Beer Brewing – Rollingskull

On Ecosystems and Workflow

I could be best described as a “systems guy” I design and build systems to interact and work with other systems. Most of the times the systems are pre-built and I have to just do the interconnecting, other times it’s much more complicated. At home I’ve carried over this philosophy for the most part, I’m so deep into the Apple ecosystem it’s not even funny. You know what stuff truly just works though, so if it works for me then I’m good with it. I have philosophical reasons for not being all in on Google and Microsoft is firmly in the services side outside of Surface and Xbox.

I still maintain presences in Google and Microsoft domains, if you had to ask me which one was primary I would say Microsoft as I actually pay for their services. I have Google because it’s basically a utility for the internet at this point in North America.

With all that being written, I have made some decidedly interesting choices over the years in terms of where to put my ecosystem dollars. On the digital media front I’m iTunes almost 100% except for books, I’m all in on Amazon Kindle for books. In home audio I’ve gone a decidedly “Switzerland” route mainly because there was no Apple entry till late last year, and when it comes to audio I don’t want an assistant I want good sounding music. So SONOS is my platform of choice for the home audio side of things. And honestly their stuff works quite nicely across all mediums and and it sounds really good. Once you buy one, you won’t be able to stop.

So the one place where I’ve looked and haven’t really made a commitment is home automation. Part of it is out of lack of wanting yet more devices on my WiFi, but at the same time the overall ecosystems are becoming robust enough to warrant consideration. When you look at the major ecosystems out in the wild there are three that stand out… Apple HomeKit, Google Weave, and Nest. Nest already has a beach head in my home with a thermostat and a couple of smoke detectors, which other then helping the thermostat figure out when I’m home aren’t much worth the price of admission. Looking at the history I tend to go with ecosystems where there is a solid marriage between hardware and software.

Ecosystems are great until you don’t have any body supporting you or the company discontinues it. At least with hardware there is a chance that your stuff gets sucked up by someone else, but eventually everything dies.

Continued on backup strategies at home

This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….

OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.

Well shit…

Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.

I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.

I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.

This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.

Then I had a thought….

Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….

So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.

On the iPad Pro.

So last week I mentioned I had started taking classes for a masters degree… One of the things that became very quickly apparent to me was that while I have a really nice computer setup at home. It sucked like portable hole going to a vacuum dimension. I’ve had a iPad of some sort since the iPad2 days. I’ve always found them to be handy but never really good for much more then keeping track of my fantasy football teams and surfing the internet on the couch. The best use I’ve ever found for it is watching movies on a plane or something similarly single focused.

So with this class I made a concerted effort to use my iPad Air 2 with a Bluetooth keyboard for class for taking notes on reading and doing outlines for papers. I knew that writing full blown papers wasn’t going to happen but I was going to go for 70% of my homework. The first week of class it blew up in my face so hard… the keyboard was just to small, my gorilla sized sausagesque fingers were missing and double tapping keys constantly, along with just being generally uncomfortable. The process did show great promise though the ergonomics sucked. Which I kind of already knew from using the iPad at conferences for taking notes, good for a quick thing or two but hands on keyboard for more then a minute or two and things started to be “no bueno”.

So this led to a deep discussion of replacing the iPad with a portable device that could act as a writing and research device and fill the remarkable small iPad sized niche in my life. One of the things I have noticed over the last 2 years since I got a iPhone + is that I used my iPad much less and just defaulted to my iPhone. I seriously questioned if another iPad was warranted or would I better served by a low end surface or MacBook.

Chrome books have merit, I’m not just there yet…

I kicked around the concept for a week and what I finally landed on was. While a second laptop to carry around would be nice, I would already be behind the tech curve on a piece of gear that I knew had a limited shelf life and low resale/hand down value. That’s what killed the laptop and 2in1 situations and ultimately landed on a iPad Pro 10.5 with… a keyboard….

So basically I have a single app focus laptop with a small keyboard that isn’t to cramped for my gorilla like hands that is reasonably powerful, integrates with my workflows, and can fill a iPad sized niche in my world. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how nicely the iPad has worked fill some roles and I’ve already found uses for it outside of the original scope. It’s not a daily carry device in the work bag… I may not use it every day, but it’s there and I only need to charge it once a week. The down side is with the keyboard and the smart connector it’s tough to use it on my lap… and I kinda despise the on screen keyboard. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

On backup strategies for the home…

On backup strategies for the home…

So I had a thought this evening as I was looking at my router and seeing my upload tick across the megabytes while my Crash Plan was syncing to it’s cloud backup.

Do I really need to be doing whole user directory backups to the cloud?

It was a moment of reflection, I had installed crash plan on the new Mac last year because, well that is what I always have done since 2010 when I started with Carbonite. Yes, I had Time Machine… but after the great flower fire of 2010, I had been running a dual onsite / offsite backup strategy. A little belt and suspenders for home, but practice what you preach to the people at work. Fast forward seven years and my two major reasons for doing a multi backup strategy have pretty much gone by the way side.

DEAR LORD I’M THE ONLY PERSON WITH COPIES OF XYZ PICTURE… because I’m a bit of a data hoarder, and apparently no one else in my family can be bothered to learn how to use FLICKR.
Cloud syncing technology is pretty seamless now for user folders.

The first problem is pretty much taken care of by the fact that every photo I take is synced to three different services pretty much automatically off of my phone or main machine within 24 hours. So no issues with losing those pictures that appear to be only backed up by me. The second one wasn’t as in your face and really didn’t hit me till the last two weeks or so.

I signed up to start taking some classes and working towards a masters (that’ s a separate blog post when I feel like talking about it). Anyway the school uses Office 365 which I subscribe to on a personal level already. My entire workspace is through the Office 365 portal on the schools website, which I thought was pretty cool. Until I signed into my personal copy at home with my school credentials and had a second instance of OneDrive sync start up. Thats when it dawned on me, I’ve been on OneDrive for a couple of years now and could lose my computer tomorrow. I wouldn’t care everything I need is up in my OneDrive… it just took a few years for that particular wall to fall.

So now as I sit here looking at my Crash Plan app I’m wondering to myself, do I actually need to continue to pay for a service that while it does provide a complete copy of all my files and 30 days of deleted files…. it’s slow as hell doing a restore and kinda cumbersome for anything more then a folder or two. Also my /User/tom folder on my Mac is 86GB after documents, pictures, music, and some video, but before any of my Virtual Machines.

So that’s something to talk about there, what about Virtual Machines or larger databases you may have on your local machine. Well for me, I use rsync for the VM files themselves to be synced to my home server. After that I really don’t care, I don’t run anything production on the VM’s they are there specifically to play with and blow away as needed. The Windows VM machines are a little bit more temperamental then Linux for me, but that’s because I get annoyed that I have to license my Windows machines versus just popping a new Linux flavor.

So at the end of the day, the question is for me is there a good reason to keep paying for Crash Plan or something of it’s ilk? I honestly don’t know, in just the writing of this post I’ve gone through a fair amount of type space that says maybe not.

Things to chew on.

On beer brewing and being frugal

In the year 2007 I had a pretty good June, I sold my first house… paid off a bunch of bills accumulated because I was selling a house…. bought my first MAC…. and bought my first home brew kit.

One of those three items is still with me today… go ahead guess… I’ll wait.

Jeopardy Theme plays in background

If you guessed the MAC, you would be close but after 5 years the old laptop couldn’t keep up. Almost all of that first beer brewing kit is still with me and still used in some shape or form. The only casualty has been a glass carboy that cracked when cleaning. For 10 years to still be using most all of the stuff is pretty impressive in my world. Which now 10 years on I’m to a point where I want to step up my brewing operations by don’t want to piecemeal the deal.

So here is the outline of what will become the brew setup 2.0

Overall the system will use a “HERMS” process https://youtu.be/PNKcQoGZOpQ though mine won’t be nearly that fancy.
Hot liquor heating will come from a second propane stove I have
One pump for the entire setup which means I’ll be moving hoses
which means quick connects for hoses
And I need to get a counter flow chiller

I do have a diagram someplace in one of my cloud drives, but it is not ready for prime time.

So in the mean time… I keep plotting and planning.

There be 3rd party publishing apps…

Well now it’s all begun in a way…

That I now can start showing what it looks like to write outside of a normal interface on a dedicated app. The Ulysses app is pretty fantastic, the only problem is it appears to be pretty basic, though I do appreciate it uses the library concept of the MAC and sticks with that hard.

OK so I guess the next thing is to publish a picture of the new setup and maybe one day instead of talking about my computers I’ll talk about beer brewing, turns out that day is farther away then anyone thought….

At least the monitor and laptop are very pretty….

Yeah… about those new posts…

It would appear that my eyes were bigger than my personal project threshold on re-lighting the fires on this thing. Not the first time something like that has happened and it won’t be the last.

It gives me more time to do research and really figure out what kind of home brewery I want to build.

Which is to say that I’ve figured out, now I’m just trying to find the parts for cheaper… also electric or propane.

Plusses and minuses to both… discuss amongst yourselves…. I’ll check in Q3-ish and see how it’s going.

In where I chroncile what the plan is…

OK so with the “relighting” of this blog I guess I should lay out the plan as it stands today January 8th….

The old content is going to stay… no sense in hiding it…. also it’s mostly drivel… and it’s already been indexed so many times even if I wanted to hide it I couldn’t.
The general goal will be for documenting homebrew process, equipment, and results. This is much easier to handle then video at the moment… though video may find it’s way here eventually.
I’m going to use a App on laptop to write instead of the web interface because I like apps better then web interfaces and I can do a somewhat more integrated workflow.
My “goal” is to write at least once every week to start with so we will see how that goes.

This plan is written in jello that may or may not be in a working fridge, don’t plan on holding me to this.

If you plan on holding me to this then welcome back after 2 years of radio silence!

Oh yeah… this thing….

So ummm it’s been a while…. like just a tick over 2 years a while…

So what’s new?

Same old same old huh?

Yeah same here…. I got a new MBP… hostname “I Am Groot” it’s interesting looking in logs… there are much more verbose then the namesake….

So where have I been? Same place as always, just on a different page…. or pages as the case would be.

I’m still paying for this domain and I like the Word Press platform much more then some of the other platforms out there… and there seems to be something much more authentic about the personal site then using a “FriendFace” or “Tweetgram”.

I don’t know I do like “Tweetgram”

So ummm yeah… I think this is officially going to get re-lit for something other then chronicling the journeys of nothing… I’ve missed the writing and I stepped away for various reasons that I won’t get into here. Feel free to ask me next time you see me and we have a beer…. until then you’re just gonna have to watch me make beer and go through the whole beer brewery process.

One day I will get there… today is not that day… Tomorrow isn’t looking like it either.

And there was a kind of Yellow King Kolsch…

And the last of the extract brews is in the keg… It’s for the ~~Super Bow~~…. BIG GAME in February… Any whoo it’s a Kolsch style ale so by far the lightest I’ve ever done. And by light I mean I can’t hide any screw ups in the brewing process.

With the restart of the brewing hobby (3 batches in the last two months) I’ve moved to a bucket for a primary fermenter (heck of a lot easier to clean) and have moved the carboy to secondary fermenter status. Previously I was using the keg as the secondary fermenter and ager which led to some funkiness (and not in a good way) to the beer. The last two batches have employed the carboy for secondary fermentation and the keg for aging with distinctly better results.

And because I’m always looking for a excuse to use my iPhone… here is a time lapse of transfering the Yellow King Kolsch from the carboy to the keg.

The sediment on the bottom of the carboy? That’s after a 24 cold crash…. and I wonder why the other beers tasted kind of funky.

Well other then the lines.