Archive for the 'Hacks' Category

I have always wanted to brew beer and have a number of friends that do. The results are almost always delicious and always interesting.

Having helped with the bottling process, I decided long ago that if I were to ever brew beer, I would not use bottles. Instead, I would rack into a keg and dispense from there.

Obviously, I needed a kegerator!

To force the issue, I brewed my first batch of beer a few months ago knowing that i would have to figure out a means of serving said beer from a corny keg before I could enjoy the fruits of my brewing labors. A 5 gallon “corny keg” is the standard vessel used in soda fountains and it has two “ball locks” on the top, one for the gas line and one for the liquid out line.

I actually looked into simply purchasing a kegerator outright, but they were expensive, generally inefficient, and often designed very poorly.

Thus, I decided to build my own.
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Our laundry / utility room isn’t large, but we consider it to be a gem given that most bay area homes seem to have their laundry in the garage!

Thus, space is a premium and that makes dealing with the handful of items that need to be air dried on a flat surface a challenge. A drying rack that sits around on the floor unused 90% of the time is guaranteed to be in the way 90% of the time!

Thus, a solution that can easily get out of the way was sorely needed!

Having scored a cheap bicycle ceiling lift off of Amazon, I added a couple of metro-cart shelves ($20/each at most hardware stores) held together by four 12″ bolts. the bolts hold the bottom shelf tightly sandwiched between two washers and two nuts on each bolt. The bolts hang from the holes in the top shelf (more washers!) and the top shelf hangs from the bicycle hoist.

Conceptually, it works really really well. Perfectly, in fact. And the metro-cart shelves allow for stuff to be hung from below, too.

The only complaint is that the bicycle lift works exactly as you might expect for $10-$15. Expect to have to keep the shelf level as it goes up/down. No big deal, but I will be replacing the rope in the near future.

As a part of our ongoing home improvement adventure, we are installing solar panels. Between the state and federal rebates, the increasing cost of electricity, and the improvements in solar technology, it is an investment that will pay for itself in a decade or two. Maybe less, if California really starts paying for excess production.

And, of course, Solar scratches my techno-geek itch. In particular, the system we are installing uses per-panel micro-inverters that leverage IP-over-powerline to network with each other to synchronize phase and deliver power back to the grid. As well, it makes the system easily expandable in that we can drop new panels in without having to replace a costly single inverter.

Apparently, when this is all said and done, I’ll have access to a web site with a set of schematics that show our panel layout along with individual and overall power generation statistics.

Of course, being that we live in an Eichler, the path between concept and final installation has to have at least one adventure.




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Hah! While the NeXT system in my garage didn’t have the original BackSpace.app on it, it did have a copy of the solitaire game that my friend and I worked on.

And that had an itty bitty SpiroScale screensaver embedded in the info panel!

Imagine that full screen — all dithered and textured in 2 bit grayscale. When color NeXT systems shipped a couple of years after I wrote the screensaver, I was quite delighted with the results (as seen below)!

Solitaire was an amusing little bit of indie development. Beyond having 4 different company logos in that about panel prior to finally signing with a distributor, the eventual distribution license was a flat monthly royalty for 25 months for Adam and I.

Flat royalties work out well when the company making the hardware your software runs on stops making said hardware….

Some months ago, I ported an ancient screensaver of mine to Mac OS X (then Leopard) and made the binary available.

I have since ported it to Snow Leopard and have made the source available via subversion. Pre-built binaries are also available.

There are actually two bits of source there; the first is which contains the Lizard Saver and a second screen saver called Spiro Scales. The screen savers should build for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, including support for Snow Leopard’s 64 bit GC-only screensaver requirement.

The second bit of source is called Screenalicious and is a simple/stupid application for displaying a screensaver in a window and allowing you to easily take scaled down screenshots. It was a hack when I originally wrote it in the ’90s sometime and it is still a hack.

SpiroScales was my first interactive screen saver. Interactive in that the pattern generated is entirely determined by mouse position (not movement).

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I recently picked up an ExpressCard/34 SD reader along with a Transcend 16GB SDHC card. The reader was to ease the transfer of photos from a digital camera and the high-cap SDHC card ensures I can take plenty of photos without shuffling about cards.

With the recent announcement of SD-slot-ness MacBook Pros (drool) that can boot from the SD slot, it made me wonder if a previous generation MacBook Pro could do so, too.

And it can! Which isn’t totally surprising. SD ExpressCard readers effectively act like USB drives and most (all?? I don’t know) Intel macs can boot from USB devices.

On the click through is instructions for formatting an SD car correctly and slapping down a bootable image.

Given the relatively low prices of SD cards, I’m making a habit of carrying around a “rescue card”. Tiny enough to not be noticeable, can be reformatted to use as photo-space trivially, one hell of a lot of tougher than optical media, and will prove to be indispensable if I ever need it.


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Way back in February, I racked the persimmon wine between the various glass carboys to get it off the yeast poo (lees).

At the time, the two carboys showed 11.5% and 12.5% ABV. Not bad. But it didn’t taste very good in early March/April; way too bitter and *bleh*.

So, I let it sit until last week. The flavors have mellowed and, chilled, it is quite a drinkable beverage.

At about 12% ABV, it is obviously a dry wine. There simply isn’t any sugar left!

The sweet essence of persimmon is both present in the nose and in the flavor. And the characteristic astringency of persimmon carries through, too, giving the wine a slight “pucker” at the end.

I bottled a bunch of it in 750ml tequila bottles that I have lying around. However, I also mostly filled a couple of 2 liter soda bottles, chilled the wine to near freezing and then force carbonating.

It makes for a delicious wine cooler. Very drinkable and, at that level of ABV, it tends to sneak up on you!

Given the ease of making wine — much easier & less involved than beer — anyone with an overabundance of fruit (or veggies, even — I have a recipe for a tomato wine that sounds pretty good. Onions, too, even) should give it a try.

All you really need is a plastic bucket (primary fermenter), a glass carboy (secondary fermenter), some tubing, an air lock, fruit, sugar, yeast, and something to sterilize everything (I use sodium metabisulfite and/or an iodine solution — both very cheap). The glass carboy is the most expensive component and three gallon carboys can be had for less than $30.

(Again, for those in the South Bay, the folks at Fermentation Solutions have everything you need and are extremely helpful.)

Update: I have taken to bottling the persimmon wine into 2 liter plastic soda bottles. To these, I add about 3 tablespoons of cane sugar and then use my forced carbonation rig to lightly carbonate the wine. Very refreshing served chilled.

Update: Since posting this, a number of friends in the bay area have asked me about this rig and where to obtain the parts. You can buy all the bits and pieces separately if you want, but for not much more money you can just get a kit that has all the parts + a cornelious keg.

I picked up the full tank, gauges, regulator, hosing, clamps, 5 gallon cornelious keg, and dispensing spigot for about $250 from Fermentation Solutions in Campbell. Again — great store, very supportive, nice people, know their stuff.

For CO2 refills, I’m going to Carbonic Services. Refilling the 5# tank will cost me $12. They sell tanks, many different gas mixtures (need nitrogen? no problem), syrups, etc.. You can also get your tank refilled at many welding supply houses, but “food grade” and “welding” are not generally compatible.

For “the carbonator” cap, you can mail order it from any of a number of places. Do a google search. I have found that shipping can be a killer when ordering brew stuff. Find someone relatively local.

For folks in the South Bay area, Seven Bridges Cooperative has The Carbonator, along with a pretty awesome selection of really high quality brewing ingredients and, even, coffee beans.

I love carbonated beverages, as long as they don’t have a ton of sugar (including the various sugar substitutes). I find the scrubby bubbles are a bit of a flavor enhancer as well as adding a bunch of texture.

But, damn, it is an expensive habit! And painful to drag all those bottles of carbonated water home. Worse, any kind of fizzed flavored water is 3x more expensive or more. Ever price out those yummy “italian flavored bubbly water” drinks? Ridiculous.

Problem now solved, though.

I picked up a kegerator kit from our local homebrew store (Fermentation Solutions on Winchester — right next to Luigi’s extremely yummy italian restaurant).

The kegerator kit includes everything you need to, generally, produce, and/or carbonate, and then serve, about 5 gallons of beer (or other beverage).

However, you need one more piece of the puzzle. That blue piece at the lower right is “The Carbonator“. It is a bit of patented plastic that screws on to your everyday average 1 to 3 liter soda bottle and has a connection for the standard ball lock connection on the other end. Expect to pay about $14 for one. Get three to five while you are at it.

You can make it yourself out of a tire fill valve (search Google). I chose not too as “tire” and “food grade” are not remotely related.

Once you have your basic setup, it is time to carbonate some beverages!

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Out of the blue, I received a tweet from Steven Blackford:

@bbum Wanted to say thanks the old BackSpace Module LizardView. Still using it after all these years on all my NeXT systems.

Wow. That took me back nearly 20 years! From the moment I started writing Objective-C code on a NeXT in 1989, I have taken a break every couple of years to write a screensaver or five. They have always been fairly simple, always geometric in nature, and generally with a bit of fractally goodness.

At left is a screenshot of LizardView. It was one of the first screensavers I wrote for the NeXT. Fortunately, Steven still had the source for LizardView (I likely still do, too, on one of the optical discs in my garage) and it took me about 10 minutes to port it to Mac OS X Leopard.

Blast from the past.

If you’d like to experience this awzzum zele-bra-shun of k0l0rfull moiré patterns, I dropped Lizard.saver.zip on friday.com.

Funny story; in about 1996 or 97, I found myself at a rather random (and not that terribly good) rave like party in St. Louis, MO. There was a video projector that was running some “rave animations” loop. Lizard was used throughout as 5 or so second interstitial between different animation sequences!

Update:

We’ll be lucky to get any Osmia lignaria bees this season as they generally try to already have a nesting site by now. They are a very early season pollinator!

However, there is a second native bee that may likely take up residence and provide effective pollination services all summer. Osmia californica, another mason bee, takes over about the time lignaria is done!

I might order some tubes of Osmia californica bees to kick start the local population.

If you have any interest in gardening or flowers, or follow any kind of agricultural related financial markets, you are likely aware that one of the ecological disasters we face is known as colony collapse disorder.

Basically, the worker bees in a honey bee colony die, get lost, or otherwise just cease to function. The cause has been attributed to pollution, mites, genetic degradation, pesticides, genetically modified crops, and/or a slew of other guesses.

It is a serious problem in that bee driven pollination of crops is what sustains much of the agricultural production in the United States.

Oddly, though, the european honey bee — the bee that everyone immediately thinks of as the One True Way that flowers are pollinated to yield seeds and crops — is actually an imported species and, frankly, a bit invasive at that.

Not only invasive, honey bees tend to be territorial in that they will actively defend their hive. As well, they really aren’t even that efficient as pollinators.

Not surprisingly, there are many native pollinators buzzing or flitting about. In the South Bay, the most noticeable are the carpenter bees as they are gigantic, relatively clumsy, totally non-agressive, fuzzy, and have a noticeably loud buzz while flying.

But they aren’t the true superstars of the native North American pollinators. For that, one should look to the Mason Bee or Orchard Bee (Osmia lignaria).

The mason bee is a rather docile flying insect that is considerably smaller than the carpenter bee. Like the carpenter bee, it is non-territorial, won’t sting unless seriously threatened, and is non-swarming.

The mason bee is an extremely efficient pollinator as a single bee may visit over a thousand blooms per day.

Clearly, this is a bug whose presence should be encouraged!

Fortunately, it is easy to provide housing for such a helpful critter. Roger is standing next to a mason bee home that we made over the weekend. We chose to make one out of a block of wood. However, bundles of reeds, bamboo or — even — appropriately sized straws work quite well, too.


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This year we are making a more concerted effort to actually, like, plan meals and buy what we need as opposed to ending up with the world’s most expensive compost heap from the wasted food bought at the farmer’s market with best of intentions.

As a part of that, I’m also taking a more serious run at the whole gardening thing in our community garden plot.

This actually started last fall when I turned and planted the entire 20′ x 30′ (approx) plot with fava beans. Now, we happen to love fava beans, but not that many. There was an ulterior motive.

Namely, fava bean plants do a brilliant job of pulling nitrogen out of the air and fixing it into the cells of the plant itself. As well, since favas are such a vigorous over-winter growth in this climate, they nicely shade and choke out most of the weeds that would be sprouting about now.

To put the nitrogen into the soil, the bean plants must be worked into the soil. Last year, I did this largely by hand (with a much smaller number of favas) by digging holes, chopping up the plants with a shovel and turning them into the soil. It worked, but not terribly well as it leaves potentially large air pockets in the soil that plants hate.

This year, I used Blue Blade (pictured at left). Or the scariest damned Make-style hack ever. It is one of the various inventions used by the gardeners in plots around mine. (No, I didn’t make this — if I had, the sides would be a bit sturdier and I would have used nylon nuts to keep the damned thing from falling apart.)

It is a pretty simple device.

• Rip apart an old lawnmower
• Cut a piece of plywood in a circle the same diameter as the lawnmower’s deck
• Drill hole in middle and bolt lawnmower engine to plywood
• Attach blade to bottom
• Attach plywood to a sawed off barrel (In this case, plastic… lending to the fear factor)
• Cut a 2.5″ in diameter hole to the side of the engine
• Attach a plastic tube used to feed in the favas
• Grab a handy stick and jam the engine’s throttle wide open because you don’t have a throttle cable or dead man’s switch anymore

Then? Fire the damned thing up and feed favas, weeds, and any snails/slugs into the tube.

The end result is green gold. A thick mat of minced favas that are easily spread and turned into the soil. Not only does it add a ton of nutrients to the soil, but the fibrous matter loosens the soil quite a bit and makes subsequent planting and weeding tasks a ton easier.

I’m still letting a good sized patch of favas grow to full maturity. Which is frightening. I picked up fava seeds from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply along with a rhizobacteria that grows in symbiosis with the plant to maximize nitrogen yield through excellent plant growth & health. In my case, this means a solid mass of 6 foot tall favas!

Peaceful Valley or “groworganic.com” is an awesome company. They have been very helpful and have an amazing assortment of heirloom seeds.