So, since this is my first brew, I thought I would show what I have done. Moving from the primary to the secondary (carboy).
Full carboy, almost 5 gallons.
Drew a little for tasting, unbelievably awesome. Cant wait for it to be carbonated and cold.
Sludge, glad this settled out.
I will post some more pictures when I get around to bottling.
Look at what came home with me, a new bigger brewing kit! I received the Mr. Beer kit for my birthday, while it worked great, most of the brewing community does everything in 5 gallons batches, so I have decided to take brewing to the next level.
Brewers Best Kit
Strainer
Spoon
Ingredients to make an Irish Red Ale
Specialty grains before steeping.
Sorry, a little fuzzy, but steeping the grains.
Science!
More active science!
More to come!
For my birthday, I got a Mr. Beer kit. I wanted to get into brewing, but didn’t want to take the leap into a expensive kit, so this turned out to be a great gift.
I brewed the Cowboy Lager first, and it turned out really good. Here is a picture, it has a little yeast from the bottom of the bottle, normally its not so cloudy.
Just brewed the Blonde Ale, look for a status update in about a month.
I use to blog about my blackberry when I got it and would post reviews of different apps. I have since then migrated to Android, but I haven’t posted anything android related yet, so I thought I would start.
To start off, I have an HTC Evo, rooted with CyanogenMod 7 on it. If you do not know anything about Cyanogenmod, I would recommend checking out their website.
The biggest advantage to using cyanogenmod is the customization you can do with it. With Android 4.0 source being released, I like the new design, which has insipred me to try out some of the ice cream sandwich themes for CM7 which is based on the AOSP Gingerbread 2.3.x.
To start off I have this theme for Cyanogenmod installed.
I recently switched from adw launcher to go launcher, but this launcher theme is for all the major third party launchers.
Then I use the ring locks on cyanogenmod, with this modification to the unlocker.
Here is the final results.
Here is the wallpaper I am using. Link
I did this modification a few months ago, but thought I would write a post about it. My xbox laser stopped working, and you have a few options when this happens
A) Buy a new xbox
B) Return the unit to get fixed by Microsoft
C) Fix it!
I choose option C.
I looked online and found lots of help, found out there is several different models of cd-roms in xboxs. The cd-rom I ordered off amazon was actually the wrong cd-rom, but had the same laser. So I had to remove just the physical laser assembly and replace it. I wont actually provide any instruction on how to replace the lasers, there are many websites out on the web that explain that better then I can, I just wanted to share a picture of the drive assembly and my experience.
So back when the whole TV transition was just starting and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I bought an antenna that I thought would cover my needs. Its an Antenna Direct DB2 antenna. Its a nice Multi-directional UHF antenna and at the time it worked great because there wasn’t any VHF stations. However after the final transition, two of the major stations switched back to VHF to the channels 7 and 9. So when the world cup started on TV, I decided I needed ABC which was on channel 9. So I researched what I needed to do, and obviously I needed a VHF antenna, but I didn’t want to get rid of my current DB2 antenna. In basic I needed a simple half dipole antenna to add to my UHF antenna at the center.
Since I wanted channel 7 and 9, I found out which freq the channels broadcast in.
VHF HIGH 07 174-180 Mhz
VHF HIGH 09 186-192 Mhz
Found the calculations to get length of wire for frequency from this website here.
Formula: Length of wire = 468/frequency
Example: Length of wire = 468/180.000 Mhz (upper range of channel 7)
Length of wire = 2.6ft feet or approx 30″
I think the exact length was about 30.5″
The material I used for the antenna was some aluminum wire rod I picked up at Menards. I forgot to get the exact size but it was slightly larger then the original wire. I flattened the ends with a hammer and drilled a hole so I could mount it to the balun.
Here is the finished product. I would like to mention it picks up channel 7 and channel 9 now!!! So I would say this has been successful.
Here is the finished product.
Here is the back side and how it mounts to the balun.
Maybe after the two antenna projects I have done, maybe I should take an Electromagnetic fields Class from school…
I would like to note this may be unsafe to modify your antenna! NO guaranteed results!
Random photos from Chicago
I use tomato on one of my routers at home. Its a hacked firmware for select linksys routers. So far it has treated me really well. I have my bandwidth monitor enabled, which keeps track of downloads/uploads in gigabytes. You can backup the logs. That is where I am running into issues.
When saving through cifs on Windows 7 (I am assuming Windows Vista is very similar), I had to do several special things to get it to work properly.
1) First issue I had, is mounting the cifs, you need to use the IP of the machine not the hostname. Since it does require the IP, I made my desktop machine ip static.
2) Now you have to share a directory to be able to save the files too. I have mine saved to a dropbox folder as an extra backup. When mounting the cifs you need a user account on the machine and it must have a password. Make sure that user has access to the shared folder. To share a folder you can just right click go to properties->sharing
3) Another issue I had was, the folder had to be in the root of the filesystem for it to work. I am unsure why, but just from looking on google about cifs and tomato that was a suggestion. Since I wanted my logs saved in a different location this didn’t work for me. So I found out if you make a simlink in the root of your harddrive to the directory where it will be saved it will work.
I created a simlik with the command below (With windows 7 you have to run the command as an administrator, right click on command prompt and so a run as).
C:\mklink /D C:\tomato “C:\Users\tonyscha\My Dropbox\tomato”
Now my tomato bandwidth logs are saved hourly!
Enjoy
Here was my other case mod I did back in the day. This was from 2005 I believe. I will add my comments I originally had 😛
The place i bought the case from
http://dealsonic.com/skmssialatxm.html <—- Dead Link
The manufacture website http://www.skyhawkusa.com <—– Dead Link
This is the case after i took it apart, and kind of put it back together so i
could get a picture
This is the only plastic pieces on this case are the two on the left, and they are covered up.
I wanted to mount an 120 mm fan like I ordered, this will have to change, maybe a 92mm fan because 120mm will not fit.
I am going to mount a 120 mm fan on the front though. This will require a lot of cutting and gluing of some sort, more to come on this when i get around to it.
The front piece are even aluminum
And at last, the slide out motherboard tray.
I am going to put a blow hole on the top.
This is a picture of the back were i am going to make the fan part of the case.
Going to cut the inside part, and leave the outside lip.
This is how the fan will sit in the back
Drawing is fun… The front of the case needs some cutting to make a 120 mm fan fit. I dont have to cut the front plastic piece because the fan will be on the back side, but to get maximum air flow i will cut it.
Just showing how the front fan will be, but it will be on the back side.
BLURRRRRRRRY opps, well i see pets in pictures so I took a picture of my fish, and my new XP-90 that has an Panasonic Pofolio fan.
and at last the cheap filter and grill guard for the top blowhole.
ANOTHER UPDATE Dremel time !! Here is my front mounted fan after i cut the front
The fan on the back was tough to fit, i need to cut the frame as i said before. Here you can see it sitting in the frame on the left side.
I cut the 3.5inch frame that holds the Hard Drives and the Floppy. I needed the room so the fan could blow some air. I was going to some how remount it but I decided that it doesn’t need it.
Here i jimmy rigged a power supply and hooked up the fans to kind of see what it will look like after it all set to go
This left to do
1) Cut blow hole on top of case, i was practicing with Dremel on the insides first.
2) Get some money and order the rest of the computer components HEHE 😀
Here is a picture of all three of the fans mounted
The top one with its grill guard, i wasnt sure how it would look, but doesn’t look to bad.
Here is how i marked it off on the inside of the top of the case…. if that make any sense. Pretty much looked at different sizes of power supplies and looked at the depths on them, i didnt look to hard, but the biggest i seen was 180mm. So i made the fan 180mm from the back of the case, then just centered it from side to side. I checked with an extra cd-rom and i wont be able to put it on the top bay but thats ok, i was thinking about putting a fan controller there.
This picture you can see i mounted a fan on the bottom of the case to blow air up.
I was digging through some old photos, and ran across these photos. This was around 2005.
