If you follow me on any social media, you probably already know this, but on Monday I passed my Amateur Extra (Element 4) exam for Amateur Radio. This is the highest license for ham radio in the US, and it was a lot of studying for me. I am excited to accomplish this in my life, and am currently researching a computer interface circuit for my radio that will allow me to work with digital modes like PSK31. Be looking for me on 20m PSK31 soon!
K7AJC/AE
Time to do some crowdsourcing. If you can identify this language, please let me know! I was tuning stations around the 20m band and had no idea (apart from the bits of callsign in English) what this guy was saying: radio.mp3
Wow has it been a month since I posted here? I guess not much has gone on lately. I've been super busy at work focusing on software development, and have spent a lot of my evenings studying for my Ham Radio license. Last Saturday, (June 11 2011) I passed the element 2 and element 3 tests (Technician and General level tests), and missed the Extra test by 10 questions. So late this week I expect to get my call sign from the FCC.
Lorien's older sister is here with her kids for a good part of the summer, back from Indonesia. They brought us some pretty amazing stick cinnamon, I'll have to post a picture. Each stick is at least two feet long!
I am thinking about helping out on a "field day" station answering CQs from all over the country next week, the station will be open for 24 hours so they need a lot of operators to listen and respond.
I joined an online writer's group with some friends and strangers, so you may see some odd things come up here as I cross-post them.
Captain Oinker grunted as she ran through her ship's pre-launch procedures. The scene her hull-cam showed her of the landing area was awash with locals frantically waving their arms to get her attention. She already cut their apologies short by turning off the audio feed. The computer prepped the darkmatter bomb for her as she set the target for the center of their planet. One trotter-shaped button press later and she could set course for the next planet on her list: Earth. Perhaps they haven't mistaken the ambassadors sent to them by the Porkucouncil as a food source like these primitives did. Perhaps she won't have to destroy their world...
Last night I used my new birthday present (a hand-powered wheat grinder) to grind flour. Three cups took me around 10 minutes. I made a biga (small amount of flour, water, and yeast) and a soaker (the remainder of the flour and some milk) last night, and mixed up the dough earlier this morning.
I've been making my own bread for a long time now, but wheat bread has been a difficult one to tackle. Most homemade wheat breads come out too dense. I have a recipe I've adapted a little that I'm mostly happy with, but last night I decided to make another change and introduce the soaker, which I learned in a different recipe that didn't turn out the way I wanted but I think has something to contribute to this recipe. So my changes include: less white flour (original recipe was about half wheat and half white), non-fat milk instead of water, a little more honey (to sweeten the deal), and wheat germ added to the flour and milk soaker.
The idea with the soaker is that the wheat flour absorbs moisture overnight and softens up more than it would normally. I think this will be important because the hand-ground flour texture isn't commercial-fine. Depending on how things work out (I'll know later today) I'll upload a picture or two. When I'm happy with the recipe I'll add it to my cookbook.
I've been playing Dwarf Fortress lately, and it has really sucked up my spare (ie, sleep time. Apologies for the width issues, and if your screen isn't big enough to see the whole thing as intended.
I have a fortress that's going pretty good right now for being new to the game. As I was poking around looking at what my dwarves were doing, I ran across this wall engraving:
Now this was funny enough, but you don't know the whole story. Here's a description of the female dwarf in question:
Stoney hates mussels! Hahahah! The only thing that would have been funnier is if the engraving had been done in Stoney's room. But I changed room assignments so now it is.
Two words that really don't have much to do with each other. But they are two things that are on my mind lately. Well, aside from Dwarf Fortress (thanks a lot for the new addiction, Peppin).
I'm pretty sure my degrading sleep is due to my mattress. Last night my wife and I went out mattress shopping and ended up buying a Tempurpedic. But since nobody keeps them stocked around here, we have to wait a couple of weeks for delivery. In the meantime, I decided to try out the bed in our guest bedroom last night. I slept better than I have in weeks. Hence the conclusion about my mattress being the problem. I'm sure it will take more than one night, but early indications are favorable.
Now, vanilla! I have recently come in to possession of several hundred vanilla beans, and have decided to make my own vanilla extract. I started two small batches, 12 ounces each. That was almost two weeks ago. The Instructable recommends waiting 4-5 weeks before using, but by the smell I'd guess I could use it at any point. In any case, the experiment has been successful so it's time to go big, and this weekend I'll make a few much bigger batches with some wine bottles I got from a friend.
A few weeks ago I had some work done on my plumbing. I ended up with an extra hot water expansion tank, a 2.2 gallon tank with a hose connection on one side and a valve like a tire's valve stem has on the other.
Of course, as soon as I saw it I thought SQUIRT GUN and started stewing over some ideas of how to implement it. In the end, I decided to use a sprinkler valve with a momentary switch connected to it, and a handful of PVC pipes, adapters, and couplers. Home sprinkler valves run on 24v AC power, but I found that for whatever reason a 9v DC battery seems to trigger it just fine. I have yet to do a full pressure test though.
I'll write up more of this later, after my final tests. I've already got some ideas for Vera Mark II (a switch to use a 555 timer generating a square wave with a rheostat or potentiometer as a frequency modulator—think variable machine gun pulses—and a power LED.
If I dress her up she'll get taken out somewhere nice…
Addendum One: The 9v power wasn't enough to trigger the solenoid when it was under pressure. I thought this might happen. Working on a higher power source to see how it goes.
Addendum Two: Switching to a 12v or 18v supply works just fine. Two 9v batteries in series is more compact than 8 AA batteries in a holder.
I ordered an old lying press today. Depending on where you search, it's also called a laying press. It looks like this. The bit on top is a plough, the last piece of my bindery puzzle. I'm tempted to just buy a few more tools so I can make my own press and plough. I got a good deal, and having one will make it easier to reproduce if I decide to start making them in the future. There aren't a lot of places to buy them…
I've been working on my downstairs project for most of the day. I figure I put in about seven hours today, mostly installing insulation between the upper and lower floors to keep noise from traveling between the rooms. My kitchen is over the downstairs bedroom, and the family room is above the library. I also finished some electrical wiring (a project I was putting off because it was so nasty difficult to get 12/3 around a 90° corner boxed in by 2x4s on every side. All that work just to have a light in the bedroom closet…
I also nailed in some 2x6s along the bottom plate in the bathroom around the shower so I have a place against which to put the concrete for the custom shower pan, one of the next projects on the list.
Finally, at this point, I can start installing drywall. Or plywood—in the library ceiling—because I'm putting brass tiles on the library ceiling. I have quite a few things to work around, but as I start putting drywall up I'll be clearing space out of my garage, so it works out perfectly. Right now, though, I'm sore, hungry, and thirsty.
I started downloading Starcraft 2 yesterday morning around 7am. Given that it was 6.99Gb, I figured it would take most of the day. I was wrong.
The ETA bounced around 30 to 120+ hours. After I got home, I started digging in to the download client settings, and found the peer-to-peer info page, which showed me that I was getting a whopping 6Kb/s from three different peers, each at 2.0Kb/s.
So I figure the Mac version wouldn't be as popular as the Windows version, but seriously—this was horrible! So I shut down the peer-to-peer functionality (not recommended by Blizzard), and immediately jumped to around 600Kb/s download rate. It finished in two hours.
Starcraft 2 is, however, gorgeous.
Today I had a lot of things going on, and I did some baking, too. I made two sourdough baguettes, mixed up a loaf of sourdough that's in the refrigerator, and also mixed 4 pounds of Boule, a round white bread we use for sandwiches throughout the week. The sourdough loaf will be cooked tomorrow, perhaps with one of the Boule loaves too (it makes 4 one-pound loaves).
I seem to do a lot of baking on Saturday now, so I think I'm going to rename it Breadurday.
I haven't done much on the MUD in the last few days, my Kindle showed up the other day, and I've been busy sucking up public domain content with which to fill its little static-RAM guts. I have to say, as much as I love books (and I love books!), a Kindle is a nice device to have! I won't be buying lots of books electronically anytime, but there is a lot of free content available that I want to read.
I am making a new bread this week: Italian Semolina. I made two loaves of white last night, and one big loaf of sourdough. And I'm enjoying a little bit of everything for lunch today! There are few better things than fresh homemade bread…
I've used this exact method to get a dormant starter going so well that it nearly triples when I refresh it. If this doesn't get your starter up and running like crazy, then there's no saving it!
Warm up 1 cup of water about 20 seconds in the microwave. It should be warm, but not hot. Too much heat will kill your starter. If it's too hot for you it's too hot for your starter.
Add 1 cup of your starter to the water and whisk until uniform. Discard the rest of the starter if it's dormant. If it's really active, use it!
Put 1 1/2 cups of flour in a bowl with the starter and whisk until combined. It's okay if there are some small chunks of flour, but you want it as well-combined as possible.
Cover with plastic wrap and keep it out on your counter. If you have a warm sunny spot, that's even better, but it'll work at room temperature.
Repeat this process in the morning and in the late afternoon/evening for 3 days.
Once it's really active, you should refresh it every 2 days or so if you keep it out. If you refrigerate it, it should keep indefinitely.