice account to a phone.]

You'll need a spare computer (but it does NOT need to be powerful or have a ton of RAM or disk space - you might even be able to use a free Amazon EC2 instance). You'll also need a SIP/POTS adapter, like this $30 unit from Grandstream. You'll also need to be nerdy enough to have installed Linux once or twice before, though you do NOT need to be an expert to do this... What follows are all the steps you'll need to set up and configure an absolutely minimal Asterisk installation.

Install CentOS 5.5 - choose the "Server" install. After installation, run the following commands:

yum -y update
yum -y install bison bison-devel ncurses ncurses-devel \
zlib zlib-devel openssl openssl-devel gnutls-devel \
subversion automake gcc gcc-c++ libtool gnutls \
gnutls-devel texinfo kernel-devel

Download Iksemel from http://code.google.com/p/iksemel/, expand in /usr/src, then run:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make check [be sure all tests pass!]
make install

Download the newest version of Asterisk, expand in /usr/src, then run:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Add the following files in /etc/asterisk:
logger.conf:

[logfiles]
console = warning,notice,error

modules.conf:

[modules]
autoload=yes

gtalk.conf:

[general]
context=google-in ; Context to dump call into
allowguest=yes
[guest]
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
[myaccount-gtalk]
username=[YOUR GMAIL USER]@gmail.com
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
context=google-in
connection=gtalkconnection

jabber.conf:

[gtalkconnection] 
type=client
serverhost=talk.google.com
username=[YOUR GMAIL USER]@gmail.com/asterisk
secret=[YOU GMAIL PASSWORD]
statusmessage="I am asterisk"
status=xaway

sip.conf:

[general]
port=5060
bindaddr=0.0.0.0
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
[101]
type=peer
host=dynamic
secret=asecretpassword
context=users

extensions.conf:

[default]
exten => s,1,Set(CALLERID(name)=${DB(cidname/${CALLERID(num)})})
exten => s,n,Dial(SIP/101,10)
exten => s,n, Hangup
exten => 101, 1, Dial(SIP/101, 10)
[google-in]
exten => [YOUR GMAIL USER]@gmail.com, 1, Dial(SIP/101, 180, D(:1))
[stations]
exten => 101,1,Macro(phone)
; * Route the call using the google voice bridge
[gv-outbound]
;append an area code if necessary
exten => _NXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(dnid)=1323${CALLERID(dnid)})
exten => _NXXXXXX,n,Goto(1323${EXTEN},1)
;append a 1 if necessary
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(dnid)=1${CALLERID(dnid)})
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Goto(1${EXTEN},1)
;do our real dialing
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Dial(Gtalk/gtalkconnection/${EXTEN}@voice.google.com)
exten => _+1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Dial(Gtalk/gtalkconnectionEXTEN}@voice.google.com)
[users]
include => stations
include => gv-outbound

You can now start up asterisk (in a sort of test mode) with "/usr/sbin/asterisk -vvvgc". Keep that console connection open until you've confirmed everything works as planned. (When it's all good, you'll find appropriate init scrips in the contrib directory of the asterisk source.) Check to see if you're connected to your Google Voice account with "jabber show connected" from the asterisk console. If you're not connected, then something went wrong...

The only other thing you have to do at this point is configure your SIP client (whether it's a soft-phone or an adapter like the Grandstream device I linked to above.) Then try dialing out, and call your GV number from another phone to test the in-bound calling!

You can do a LOT more with Asterisk, but if you just want to get your GV number linked to a phone at home, this is all you need to do!

Thanks to these folks for their information, what they had to share helped me sort this all out:

http://supermario-world.blogspot.com/2010/11/asterisk-18-and-native-google-voice.html
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Speaks+with+Google+Talk
http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/asterisk_installation_compilation_centos.html
http://jeremy-mcnamara.com/asterisk/how-to-configure-asterisk/
http://blog.polybeacon.com/2010/10/17/asterisk-1-8-and-google-voice/

Get up, stand up!

2010-08-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Last year a coworker and friend (Rocco) set up his workspace so he could use the computer standing up. It wasn't the first time I'd heard of people doing that, but he was the first person I knew who was giving it a try. After a few days, he swore by it. He's a smart guy, so I started to give it some serious thought.

A few months later another coworker and friend (Carol) said she wanted to get a stand-up desk, and she thought I would be into it too. She was right. I started reading more about it and found lots of good information in support of this (links below) and I was sold. It's been about three months now since I switched, and I'll never go back to sitting down at the computer - this is biggest positive health change I've made this year (last year it was ditching my shoes).

My core is stronger than it's ever been, I haven't had any back issues since the switch, and I've definitely got more energy than ever.

We are using the FREDRIK desk from IKEA ($149), and GelPro Chef's Mats from Amazon ($99). The desk is perfect because it makes it easy to get the monitor up at eye level (keeps your head up which means the blood flows more easily to the brain and you'll have less eye and neck strain). You probably need a nice gel mat to stand on as well, and the GelPro mat is PERFECT, makes all the difference in the world.

This is definitely catching on at work (that picture up top is three standups in a row, and there are another three people here also using the same setup!) I'm hoping more of my friends give it a try too. Honestly, this is the kind of stuff that makes your whole life better! (Also, get more Vitamin-D while you're at it!)

The links:

Longer you sit, the shorter your life: http://yhoo.it/d80NWl
Rethinking the desk: http://blog.trailmeme.com/2010/04/rethinking-the-desk/
NY Times: http://nyti.ms/crnR9A

More people finally catching up!

2010-05-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to gloat a little bit. In 2007 we told DirecTV to suck it. We cut back on our TV watching anyway (because watching less is good for you, seriously!) What we did want to watch, we were able to get from the Internet.

LA Times pointed out more people were doing that in this article from October 2009.

Just yesterday, CNN Money said one in eight people will drop their cable this year in favor of using the 'net...

Hopefully we'll break our ridiculous TV habit this year. Good reading on why we should do that here... http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/russell/russell4.html

Week 2 (redux) - 3 for 3

2010-04-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I got a cold that totally kicked my ass. I was only able to ride on Monday, and the week went downhill for me after that - so I say this week is a do-over for last week and will stand as my official "week 2"...

It's definitely getting easier to get out the door for the ride. I know the route well enough to never have to think about it, and have figured out the quickest way through a few tricky intersections. Not having to pay attention to the route is nice, I get to space out and think about other stuff and before I know it I'm home!

Monday was tough this week - it was cold (at least cold for me, low 50's). Thursday was cold too but not quite as bad. By Friday the weather had gotten beautiful again, that helps a lot.

With two weeks left I think this is going to be an easy habit to get into. 210 miles commuted so far. I think my next goal will be to commute (by bike) 1000 miles. How many miles should I ride before I treat myself to a new bike :D ?

To work (4/19)
Back home (4/19) - no data :( Forgot to charge the garmin so battery only lasted for the ride in
To work (4/22)
Back home (4/22)
To work (4/23)
Back home (4/23)

Excuses, excuses...

2010-04-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

Last week (4/12 - 4/16) I only managed to ride one day:

It was not fun times. It had rained the night before, so the morning was cold and wet (though I know it's nothing compared to the weather you peeps in Chicago get to ride in!) On the way home it was raining for the beginning of the ride, and then I had a headwind for the rest of the ride. I think it was my slowest riding yet.

The next day I woke up with a cold (Heather and Nate had a cold the week before and I though I'd escaped, but I guess not!) Wednesday I felt even worse and ended up taking a sick day. By then I realized there was no chance of putting in three rides this week, so I scrapped it. Looks like I'll be going into May just to make sure I get in four weeks of 3-a-week rides to work :)

At least I rode today - I'm pretty sure this week will be 3 for 3.

Week 1 - 3 for 3

2010-04-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

This was the first week to put up or shut up - I committed myself to riding my bike to work at least three days a week in April. It was raining cats and dogs Monday morning and I'd only gotten half a nights sleep due to a vomiting toddler, so I talked myself into driving instead of riding. That meant I was going to be riding two days in a row - I was a little scared...

All in all, it was not half bad. My ride time improved bit by bit (except I took it easy on myself on Friday but was still only like two minutes slower than Thursday!)

With Heather's help I also found my Garmin ANT stick, so if you want to see the gory details the links are below. It was a pretty fun week of riding, and I'm looking forward to riding my bike to work a whole lot more this year. (By the way the bike path along the Orange Line is fantastic!)

Anyone else riding their bike to work? What's it like for you?

Bon Jovi would be proud

2010-04-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

I know people think it was about something else, but Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive" was all about bicycles. Steel horse? What else could he have been talking about? That dude is seriously into bikes...

So I'm ready to kick off my "ride three days a week in April" plan this Monday. The "test ride" to work last Monday wasn't half as bad as I feared. It took longer than I expected (1:12), but I'll get faster. This weekend I got panniers so I'll have enough room for clothes and the computer. I also swapped the pedals, as the bearings were starting to go in one of the old ones. Light is charged up in case I'm caught in the dark, and everything is good to go.

I'm using a Garmin 405 to log the mileage, but haven't found the USB key that transfers the data up to the garmin site... I think I know exactly which bag it's in, only problem is I have no idea where that bag is. I'll search for another week before I break down and buy a replacement (but if you've got an extra, please send it my way!)

Oh by the way, thanks LA weather for getting chilly and rainy for my first day riding to work :(

Shaming myself into fitness

2010-03-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I would occasionally ride my bike to work (25 miles each way). I stopped when we had Nate because there was no way I could get home in time to have dinner with him if I rode. I also got pretty damn lazy the first year after we (well, Heather) had him (and I sure put on my fair share of baby weight!)

Now that I've got a new job it's easier to shift my schedule around a bit so heading for home on the early side won't be conspicuous and frowned upon. It's also closer to home (15 miles each way), and the way back home has a lot less uphill. That means the only real barrier is me. Damn.

THAT'S why I'm going to start talking about it here, and probably on facebook and twitter (or maybe I'll just always talk about it here and post links elsewhere...) The more people who know about it, the more people there will be to give me crap if I don't follow through!

Here's the deal: I'm going to start riding my bike to work in April. I'm going to do it three days a week. With any luck, by the end of April I'll be so used to it, riding my bike to work will have become a regular habit.

Wish me luck!

-Christopher

Barefoot running on the radio

2009-09-21T14:55:00.001-07:00

On national radio, the editor-in-chief of Runner's World (David Willey) shills for the shoe companies while spreading misinformation. This piece on NPR from last week started promisingly, but the guy doing the story didn't bother to question this statement:
"If you are a very efficient and biomechanically gifted runner, running barefoot could probably work for you."

I was not surprised that the editor of a running magazine (which makes nearly all of it's money from shoe ads) was dismissive of barefoot running. I WAS surprised that the guy from NPR presented Willey as the expert on all things running, and didn't question a single thing he said.

The worst quote, when asked what would happen if everyone chucked their shoes, Willey replies "If a lot of runners - or all the runners out there in America - did that tomorrow, the vast majority of them would get hurt very quickly and would have to stop running for a very long time."

The audio and print story is online at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112995970

-Christopher

Homebrew Primer

2009-08-18T18:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote this up for my friend Moshe, and have since forwarded it to probably five or six people who are interested in brewing their own beer. I thought I might as well put it up here, should make it a lot easier for me to share!

WOW, here's my home brew primer. It's long, but if you read it all you will have all the info you need to get started. You could get most of this same information from the book The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, which is a pretty good book to start with. You could also just go to http://www.homebrewtalk.com/ and check out their forum where you can find a few good starter guides.... One other good book I could suggest: How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time.

BREWING STEP ONE:
The three main methods of home-brewing are "extract", "partial-mash" and "all grain".

Extract brewing uses malt extract (either liquid or dried malt extract [aka DME]). This malt extract is a syrup-like (or powdered) concentration of the sugars contained in the grain. It's extracted from the grain and concentrated under pressure, and sold by the pound. Brewing with extract is easy, and requires a smaller brew pot (because you only need to boil 3 gallons or so of liquid since the malt is highly concentrated - you add water to bring your total volume up to 5 gallons AFTER you've done all the brewing...) The only drawback is that it's not considered "pure" brewing, since someone else has done some of the work for you. SOME people claim they can taste the difference between an extract and all-grain brew, but most people would never know the difference. Extract brewing is AOK... You need a brew pot at least 4 or 5 gallons for this.

Partial-mash uses extract plus a small amount of specialty grains used to influence the beers flavor to match the particular style. For instance, a recipe might call for six pounds of pale malt extract, plus another pound of some specific grains. These grains will be steeped in 160 degree water for 20-30 minutes, and then that liquid will be poured through a strainer into your beer. For best results, those leftover grains would then have 170-200 degree water poured over them to rinse the last of the sugars off the grain (this process is called sparging). Some recipe kits come with a mesh sock to put the grains in, so you would not need to strain the grains out, just pull out the sock. This method makes it a little harder to "sparge" the grains, but you're really not getting much sugar out of such a small amount of grain anyway, so it probably doesn't matter. You need a brew pot at least 4 or 5 gallons for this.

Finally, there is "all grain" brewing, where you start with a big bag of ground grain (10lbs up to 20lbs depending on the beer, though the more grain the higher the gravity/alcohol content), extract all the sugars yourself, and then proceed from there the same as you would have with any other method. Getting the sugars out is called "mashing", and can seem complicated and daunting at first. In short though, you need to control the temperature of the grain at two different temperatures, and possibly three or more depending on the type of grain and the specific recipe you are using. There are entire books about this process, so I don't think I can give it justice here in a paragraph or two, so I won't even really try. The main consideration for someone just getting started is that all-grain brewing requires more (and larger) equipment. First off, you need a boil kettle that can handle at least 7 gallons, or possibly more. Many people convert a half-barrel keg (like the kind you would rent for a party) into a brew kettle, since they're about 15 gallons in size. That also means you probably have to boil your beer outside unless you have a really large cooktop. People use the burner setup that comes with a turkey fryer (available from home depot most commonly.) So you need at least one large kettle, possibly two. One will be your Hot Liquor Tank (HLT), where you heat up the water for the grains. The other would be your brew kettle where you boil your wort (the sweet liquor you extracted from the grains, pronounced "wurt"). I just have one large kettle, and find that to be pretty easy. Then you need a large (7-10 gallon) water cooler to hold the grain and water during the mash. These coolers work pretty well since they hold the temperature for a long time. If you don't want to use a cooler, and have a large pot available, you can keep the grains in the large pot and heat them directly. This can be tricky though, as you risk scorching the grains while applying heat - this can give your beer some off flavors.

Wow, that's already a lot about all-grain, I think I'll let it rest there. I can talk for a while about this in person, and show you the setup I'm using (where you use steam to heat the grain), it works really well and was not terribly expensive.

BREWING STEP TWO:
Now you've got your wort and it's either 3 gallons or 6 (or more if you're doing a large batch or brewing a high gravity beer that has a lot of volume you need to concentrate.) Let's assume you're doing an extract brew as that's the easiest. You want a vigorous rolling boil during this hour, and the timer starts once you hit the boiling point. Most recipes call for a one hour boil during which time you will add hops to the wort according to a schedule. You'll usually add some hops at the beginning, then after 45 minutes add more, and finally there will be your bittering hops added right at the end after you've turned off the heat.

BREWING STEP THREE:
You've boiled your wort for an hour, now you need to cool it down to about 70 degrees, add water to bring it up to the necessary volume, add your yeast, and then wait! There are a few different methods you can use to cool the wort. Simplest (and I've done this many times) is to transfer from your boil pot into a fermentation bucket that already has a bunch of ice in it. The boiling wort will melt the ice and if you're lucky, it will stabilize around 70 degrees. I usually would just cover it up and let it sit until it got to the right temperature at this point. I also made a "chiller", which is a coil of copper tubing through which you pump cold water. You put the tubing in the wort, and keep recirculating cold water through it while occasionally stirring the wort. You can also buy a counter-flow chiller, a chillerator or a chillzilla.... There are many options, and most of them get pretty expensive.

OH, before pitching the yeast, it's really important to oxygenate the beer. You can do this by shaking the hell out of the bucket or carboy, or by pumping oxygen through a small stone with either an oxygen tank or an aquarium pump.

Anyway, once it's chilled, you put it in a bucket or glass bottle (aka carboy) for fermentation. Pitch your yeast into the mixture, and seal it with an airlock so the gas the yeast creates can escape without allowing air from the outside to get back in (which can contaminate your brew.) After a week or so of fermenting, I usually transfer to another carboy using a siphon. This is so you can leave the now dead yeast at the bottom of the first vessel, and let it sit for another week or two in a new vessel, allowing all the suspended grains and yeast to settle to the bottom. This helps you get a clear beer, so there won't be any sediment in the bottom of the glass when you're drinking it a few weeks later. During fermentation, every strain of yeast will have a specific temperature range that it performs best in. The recipe will usually suggest a yeast or two, and will also usually say what the optimum fermentation temperature is. I've been using a small wine fridge for fermentation, it's convenient and keeps the beer at whatever temp you set on the front.

After fermentation is all done, you can either bottle the beer, or put it into a keg. If you are going to bottle, you need to add some sugar to the beer again. Once the beer is sealed in a bottle, the small additional sugar will wake up the yeast again and carbonate your beer. If you put too much sugar, you might end up with bottles that explode due to excessive pressure.

If you're going to keg (by far the easiest way) you just transfer the beer into the keg, and seal it up. Then you cool it to 40 degrees, and pressurize with your CO2 canister. After three days to a week, the beer will have absorbed the CO2 and will be carbonated and ready to drink! Some beers are ready at this point (roughly three weeks from when you brewed), other beers can take 3 to 6 months to properly condition (they won't taste quite right if you don't wait long enough with some of the more complicated beers.) ECONOMY: You can expect to spend from $70 to $500 on your initial investment. Spending a lot up front probably means you won't need to buy anything but ingredients for a while.

Good sources for starter kits:

At the bottom of that Northern Brewer page, their ultimate kit would get you started with everything you need, including keg. You might be able to piece things together for less, or work your way up to having all the pieces over time. I guess it depends on how much you want to invest in the beginning.

One gallon is 128 fluid ounces, which means a five gallon keg contains 53 12oz beers. Assume $10 for 12 "premium" beers, that's about $44 worth of premium beer in a keg. The ingredients would cost around $30, so the more beer you drink, the more money you save! You can spend more ($40-$45) on ingredients, but that's for a pretty serious brew, and then you're talking about copying a beer like Arrogant Bastard Ale which I think costs $10 for just a six pack! That means your keg would hold roughly $90 worth of beer!!

A good starting point would be the extract recipe kits they sell at Northern Brewer, take a look at them on their site. Another good alternative is to come in to the brew shop in Culver City and use one of their recipes. They have all the ingredients there, and help put the kit together if you're using one of their recipe packages.

shoes are bad!

2009-06-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

EXCELLENT book, probably one of the best I've read recently:
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Good article (shoes are bad!), Popular Mechanics says so!

Another good article (seriously, shoes are bad!), Popular Science agrees!

-Christopher
[UPDATE: Some interesting links below]

tivo is for suckers

2009-05-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

OK, that title is unfair. TiVo is pretty great, I bought a series 1 in 2000, and within the first year added a giant hard drive (120gb WAS pretty big in 2001!) and a network card. A year later I got DirecTV and the Philips TiVo that worked with DirecTV. That was when I started experimenting with archiving and offloading content. None of the experiments went really well.

My goal was to keep my own archive of recorded shows, for as long as I wanted, and be able to play them on any TV or computer in the house. I also wanted to convert all our DVDs to mp4 and be able to scroll through the movies and play them, like a pay-per-view system at a hotel. That meant I would need a "back end" to store and deliver the content, and a "front end" to browse and play the content.

The first pass was marginally successful: I started ripping all my DVDs to mp4, and storing them on a file server at home (the adventures in file serving will be the subject of another nerdtastic post...) To browse and play the content, I hacked an XBox and installed Xbox Media Center. It worked reasonably well, but since the XBox had limited memory and horsepower, it couldn't handle decoding movies encoded with some of the better codecs (like h.264 which was at the time gaining popularity, and improving rapidly.)

The TiVo was a pretty poor primary source for capturing shows since it encoded everything in MPEG2, so for long term storage and reasonable tranfer rates you had to transcode everything, which just took too long. It was also a bad choice for the front-end because you couldn't use it to play media from an external source (like the file server that had all my movies) unless it was mpeg2 (AND you had to transfer it to the tivo, it wouldn't stream directly from the source.)

I played around with MythTV for a while, but I think the "myth" part of the name refers to the myth that it actually works. (I know I know, it DOES work, just not reliably or easily.) In theory it would have been a pretty great system, as they used the backend/frontend model from the beginning, and they offered players on multiple platforms, so it should have been relatively easy to build up a PC for however many TV's I wanted to play the content on. As I started working on it though, things just got too complicated. Ideally I would have three DirecTV tuners connected to it, and be able to capture three shows or movies at the same time. I got it working well enough with one, but the whole thing seemed to flaky and fragile, and I needed something that would always just work, and that my wife and friends could use with little or no training. MythTV was not the answer.

Ironically, the approach that answered all my questions was prompted by me taking the first steps towards getting rid of TV altogether. I convinced my wife to go along with me on canceling our DirecTV subscription by promising we would still be able to get the handful of shows that we wanted to watch, and she would not have to sit in front of a computer to watch them.

While learning about MythTV and the community of people working diligently (and without pay) to improve it, I discovered that a great many of them were sharing the shows they captured via bittorrent. Though an argument can be made that it's stealing, if you're just talking about watching over-the-air shows it's no different than watching it after capture on your tivo, and using the 30-second-skip trick to jump past commecials. (If you're talking about pay-tv stuff, like HBO shows, etc., well, then you are stealing... But maybe it's OK if you ultimately buy the DVD's when they're available?)

So the shows were out there, but was there an easy way to grab them as they became available? Absolutely! The bittorrent client Vuze is the best one out there, and there are hundreds of plugins written to extend it's usability. One plugin, RSS Feed Scanner, specifically addressed my needs, and worked beautifully. Then you just have to find your RSS feeds, though you can probably find everything you need from EZTV. [EDIT: I withdraw my support of Vuze after a forced upgrade wiped out all my RSS settings! I replaced it with utorrent and found it's far better, faster, and has RSS support built right in!]

With the content side sorted out, what was the best way to watch it? The XBox worked for some stuff, but not always. It was also occasionally crashy, and would sometimes lock up right in the middle of a show. Thats no bueno...

The answer turned out to be AppleTV! It required a slight modification since Apple would rather you watch things you get from the iTunes store, but there's really nothing to it. There are a ton of things you can do to the AppleTV and there's lots of information out there on the subject. All you really need to do is enable SSH (for easy remote access), then install the divx and xvid codecs and a file browser. Engadget had a good article about it, and I found other sites/guides as well (email me if you have any questions, I'll be happy to help!)

We've been using this setup for almost two years now, and it's worked almost without incident. You can get AppleTV's on ebay pretty cheap, so there's no big barrier to adding players to multiple TV's throughout your house. As long as you don't mind waiting a few hours until after it airs to catch a show, your only ongoing cost is the bandwidth. There might be problems down the road (ISP's don't like bittorrent because they promised you more bandwidth than they have, and bittorrent has a habit of using up the bandwidth available...)

-Christopher

Mashing with steam

2009-05-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've been brewing beer for a little while now, and have been having a lot of fun with it. As it seems to go with all my hobbies I just kept escalating, expecting to eventually have a huge crazy brewing setup (aka "brew sculpture") with three computer controlled burners, multiple pumps with plumbing and solenoid-valves to move the liquid from stage to stage along the way, etc. My plan was to work up to that when I started all-grain brewing, but luckily those plans were derailed. (I say luckily because it would have ended up costing me hundreds, if not a few grand!)

As I started to learn about all-grain brewing, the concept of using a HERMS looked like a great approach to me. I expected I could set everything up indoors, using electric (and would only need to pull a new 220v circuit, wouldn't need anything else.) Since I was going to use a heating element, I might as well control it with a computer. In the process of looking into whether anyone else was using an Arduino to control a HERMS setup (and there are people using an Arduino in the brew process), I came across a pretty interesting setup. Yuri Rage on homebrewtalk.com had taken a 5 gallon keg, replaced the fittings, and was using it as a pressurized steam vessel! Check out the results!

I thought it was a really neat idea, and using steam was pretty appealing since it's an incredibly efficient way to transfer energy. The problem I kept seeing with using HERMS is that it takes way too long to raise your mash temp. You can go with a RIMS approach and potentially move the temp up faster, but then you still run the risk of scorching your wort and or having a really watery wort if you're going to pump high volume quickly. All the approaches I saw looked overly complex and expensive, and it started to look to me like people were putting this stuff together not to brew better beer, but just to build a really impressive system.

I went back to the forums for info on steam, and saw everything I needed. These posts from Fly Guy and Beerman sealed the deal for me. They were both using a plain old stove-top pressure cooker with a valve at the top, and sending the steam down to a simple manifold made from copper tubing, into a classic Igloo cooler mash tun! Using this setup I've been able to raise the mash temp 10 degrees in just over 5 minutes (that was with 9lbs of grain I think.) No risk of scorching the grain since the highest temp you'll get into the grain will be under 240 - just make sure you stir the hell out of it while applying heat and all should be good.

I put pictures of my setup online, feel free to email me if you have any questions at all. I'm extremely happy with this setup, and believe I'm equipped to do just about anything I need to with brewing, all for probably about $200!

(As an aside: I found a great writeup someone had done about why he was not a fan of using HERMS. The guy laid out details on how fast you could raise the mash, and why it was not the best way to brew; basically he said you can NOT do it fast enough with a HERMS. I think he went on to discuss using steam for mash temp control and showed how much more efficient it was - but I'll be damned if I can find it now! Too bad, it was really interesting, can't believe I didn't bookmark it...)

More links on the topic:

This one is probably the most elaborate setup I've seen, looks like it works great!
Choosing your heating method
Greg at Culver City Homebrew pointed me at this article on the subject at Brewing Techniques, good reading.