So, long time no blog.

One reason for that is that I have been busying myself with home brewing of beers, ciders and ginger beers. Home brewing is a great hobby that gives you great control over what you make. Flavours can be tweaked, styles can be modified.

On the whole it is a very simple process and certaqinly not one to be afraid of.

In days gone by, home brew was something that your neighbour or father in law did, and the results were never anything to write home about. They would spend nights in their shed or laundry concocting and maintaining their brew and spend the days roaming the neighbourhood and harassing their friends to collect bottles.

Times have certainly changed now. Coopers have seriously commercialised the worldwide home brewing industry and are the biggest home brew manufacturer in the world now. They product some fantastic kits and sell everything that you need.

A starter kit will set you back $80 and contain everything that you need to produce an excellent Coopers Lager.

I digress.

In my short time brewing I have discovered something that not all home brewers stumble upon. One of the most important factors of producing a GOOD home brew is ensuring that the first fermentaion cycle is done at a controlled temerature in the right range.

I have had some cracking results with beers brewed in my garage, but that was while the ambient temperatures were higher, and a bit more consistant. Now that we are in winter, the Sydney temps are varying a bit and where I live it gets as low as 3 or 4 decrees C overnight and as high as 20-24 during the day.

This is causing me issues.

My latest batch is no exception. The thermometer tells me that the maximum temp for the current brew was 21 deg C and the low was 16 deg c. This is going to be reflected in the taste I am sure. (ideal is 22 deg c)

So, what is a brewer to do to fix this? I am building a fermentation cabinet. Big enough to hold two carboys and lined with insulating foam, it will be able to level out the temp differences. However of course I am not leaving it at that. I have a peltier cooler and a temperature controller and am going to create a franken-heater-cooler cabinet that will hold a temperature. It will heat to get the right temp if the ambient temp is lower that the set temp and it will cool when the ambient is higher.

I am still collecting the parts at the moment, so expect updates in July as to how it is going, however my testing last weekend allowed me to refrigerate a cardboard box that was not insulated down to 6 degrees c from the ambient of 19 degrees c, and heat up to about 35 degrees c.

This is going to be an interesting project and I am yet to find any reference online about something similar.

The concept of the ‘Smart House’ is nothing new, and the reality for some years now has been that if you throw enough at an electrician, he will install some flavour of a domesticated commercial system.

For somewhere north of $5,000 you have been able to get a new house wired and installed with a Clipsal C-Bus system, but dont expect it to do very much except have very funky looking switched with LED’s on them and diide the house into a few zones that you can control the lights from other areas.

But is this enough for today?

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As far as Home Theatre PC (HTPC) software goes, there are not a huge number of players in the software only market. Of course every Digital Tuner card comes with some flavour of Windows software, but that isnt all that usefull if you want to run a true HTPC network at home.

There are some fantastic *nix variants available, most around the same core.
Knoppmyth
Mythbuntu
MythDora 

These are all of course built around the ever popular MythTV, however are all in LiveCD versions so that there is little to actually setup or compile. ( This is a very good thing as MythTV can be difficult at best to setup)

But now there is another player on the scene, has the playing field changed?

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Are you the kind of ‘early adopter’ that loves to have non-consumer grade kit in your house?
Do you have PC based devices in your house to perform chores that embedded devices usually do?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the questions above then you understand the pain that is in my household currently.

In a revious post I postulated the woes of losing a raid 5 array and the heartache that goes along with the sick to the stomach feeling that you have lost years worth of accumaleted entertainment data.

It has been two weeks now, and I am pretty much no closer to having my 4 hoe systems back together again.

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It is an old addage, but it is too too true.

Nothing earth shattering has happened, so breath a sigh of releif there, but I lost the home server on the weekend. Well it was a pretty devastating even to the kids.

The OS disk of my centos 5 based server went tits up for some reason known only to itself, and refused to reboot.

So that took the details of the software raid array with it, and now I am 1TB of data lighter.

That isnt quite true. There is still a chance, albeit a small one, that I can get the data back, I just havent been brave enough to try and rebuild it yet.

Basically that is 800gb of TV and movies that has been lost to the ether. (all recorded off TV of course. OF COURSE)

I guess a backup would have been a wise thing to do, but when you splash out for 4 x 320gb discs to build a 1TB array, backing it up is actually a bit daunting.

Should I have built 2 arrays?

That wouldnt have helped because it was the controller (software) that failed so I would have had 2 dead arrays.

I knew the risks and I took a calculated risk considerring that it *was* a raid 5 array.

Lose a disk and pop in a new one for self healing….. right?

<sigh>

1TB external USB 2 single disks are now <$200 AUD so I guess that having one of them as a backup would be wise idea, but that is where you start to think crazy thoughts.

Hang on, I can get 1TB disks now for the same as what I paid for the 320gb’s. For $400 I could replace the aging 320gb drives with 1TB drives and get a 3TB array. How cool would that be?

And roll on the backup issues once again.

Is it just me or does no-one really get it still in regards to what High Definition realy is?

OK, so maybe it is just me, but I could have swarn that there is a load of TV’s being advertised out there as HD that are not in fact, you know, HD.

I think that this all stems from the US market and their use of NTSC ( or Never The Same Colour ) as we used to call it in video production

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There is a new site promotion tool that I am going to give a go, called Web Traffic Juggernaut.
Here is some info.

Web Traffic Juggernaut video

Web Traffic Juggernaut is a new site that says it guarantees more web visitors and online advertising with very little effort or cost. So I decided to put it to the test…

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Just a quick post to inform that Armadillo Aerospace has just won the first level of the Lunar Lander Challenge.

That is $350,000 USD to them for that leg.

They will attempt the Level 2 challenge tomorrow and go for the big bickies.

WELL DONE ARMADILLO!!

Interestingly, they have just also announced that Armadillo and the Rocket Racing League have teamed up and starting a new company that will be offering private space tourist flights from Spaceport America.

Testing will begin early next year.

How fricking cool does that look?

Imagine floating at sub-orbital height in a plexi bubble with near on 360 degree in all directions visibility.
That puts a damper on the small little portholes of Virgin Galactic and the rest doesnt it?

Green energy and the installing of solar panels on your house is all the rage at the moment, but what does anyone *really* know about the facts?

Yes you can get a govt rebate, but your COMBINED household income has to be under $100,000  year.

Yes Energy companies will give you further discounts, but only if you transfer to them the Renewable Energy Certificates at no cost.

Lets think about this for a second…..

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So, I am trying to diagnose a power issue that we have in the new house.

Maybe twice or three times a month the Earth Leakage Breaker will pop in the dead of the morning, cutting power to the house. Luckily I havent been caught out yet missing my train due to the alarm being off, but it is only a matter of time I guess.

We dont have much turned on at that time in the morning, only a handful of mobile phone and laptop charges and the occasional plug pack for various devices, a couple of computers and oh yeah, the fridge.

On discussing this matter with a few electricians on the OverClockers.com.au forums, it was decided to try and isolate the issue, despite the fact that it might take 12 months to do so.

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