bits and pieces of what dreams are made of

Just made the most awesome vegan hot chocolate EVAR

2012-02-14T00:23:00.000-05:00

I have a ton of this carob powder stuff left over from before I failed at the raw food thing. It's kinda like chocolate, but not quite. The raw folks love it, I guess. Figured I'd put it to use.

Anyway, here it is:

about 8 oz. of almond milk (preferably homemade, but store bought works, too)
a cinnamon stick
a couple teaspoons of agave syrup (I used the dark kind)
a couple tablespoons of carob powder

Add cinnamon stick to almond milk in a small sauce pan or one of those cool Turkish pots with the long handles
Heat to just before a boil
Add agave and carob power, and stir until it's all mixed together an smooth
Let it heat up just a bit more so it starts to boil, so it gets that kinda marshmallow-y frothy stuff
Try not to think of Rick Santorum while looking at the frothy stuff
Pour into the awesomest mug or coffee cup you can find
Enjoy

Sammich

2011-05-18T20:41:00.003-04:00

One of my latest kitchen obsessions, homemade almond milk (omg sooooo good), has led to a new obsession: Mediterranean Almond Bread. It's perfect for so many reasons. I found it while looking for something to do with the huge amounts of almond meal I have left over from all the almond milk I've been making. So that's one reason right there. Also, it's just really good. And the other ingredients were all pretty easy to round up. The flax meal is the only thing that could have been a hurdle, but I have so many flax seeds right now, I figured I'd just make some from those. Fortunately, with the help of my trusty Magic Bullet, it worked.
But the biggest reason finding this recipe makes me so happy is I've been in dire need of some sort of sandwichy bread substitute. I don't think I realized exactly what a huge role bread plays in my diet. The ability to make a sandwich is completely taken for granted until you suddenly have no way of doing so. I had no idea "raw bread" even existed, so I was utterly thrilled when I stumbled across this. And I'm currently quite satisfied, having just finished my second sandwich made from my first batch of this stuff.
So, between the chips, the bread, and the milk, I think I'm on my way to completely reproducing a typical, fat, lazy, American diet, only 100% raw and unprocessed. Kinda neat. I think.
Need to find raw, vegan "bacon" recipe, so I can make BLT's...

Fatty, fatty, two by four

2011-05-17T22:15:00.003-04:00

Along with this some exercise, I've been transitioning into a mostly raw, pescetarian diet. I've been lacto-ovo-pescetarian for about 8 years, so it's not a particularly drastic change for me. Lots of raw fruits and veggies, nuts, seeds, some fish, and a shit ton of water. No dairy or eggs, and no processed food. Sometimes the fish is cooked, and the occasional non-raw item makes it's way into my belly, but I'd say I'm about 90% raw foods only. I still drink Diet Coke, though. Usually about one a day; rarely more than two. Also, I don't care what you say; beer counts as a raw food. Also wine. Bite me.

So this whole raw diet thing has introduced me, or rather, re-introduced me to a few things with which I am now utterly obsessed: food dehydration, fermentation and pickling. I want to dehydrate everything. I want to pickle everything. And I really, really wanna make me some mead. The last batch of kombucha killed my mother, and smelled like death. So I'm kinda in limbo in that area until I find and/or grow another one. But, boy, have I been a dehydratin' fool.

My favorite recipe right now is a slightly modified version of the Flax Crackers in Raw Food for Busy People. I have to do half-batches, because I don't have enough fruit leather sheets for a whole batch, and my crappy little dehydrator is pretty small. This sucks, because they get eaten (by everyone) more quickly than they get made. What I really want is one of these, so I can make a ton of these, and still have room for other stuff. Anyway, here's my version of the recipe:

3/4 cup flax seeds
1/4 cup chia seeds
somewhere around a half cup of tomatoes
handful of cilantro
2-3 cloves of garlic
half of a jalapeno
about 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
about 2 cups water

I use the Magic Bullet my mom gave me, because it's a good size for this, it's easy, and I giggle every time I see/think/say the words, "Magic Bullet". Of course, a food processor or blender will work, too. With the Magic Bullet (tee-hee), I shove the tomato, cilantro, garlic, pepper and salt into the cup, and top it off with some of the water. Then I let it do it's Magic Bullet thing for about a minute, until it's all pureed and whatnot. With a food processor, only add one cup of water, then process. You basically need two cups of liquid all together, so measure the puree, dump it in a big bowl, and then add the difference in water, so there's about two cups all together.
Add the seeds, mix it around, and leave it alone for about 3 hours. If you have pets, you might want to cover it with something, so you don't end up with Cat Hair Flax Chips.
After 3 hours, it'll be a giant, slimy glob. Mix it around really well, then spread it over the fruit leather dehydrator sheets. It should be somewhat thin, but solid, so you can't see the sheet through the seed mixture.
Let it dehydrate for about 8-12 hours, then take it off the sheets. Lay the huge, partially dehydrated chips driest-side-down on the dehydrator trays (without the fruit leather sheets). Let it go for another 4-8 hours.
When they're fully dry, break them into chip-sized pieces. Enjoy with fresh salsa, guacamole, or whatever else you like to dip your chips in. Or just eat them plain.
They're not exactly low-calorie, though, so go easy on 'em if you're trying to lose weight.

Natty Nightmare

2011-05-17T20:16:00.009-04:00

So I upgraded both my personal laptop and my work desktop to the latest version of Ubuntu, 11.04, or Natty Narwhal. Since I did, I've had nothing but problems. First, Unity was a truly unpleasant surprise, and was the first thing I fixed. Well, I didn't really fix it, I just logged out and logged into a new session with "Ubuntu Classic". But that was just the beginning.
My most recent hurdle was trying to hook up my external monitor to my laptop, a not-so-new Toshiba Satellite. In Ubuntu Classic, every time I plugged the monitor into the laptop, I'd end up with all kinds of tearing and scrambling. It basically looked like my computer was on acid. The weird thing was that it was pretty much just the desktop background that was doing this. The windows themselves seemed to be fine, for the most part, so I was able to launch Chrome and start googling.
When mucking around with the Monitors preferences didn't get me very far, I logged out and switched to "Ubuntu Classic (no effects)". That solved almost everything. Key word: "almost".
So now the monitor and laptop screen are both working as dual screen, and they're both at the correct resolution. Only problem was all my windows were partially transparent.

That dark gray spot in my browser window is another window behind it. So as you can see, this is kinda a big problem. Fortunately, there's a pretty simple solution:

Press Alt+F2 to launch the Run Application window.

Enter "gconf-editor" and click "Run".

In the editor, go to apps -> metacity -> general and uncheck the box next to "compositing_manager".

Ta-dah! Finally, things are back to normal.

Hopefully that helps someone.

Windowfarm

2011-04-15T02:00:00.006-04:00

Finally got a good amount of work done with the windowfarm I'm building. I'm using glass wine bottles and latex tubing to avoid plastics, and it's requiring a lot of extra work. Figured it would be a good idea to document the process.

Bottles
I got some empty wine bottles from the wine store by my old apartment. This was great, because they were free, and there was very little liver damage involved. A friend of mine and I went halfsies on a wet tile saw, which lives in his garage, and that's what I'm using to cut the bottoms off the bottles. I've been following this tutorial: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-use-a-wet-tile-saw-to-cut-glass-bottles/. This method's been working very well. Once all the bottles are cut, I'll grind and sand them down, roughly following this tutorial: http://www.instructables.com/id/Drinking-Glasses-from-Wine-Bottles/.

Once the bottles are done, they'll be mounted to an extra long shower tension rod (to avoid putting holes in the window and allow for portability) with some pipe hangers.
The 1/2 in. Galvanized Split-Ring Pipe Hanger will be clamped tightly to the tension rod. With some 3/8" hex screws (1" will work, but shorter would be better) and some matching hex nuts, I'll attach 3 in. x 12 in. Plastic-Coated Pipe Hangers and 1-1/2 in. x 12 in. Plastic-Coated Pipe Hangers. The 1 1/2" hangers will serve as the base, and the neck of the bottle will fit in here (upside down). The 3" hangers will provide stabilization, and will fit around the wider part of the bottle. I've decided to stagger the bottles, which means the bottle mount will only have one small hanger, the mounts in the middle will each have one small and one large hanger, and the top mount will have only one large hanger. With this method, I can cut down the number of split-ring hangers needed. Plus, it'll hopefully look cleaner. Kinda like this:


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I have some foam weatherstrip tape, and I'll line the insides of the hangers with that, to provide cushion against the glass bottles.
In order to fit the bolts through the holes in the pipe hangers, I had to make them a smidge bigger. I managed to accomplish that with a drill and a High-Speed Steel Knock-Out Drill Bit. I think the one I used was a #2, but pretty much anything that'll get the whole a tiny bit larger than the 3/8" bolt will do. The first hole in from the hoop on the bigger pipe hangers and the second hole for the smaller ones should be good. Taking it any further out than that doesn't seem very stable, since the stems aren't all that sturdy. I used the second hole on the small hanger so the hoops would line up in such a way as to keep the bottles (mostly) straight up and down. Using the first hole would have caused the bottles to sit at an angle.
I also needed to flatten out the twist in the pipe hangers, so they would hold the bottles upright instead of sideways. A table clamp worked well for this. If I'd had it, I would have used pieces of wood or metal between the hanger stem and the clamp, just to get a quicker and smoother result. It worked well enough as it was, though.
The stems of the pipe hangers were far too long, so I trimmed them all down with snips, then used a rotary file to pretty the cut edges up a bit. I made it a point to leave at least one extra hole on the stems, just in case they're needed at a later point.
Right now, I'm running into problems getting everything to line up correctly on the hex bolts. The threads don't go all the way to the head of the bolt, and that's causing the hangers to move around. I'll pick up some washers tomorrow, and I expect that to solve the problem. Hopefully I'll have the frame fully assembled by tomorrow night. Pics to follow.

Nothing particularly interesting.

2011-03-26T07:15:00.002-04:00

So the cloud project has been put on hold, as I've been spending most of my free time learning Python and figuring out how to best go about building an automated testing framework with Python and Selenium for work. Once it's all up and running, I'll probably give an overview of the end product, as well as the hurdles we ran into along the way.

The other thing that's been taking up my nearly non-existent free time is my latest obsession: Kombucha. If you have no idea what this is, you can read all about it in this wonderful article written by Dr. Wik I. Pedia. (I totally stole that unfunny joke from someone on Facebook, btw.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombucha

I brewed one very small batch, but it turned out to be pretty much vinegar. So I'm working on batch #2. Right now, it's in the second fermentation, and should be ready in a week or so. I grew the mother from some tea, turbine sugar from Trader Joe's, and a bottle of GT's Kombucha. It looks really, really gross. Like when you leave a glass of juice in your bedroom somewhere kinda hidden, and you don't find it again for a couple of weeks. Pics in the relatively near future.

Calibre in the cloud, part 1

2011-01-25T19:25:00.005-05:00

So I recently discovered Amazon Web Services, and I'm in love. With the free and ridiculously cheap options they have for S3 and EC2 right now, I figured this would be a fun way to host my media in the cloud, starting with ebooks. Calibre has this neat web server capability, making it a pretty good ebook reader to use for this project. Also open source FTW.

I'll try to document the steps I'm taking in this blog, and hopefully compile a nice little step-by-step guide once I finish. I'm not exactly a l33t h4xx0r here or anything, so some stumbling and stupid mistakes are to be expected. That said, here we go:

I should point out that I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop (main computer), as well as on my desktop (which I may or may not be using with Calibre, but I do use to access my S3 account), and Android on my mobile device. These are the environments in which I'll be working. I'll also be running Ubuntu on my EC2 instance, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

First, I set up my free AWS account. That was simple enough. Just go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and follow the directions. If you have an Amazon account, you can sign in with that. You'll end up at the Welcome page.

At this point, it can get a little more confusing if you don't know what you're doing. I started with the S3 part, since storing my media and files in the cloud is what started this whole thing. So select Amazon Simple Storage Services, and then the button that says Sign Up for Amazon S3.

Whoa. Now, assuming Amazon hasn't changed the registration process by the time you read this, you'll probably be bombarded with ginormous list of prices and numbers and stuff. Don't worry. It looks scarier than it really is. I'll get into pricing and stuff later, but I can say that in the past two months, I've spent $0.15 and $4.25 consecutively, and that's because I've got a LOT of junk in my S3 buckets. So as long as you're willing to part with a few cents here and there, you should be okay. Just give it your billing info so we can keep going.

I guess they're a little slow over there, because I got a message saying they're in the process of activating my subscription, and they'll email me when it's ready for me to use.

I don't like waiting.

The email finally came. I clicked the link in it. Yay fun.

If you're not already signed in, you'll have to do that again. You'll be at your account page, where you'll see all this crazy security credentials stuff that could probably be presented in a more intuitive manner. But I guess they're not exactly trying to appeal to the masses here.

So here's the deal. Your new S3 account is kinda like an external hard drive, where you can store your backup files, media, porn, whatever. Only it's a magical, invisible external hard drive. Okay, it's not invisible, but you don't carry it around in your messenger bag, plug it into you computer with a usb cable, or occasionally drop it in the toilet then have to leave it in a bowl of rice over night and hope for the best. It's safely tucked away, nowhere near a toilet. I think.

Now, because it's remote, it needs to be secure. Enter Security Credentials. We'll get to that later.

There are two ways you can work with your brand new S3 account: the web interface or a third-party application. I tend to go back and forth between the two, but I prefer to use a tool called jets3t.

The web interface is called the AWS Management Console. You should see a link up at the top of the page that says Sign in to the AWS Management Console. I recommend opening it in a new tab, but then I'm a tab hoarder, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. Once you're at the Console, you'll notice a lovely...well, not much. You don't have anything uploaded yet. Your hard drive is empty. You need buckets. Buckets are like, well, buckets. You put stuff in them. Your stuff needs to be in buckets if it's going into your S3 account. So make some buckets. Name them something interesting. I made one called "lindseyspublicdomainlibrary". You can set up logging, but I didn't. Seems like a waste to me for what I'm doing. I'm sure that'll come back and bite me in the ass at some point.

Buckets appear on the left, and you can click on one to see the contents of it on the right. The bucket we just created has nothing in it, but that's okay, because uploading all my ebooks through the Console would be a PITA. Instead, I'll create a folder called "epub", then move on over to my third-party app for the uploads.

I use jets3t mostly, so we can start with that.
sudo apt-get install jets3t

Once it's installed, launch jets3t-cockpit. Just type it into your terminal, because I don't think it will show up in the applications menu of Ubuntu. When it launches, the login window is open. Stay on the S3 Online tab (the first one). We're making and storing a file in your S3 account that Cockpit will use to access you S3 account, so you only have to enter the passphrase and password, which you create. Enter a passphrase in the Passphrase field and a password in the Password field. I know it's hard, so I'll give you a minute to catch up.

Click Store Credentials. The AWS Credentials window pops up.

Back over at your AWS account page where you saw the Security Credential stuff (this is why I said to open the Console in a new tab), there's a section a bit down the page called Access Credentials. In that section is a box with three tabs. For now, we need to be on the first tab. You'll see an Access Key ID and a "show" link under Secret Access Key. Copy and paste the Access Key ID into the AWS Access Key field of the AWS Credentials window in Cockpit. Click the "show" link (back on your account page), and your Secret Access Key should pop up. Copy and paste that into the AWS Secret Key field of the AWS Credentials window in Cockpit. Click OK. You should be good to go. Now you won't have to copy and paste those long character strings every time you log in via Cockpit. Click the Login button.

You should see your bucket(s) on the left. Click the one you made earlier, and if you made a folder, it should show to the right. At the top right, there's a button with what looks like a gear or something on it. Click it, then select Upload Files. Navigate to and select the folder with all your ebooks (I got my public domain epubs from here). Click Upload Files. Sit back, relax, and wait for jets3t to upload all your files.

Once all the files are uploaded to S3, it's time to launch our EC2 instance.