AKSchaefer – Life in Motion

  • Vegas!

    I had the opportunity to attend Black Hat 2013, so while in Vegas, I took a few pictures, thought I would share.

    First picture, always the most important, registration area of Caesars Palace.

    Harley Davidson Cafe, BBQ wasn’t that good.
    Pool at Caesars Palace
    Customized Room keys, awesome!
    Biggest chain link flag I have ever seen!
    I found Alan from the Hangover!
    Eiffel tower, Vegas style
    Creep clown sign at Circus Circus
    Wedding Chapel from the movie Hangover.
    Gold and Silver Pawn aka Pawn stars
    A store for just M&Ms, are you kidding me?
    My only food picture… Fat Burger!

  • Nice Glass

    Kayla dropped her phone a few weeks back, and decided to take the leap on replacing the glass.

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    On the left, tools to remove the old glass, in the middle is the patient, and on the right is the glass transplant.

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    Taking the hair dryer, heated up the glue which allowed you to pry up the glass.

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    Here I got a really good photo of when the glue is separating between the glass and the digitizer.

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    I should have taken a picture of the phone naked,  I mean without the glass, however I forgot. Anyway, I just slapped the new glass on there with no glue, the previous glue is suppose to be enough to hold on the new glass.

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    Proof it works, in the middle of a transition.

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  • My Google Reader replacement

    So recently google announced it was going to shutdown Google Reader. I am sad to see this go as its in the top 5 Google services I use. After much frustration with corporate America (Google in this case), and not have any power as a consumer over this, I decided to skip using the other commercial RSS replacements, and I turned to the open source community. After reading all the tech websites with suggested RSS reader replacements, I found out about tiny tiny RSS. I installed the web application on my linux webhost and used my domain, and imported my google reader subscription.xml file that contained all my feeds. It was fairly easy to setup (about the same work as setting up a wordpress blog from scratch), will work as long as I provide the hosting, and has a large community. One item I did have to do was find a couple of plugins to enhance the user experience. The two plugins I installed were Next-Prev toolbar and videoframes, which allows embedded videos (such as youtube) to be displayed. There is some configruation options that allow you to configure when it should update the RSS feed, the only complaint I had was you need the ability to run server side commands to make it automatic, however if you leave the webpage open in a browser, it will update when open. I might create a script to run from my home computer to open the website every 10 minutes so when I browse from my mobile device, it contains the latest data. One last thing I needed was a mobile app which is available on the google play store for $1.99. The mobile app is worth the price.

    If you are looking for a Google Reader replacement, I highly recommend checking out the tiny tiny RSS website and setting up the service for yourself.

  • First bottling experience – finished with a bang

    I just bottled my first 5 gallon beer YEAH. I have done several Mr. Beers in the past, but those were all using plastic bottles.

    Thinking it wouldn’t take more then an hour and a half, I started getting all my bottling supplies prepared. I got 54 bottles ready, sanitized them using star-sans, boiled my 5oz of sugar, transferred my Irish red from the carboy to the bottling bucket (sanitized). I started bottling, spilled a little here and there, but I thought overall pretty good.

    I ended up with 51 bottles, which I thought was awesome for my first batch.

    Took the first 36 bottles down stairs to my unfinished basement (had boxes from previous 12 packs). Then I was going to take the last of the bottles down stairs. I had 12 bottles which were in two 6 packs (in a plastic bag) in one hand, and in the other hand a 6 pack (3 full/3 empty). I made it about 1 step and the bottom of the 6 pack gave away. All six bottles went down the stairs, 2 of the full ones broke, and I think 1 of the empty ones broke. Beer and glass all over, good thing the basement is unfinished, but still made a huge mess and this is at about 10:15 at night, and I was ready to go to bed. Over an hour later, I am finished cleaning up the mess.

    I was too frustrated to take any pictures of the mess!

    The bad, I lost two bottles of beer.
    The good, I still have 49 bottles of beer.

    I put them all in totes just in case of bottle bombs, taking no chances with this.
    Just wanted to share my first bottling experience.
    The end

  • New Beer Kit Part 2

    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.

  • New Brew Kit

    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!

  • Mr. Beer Kit

    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.

  • First Android Post – Cyanogenmod 7, Ice Cream Sandwich themes

    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.

    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

  • Replace Xbox 360 Laser

    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.

  • DB2 Antenna Modification to include VHF

    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!