404
This custom 404 page is hard to spot if you're not looking closely, but pretty hilarious once you do.
Dec 3, 2003 @ 16:38 » no comments » General
Header reworking
I'm reworking the header of the site to use CSS styled unordered lists, so if the site temporarily looks funny, that's because I'm editing it live. Please stand by...
Update: mostly done, but while fiddling with it, I found the nested variant of horizontal unordered lists, which looks promising for what I want to do with it. I'll leave that for later though.
Dec 5, 2003 @ 10:59 » no comments » Sitestuff
Snowy flakey
Cool, make snowy-flakey figures and watch entropy set in.
Dec 9, 2003 @ 12:54 » 1 comment » General
Kill Bill
Most comments on Tarantino's latest movie, Kill Bill (Vol. 1), praised it. And it is a fantastic movie. If you grew up in the seventies and eighties and watched lots of movies, especially if you fondly remember all those martial arts B-movies and/or spaghetti westerns that were broadcast late at night, there's so much to love and recognize in Kill Bill. It's one of those movies that I just might go and see for a second time, simply because so much happens on screen at times. Recommended!
Dec 10, 2003 @ 11:23 » no comments » General
Tigers and espresso
iTunes is playing Miles Davis (Smooch if you have to know), so this seems a good moment to reveal that I'm making progress on making espresso and cappucino. The espresso machine's been in service for some six weeks now and I've gone through a couple of kilos of beans, trying out various types and roasts of beans. For the moment I've settled on using the dark espresso roast from Geels. It's easy to make an espresso with this roast that immediately tastes like an espresso you'd get in a coffee bar, so it's a great starting point to refine my technique. Eventually, I recon, I'll switch, because Geels' dark roast tastes a bit simple, a bit flat. The best I've tasted so far is the Sumatra from Brandmeesters, but this bean has such a specific and full taste that I find it hard to make out the small, but crucial differences in brewing quality. Espirito Santos shares the second place with Geels dark roast, and gets brownie points for having a great name :-)
As for pulling the espresso shots, a couple of days I ago I started to see "tiger striping" in the pour from the portafilter, which is generally considered to be a sign of fine espresso. I haven't been able to make the tiger striping last for the whole pour, but about half the pour now has tiger striping each time I pull a shot. Some shots still taste a bit too bitter, which is a sign of overextraction, but some shots are coming out all silky smooth. I achieved the tiger striping by changing how I tamp down the grounds in the portafilter. I started out with some advice from the Coffeegeek forums, tipping about two-thirds of the coffeegrounds in the portafilter, giving it a light tamp, then topping it off with the rest of the grounds and tamping hard. Now though, I tip about two-thirds of the grounds into the portafilter, smooth out the surface with my finger and then add the rest of the grounds, smooth out again with my finger, and finally tamp the grounds down hard in one go. After I changed my tamping method, the volume of the shots drop from 120-140 milliliter shots (~2-2.25 ounce) to about 60-80 milliliter shots (~1-1.5 ounce). There's still quite a bit to improve, but I'm getting really decent results, so I'm not afraid anymore to invite someone for an espresso.
As for the cappucino, the steamed milk is more consistently starting to turn out all smooth and frothy, instead of too hot milk at the bottom with large bubbly foam on top. It's not yet "microfoam" quality, but then, I do need to buy a decent pitcher to steam the milk in, because right now I'm working with a too tiny 250 milliliter pitcher. The trick though, was not to steam the milk for too long. Steaming too long makes the milk too hot and destroys the fine frothy foam. That's pretty hard though if you're only steaming about 120 milliliter of milk in a 250 milliliter pitcher.
So... I guess that's about it for the moment. I'll write up a review of the ECM Botticelli 2 espresso machine in the not too distant future, but for the moment I guess you'll just have to swing by our place to know more, or rather, to taste more.
Dec 12, 2003 @ 14:19 » 2 comments » Espresso
Global economics
There is some logic in this post, but it might just be my own kind of logic, so let me give you the parameters of the problem up front. I've been meaning to buy a digital camera for a long time and the Canon Digital Ixus 400 is just what I want. Also, I happen to have a 500 US dollar cheque sitting on my desk, so it would seem there'd be a solution, right? Now for the problems that've kept me from actually buying that camera so far:
If I want to cash a US bank cheque in the Netherlands, I pay a commission of about 10 to 15 euro. That's not too bad, but the exchange rate for the dollar has plummeted, so at the moment I only get about €390 for those $500. I have no idea if those rates are going to get better or worse, but the cheque is only valid for 180 days, so I have another 5 months left to cash it.
I was about to cash the cheque anyway, because last week I saw that the electronics superstore around the corner had dropped the price on the Ixus 400 from €499 to €444. I figured I'd chip in €50 myself and just get it over with. Today, however, the price for the camera had bounced up to €479. Huh? A new price every week? This crappy price policy put me off enough to not buy the camera right now. Okay, so there are a number of online stores that sell the camera for €420 and up, but I'd rather pay a bit more to get it from a) a brick-and-mortar store that you can go to in person if there's something wrong, or b) an online store I actually trust because it gives you more contact information than just an e-mail address.
Now, what's really annoying is that if I were in the US, $500 would be $500, and the Ixus 400 is selling for about $400. $400 is only €330, but that's really just hypothetical, because you need to add shipping and import tax, and I'd be buying from an overseas e-tailer, which isn't the best idea in case something's wrong with the camera. Psychologically though, buying the camera here with the money from the dollar cheque, I feel I'm getting screwed over twice by global economics. First, I'm getting 100 euros less than I have dollars because of the exchange rate, which wouldn't be that bad if the price for the camera was priced equivalently lower in euros, but the opposite appears true, because not only is the camera somewhat cheaper in the US, converted to euros the camera is about €150 cheaper in the US than here...
So, I still haven't got a camera, because I'm thinking either the electronics superstore will eventually drop the price again, or the exchange rate will get better so I get more euros for those dollars, but I could be wrong on both counts, or it could just take too long. So now I feel screwed for a third time, for still not having the camera. Damn global economics!
Dec 16, 2003 @ 17:37 » 1 comment » General
Low power
It's christmas already, I'm still kind of ill from a nasty case of the flu, and I'm writing in with something techy. There is a nice thread on Slashdot about what you would or could do about your computing needs in a really remote place that is off the power grid. Think Santa Claus, Alaska, snow, log cabin. The guy wants to keep an electronic log on all the people who deserve a present, but he's clued in about environmental issues, so he's not about to start burning diesel to power his appliances. He needs a low power solution. There is talk about whether to get a laptop or to build a low power workstation, mention of solar panels, the realisation that it's really wasteful to convert 12 or 24 Volts DC to 120 Volts AC only to have the laptop's powerbrick to convert it back to 12 Volts DC, so why not get a DC/DC PSU, and warnings of tech-hungry grizzlies. Most of the time electricity is just there, but it's good to sometimes be reminded that right now, we're spending big gobs of it rather wastefully. In a few decades, I hope to be reading a book or the Net in a very energy efficient solar and/or fuel cell powered house. Maybe I will be re-reading The Lord of the Rings again, as I am now.
Dec 25, 2003 @ 00:47 » no comments » Tech
Celebrating my new camera
So they dropped the price on the Canon Digital Ixus 400, again, and I finally bought it. As is custom, I'm posting a picture of my cat, Willem. This is really him, for a lack of better words, all his "catness" showing through.
"Stop whining already, it's not like like I'm making it impossible to use the keyboard and the mouse, wedged between you and the desk like this. Just feed me if you're that fed up..."
Dec 27, 2003 @ 15:12 » no comments » Photo
Empty and full
One empty cup, one full cup... an intriguing peek onto my desk ;-)
Dec 29, 2003 @ 15:17 » no comments » Photo
Linux, yea!
OMG! I just installed Linux. Heh... It took a little doing, but I just installed Mandrake 9.2 on a spare partition and I'm typing this from Mozilla running on the KDE desktop. This feels like a "hello world" post: announcing I'm alive to another part of the universe.
It took me about two and half hours to get things up and running and that includes one failed install and one succesful install, so here's a quick telling of the story. I couldn't have done it without Randy Newman playing the piano and singing on iTunes on the other computer — I love Baltimore, what a great song.
So, Linux, installing, and such... I got a second computer a while ago and it fairly quickly became my primary workstation. After transferring many files, that meant I had a spare computer sitting under my desk, with a Windows 2000 install and a now empty partition. I checked out Linuxiso.org to see which distributions I could download in easily burnable ISO format. At first I downloaded Gentoo, because their website seemed most accessible and they promise an easy update system for their distribution. Having downloaded and burned the CDs, I couldn't find any information about setting up a dualboot system with Gentoo. I'm not about to nuke the Windows 2000 install on the old computer, because that's the box that holds the cd-burner, and that's a quite useful piece of technology around here. So I put Gentoo aside and browsed the other distributions' websites again. Mandrake seemed pretty well documented and the 9.2 build is from November, so that's pretty recent, so why not give it a try. At least the documentation talked about the installer, DrakX, that offered the possibility of creating a dualboot system.
I downloaded the 3 ISO files, burned the CDs, and rebooted. At first the installation seemed to proceed smoothly, but after a while I got an error message. There was an error installing "util-linux-2.11z-7mdk.i586." Right, what kind of error? It didn't say, but I could proceed the install regardless, so I did that. Unfortunately, some more rather terse error messages cropped up, telling me there were problems with various Vim files, some fonts, and XFree86. Hmm, well, continue anyway. I must give Mandrake credit for not having these errors muck up my Windows installation, because when the installation was done, it had installed the Lilo bootmanager correctly and I could boot into Windows. Linux was another thing though. Actually, I could boot into Linux, only I ended up with only a prompt. But that's not enough for a wet-behind-the-ears first-time Linux user. Not even for one who has dabbled a little at the Unix prompt, knows how to call up the man(ual) pages, and traverse the file system.
What could have gone wrong? Had I selected too many, possibly incompatible packages? I rather doubted that. It could have been a bad cd-rom though, I figured. Okay, boot back into Windows, double check the md5sums. Nothing wrong there, so burn that first disc again. Reboot, click my way through the installer again, omit Gnome and the other windowsmanagers this time, and click start. Wait for the first error message to pop up. Wait some more. Cross my fingers. Cheer and finish the installation. Just a bad cd-rom then. Bless Randy Newman, quick playlists, and the repeat function.
Then I watched my computer boot up and launch the KDE desktop. Rifle through the "start button" menus and hmm... no Mozilla? Just Konqueror? Oh well, let's use that then. Ugh... my website looks really ugly in Konqueror and doesn't even display correctly. Fiddle with Configuration > Packaging application and have it install Mozilla 1.4, since that's on the discs. Installation goes smoothly, Mozilla shows up in the "start menu" immediately, and works as it should. Fonts don't look anywhere as good as they do on Windows, especially XP with ClearType enabled on a LCD screen, but that's secondary for the moment. The important point is that everything works. Yea!
Okay, next step is figuring out if that Packaging installation tool thingy will also download and install newer versions of programs off of the Net, or if I have to read more documentation and do that kind of stuff myself. If you feel like leaving a helpful comment, please, don't hesitate! It's time for bed now, but tomorrow there's more time to fiddle.
Dec 30, 2003 @ 01:01 » no comments » Software
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