June 12, 2010

Temperature surfing the Gaggia Classic & the Hario Mini Mill Slim

Bought some Gimme! Leftist Espresso blend recently when we were visiting friends in NYC dropping off a nuptial related coffee making apparatus type gift. & Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been enjoying the Chestnut Hill Coffee Company’s espresso offerings of late & we actually rode bicyclettes all the way up that gosh darn Chestnut Hill to Germantown Ave.  It’s actually quite steep coming up from Forbidden Drive (i.e. sea level) in the Wissahickon Valley to 500 feet, averages about 10% grade or more in the beginning.

At any rate, some coffee related stuff:

1) The nuptial gift was a Capresso MT500 with reusable gold cone filter.  This is a pretty nice coffee making machine.  The advantages over the MT600 glass model, from my research include: 1) a stainless thermal carafe, 2) fully stainless heating element system, & 3) a Portuguese temperament

I’m not actually sure if the  MT500 model vs the Chinese constructed MG600 makes much of a difference, but according to Amazon reviews it does, and there’s over 300 reviews between them so I figure better to go with the older Portuguese made model.

Capresso MT500 Coffee Maker

Capresso MT500 Coffee Maker

I finally ordered my Hario Mini Mill Slim hand grinder.  The nice old Pe De C’ bought me for nuptials has worked well but basically the burrs are not tight enough except for certain blends of espresso, I needed more leeway and precision on the finer burr settings.  I usually don’t make more than a couple of double shots a day so I figure the Mini Mill and its ceramic burr set should be perfect and as a bonus I can travel with it.

Hario Mini Mill Slim Hand Grinder

Hario Mini Mill Slim Hand Grinder

I’ve been measuring the shots on the Gaggia Classic with an instant read thermometer.  About 30 seconds after the right hand brew temp light comes back on gives the highest brew temperatures, usually in the 180’s °F.  I need to either PID the machine or buy a new higher temp thermostat if I want 192 °F in my demitasse. Though the PID may get my starting brew temperature more consistent, supposedly the problem with these small single boiler machines is that they don’t have enough volume @n temperature to maintain a full 30″ shot at 201 °F (or @whatever you’re dialing in your espresso). A Swedish fellow from Stockholm managed to build his own heat exchanger / pre-heating coil using aluminum billet, to help the Gaggia maintain the temperature throughout the shot, you can read about it on Home-Barista.com.  I am not sure to what lengths I’ll go for that perfect shot.

DIY Gaggia Classic Heat Exchanger

DIY Gaggia Classic Heat Exchanger

Gaggia Classic PID @ Auberins

Gaggia Classic PID @ Auberins

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Filed under Coffee, DIY, Espresso, Mark, Metalwork

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June 11, 2010

Quick Thoughts

  • Fully guy wired post and tension cabled rack for the Mac Mini and the Time Capsule.  Anything with a spinning disc drive should be hung in the open air to stay cool and quiet.
  • Hidden behind the speakers, active digital cross-overs with AES/EBU built into the active amp plugged into the speaker drivers.  Check out the Danish company “Ground Sound” looks good.
  • Control all this wirelessly using an iOS application.
  • Some sort of redundant NAS RAID product like the Drobo FS, DLNA NAS, etc. In a perfect world the Drobo FS only needs one other device on the network to translate DAAP between the music on the server and AES/EBU of the DAC/speaker inputs & that device would communicate with the wifi remote.
  • Sonos makes something sort of like this.  Logitech’s Squeezebox too.  But the PS Audio PerfectWave DAC is essentially what I’m talking here, I think with the network bridge “lens” option it’s over $3k.
PS Audio PerfectWave DAC
PS Audio PerfectWave DAC

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June 9, 2010

Mass .flac to Apple Lossless (ALAC .m4a) conversion

I have a couple posts going on the back burner, namely the re-foaming process on the 8″ woofer drivers from the Advent Heritage speakers I found in Greenpoint and the Mac Mini media server setup we have going now.  But first, say you want to convert all the albums you ripped to FLAC to Apple Lossless (.m4a) under OS X.  You want to know what’s easiest and quickest for batch conversion?

The X Lossless Decoder (see: XLD) is one very good option for OS X.  I find generally his application works best decoding full album single file rips from EAC with .cue sheets.  Usually with EAC you’d have three files, the .log, the .cue and the full album .flac file, XLD will nicely split the .flac into .m4a (Apple Lossless) individual files with little effort.

For larger batches, and because I used Stephen Booth’s “Max” for a lot of ripping, I find batch processing of tags and mass conversion a bit easier.  Where XLD is good on an album by album basis I found that Max was very good for converting whole directories of individual artists with multiple albums.  I find that I’m often fixing tags first in Max and then again in iTunes and then the last step is usually confirming the album art for use with Cover Flow.  It takes probably 5-10 minutes per album and it’d be faster if I had uniformity in my ripping standards.

I think ultimately, as an archive, using EAC and backing up to an image (.flac, .cue & .log) makes the most sense (but takes the longest). For playback and ease of use, unless you’re really crazy about bit perfection, I think the sound quality with Apple Lossless (.m4a) and iTunes is perfectly acceptable, especially with a halfway decent external DAC.  I’ve been using the Mac Mini as our A/V front end and the Apple Remote application for the iPod Touch works very well (over wifi)  allowing me to control iTunes on the Mini.

X Lossless Decoder (XLD)

X Lossless Decoder (XLD)

Stephen Booth's "Max"

Stephen Booth's "Max"

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Filed under Apple, Audio, Audio Server, Computer, Music

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June 2, 2010

OS X and the “cat” command for appending sequential .zip files

For whatever reason there is certain a level of incompatibility between various .zip (archive) file formats among various operating systems today.  It’s certainly not that you won’t be able to access any file type on any given system, as there are many tools to do so, mostly it’s a question of how many hoops you have to jump through.

Specifically, I had a sequential .zip file that was in multiple chunks where the first file ends in something like:

zzzzzz.zip.001.zip

And the next files in sequence look like this:

zzzzzz.002
zzzzzz.003

OS X comes with a couple of utilities for archives but neither seem to be able to handle this particular sequence (especially if it is AES256 encoded with a password).  There is a $20 piece of software called BetterZip that has no problem with any type I gave it, however, I found a free utility called The Unarchiver which seems to be an excellent replacement for the OS X native ‘BOMArchiveHelper.app‘ and if you use the *nix ‘cat‘ command (see: Concatenation) you can append the sequential files all into one and The Unarchiver will work fine.

Open the Terminal in OS X, red is what you type, assuming all the files you want to append are in your home directory:

computer:~user$ cat zzzzzz.zip.001.zip zzzzzz.002 zzzzzz.003 > onebigfile.zip

Where onebigfile.zip is your new appended file, ready to be unarchived.  I’m sure they teach this to preschoolers in *nix 101, in fact I think there is a book out now called Linux For Lilliputian Lads, but I found it useful.

I’ll be doing a writeup soon of the re-foaming process of my Advent Heritage speakers, they sound better now.

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Filed under Apple, Computer, Linux, Mac, Mark

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April 14, 2010

Zoe & Mark, Blingee!

Zoe & Mark LIC Gantry State Park (Blingee!)

Zoe & Mark LIC Gantry (Blingee!)

Found this buried from last Winter on Zoe’s laptop.  Somehow I don’t think she ever showed it to me.  It’s amazing what you can put together these days on the web, for further examples see http://blingee.com.

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April 5, 2010

Buffalo & DD-WRT still kicking ass

My Buffalo WHR-G54S is up and running at another friends’ home in NY. That’s two fresh routers (well one Tomato firmware update) and one used replacement for the utter rubbish Netgear WGR614 v3. The Netgear had an Atheros chipset from 2002 and the firmware prior to flashing an update was 2003. I applied the 2007 release from Netgear to no avail. The problem was whenever multiple wireless devices vied for access the router would dole out IPs successfully but would then lose all connectivity, both wired and wireless and require a reboot. Z and I were not pleased.

Thankfully I found our trusty old Buffalo flashed to DD-WRT packed away and once reset, it was plug and play.  There were about five fruit computers suckling off the 802.11G wireless connection within short time.

Still TO DO: a cheap ultra-low wattage Open/Free RADIUS server?  What’s the easiest method for ultra secure wi-fi?

Buffalo WHR-G54S running DD-WRT Epic Win!

Buffalo WHR-G54S running DD-WRT Epic Win!

Netgear WGR614 v3 Epic Fail

Netgear WGR614 v3 Epic Fail

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Filed under Computer, Linux, Networking, Technology

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April 1, 2010

TFTP after a bad flash on WRT-54G Ver 2.0

Was helping a friend trouble shoot an old Linksys WRT-54G Version 2.0 and I thought it might be worth installing the Tomato firmware and see if it helps minimize the connection drop outs he’s been having.  I thought upgrading via the Linksys admin menu would be a snap.  I made a couple of mistakes.

1) Always do a hard reset (30/30/30) on the router before flashing

2) Always hard wire and set a static IP that is within the default range and turn off all other network cards

3) Be patient, because sometimes it’ll take a few minutes

What happened was this: the upgrade from the Linksys admin utility resulted in a corrupt image such that I was no longer receiving an IP address, the router was not booting, all I got was a flashing green power LED.  Thankfully, Draytek Router Tools v.4.2.1 comes to the rescue with TFTP tool, as I tried the Linksys version of the software with no luck.  Router Tools allowed me to get the WRT-54G back online with the latest official Linksys Firmware v.4.21.1 and at this point I went back into the menu and tried the Tomato v.1.27 .bin again and it actually worked.

Now, whether all this means the router will stop being flaky, I don’t know.  But many other users swear by Tomato and say that it’s a significant improvement over the stock firmware and includes a lot of QOS features and should increase stability.

This is pretty much the best guide I found on recovering from a bad flash:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Recover_from_a_Bad_Flash

This is the link for latest official Linksys firmware on the WRT54G:
http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/lbc/WRT54G/download

And if you click on Version 4.0 on the BEFSR41 router/hub you can download Linksys’ official TFTP tool, which probably won’t work and you’ll need to download the Draytek utility anyways:
http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/lbc/BEFSR41/download

Linksys WRT54G Version 2.0

Linksys WRT54G Version 2.0

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March 31, 2010

Welcome back to the USA. Now why did you visit all those countries?

I suppose it’s typically “American” in spirit that as we arrived at customs at Newark Airport the first thing the guy stamping our passports asked was, “Why did you visit all those countries?” even after we’d explained to him that it was our honeymoon and that SE Asia is actually quite inexpensive, he wasn’t satisfied.

And simply put, this may be one small part of why there are nut jobs throwing rocks through public officials’ windows now that everyone in the US is guaranteed access to private health care (yes, private health care!). During our travels we saw at most a handful of other Americans (but hundreds of Danes, Germans, Aussies, Brits, etc.) and I realize there really is nothing you can say.

There are pair of Swedish films made in the late 60’s (‘I Am Curious (Yellow)’ and ‘I Am Curious (Blue)’) and the young protagonist of the ‘Yellow’ film is scolded by an elder conservative Swedish gentleman of the upper-class after asking him too many questions, he says “Why are you so damn curious all the time?!” and that’s exactly it.

Even if you were to explain to thousands of American’s that most places in this world are cheaper to live and travel to than say the Midwestern States, it wouldn’t make a difference.  And somewhat ironically, speaking English is an asset in and of itself.  In many places you’re guaranteed food, housing and a stipend just for speaking the only language America officially recognizes.

But those thirty percent of Americans with passports have already self selected as being at least mildly curious and of those you’d need to find the ones that have flexible jobs, savings, travel planning ability and a bit of wanderlust.  God bless all of them I say.  I’m never leaving this country ever again.

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