Archive for the 'Entertainment' 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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If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

I have long wanted a really good toaster oven. One that had decent capacity, was versatile, and insulated such that it doesn’t lose a ton of heat when sticking food into it. As well, I can’t deal with poorly designed products and will often choose dead simple over a full featured item simply because simple is harder to screw up.

After 8 months of research and comparisons, I finally settled on the Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven. It isn’t simple and it certainly isn’t cheap, but the Breville is really quite an excellent piece of technology.

The Breville’s controls are straightforward. You select the mode first, then there are two additional dials that configure, effectively, temperature and time. For toasting, the two additional buttons select slices and darkness; seemingly silly, but it actually works quite well!

As well, the toaster oven has a convection setting and a “frozen” setting that automatically adjusts the cooking times to account for cooking frozen foods. The “frozen” button is the one feature that borders on frivolous gadgetry. Then again, cooking random frozen foods really isn’t a part of our diet. If it was, the adjustment it makes actually does make sense.

The interior capacity is large enough to bake a 13″ pizza or roast a whole chicken (though you might have to cut it into two halves). Combining decent insulation with high wattage, the Breville both heats relatively quickly, holds heat well, and the outside does get warm, but not terribly hot.

When the internal rack is in toasting position, opening the door magnetically slides the rack out a few inches. Very convenient.

All in all, the Breville is a well engineered kitchen tool. It can easily replace your toaster and can often fill in for your full sized oven while both pre-heating more quickly and using less electricity overall. And, of course, the Breville can act as a secondary oven for those times when you need two ovens.

Since the addition of the Breville to our cooking toolset, it sees daily use.

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For Christmas Eve, our tradition is to serve the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

This year, my parents and one of my sisters are in town. We were joined by our neighbor Ron.

As the name implies, the meal is composed of at least seven seafood dishes. Thus, a great excuse to pull out the full china settings and go for fancy table supreme!

Since my father is allergic to soft shelled seafood, this year’s feast included oysters, squid salad, clams, mussels, scallops, sole, and freshwater bass.


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One of the problems with the Chemex coffee maker is that it is utterly useless for making more coffee than you plan on consuming in one sitting simply because it does nothing to keep the coffee warm! We have guests coming in over the holiday break and I want to be able to make a pot of chemex, pour it into a thermos, pour some more hot water over the grounds (if you use enough grounds, this works great!!) and then our that into the thermos, too.

On the recommendation of one with a clear caffeine addiction, I picked up the Thermos Nissan 51 Ounce Stainless Steel Carafe pictured at left.

It does a brilliant job! I made coffee at about 10AM this morning and it was still hot — not burning hot, but hot enough — after 5pm in the afternoon! Better yet, the coffee maintained its flavor just about as well as one could expect! The caffeine addict that recommended the carafe indicated that pretty much all of Thermos’s Nissan line are top notch, too.

I tried putting the Chemex on a Bunn Warmer — was enticed by the name, obviously — but the combination of a hot bottom plus sides that shed heat rapidly meant that the coffee quickly turned ultra-nasty flavored. Yuck. The Bunn will prove useful; it turns out it heats water to pretty much the perfect temperature for brewing certain kinds of green tea that don’t tolerate boiling water without yielding bitter flavors!

I have recently been playing through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
after having played through the utterly brilliant Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
.

Absolutely genius game. Personally, I have always hated tracked games; games that have a single story line that you follow along, with little to no bifurcation. Yet, Uncharted 1/2 both do such a good job of telling a compelling story that I’m having a total blast. The voice acting and character animation are top notch.

It is as if you are playing along an interactive movie. Where you do get to make all the decisions is in how you approach any given battle; …go stealth or go in with guns a-blazing? …AK-47 with hundreds of round, a sniper rifle that’ll one-shot-kill, but requires precise aim, or a shotgun that requires close range & is devastating? …sneak around and take out the gunner’s nest from behind or try and lob a grenade?

The one problem though, is that the game freezes about once every hour to hour and a half of play. It may be a thermal issue (though I’m playing in a relatively chill room and the PS3 has excellent ventilation), but the symptoms are slightly odd. The music keeps playing, but all graphics and controls are dead. Upon restart, you find yourself just beyond where the freeze occurred, as if the game detected the freeze and moved you to just beyond the point where it happened. If true, this is welcome, but it sometimes means that you are in a tight spot with no appropriate weapons.

And I’m not the only one. Looking at this google search, I see hundreds of reports of the same behavior.

Some see the freeze occur more often than others (and I suspect some are thermal issues, from the descriptions). The problems aren’t limited to any particular model of PS3, either (I’m on a 120GB Slim, being the cheap bastard that I am).

Others have reported no problems at all.

I wish there were some means of reporting bugs and/or tracking issues like these.

While annoying, this isn’t a catastrophic bug (at least not for me — it doesn’t happen that often) to the point of making me regret the purchase. Total a worthy and awesome game to play through!

One reason I started this weblog was as a means of taking notes such that I could use google to index my brain. Another reason, though, was that others would comment on my various postings with ideas, refinements, suggestions, and criticisms. This posting is in response to just such a contribution.

Shortly after writing the turkey fryer article, a comment hit the moderation queue suggesting that I give rice oil a try for frying a turkey. Specifically, the comment pointed to the California Rice Oil Company.

I emailed the contact on the post to ensure that it wasn’t spam and, in so doing, the company offered to send me a gallon of rice oil for review.

I’m not entirely certain how I have entirely missed rice oil in my cooking explorations, but I have. And now that said company introduced me to the oil, I’m never going back.

It is a fantastic product. Better yet, it also appears to be one of the healthiest oils around (see the references).

I love to fry foods and, with the turkey burner or deep fryer, I can fry outside without stinking up the house. A common misconception is that fried foods are greasy & unhealthy. Starting with a good quality & healthy oil, neither is actually true if the fry is executed properly.

In general, the key to frying is to get the grease or oil hot enough that the waters on the surface of the food boil quickly and either seal the food or cook whatever batter or coating is on the food rapidly. Too low of a temperature and it will be greasy.

And that is what I find most amazing about rice oil.

Olive oil has a ridiculously low smoke point of 360℉. At or near that temperature, olive oil will start to smoke and, more importantly, it will start to break down, both changing flavor and greatly impacting the nutritional elements in the oil.

Canola, Peanut and Soy all have smoke points around 450℉, much more reasonable for frying. But all have nutritional deficits or somewhat questionable manufacturing practices (for example, Canola oil is largely produced from genetically modified crops).

Grape seed oil has a very high smoke point of 485℉, but is not balanced across the fats and is very expensive.

Rice oil has a ridiculously high smoke point of 490℉. The pan in the picture was at somewhere north of 450℉. I have never cooked with an oil that wouldn’t be smoking or changing flavor at that temperature!

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Ultimately, the whole point of resurrecting my old screensaver code was to finally port DPhyllotaxis to Snow Leopard.

Beyond being, perhaps, the most over-engineered screen saver ever for what ultimately draws colored dots, I wrote this as a sort of virtual flower for my then-girlfriend, now-wife-of-more-than-a-decade, Christine.

The underlying algorithm on this one is based entirely on phyllotaxis and the phyllotactic pattern of growth seen across so much of the plant world. The most well known example being the layout of seeds in a sunflower and that particular form of phyllotaxis is exactly what this screensaver mimics.

The color calculation in this particular screen saver is, frankly, goofy. Every floret — every dot — is actually rendered. The brightness is determined by calculating a color once, grabbing the red component and then calculating the color again using a slightly different algorithm and using the previous red value as the new brightness. Rather silly, but the results are pleasant enough.

When I originally wrote this in 1994-ish, it used Display PostScript to do all the drawing. Specifically:

/* this should not be done here */
PSarc(cp.x, cp.y, 15. + (11. * pp.r), 0, 360);
PSgsave();
PSfill();
PSgrestore();
NXSetColor(NX_COLORBLACK);
PSstroke();

I have no idea why, 15 years ago, I thought it important to note that “this should not be done here”. None. So, in the ported code, the comment is gone.

CGFloat floretDiameter = 10. + (11. * pp.r);
CGFloat floretRadius = floretDiameter / 2.;
NSRect floretRect =
    NSMakeRect(cp.x - floretRadius,
    cp.y - floretRadius,
    floretDiameter, floretDiameter);
NSBezierPath *floretPath = [NSBezierPath
    bezierPathWithOvalInRect: floretRect];

[floretPath fill];

[[NSColor blackColor] set];
[floretPath stroke];

There are, of course, many ways to make the above a ton faster. Save for reducing power usage by going a more efficient route, it just doesn’t matter for this particular use case as I already had to slow down the animation rate considerably.

Seems there has been a bit of performance jump between the 25MHZ 68040 this was originally written on and the 2GHZ Core 2 Duo machine I used for the porting work.

Code is in the same repository as the other screen savers. I also tossed a pre-built binary on the server. Only tested on 64-bit Snow Leopard, but it might should also work on 10.5 ppc/i386.

Just found yet another use for my turkey burner. Roasting chile peppers! Worked flawlessly and was a heck of a lot easier than a plumber’s torch.

This kind of gas burner is just incredibly useful for anyone who enjoys cooking. It is designed to be able to heat a pot of grease up to the 350°F necessary to deep fry a turkey (which I have never tried). Thus, the burners put out a truly awesome amount of heat!

Note: The Underwriter’s Laboratory will not certify turkey fryers at all. Why? Because people are stupid and need to be protected from themselves when using powerful tools. When frying, it is terribly easy to cause a grease fire. So, fry away from your house and use the nifty good-eats style turkey crane. And have a grease friendly fire extinguisher on hand.

Or just do what I do and don’t actually fry turkeys on it!

You can find the burners at any decent hardware store. If you do, make sure it has a few features (all of which the burner at left has — except the pot):

Flat Top Surface

The top of the burner should be flat. This is critical if you want to put something on it that is burgerbigger than the burner (like a grill). Yes, I was hungry when I wrote this.

Cast Two-Piece Burner

The burner, itself, should be two pieces of cast iron held together by a bolt through the middle. The burner will get stuff spilled on it and it will rust or corrode. The two piece design makes it trivial to take it apart for cleaning. A wire brush on an electric drill makes cleaning trivial.

Adjustable Air Vents

This is needed to be able to tune the flame. Not just for maximum heat output, but sometimes also for maximum flame height.

Long hose with valve on or after regulator

The gas coming out of the tank is relatively high pressure. The burner’s secondary regulator will take care of regulating down to something more reasonable. The valve after or integrated into the regulator is critical because the pressure off the tank, while high, will change considerably as the tank empties. That and it is nearly impossible to make fine adjustments on the high pressure side of the line.

Stainless Steel Pot

If you get a kit, try to find one with a stainless steel pot. It will last longer and corrode less than aluminum.

Stable Design

Some burners have legs that go straight down or are relatively tall. Stupid. Ideally, you want a three or four legged burner with relatively wide set legs. If three legs, they should spread quite wide for stability (like the one to the left).

OK — so you have the beast of a burner. What can you do with it? I’m sure there is more — comments welcome — but these are just some of the things I have done with mine:

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I used to be a complete french press fiend. However, the combination of the tedium of cleaning with the potential, now largely considered true, of increased cholesterol pushed me over to drip. (Espresso is like a pet snake — awesome when I get experience someone else’s but I ain’t gonna deal with that crap on a daily basis).

I tried a couple of electric drip pots but they pissed me off. The first featured a carafe that would drip coffee all over no matter how you poured and the second was optimized towards ensuring maximal grounds in your coffee cup.

Disgusted with technology, I decided to go the luddite route. Simple as possible. Carafe. Filter holder. Filter. Done.

In looking around, the Chemex Coffeemakers kept popping up. Gorgeous, simple design. Given the raves I read about the chemex coffeemakers, I decided to give one a try (like the one at left) and, also given reviews, decided to compare Chemex filters with a gold plated reusable coffee filter.

End result?

The Chemex + the Chemex filters produce the smoothest cup of drip coffee I have ever had. Flat out delicious. Start with a really good bean, freshly ground, and the Chemex consistently delivers an amazing cup of joe.

Frankly, I don’t believe for a second that it is the Chemex, itself, that is imparting such quality to the coffee. It is really the filter and the Chemex is just a gorgeously designed carafe to carry it.

In particular, the Chemex filters are a surprisingly heavy paper that seems to do a brilliant job of filtering both the really fine bits of the ground beans (which the metal filters let through), but also the oils and other nasty bits that contribute to the bitter flavors (and, potentially, cholesterol).

Frankly, coffee through the metal reusable filters flat out suck by comparison.

I have since bought a second Chemex for the office and have picked up a couple of Chemex for friends who have been amazed by the quality of the resulting coffee.

Again — the filters do seem to be the key (as long as you are brewing into a non-reactive vessel). The filters can be found online and at both esoteric hardware stores and your more obsessed coffee shops (Barefoot Cafe, for example — awesome place, coffee obsessed).

Highly recommended.

Update: I’m not interested in “fixing” french press or espresso. Espresso is too damned fiddly and I don’t want that many tubes, pipes, pumps and boilers between me and my coffee in the AM. The Aero-Press is an awesome contraption but, again, not interested. French Press with a filter sounds double-plus-fiddly & annoying.

No, I’m not trying to convince anyone that drip is superior, just that the Chemex filtered drip is superior to other drip.

I will, however, be perfectly happy to test drive a cup of coffee in any form, if you want to demonstrate the awesomeness of your extraction device & beans.