Category: A Method to the madness

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 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….

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.

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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.

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.

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.

IT’s Alive!(?)….

The latest batch of home-brew is fermenting… and well it’s fermenting. I’m on about a 3 batch a year clip. Which for how much beer I drink vs how much I have away to the curious hordes is about the perfect amount. The main obstacles to higher production levels have more to do with my unwillingness to invest in a true fridge for fermentation or dispensing.

Actually this little hobby of mine is coming up to a cross roads of sorts for me… On the one hand I can keep doing what I’m going which are kits and recipes that other people have come up with and keep using the dry malt and syrups. It’s easy and fairly “quick” to turn around a batch of beer in about 3 hours. On the other hand I don’t have the level of control that I would like to have for the final product. I don’t know how much control I really can have since there are so many variables at my level of brewing (temperature, yeast variety, sugar in the brew) and 1 bad part of the process and I’m screwed. On the other hand I don’t feel that I’m at a level that would justify spending the time and money to work all of the “variables” out.

I tend to be of the opinion that I need to either;
1. Start coming up with my own recipes (no small task but do able)
2. Leave the malt extract world behind and start looking at going to a all grain process. (no small task but doable)

I’m tending to lean toward the all grain process since it would let me develop some additional skills in my hobby and at the same time allow me to work slowly but surely to developing my own recipes.

In either case I need to rework my fermentation cooler. I like my ales just as much as the next guy but the freezer with a thermo-coupler is not cutting it anymore. My biggest issue with the freezer is that it’s just a pain in the back (literally) to get the carboy in and out when it’s full. Also the temperature control is not the greatest. I’m thinking a small fridge that could hold 2 carboys would be about perfect. Have one carboy on fermentation and have the other one on aging. I’m not worried about carbonating the beers as that takes place in the keg which would stay in the freezer (though the CO2 tank needs to come out side so I can get two kegs in there). The fermentation fridge also opens up possibilities of expanding beyond beer to things like Wine or Mead (OK maybe not mead).

For the time being I have a batch that will be ready in about a week or so and maybe sometime this summer I will sit down and make this rather nifty chiller that was on life hacker on Friday… that thing would be deadly for Cardinals tailgating.