Look at that brick. Well, half of it anyway.
Heeeeey, that’s not the right board…
Boy, this is gaming! (project preview)
One-gallon recipe for Alexander’s wine grape concentrates
Normally the cans of grape concentrate sold by Alexander & Sons/California Concentrate Company are meant to be sold in pairs, as the default recipe is for a 5-gallon batch, and requires 2 46fl.oz. cans.
I’m not up for 5gallon batches yet (no room), so here we are with the recipe numbers converted and usable for smaller batches.
These will be calculated out per gallon of finished wine. Each can has enough for 2 1gallon batches, with some concentrate left over for backsweetening if you desire.
One-gallon batch:
Alexander’s(tm) Concentrate – 2.3 cups
Cold water – 2.3 “cans” (13.225 cups, or… Continue reading
Experiments with SteamOS
Valve has released SteamOS into the wild, and invited us to play.
And so I have, well outside the recommended parameters of their system requirements… because where’s the fun otherwise?
For reference: http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
My SteamOS test machine is an old Intel Core2Duo-based Mac Mini with an nVidia Geforce 9400 GPU. Not really a beefy gaming box, but adequate for simple games and playing videos with hardware acclerated decoding.
I started with the custom installer from the link above, and the install went surprisingly smoothly following their directions – until it came time for the recovery partition steps. Those flat out… Continue reading
The label.
New batches!
Trying my hand at brewing from a raw cider again, putting the last year of learning and experience to test.
The first batch is sitting there in secondary now, the second is in primary (in the tub in case of spillover)
The green bottles are the product of my last wine batch. Not amazing, but drinkable.
My little brewing corner
Hopefully the cider will turn out well. I’m going for a Crispin BareNaked feel with the unfiltered cider. As always, time will tell.
Come down to the arcade!
I haven’t built it yet, but the basic design is complete.
It’s based around a spare Dell 17″ LCD, and a miniITX board I aqcuired.
The speakers are 2 small Tang-Band drivers, more than enough oomph.
If anyone decides to build it, send me pics!
Shapcano’s Shadowrun Fiction Mirror
About 5-6 years ago, I was poking around the internet, looking for information on this cyberpunk RPG I’d heard about called Shadowrun.
This led me to a simple little corner of the Shadowrun Webring, a page run by a chummer known as shapcano. He wrote a series of fantastic short stories, and a few short novels that really brought the world of Shadowrun alive to me.
Thanks to him and his stories, I was approached by a group looking for Shadowrun RPG players, and although I’d never played a pen-and-paper RPG before, I loved Shadowrun so much that I jumped… Continue reading
UPDATED HP Envizex files and basic config
Some time ago, I acquired one of these bad boys:
There are a few good resources on setting one of these up, namely:
http://lisas.de/~adrian/envizex/
http://www.ductape.net/~brianm/xterm/
http://envizex.arganite.com/
The HP X Station reference is here.
Now, why do I write an article instead of just linking these?
First off, they’re outdated. REALLY outdated. Secondly, the software install scripts no longer work properly on modern Linux machines, especially the 100mbit patch from envizex.arganite.com. If you don’t have that, your Envizex will NOT boot unless you have this connected to a 10mbit HUB. It will not autonegotiate a 10mbit connection on the… Continue reading
Surprises
Well, I had intended to bottle my raspberry apple cider this evening, but it needed a bit more time.
So I pulled out this little half-gallon of red wine I’ve had on oak for a few months to throw out as a failed experiment. To my astonishment and utter surprise, it is quite drinkable. Not utterly fantastic, but not the biting hobowine it was after secondary.
Good enough that I bottled it.
Not bad for a first go. Amazing what a little bit of time and oak can do.
Sneak peek
Oh hey, what’s this?
