Archive for the 'Hacks' Category

Since we accidentally acquired a parakeet, we go through quite a bit of bird seed. Steve– the parakeet– gets a fresh bit of food each day, but never quite finishes yesterday’s. I didn’t want Roger simply pitching the old into the yard as that attracts rats and Ruby — the dog — would hoover it up (she is a confused dog; part cat, part bird)!

So, we built a super simple bird feeding platform. It is a wooden frame with a bit of window screen in the middle. The screen is held to the frame by bits of thin wood nailed to the frame (as seen in the photo). The whole thing is suspended from the house via eye-hooks with coated stainless steel wire.

Dead easy to build and made entirely from scrap and junk drawer bits.

By going with this open design, we can throw Steve’s leftovers, bits of fruit, seed pods and the like onto the frame. Rats don’t seem to bother it given the proximity to the house and the slippery wires (which, frankly, surprises me a bit).

Because it is open, the feeder attracts birds that are normally ground feeders, like this pair of mourning doves that visit the feeder every afternoon.

This is the reason why I write this weblog. After writing up the entry on the Kegerator project and tweeting it, I received a “nice job!” from the creator of a product called the KegCapTap.

Pretty much every commercial keg of beer ships with a round plastic snap-on protector over the very much standard sized keg coupler/connector. Of course, that snap-on protector is a marketing opportunity and, thus, every keg comes with a nice logo’d cap identifying the brand, if not the specific beer!

Enter the Keg Cap Tap.

The Keg Cap Tap is a tap handle that’ll fit just about any tap valve (the company also sells adaptors). The round end just so happens to be the exact same size as the top of a keg and, thus, quite nicely holds the branded keg protector.

As a result, whatever random commercial brews I have in my kegerator will now be identified quite clearly on the tap.

For my own beers, the Keg Cap Taps came with blank plastic snap-on protectors. For now, I’ll just slap an Avery label on the blank and write in the type of beer. Someday, I’ll have to actually print up little logos and such!

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!