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A while back I made several batches of beer using a Mr. Beer kit that Mom gave me for Christmas. Eventually Mom made a batch and so did Jeb and one of them gave me back the keg, so now I have two kegs, but only one set of bottles. In the Spring, Mr. Beer had a sale on their cans of beer syrup and I bought four of them. Adding water and yeast and waiting for fermentation, the result is 2 gallons of beer with a 3.2% alcohol content. The ones I bought this time included “booster” which is additional sugar that adds 1% to the alcohol content and they sent two packs with each can. It doesn’t affect flavor like adding malt, just gives extra food to the yeast who generate more alcohol.

After a very hot October, the house is now cool enough to ferment beer, so I decided to do a batch this weekend. One of the cans was for a Marzen style of beer, which is German, but I thought I would still add stuff to it, including extra hops (even though Marzen isn’t that hoppy usually) and some malt. So I drove to Ale Yeah and was told they hadn’t sold homebrew stuff for 6 years (bought some beer anyway). So it has been a while since I did this. But they told me a place that is actually closer to my house and I went there and picked up 1 oz. of Mosaic hops and a pound of Golden Light dried malt extract, plus a reusable bag to put hops in since adding hops makes such a mess. So an extra $8 in ingredients and $4 for the bag plus each can plus booster was $9.

I had to go back and check out the process that had gotten the best results, which is what we did at Jeb’s house. I pretty much repeated that, but only used half of the malt since I was still adding the two booster packs (hopefully the opened pack of malt will keep) and used Mosaic instead of Wilammette hops. I boiled the malt and half of the hops for 25 minutes and added half of the hops with about 15 minutes to go. The hop bag made things a lot better and I was able to reopen it and add more hops to it partway through. The bag can be washed in the washing machine, but it is stained green now. The yeast started working right away and I am getting trub, but not that many bubbles yet. 4 weeks of fermenting puts me bottling on December 7.

A couple of years ago I got a 55 inch Hisense UHD TV after my old TV died. I got a fairly cheap TV after realizing that the technology was still changing (HDR displays were still pretty new and a new version of the HDMI port had come out) so to get something future proof was going to be really expensive. The new TV was still no slouch. It had the new HDMI ports (well, 2 of the 4 HDMI ports) and a version of HDR that worked okay, getting very good ratings at rtings.com. The built in TV apps weren’t great and not that upgradeable, but the basics were there including Netflix and Vudu. Plus I was able to buy an Amazon Fire TV stick for $30 and this year a 4k Roku for about the same price that gave me all the apps I wanted and now in 4k.
Continue reading “Another New TV”

At some point in my life I bought a coffee table, not to put my feet up on or to eat from while watching TV like everyone else does, but to hold my DVD player, VCR, and surround sound receiver, next to my floor-standing giant rear projection TV. When that TV died, I got a new flat screen TV and needed a place to put it. However, the legs of the TV were spaced so far apart that they would overhang the ends of the coffee table just a bit, inviting disaster if the TV shifted at all. So I got some boards from Home Depot and put those on top of the table to widen the top just enough to comfortably hold the TV. The lower shelf of the coffee table held the receiver and the center channel speaker of my surround sound system and there was just enough room under the TV to hold my UHD Blu-ray player. I put the left and right speakers of the surround system on top of the old left and right speakers from my previous surround system to get them up to the height of the TV screen and closer to ear height on either end of the coffee table. Great little system.

Continue reading “Carpentry”

Way back in 1999 I got my first surround sound system, a “home theater in a box” by Aiwa consisting of a receiver and 5 speakers, so that I could enjoy surround sound from my DVD’s. Surround sound isn’t mind blowing, but it is pretty neat, kind of underwhelming given all the hype, not that I was spending huge amounts of money. I’m not sure why I felt the need, but in 2007 I upgraded to an Onkyo system with 7 speakers and a subwoofer. Even today most Blu-ray movies don’t have 7.1 audio, but I felt like I would be missing out. And the subwoofer adds a lot of oomph to explosions while also filling in the low frequency sounds that small speakers have a hard time producing. It was a nice system and worked well in a pre-HDMI era where all of the sound was carried over RCA cables instead of HDMI cables (so many wires!), but when my old pre-HDMI TV died in 2017 it was time for another upgrade. Rather than spend twice as much for another home theater in a box, I just got a new Denon receiver and kept the Onkyo speakers and subwoofer. The Denon receiver was neat because it came with a microphone that you would put in different places in the room and the receiver would come up with the best settings. I’m not sure if it is just equalizing the speakers, syncing them up, or something more advanced, but it is a great idea.
Continue reading “Surround Sound Upgrade”

Many years ago at work I got a computer with two giant CRT monitors. I think they were 21 inches (always measured diagonally across the viewable area). I loved having the extra screen area so I could have two programs open and easily copy info or refer to info on one screen to write an email on the other. The next time I got a home computer I made sure it would support two monitors and it was just as great at home though my monitors weren’t as nice. I remember when they switched to LCD flat screens at work and the big 22 inch monitors were $1000 each so we put locks on them.

At home I decided to start using a laptop in addition to my desktop and eventually replaced the desktop with a laptop, so now I have two laptops, one being used as a desktop with external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. The problem with that is hardly any laptops support two monitors, but they can extend their desktop on to an external monitor and you can have a window open on the laptop and another on the external monitor. I have been using a 4:3 17 inch monitor (1280 x 1024 pixels) that came with my last desktop computer in 2005 as the second screen. This has worked fine for the last few years. What is really amazing is that the laptop, with a screen resolution of only 1366 pixels by 768 pixels, can support an external display of 3200 x 2000 pixels, 6 times as much working area (my newer laptop supports full 4k output).
Continue reading “New Monitor”