I had not played with my eeepc for a while and wanted to try something a little different and lighter, in this hunt I found crunchbang and so far I’m impressed!
Crunchbang uses openbox for the window manager which makes it much lighter they are also using a excellent looking default theme which while lean is also good to look at.
the eeepc version of crunchbang comes packed with all the tools you would need on a netbook except for a office package like openoffice which I feel is the only thing missing.
I highly recomend giving crunchbang a go if you have a netbook and are looking for a nice light linux distro just dont expect bells and whisles.
My Fridgemate arrived earlier in the week and is waiting for me to build it. I need to get few things and then I will put it together. From what I can see it looks very easy to build just need to wire it up into a jiffy box and it should be good to go. Its much smaller then I imagined it would be, I don’t know why I expected it to be larger though! Once its all up and running I will be able to control the temperature of the fridge without having to turn off and on the fridge myself.
I also have upgraded the page to the new version of Wordpress and gave the page a bit of a face lift with a new skin. I’m loving the new version of Wordpress the administrator interface is much more user friendly now! if you have a Wordpress page I recommend upgrading.
I have been watching some videos on doing a partial Mash brew and thought I would shear the best video I have found so far with some cool basic instructions on doing a partial brew. The guy doing the video can get very annoying but he dose have some cool info when he is not talking shit.
On a side note I ordered a FridgeMate MKII for controlling my brew fridge temperature so hopefully that arrives later this week. I have also been drinking my first brew and now that it has been bottled for a few months its tasting awesome!
I have been getting a HUGE amount of spam lately. Every few days I have to sift though a few 100 messages to find the 1 or 2 good comments. To try battle this barrage of spam I have turned on registrations and hopefully this will also means anyone who registers should be able to post a comment and have it appear instantly, I should not have to approve your comments all the time.
I will try this for a few weeks to see how it gose and if I still get a lot of spam I will look at something else to try cut down the crap.
Ingredients
Can of Coopers Pale Ale
1 kg of Coopers Booster 2
Steps Pitched yeast at 22 deg, Dropped temperature of wort using the fridge. Going to a attempt to keep temp down on wort by turning fridge on for a few hours a day.
Original Gravity Reading: 1058
Gravity Reading 16/01/09: 1020
Taste on 16/01/09: Good Taste for being warm slight tingle of that home brew flavor
Gravity Reading 27/01/09: 1011
Taste on 27/01/09: Good taste even when flat and warm, No home brew flavor anymore.
Taste on 31/01/09: still good taste but some home brew flavors have returned Very, Very Drinkable still unlike first beer.
Alcohol Level Calculation: 1058 - 1011 / 7.46 + 0.5 = 6.8%
If this is correct and I have not made a mistake on my original reading this is going to be a very strong beer!
Bottled: Bottled on the 31/01/09 Bottled into glass bottles used Coopers sugar drops for carbonation.
Additional Notes:
14/01/09 - had massive 40+ day fridge temp got to 26 over night brew was left for approx 8 hours at this temp.
30/01/09 - Massive Heatwave and could not control fridge. temp got to 30c in the fridge for a day. I really need a control for the fridge before starting next brew.
I’m hosting a movie night this week but to put a bit of a spin on it I’m going to have it under the pergola in the backyard! hopefully the weather is good the forecast is sunny with a high of 27°C and a low of 16°C so should be wicked.
The plan is to setup my old projector and use a large white bed sheet as the screen. I have punched a hole in each corner of the bed sheet and put a length of thin tent rope in each hole. I had a worry that the sheet would tear at the holes once it has been pulled tight so I have used thick duct tape on each corner also to reenforce them.
The Backyard Cinema Screen
Above is a picture of the screen up. Latter tonight or tommorow night I’m going to test the projecter on the screen and see if I can get the entire system working before Saturday. last thing I want is to have everyone over and find projecter dose not work or something stupid like that.
I found out today that youTube has added high definition video support. I uploaded a few videos to try it out and so far I’m very impressed. Compared to the free version of Vimeo it has a lot going for it. Maximum file size limit is 1gig per file compared to Vimeo’s 500mb per week and you can upload an unlimited number of HD videos compared to Vimeo’s 1 HD video a week.
My youTube channel is here subcribe to my channel!
Tomorrow I will be posting some instructions on how to render video in Sony Vegas Pro 8 so that they will show up as a high definition video on youTube.
Steve and I very hung over from the night before where watching a Bam Margera video I think it was called “where the fuck is Santa”. Once it finished Steve had a urge to do some flips so I quickly grabbed the video camera and recorded him doing the flips.
I was bored last night so I edited the video and set it to some music. I like the way it turned out even though its very short. Its not bad for just playing in Vegas 8 while watching Death Race on TV.
On Monday night I was happily watching Top Gear on TV when my mobile phone started ringing. A quick look at the mobile’s screen quickly told me it was Josh, “Wonder what Josh wants” I thought to myself as I pressed the answer button. “Hey dude whats up?” I ask “DUDE, Go Outside!!” Josh quickly replys. Confused by this request, I get up off the couch and proceed to the front door. Before I open the door I grow curious of Josh’s demand and ask “Why do I need to go outside?” to which Josh answers “Just go out the back!! and look at the sky”.
I make my way to the back of the house and stand on the back lawn I look up at the sky and instantly burst into laughter! “DUDE, Oh my god the Sky is smiling! that’s Awesome!”. Impressed with the sky’s sudden display of emotion I quickly grabbed my camera to take this video!
I’m currently in the process of editing some videos and doing a full face lift to the site. I’m going to be steering the direction of the site to more video content. Hopefully it all comes along and works how I have it pictured in my head. I will be using Revver for most videos and Vimeo for the larger and the more high quality videos. Drop a message in the comments if you know of any better video hosting services.
I have been thinking about doing this for a long time and now that I have a high quality digital video camara I can look at making it a reality!
