Author: Tom Kern

Act nice and gentlemanly…..

I’m a Linux fan… actually more accurately I’m a fan of well written operating systems that do what they are designed to do in a functional and consistent manner…. Which means with the exception of 1 NT based windows OS I’m a Windows Fan…. And lets face it I do 95% of my personal stuff on the Mac but you know Mac is like 1 step to the Right of Linux… if Linux is the slacker brother who lucked into a wicked job and hot wife, then Mac is the starving artist brother who tried to reinvent himself 10 years ago with increasingly better results.

So I was going to write about music on my phone… Yeah music on my phone… which is Android… which is Linux… which in the previous paragraph I may or may not have mentioned I’m a fan of. I’m also a fan of iOS, but I made a conscious decision to not move to a iphone because I am not a fan of the walled garden approach that Apple takes with iOS (yes there are ways to get around it, but honestly I’m lazy and I don’t really feel like screwing around with it). While I’m fine with a iPad and iOS as a combination (the upsized screen makes apps just a little bit easier to use in non-app form and goto a browser based setup). One of my consistent complaints of Android has always been it’s kind of a pain in the ass to get music loaded onto, mainly because the iPod and other iDevices are the standard for this particular endeavor (shit just works and works well). It’s a small gripe and I don’t listen to music on my phone enough outside of Pandora to really be that worried about it.

Now Amazon has come along with their cloud player… and oh shit son I have a new favorite application on my phone. I already liked the Amazon MP3 store, and now that I’ve played with it and the cloud music integration I’m sold. Yes it’s 5GB free, but it’s $20 a year for another 20GB… I know several individuals who pay $25 a year for flickr-pro account and have no real business with a flickr pro account.

Will cloud music replace pandora? Probably not, half the fun of Pandora is listening to new music that you might not otherwise have listened to (there is a reason I’m started listening to alot more 70’s southern rock and it’s not the nascar). The main reason I like amazon cloud music… I don’t have to screw around with double twist and it’s slow syncing to get my music on my phone… turn on the app, get the data flowing and life is good my friends.

Now if I can just figure out a way to automate the moving of podcasts.

Caution “Danger Lager” ahead….

The latest creation(ish) from your top 5 favorite home brewer is “Danger Lager” originally called “Max’s Danger Lager” but I decided to change the name since I probably shouldn’t be promoting a cute little baby to drink.. though I openly encourage his parents.

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So what’s it taste like? Well it’s got a sweet start and and has hints of alot of things… amongst six taste testers I got six different responses, the one thing they all said…. It lacked the distinctive bite of usual home-brew (I’ve been trying to get rid of that bite for a while now). And as Don said… “This is a beer you could sell” well that was nice of him.

Basic components of the “Danger Lager”? A kit from my new favorite brew shop “Brew your own brew” It was originally a Golden Ale kit, but instead of a ale yeast I swapped out to a lager yeast. I also made a few other modifications to the recipie but it’s still really hard to screw up a kit home brew beer.

Why call it “Danger Lager”? Well other then being a cool name, well it kind of sneaks up on you and can kick your ass.

Hello I’m Johnny Cash…

You know maybe just maybe I shouldn’t use the line from whatever song is playing on iTunes when I start writing… you know it may be a good idea… but you have admit I have your attention now don’t I?

So I took a few days last week and just checked out of reality for bit… and by checked out of reality I mean I had a “staycation” and by “staycation” I mean I’m to f*cking cheap to go anywhere with out a damn good reason. And even then there is going to be alot of damn whining.

From here on out we are going to call the “staycation” what it really was… “Tom fucking around” (Tfa).

So on my little Tfa excursion, I had two markedly different experiences for the about the same price…. on one side I went a picked up “Medal of Honor” for the PC… on the other side I got some zombie novels. Guess which one I enjoyed infinitely more?

First “Medal of Honor” not the greatest game ever, but decent for a single player campaign and lets face it these things are built to be multiplayer and almost no attention is played to the single player experience. I have to say after playing this game it was almost enough to turn me off to first person shooters set in anything close to the real world at anytime. It’s hard to describe and honestly I don’t want to write about it anymore.

OK so after the depressing experience that was “Medal of Honor” my brother had texted me and said I need to check out “Day by Day Armageddon” he then tells me that since I liked “World War Z” I will really like this (great now my brother is amazon.com). So I pick it up on the kindle (more about that in a minute) and sometime around noon on Friday I sat down to start the book… my plan was to read for a hour and then text Curtis to see if he wanted to go shoot guns… As Curtis will tell you he got no such text. I honestly didn’t put down the damned kindle until the battery ran out at around 6 that night. I finished it the next day. So on Sunday I’m going through zombie withdrawal and pop on to amazon to see if there is another book coming out soon, and to my pleasant surprise there is another book available on the damned kindle. Amazon one click purchase for digital goods is very dangerous… especially for zombie books. I read the second book in a afternoon it was just as awesome as the first book. Now granted I don’t have high standards for zombie books, but if you thought “World War Z” was good you will probably like “Day by Day Armageddon”

OK so now a word about digital books… I find that I’m having the same issue with digital books that I had with digital music some years ago. My first issue is apparently I’m not to be trusted with books in digital form since when I went to go “loan” the “Day by Day Armageddon” books I found there were not eligible for loaning, then I started looking at all of my kindle books and sure enough none of them are enabled for loaning. What the hell I thought Kindle could loan books now… so a quick search through the Amazon FAQs section reveals that loaning books is restricted by publisher…. well hell I guess I’m not going to be buying the next book on Kindle. Which now leaves me at a interesting crossroads… while I enjoy having books digitally across multiple devices I have to say the no loaning part (for the most part for me) is a major impediment to the platform. I know that nook has some sort of loaning functionality but I need to research that more before I think about going down that path.

Lets be honest if I got a nook color I would so hack it and put android on it….. On which I would read my Kindle books 🙂

Techonology Hates Me…

So for last couple of posts I’ve talked about moving from one mac to another… and well it appears the my windows PC reads my blog because when I was surfing the internet on Monday after work my screens decided to do it’s impression of a 3d effect trying to impress me it failed miserably….

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So the good news is I’ve sourced a new video card… the bad news is I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep running the Boinc CUDA apps that look for aliens and fold proteins on that new video card.

More migration notes… bootcamping

Ok so this one is going to be quick… I got a new mac… yea!

I posted previously on the migration process after a about 24 hours things started to magically get faster, which tends to make me thing there is some sort of background system process running that updates things to the new mac from the old mac. I don’t knot it’s just conjecture or maybe I just need to reboot the damn thing.

I’m thinking I probably needed to reboot the damn thing after dumping some serious knowledge on it.

Ok so if any of you have heard me gripe about my apple store experience in 2007 when I bought my first mac…. you know the story where the dude selling me a very expensive looked down his nose at me and said “windows isn’t going to be the first thing you install is it?” I find that I’m back to a kind of circle of life moment with my mac and windows.

It seems that my upgrade Windows7 that I bought for my old mac is tied to that hardware so I couldn’t use it on the new mac, ok not a huge deal I will use winclone and clone the dmg into the bootcamp partition… yeah that worked not at all. Which left me with… well maybe I can suck up my bootcamp windows into vmware… nope no dice. Honestly after about three hours of dicking around with I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

So now the real question comes out, do I really need to bootcamp my mac? Part of me says yes I do! Then the rational side of me kicks in, 95% of the time when I booted into windows was only to download updates and that was a bit of a pain. I can’t say that I have any real intentions of using this mac as a gaming rig… ok I do have steam on it and compared to my old mac Left4Dead is pretty sweet. When it comes to gaming though at least the kind of gaming I do the PC is the platform of choice. Yes mac are starting to do games, here is the other side of that coin I have no real desire to build a new PC other then my CPU is getting to be a bit long in the tooth. The GPU isn’t far behind.

From a overall perspective what I would like to do is move off of the PC entirely and run all of my media on a apple platform… that however seems kind of expensive but man that shit would work. I can say from a IT guy perspective it’s in my best interest to be familiar with all platforms out there so I guess I will be keeping my PC around even if it is just for gaming and looking for aliens.

Migration notes….

Some quick notes on migrating to one mac from another…. this is more for me but if you happen upon this from Google and find it useful your welcome in advance.

1. The migration assistant is useful, just don’t plan on it being fast. (3.5 hours for 130GB of user data)

2. Uninstall carbonite first on the old machine… make sure it’s not in the transfer over…. it will end up being a pain in the ass. (for the record you have enable root user in the directory utility and then delete the Carbonite folder in “Library/Application Support” (don’t forget to turn off root mode when your done)(also reboot after you delete the folder and before you reinstall… don’t ask just roll with it))

3. Clean up files on your old mac first… take the time and go through the User/%username%/Library folders and clean up the folders from that isn’t there anymore, also take this time to go through your applications folder and delete things that transfer over that really shouldn’t like firmware updates and the such.

4. Just like do a clean reload on a OS upgrade all of your stuff comes over (see part about transfer utility)

4a. Microsoft want’s it registration keys for it’s software again. (stupid outlook)

4b. Vmware does not and it’s sooooooo much faster.

I haven’t even gotten to the point of boot-camp yet so I’m sure there will be a bit out here about that…. the preview of that is I took a winclone snapshot of my environment and am hoping to create a boot-camp partion and then over lay the win-clone on that…. we will see how that works out for me….

Another sacrafice….

In the Spring of 2009 I sacrificed my blackberry pearl to the NASCAR gods… a week later I got the phone back sans sd card and in a decent shape….

In the spring 2011 race I sacrificed a HTC Incredible with the help of the lower deities Coors and Budweiser….

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I think I may need to find a new church… or at the very least stop taking my phone to NASCAR….

It feels like I’m losing touch….

So it’s been a while since I wrote about the journey that is my homebrewing experince…. and well there is a good reason I haven’t written about it.

I’ve been in something of a rut with home brewing over the last 18 months or so… process is down to the point that I can teach someone (as has been done multiple times) but for the most part I stick to kits which have the same basic process.

Heat to 155 for 30 with grains
bring to boil and cut heat
add malt
bring back to rolling boil
add hops at specified intervals
cool
place in carboy and pitch yeast.

It’s really pretty hard to screw it… you actually have to try. I’ve kicked around going to a all grain setup, but that seems to involve a bit more work then I really want to put into the hobby / I’m afraid of the dark path that will lead me down (NASCAR isn’t bad enough).

So with a somewhat heavy heart I must break with my Ale brewing roots….

I must purse “MAXimum danger” I must brew a LAGER! *queue ominous music*

Honestly the brew process isn’t that different… actually it’s the same damn kit just with Lager yeast instead of Ale yeast. What’s the biggest difference you ask? Well temperature is the biggest place Ale’s are are 65F to 72F where Lagers like to be between 50F and 56F. It’s a smaller window but doable, the bigger issue is finding a space in Arizona to accommodate that… turns out if you don’t have a digital control on your fridge the minimum temperature is 42 degrees. I did not know that until this weekend.

So with all of this written the brew is in the cooler the temperature stable at 54 degrees and me left contemplating a name….

I’m thinking “Max’s danger lager” is a good name….

It will have a picture of Curtis’s beard on the label.