Every year, our neighborhood has an annual ornament exchange.

This year, we hosted the party at our house.

For our ornament, I picked up a bunch of matte finished shatterproof (i.e. plastic) ornaments from Amazon.com and shoved ‘em in EMSL’s Egg-Bot.

For the artwork, I found an elevation illustration of the front of a typical Eichler and used Inkscape to trace a relatively minimal line drawing of the elevation (attached below).

Worked great! The person that received their ornament loved it and, of course, then everyone else wanted one, too. No problem! I printed ‘em up in whatever color combinations folks wanted.

When loaded in Inkscape, the lettering and wreath on the door are in a different layer than the house line art. The Egg-Bot Inkscape driver makes it easy to print a layer at a time and, because the stepper motors stay powered unless you explicitly turn them off, you can easily swap pens after a layer is printed without knocking things out of alignment.

If you have an Egg-Bot, those particular ornaments + Sharpie ultra-fine markers are pretty much an optimal combination. You don’t even need to take the little hanger top off when printing. As can be seen in the photo on the left, the ornament part fits well into the cup of the egg holder and the plastic eye is held quite firmly by the spring loaded part of the Egg-Bot’s egg holder.

This year, we decorated our eggs using Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Egg-Bot.

I picked up the kit from EMSL a few months ago. Roger and I put it together over a few evenings. Software installation is relatively easy (for an X11 app) and usage is quite easy.

The assembly, no surprise for an EMSL kit, was a breeze, with a extremely well written and illustrated assembly manual. Seriously — EMSL kits are the best kits I have ever assembled!

The Egg-Bot can draw on pretty much anything round that is smaller than a tennis ball; eggs of all types, light bulbs, golf balls, Christmas ornaments, and — even — fruit (I used a lemon for test purposes).

The trick is finding a marking instrument that is appropriate to the target surface. For eggs, Sharpies work quite well, but Bic Mark-It markers are too runny.

Precisely, the Sharpie Ultra Fine Point Permanent Markers, 5 Colored Markers(37675) works very well. Regular Sharpies do not; too fat. However, EMSL has various accessories available, including an “extra wide” pen holder (ordering that very soon!).

For test purposes, a pencil works well enough and can generally be erased.

When the Egg-Bot is drawing anything with curves or diagonal lines, it is almost musical in the way the various stepper motors play different tones.

Finding various bits of art proves quite easy. Basically, any random SVG based illustration will work with a bit of scaling and tweaking. Google’s Image Search can narrow the search by file type.

Alternatively, Inkscape uses Python as an extension language and I was able to whip up a programmatic image generator in just a few minutes.

As well, there are some hacks that involve replacing the pen with an engraving tool (a pecker type engraver). Might have to explore that!

Programming? Robots? Assemble something cool with my kid? Produce awesome designs that make the non-technical happy? Infinite repository of art easily searchable? Easy to use? Worth every penny!

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.
In particular, I started with a 5 cubic foot GE chest freezer
($170 at Home Depot). Chest freezers are super efficient and a 5 cubic foot freezer can handle two kegs at once with room left over for more than a case of bottles and cans.

Obviously, a freezer is designed for freezing things and the thermostat can’t be set for the ideal keg temperature of 38 degrees. Thus, I added an external temperature controller.

The freezer plugs into the controller and the controller plugs into the wall. The controller has a probe at the end of a thin tube that goes inside the freezer. As seen at the left, I attached the probe to the freezer’s wall with a bit of gorilla tape. It is spaced off of the wall by styrofoam so that the probe is measuring the internal air temperature.

The tank is a 5 pound CO2 tank with a dual gauge pressure regulator and — very important — a shut-off valve with backflow prevention device. The backflow prevention device prevents liquid from entering, and ruining, the regulator.

An angle bracket supports the weight of the tank while the tiny bungie cords anchor the tank to the kegerator. It is critical that the tank remain upright or else you’ll end up with liquid CO2 in your regulator and gas lines, thus ruining the regulator and quite likely the gas lines, too!

A new tank runs around $60 and the regulator is typically less than $50. The CO2 tank will cost around $12-$20 to refill and it will last approximately forever before it needs refilling. I might need to refill it once a year. Maybe.

Ben Holt suggested a neat hack; stick a scale on the tank holder such that you know, by weight, when that 5# of CO2 is about gone. The high pressure gauge is close to useless in that it’ll read about 750-850PSI until almost all of the liquid CO2 is gone, then the pressure drops rather rapidly.

In the picture, you can see that there is a clear hose connected to the tank and then a red hose connected to that. The output port on the tank had a fairly small barbed connector so I needed a step-up adaptor to go from the 3/16″ interior diameter clear hose to the 5/16″ ID red gas hose.

The plumbing inside is pretty straightforward. The gas line comes in, is split and goes to the two kegs. The output of each keg is attached to one of the taps. As I go, I’ll be adding quick disconnects to the various lines such that I can swap different kinds of kegs with different couplers without having to re-plumb anything.

The wooden surround around the top serves a couple of purposes.

First, I can drill holes in it and mount stuff to it. While I could drill holes in the freezer door or walls, there is the risk of damaging the cooling mechanism and, in any case, drilling through the freezer would be a big pain to do cleanly. As well, by doing it this way, I can easily take off the wood and revert the freezer to a plain old chest freezer.

Secondly, the stacked two-by-fours add a considerable amount of height to the freezer. This makes it easier to plumb inside and allows me to use a wider range of kegs and couplers (the adaptor that goes between the keg and the rest of the system), including higher profile mechanisms.

The wooden surround is grossly overbuilt, as is typical of any project I take on. Not only are those solid 2x4s, but they are glued together and have dowels tying them together and have metal plates screwed to them.

Between fridge and surround is about an inch of insulation tape that is normally used to insulate the interface between a camper shell and pickup truck.

To attach the wooden surround to the top of the kegerator, I cut aluminum angle strips down to size and bolted them to the back of the freezer where the hinges originally attached. Since those bolts originally held the lid and were designed to withstand the leveraged forces of opening the lid, they are really strong and, again, I avoid drilling holes in the freezer itself.

The lid’s hinges are then screwed to the surround.

The weight of the lid, surround, and tank hanger is enough to press down the surround on the insulation material and provides a very good, airtight, seal.

Oh, and did I mention that the surround is way overbuit? Yeah. The bolts at the corner are actually about 4″ long.

I initially used the screw style hose clamps. They suck. I have since moved to nylon clamps, as seen on either side of the quick disconnect on the gas line.

The coupler in the picture is a Sankey, the most common keg coupler used. Note that Anchorsteam’s full sized kegs actually use a different coupler. It seems that most brewers use the more common Sankey — D system coupler, as it is otherwise known — for their 5 gallon kegs specifically because said kegs are often used in home kegerators of which most come with that particular coupler!

The 5 gallon kegs run around $50-$100, depending on the beer within. That is about 40 16 ounce pours or slightly more than 2 cases of beer. Thus, really, buying the 5 gallon kegs isn’t really much cheaper than buying a a couple of cases of bottles. However, the quality is much better and, obviously, returning an empty keg is a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly than recycling 2 cases of empty bottles!

At the moment, my taps have undecorated plain black levers. I’ll have to get some stylish handles at some point but this will do for now!

When tuned properly, the kegerator delivers beautiful pours of ice cold beer. Nothing like having fresh beer on tap in your garage! And, yes, beer on tap really does taste better than anything from a bottle!

The system isn’t quite perfect yet; like any good hack, it’ll be refined over time.

• I need to insulate the inside of the wood surround. While the wood doesn’t conduct that much heat, there is a noticeable temperature gradient within the unit and I both want to maximize efficiency and I might actually add a small fan to stir the air to ensure a universally even temperature. As well, the first pour tends to be foamy because the beer in the tube is actually warmed a bit!

• Need a bottle cap catcher.

• Need something better than towels on the floor to catch drips off the taps.

All in all, though, the kegerator works quite well and a number of my friend’s spouses are mad at me because they know such a hack will soon be taking up space in their house!

Not bad for about $400!

I picked up all the beer-specific parts from Micro Matic. They have a wonderful catalog. If I didn’t already have the tank from my forced carbonation adventures, I would have started with a two-tap kegerator conversion kit, though that does come with 2 D system (Sankey) couplers which may be overkill if you plan on keeping a keg of homebrew on tap most of the time.

Update: As per a suggestion in the comments, I moved from the 8″ or so beer line on the coupler to a 5′ 3/16″ ID line. Vast and huge foam reduction. Big improvement. Thank you!! I’m still running a short line on the homebrew keg as foamage on that particular keg is not a problem. In the end, I might end up with several different length tubes with quick disconnects in the middle to enable fine tuning without ripping everything apart.

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.

Not surprisingly, the house’s electrical wiring is the source of our installation woes.

In particular, much of our electrical (and a bit of our water) infrastructure is on the roof of our house. During the original construction, wires were literally thrown over our roof from above the fuse box to wherever their destination might be.

To “protect” the wires, they were covered in metal angle iron quite literally laid over the top of the wires. On top of this, the builders laid down tar paper, tar, more tar paper, and gravel.

Of course, tar paper and gravel is just crap insulation. We have a neighbor who still has the original roofing material and their houses internal temperature stays lockstep with the outside in the summer! Ouch!

So, most Eichlers have been through two phases of insulation upgrades. In the 80s, most people laid down a relatively compact layer of fiberglass covered with more tar paper. An improvement, but still kind of pathetic.

Once foam roofing technology matured, many Eichlers have laid down foam with a thick plastic-y coating on top. Ours is one of them and, actually, we have had two layers of foam laid down. It is beyond 4 inches thick across much of the roof.

And, yes, it does a very effective job of obscuring where the wiring is.

Thus, when the solar installer were using their hammer drills (mistake, assuredly) to attach the mounting brackets to the beams of the house, they managed to hit not one, but two, of the random wires across the roof! An easy mistake to make. Actually, I had pretty much assumed that we would end up with at least one electrical break.

While the installer’s mechanical installation is quite clean and of excellent quality, their electrician simply didn’t know how to deal with an Eichler. His “fix” to the broken wire was to try and inject insulative goo into the broken area.

Unacceptable.

His second attempt at a “fix” was to pull some of the wires up into a box, match colors, and hope for the best. That didn’t work so well, either. Worse, the end result were more dead outlets in the house and other electrical problems.

In the end, we replaced their electrician with the electrician we used during the remodel. Our electrician, Rob, is a top notch professional, pays great attention to detail, and obviously has extensive experience with Eichlers.

Not only did they hit some of the original wiring, the installers happened to drill through one of the two “upgrade” wires that were run over the roof when some previous owner added window air conditioners in, likely, the early 80s.

These wires were “throw and cover” that were tossed on top of the original gravel, the metal covers tacked down, and then covered by the insulation and, eventually, foam. The metal cover is extremely thin; paper thin, really. Thin enough that you cannot see any indication on the foam surface of where these damned wires run!

Akin to throwing a dime off the roof and randomly hitting a line of ants.

You can see the whole in the metal cover that just so happened to drill through the hot conductor of the underlying wire.

To properly fix the wiring requires cutting away enough of the foam insulation to expose the problem areas along with enough wire before and after the break to make it possible to pull the wires up to weatherproof junction boxes on the roof.

I truly appreciate my electrician’s attention to detail. In particular, he recycled the old wire cover for the two wires that were left in the roof unscathed. While he could have just left the cover on the roof and let the foam seal it down, Rob took the time to properly tie it down to the roof, ensuring it won’t move and pinch the wires. Beyond that, Rob placed the tie directly over the hole that was accidentally drilled in the first place, ensuring that none of the foam goo spooges into the wiring channel.

During the remodel, Rob was also the electrician that placed metal wire protectors over basically every bit of framing with wiring through it. This was, quite literally, 3x or 4x more locations than code dictated and he did it to ensure that the cabinet hangers — during the remodel or any time thereafter — wouldn’t accidentally put a screw through his wires.

Of course, the timing for all of this just couldn’t be better (need that sarcasm mark right here) as the bay area is expecting Rains of Biblical Proportions. Translating from Stupid Newscaster speak, the does mean that we will be seeing a few inches of rain in the next week, relatively constant precipitation.

Exactly what we need when we have a bunch of holes in our roof! Especially since it’ll be at least a week before the foam company can make it out to seal our roof.

So, at the moment, we have fully repaired electrical system and 6 mil plastic sheeting sealed over the holes containing the fixed electrical. With the rain today, all seems dry on the inside.

Hopefully, we’ll have everything repaired and installed within a week or two.

I did have to add one more photo.

This is a picture of the roof area over the garage. It is also proof quite positive that the foam roof does a wonderful job of insulating the interior of the house.

In particular, that entire area is covered in a thin layer of ice. In the damp early morning air of California, the foam roof does an amazing job of condensing liquid out of the air. If it is cold enough, it freezes to the roof nearly immediately.

You cannot imagine exactly how much of a surprise it was stepping over the peak of the roof to discover that said gentle slope was a frictionless plane!

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).

SpiroScales was first written for black&white NeXT systems (before color was available). The color picking algorithm was purely a best guess based upon how pleasant the 2-bit B&W dithering on ye olde NeXT monitor looked.

Worked out pretty well.

The algorithm is a total hack.

The screen saver effectively maintains three oscillating sets of numbers. The first two streams’ phase is influenced by mouse position. The third stream is constant, but in a different phase always from the other two.

The color is derived from these three streams of values. Specifically, the RGB values are derived from the three value streams directly.

From the first two streams — the ones influenced by mouse coordinates — a second set of two streams of numbers are created which are used as the X and Y coordinates of each point of the polygons.

Each polygon is rendered by grabbing 3 points from the array of points; not necessarily consecutive points, either. However, each successive polygon is made up of 2 points from the prior polygon and a new point, which yields a continuous stream of connected polygons.

Really, this writeup was just an excuse to make the post long enough to include a few screenshots that show the rather large variation possible simply by moving the mouse about the screen and letting it sit in one spot for a while.

I have 5 or 6 variations on this particular theme that I’ll gradually add to the project as time permits. And I have some other, radically different, screensavers that I ought to resurrect.

Note that all of the drawing is done with NSBezierPath because that was a nearly direct port from the original Display PostScript calls that were used. Obviously, this’d all be a boatload faster in Open GL, but I just don’t have the time to go there.

Note that the feedback system does exhibit pattern wells. Certain areas of the screen will exhibit certain distinct patterns that you can explore by moving the mouse pixel by pixel within that area.

Due to the way the mouse based deltas are applied, two areas of interest are the dead center of the screen. That yields lots of tiny polygons that’ll fill the screen with basket weave patterns like the previous screenshot.

The diagonals, though, will yield really long/thin polygons that, if done just right, will fill the screen with really detailed, full color, moire patterns.

Have fun!

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.



Out of the box, an SD card will be formatted with an MS-DOS (FAT) filesystem.

Useless (except for in digital cameras).

But it isn’t enough to just reformat it to be an HFS+ Journaled filesystem. You also need to change the partitioning table.

To do so:

• Launch Disk Utility
• Insert the SD card
• Select the volume (labeled 16.06 GB Generic STORAGE DEVICE Media in my case)
• Select the Partition tab
• Select 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme. Even if there is only one partition, selecting 1 Partition will enable the all critical Options… button at the bottom
• Click Options… and select GUID Partition Table.
• Make sure the partition will be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
• Click Apply

You now have an SDHC card ready to be made bootable. From here, you could install Mac OS X to the card, install something like a DiskWarrior bootable image to the card, copy an already bootable partition to the card or blast down a bootable DMG to the card.

Disk Utility makes it trivial to clone whole volumes from one partition to another. If you do so, make sure and check erase destination as that will ensure that Disk Utility uses a block based copy and, thus, is about a zillion and twenty times faster.

If you have a bootable disk image around, you can easily use Disk Utility to restore the image to the partition or you can use the command line:

sudo asr -source /path/to/bootable.dmg -target /Volumes/SDCard -erase -noverify -noprompt

Then, reboot your mac and hold down the option key. The newly created boot partition should show up.

It is fast enough to boot for installation, recovery, or intermittent use.

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.