Entries Tagged 'general' ↓

ELI M. DOW: Do I win?
ELI M. DOW: carboy is from the arabic roots -> qarrba and it just means big jug

About a month ago I bought a beer ingredient kit from the Sarnac Brewery in Utica. At the time I had a few beers in me and it didn’t quite click that it’d need a lot more stuff than just some hop pellets and a can of malt. So I got home and promptly became dissapointed. That, however, is not the end of the story.
Rather than waste the $25 I spent on the kit I went ahead and bought a bunch of stuff to brew the beer. (At this point I have to admit that was another $150 or so.) I got it all at northernbrewer.com I got the glass starter kit a case of bottles and a 5 gallon pot to boil it in. After all that they threw a t-shirt in, so that’s cool
Anyway I just bottled the beer yesterday but here is how I made it.

First boil about 2 gallons of clean drinking water. This takes forever.

Now get your carboy (10 points to whoever can explain the origin of that name) (buzzco: no it’s not made of car or boy you lose 10 points). Get a gallon container and pour it into the carboy, mark the gallon mark then repeat till you fill the carboy. Now you can measure!

Now while you’re still waiting for the water to boil mess up your kichen. Really just put stuff everywhere. You have plenty of time so get creative.

Since you are still waiting for that water to boil do something constructive. Get a pot of water put it on low. Find your can of Malt Extract and put it in the water. The key here is to gently heat the malt so it’s easy to add to the boiling water. Careful not to heat it enough to make tin can shrapnel, beer + blood = DOOM

Now since your still waiting for the water to boil take a picture of some bottle caps.

Ok, the water is now boiling remove it from the heat. Open the can of malt and whatever you do don’t smell it. Just don’t. When your roommates ask what the smell is tell them you’ve been burning otters in the basement, if they knew the truth they won’t try your beer.

Pout the Malt Extract, the powdered malt, and the hop pellets into the water, mix it a lot. Now bring it to a boil again. This is gonna take forever.

While you’re waiting it’s time to sterilize EVERYTHING THAT WILL TOUCH THE WORT. (Wort is the crap on the stove.) I used a one step sanitizer specifically for brewing. (It came with the kit). This needs to be done well or your just boiling water for shits and giggles.

After half an hour or so pull the beer off the stove and drop it into an ice bath. You want to cool it quickly, down to about 80 degrees. Make sure Jeff Bisti approves

When it gets to the right temp it’s time to pitch the yeast. I didn’t explain that earlier but about 15 minutes ago you put yeast i
n warm water. Then you ignored them. Now pour the wort con yeast into the carboy (I used an autosiphon) then add cold clean drinking water up to the 5 gallon mark (that
’s why you marked the carboy in the beginning.) Now ignore it for a week.

So that’s most of it i’m sure I left out some details but that’s the jist of it. In a couple days I’ll post the bottling process.

Continuing my trend of posting blog trends late, here are the countries I’ve visited.

create your own visited country map

[title context]

So I haven’t updated in a while despite my promise to do so. This is partially due to lazyness but not blogging laziness. My uml image was busted and I didn’t know why so I never fixed anything. Turns out a while ago I set up courier with spam assasin and clamav. These are fairly memory intensive and I pay for the low end uml image which doesn’t have a ton of memory (64 mb). With uml rather than giving out of memory errror or something sane programs just segfault. This would kill ssh 90% of the time when I tried to log in and the rest of the time if I did log in anything I tried to run would segfault. After a lot of patience I was able to kill mysql and from there I had enough memory to clean up the system and leave only stuff I needed. So yay it’s working now.
In other news here is me as a south park character way after the rush but it’s all I got.

You can make your own here .

tim: oh no
tim: i just got tricked.
tim: it’s build system told me to run jam
tim: and i didn’t know what it was
tim: so I typed: man jam
tim: tim: now i feel dirty.
me : ew.

When I work from home I need to use my work laptop because all my files are there as well as lotus notes and my vpn software. Rather than putting any of that stuff on my home machine (which is considerably faster and have 2 monitors) I had been sshing to my laptop and forwarding to my desktop x server. This worked but usually caused some funkiness, especially with firefox. After I managed to blow away my connection and all my programs by accidentally closing my terminal that spawned all the apps I knew I needed a better solution. Enter XDMCP. XDMCP allows users to log in through GDM to a desktop located on a different system. Over wireless this kind of thing drags but if all the machines are sharing a switch everything is kosher.

Here’s how to set it up:

• System -> Administration -> Login Screen Setup
• Click on the ‘Security’ tab.
• Check Enable XDMCP
• TADA.

To actually log in you can do a few things.

• Just log out back to gdm. Click on system and choose XDMCP
• Or to remain logged in and connect to a remote machine on breezy run Applications -> System Tools -> New Login. Click on system and choose XDMCP
• To remain logged in and connect to a remote machine on Dapper go to System -> Log off … -> Switch User. Click on system and choose XDMCP

If you have 2 logins you can switch between them using CTRL + ALT + F7 or F8

Download http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1482

Unpack in ~ in vim or pida type :set syntax=kid

BOOM.

I love when typos turn out to do something useful. In firefox CTRL+TAB moves right to the next tab, CTRL+SHIFT+TAB moves to the left to the previous tab. For once my giant fingers have paid off.

Don’t get me wrong I like ubuntu a lot, but I frigging hate typing. Luckily they ubuntu folks thoght of me. Bash Autocompletion is shipped with the base distro but it’s not turned on. (I don’t mean regulat tab completeion). It is however, easy to turn on. edit /etc/bash.bashrc and uncomment the following block: # enable bash completion in interactive shells # if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then # . /etc/bash_completion # fi Now when you type something like apt-get up[TAB] the magic happens.

I find the longer I leave this site alone the more likely it will be that I won’t update. I think laziness has a lot more inertia than I can deal with. Anyway, although I haven’t posted recently I’ve been doing a lot with this site. Unsure.org and a couple other sites are hosted on this server and although unsure only averages about 1,000 hits a day when I’m updating zetanu.net my fraternities alumni site takes a lot of hits. On top of that it’s running Mambo and MySQL which is not a light combination. The UML image I had it on just couldn’t take the load anymore and it was seriously starting to freak out. Needless to say I’ve upgraded. On top of having a speedier UML image I also upgraded from Debian 3.0 to ubuntu breezy. The change isn’t that huge but it’s so nice developing and hosting on the same platform. On top of that migrating from one to the other is pretty simple, certianly a lot easier than moving from sles to redhat or something like that. matt out.