I recently went to the local freegeek and picked up an old Model M 1391401 for a STEAL. Part way through my USB upgrade, I found that not all great deals are created equal. While the condition of the plastic and electronics seemed pristine, there was a full cup of coffee poured into the bottom of the keyboard and congealed. I am assuming this happened about 20 years ago or so, and I would later discover that the mess had crystallized into a horrific and conductive smear on the bottom trace on the key membrane.

Now, on a lesser keyboard, I would have tossed it in the garbage and started over with a new one. This keyboard however, was a model M. It deserved better.

KeyboarDuino is an arduino with a full usb/hid stack on it.

Details after the break...

Yog Sothoth Blackberry Porter
O.G. 1.065
10 lbs Pale Malt
6 oz Crystal Malt
12 oz Black Patent Malt
14 AAU Magnum (I used 1.25oz magnum hops)
32 fl oz. of concentrated organic blackberry juice (to primary).
Pacman Yeast (Replace with any decent Ale yeast).

Extrapolated from Dan's Strathcona Porter recipe, this one adds a face-full of blackberry juice to create something like the Cannery Blackberry Porter.

Just brewed a BIG Imperial IPA. OG 1.095. Should be VERY Tasty.

There is so much food value in it that the yeasties are having a little party.

Just kegged my new top secret* xmas ale/barleywine. It is a very strong (approx 9%) dark ale, very thick, and very tasty, with orangepeel, cinammon, chai spice, and golden syrup. Nom.

After my pale ale turned out so well, I decided to make a batch of tasty tasty stout. Dan's brewing supplies had a very "Guinness-y" recipe, which I wanted to make, so I got all the ingredients there for an all grain batch. Never having tried all grain before, this was a bit of an adventure.

Much like the partial mash that I made last time for the Strathcona Pale Ale, this turned out to be a piece of cake as well. I did my best to remember my mindset from high school organic chem labs, and methodically followed the instructions, and everything seems to have worked out OK.

I have attached my brew log for the curious.

Why does debian/ubuntu package Ganglia from 2004 in their newest operating systems? I am not kidding, RHEL 4.x has newer packages at this point. This is a pretty stunning indictment of their ancient and dysfunctional ganglia packages. If you were wondering why your monitored debian servers never show up on your RHEL ganglia nodes, well, now you know why. 2.x and 3.x are not compatible with each other.

UPDATE: I created new i386 packages since there were missing plugins.

Anyhow, here are some packages (Ubuntu Jaunty only, no warranty, stated or implied, may be infected with the SchweinFlu, etc):

So I finally splurged and got a beer fridge. SWMBO and I headed down to Bellingham to pick up a slightly freight damaged fridge that we found on Craigslist. We were pleasantly surprised by the lack of damage, and the ludicrously cheap price tag. I had already picked up a keg of Storm Highland Scottish Ale in anticipation, and we had to do a couple of trips back and forth to Home Despot to get some air fittings and hose to match our slightly smaller Cornelius keg fittings, but all in all everything worked out awesome.

Sadly, we have no pictures of ourselves ENJOYING the beer, since we got into about half a dozen each before we were satisfied that everything was working properly ;)

At #VHS, SGNL (among others) started work on a beer fridge for the members. They have all kinds of great ideas, including metering, measurement, internet integration, etc. Metering was already taken care of, and there are some cool plans for user authorization and authentication, but there were still some mechanical things that needed doing...