Scotch Ale into the secondary

Last night I transferred the scotch ale into the secondary fermenter where it will finish out its fermentation and clear up hopefully a bit more. I added the oak chips to the bottom of the femermender where they should add the character of aging the beer in an old whiskey barrel, and here is why. Normally when using oak chips in this way you risk imparting far too much oak character to the beer, toasted oak is not subtle when it has never been exposed to alcohol before and really the character is quite different, so here is what I did. on the advice of the smart folks at my home brew supply I was soaking the oak chips in un-aged whiskey, this had the added bennifit of smoothing out the otherwise very harsh whiskey, adding color and flavor that would have never been there otherwise, just like if the whiskey had been in an oak barrel. this gave me an idea, I poured the oak and whiskey through a coffee strainer and then added the oak to the bottom of the secondary, in the hopes that a lot of the character had been taken on by the whiskey, and the chips would work more like a used whiskey barrel, and less like chunks of slightly burned wood.

here is where we stand

	Temp Corrected	Scale	UnCorrected
Original:	1.08	Specific Gravity	1.08
Final:	1.031	Specific Gravity	1.031
Alcohol By Weight:	5.2 %
Alcohol By Volume:	6.5 %

at this point a lot of the sugar has been converted into alcohol but there is still a long way to go, I suspect this will be at least two weeks in the secondary, if not a month.

Better than a cable box

I mentioned in my last post that I had purchased a HTPC as part of my home theater set up. The device in question is the Acer Revo RL100-U1002.


here is what I'm working with


Processor: AMD Athlon II Neo K325 1.3GHz


Processor: Main Features64 bit Dual Core Processor


Memory4GB DDR3


Hard Drive750GB 5400RPM SATA


Optical Drive: 18X DVD-SuperMulti Double-Layer Drive


Graphics: Integrated NVIDIA ION graphics


AudioSound card: Integrated


Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet


Wireless Card802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN


KeyboardAcer Wireless Touchpad with Keyboard Function


Operating SystemWindows 7 Home Premium 64-bitMotherboard


The thing to keep in mind with this device is that it is not a powerhouse, I'll not be playing games on it, I intend to use it to watch movies, maybe some light web browsing, and maybe a skype box. I set it up and used it stock out of the box last night and it works fairly well for what it is, it seems to bog down if a website has too much information to load, and I think it could have done better when streaming from my server (however part of that could have to do with server issues). YouTube and hulu worked just fine though, and once I got the display set so I could read things on the screen it looked pretty good on my 32 inch TV.  It comes with a little wireless touchpad /keyboard device which is kind of neat and works so long as you are fairly close and there is nothing to interfere with it, and after a bit of a learning curve I kind of like, though I can’t see myself using too much. Over all though I’m fairly optimistic about the little device considering the price point (less than $400)


Now to the annoying; First of all holy bloat ware batman! I mean a Norton trial, a McAfee trial, Skype, and messenger, and Acer ads, and a kitchen sink. The device is full of stuff I’m likely never going to use and could frankly do without. Secondly the dual system seems to bog down when you ask it to do what would not be considered all that much for my little netbook (which for the record has less impressive hardware). And thirdly the range on the little tablet keyboard touch pad thing is not that great, I imagine it will be a bit better when the machine is not hidden behind my TV as it currently is, though not much.


Truth to tell I had never planned to run this machine as it came out of the box, the plan is to select one of the many Linux based media center operating systems out there and integrate it more completely into my home network. I’ve narrowed things down to two choices XBMC and mythbuntu. XBMC is one I’ve heard about from several people and is supposed to be fairly easy to set up and use. Mythbuntu is based on the popular and stable Ubuntu distribution, with a lot of the desktop features stripped out it is supposed to run well on less powerful hardware and still possess a rich feature set for HTPC’s. The plan for the next few days is to download and create a couple live CD’s to try and get a feeling for these and any other OS I can come across that might work for my purposes, as well as testing to make sure they will work with all the components (wireless, the touchpad, ect).

Better than a DVR round 2

I don’t know where I went wrong but I did, it happened somewhere around the time I changed ISP’s but things just started not working right. Maybe it was because I was in essence running this server from the same machine I used just to cruise around the internet and do school work on. Maybe my tendency to  typo commands finally caught up with me, or maybe some system update just broke everything, either way I’m left with some very distinct problems, so let’s break those down.

1)      Ushare, the service I use to serve video to my Xbox 360 will simply not stay running. If the system restarts the service has to be manually started, if the service crashes it has to be manually restarted, f an update is installed it has to be manually restarted. I spend far too much time using SSH just  to restart this service these days, it isn’t fun anymore.

2)      Apache is having similar issues, and has stopped redirecting to Subsonic all together to the point now that it shows is an /index page, which as I don’t actually have a /index page is really just a list of things I’ve installed on the system

3)      Subsonic will only open if I enter the IP address, the friendly address generates a page cannot be found error.

In case you were wondering those are the three major software parts of the system, which means it is really just not working at the moment. So I am left with three choices really 1) I can try to troubleshoot all the issues that are causing this and repair the damage 2) I can wipe and start from scratch 3) I can set fire to the whole thing and give up.

I’m going with the second choice, mostly because troubleshooting sounds like a lot of work ( and hasn’t worked yet) and while setting fire to the whole mess might be fun, isn’t really an actual option.

Part of the reason I chose to start over is that the machine I am using is no longer my primary machine, which means I don’t need a lot of the features that are currently installed and could potentially be causing problems in the first place, starting over will allow me to install a proper server operating system, rather than a desktop OS with some server bits stitched after the fact. Another reason is that I’ve purchased an HTPC (which I will discuss in more detail in another post after it arrives) to act as a front end, which means all the pretty shiny things that I like to add to the part I use will not be on the server (a good thing).

So the server hardware is not changing (which sadly means its build on an old laptop still, that’s another project) but there is going to be some changes so far as software is concerned. I’m using Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS because I don’t really need all the fancy features of the latest version, and I’m comfortable with 10.04. once I’m sure everything is backed up I will install and configure the server OS, from there I will download, install, and configure Subsonic, LAMP, and Ushare more or less the way I had them back when all was right in my little digital universe, taking care to test things on each step to be sure all is right before getting too far ahead of myself.

I still think part of my problem is the residential gateway my ISP forced on me, I had requested over and over to get a simple DSL modem, however my ISP felt the need to provide me with a device that both does more than I wanted, and not enough.  Getting port forwarding and all the other various services set up on this Actiontech Q1000 has been more work than it really should,  and is extra frustrating knowing that I have a home router sitting in its box configured to do what I am fighting with my ISP’s devices to get done.

At any rate, this is the plan for now, should keep me out of trouble.