The Renaissance Programmer

Brew 2: Strawberry Cider

Mattox Beckman — Tue, 21 May 2019 01:00:35 GMT

Costco sells an apple juice that is perfect for making cider. We used 6 gallons of this and a bit over two pounds of strabwerries with Nottingham yeast.

Recipe:

Sugars

6 lbs Costco cider.
916 g Strawberries

Yeast

One package Nottingham

Log

Brew date: 2019-05-20

Added halved strawberries to a mesh bag and added them to the fermenter.
Added 6 gallons of apple cider.
Added Nottinham yeast.
Pitching temperature: 64 F
Original Gravity: 13.5 Brix / 1.0547 S.G.

Brew 2: ESB

Mattox Beckman — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 19:53:23 GMT

The last brew made a very light beer, suitable for 소맥 but not very satisfying. The main problem seems to have been that I used the top plate in the grain pipe during the mash, and that ended up compressing the grains too much. As a result, the water would not flow through it very well. The resulting beer is something like 3% ABV.

Today's brew is a Lakefront ESB from Northern Brewer. We'll try the robobrew again and see how it goes this time.

The Recipe:

Grains

Briess Organic 2-Row (9.25 lbs / 4.1950113 kg)
Briess Organic Caramel 60L (0.75 lbs / 0.34013605 kg)
Briess Organic Caramel 20L (0.5 lbs / 0.22675737 kg)
Total weight: 4.7 kg

I'm slowly converting my brewing to metric units, but the kit was in English units, appropriate for an ESB.

Hops

1.25 oz Cascade (90 min)
.5 oz Cascade (30 min)
.5 oz Cascade (15 min)

Yeast

One package S-05

Mash Schedule

Sacc rest: 67 C for 60 minutes (15 L)
Mashout: 77 C for 10 minutes
Sparge: A bunch of water from 55 C to 75 C. See notes.

I found some formulas to determine mashing water. I wanted to collect 5.5 gallons of wort for my fermenter, and various parts of the internet suggested 5 liters would be lost to the boil and trub.

Here's a table with all the values.

Measurement	Value
Grains Lbs	10.5
Grains Kgs	4.7619048
Target Volume L	25
Boil and Trub Loss L	5
Mash Volume	16.357143
Sparge Volume	17.452381

Process

The first thing was to crush the grain. It occured to me that I could crush the grain directly into the grain pipe. So I set it up this way:

Figure 1: Crushing the Grain

It worked very well. I think next time I will use more water in the mash; it took a while to mix everything together. But I didn't have to get a bucket dirty, and since the base of the grain crusher covered the pipe completely I didn't have to worry about dust getting everywhere.

Here's the result after adding the carrying handle:

Figure 2: Grain is crushed

Another experiment today was brewing inside. Here are two pictures of the setup, one with the pipe resting on top, and one with the pipe inserted.

Figure 3: Setup 1

After inserting the pipe and stirring the grains, I could use the recirculating pump to keep the liquid moving.

Figure 4: Setup 2

The next experiment was to use the counterflow chiller instead of the provided immersion chiller. I used a pump to make sure the liquid could get into the fermenter.

Figure 5: The Chill

This brew went much better than the last one. I added some DME, maybe about a cup, to top off the gravity points, and was able to hit my target O.G.

The one mistake I made was it didn't occur to me to check the wort temperature before I added the yeast. It was still about 100 F! It doesn't seem to have hurt the yeast, fermentation started quickly. I guess I can pretend it's a Belgian ESB if there are esters as a result. :)

Log

Brew date: 2018-12-15

Liquid in fermenter: 5.5 Gallons
O.G. 1.050
Pitching temperature: 100 F (!)
Time to onset of fermentation: 2 hours

Use Variables for Frequent Targets

Mattox Beckman — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 05:00:00 GMT

Use variable names in your shell

Tired of typing in that long directory name?

Sometimes when I am developing something I will end up working in two separate directories that are not that related. For example, I may be writing slides in my ~/class/cs421/periods/course-introduction/slides/ directory, and when they are done I want to put the PDF in ~/web/cs421/slides/.

You can save a lot of typing by creating some variables for it. So instead of

% cd ~/class/cs421/periods/course-introduction/slides/
% make slides.pdf
% cp slides.pdf ~/web/cs421/slides/introduction.pdf

you could have something like…

% slides=~/class/cs421/periods/course-introduction/slides/
% web=~/web/cs421/slides/
% cd $slides
% make slides.pdf
% cp slides.pdf $web/introduction.pdf

If you are going to use them a lot, you can put them in your startup file.

Use subshell tab completion

Another similiar trick is to use tab completion. I'm using zsh, which will run sub-shells if you hit tab. Suppose you are in that $slides directory as before, and you want to access the directory ~/class/cs421/periods/recursion/slides. Yeah, you could use ../.. but that can get tedious. But you could also type

cd $(pwd)

and hit <TAB> instead of <ENTER>. This will run the pwd command and paste it into your command line, leaving you with

cd ~/class/cs421/periods/course-introduction/slides/

You can then just edit the line to get what you want.

Trick three — use `zsh` extension to `cd`.

If you give cd two targets in zsh, it will treat that as a search and replace command for your current directory name. So

cd course-introduction recursion

will do the same directory switch as above.

Using Org-mode for Task Management, Part 1

Mattox Beckman — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 05:00:00 GMT

I have long been a fan of task management systems. When I was a student, I used Day Timer products a lot, and as the web came of age I tried many services: Remember the Milk, Nozbe, IQTell (may it rest in peace), and so on. As convenient as they were (usually) I found they all suffered from a combination of problems. Most were not flexible enough to keep the data I wanted. Most made entering tasks slower than it should be (something that someone proficient in an editor would notice). Some sites closed down; IQTell, in particular, closed after I had spent a month getting everything tweaked the way I wanted it.

I finally fell back on the one system I knew I could always rely on, would never close, and would be organized exactly the way I wanted: Org Mode. I have been using Org Mode for my task management system for a bit over a year now, so I'm documenting here how I have it set up. I will assume you are familiar with Org Mode already. If not, take a peek at Org Mode - Organize Your Life in Plain Text.

This will be a series of posts. For today I will go over the file structure I use: if you are already familiar with org-mode you will be able to replicate much of what I do.

Files

One of the first decisions you will need to make when you set up your org files is whether to have a bunch of files, one for each context, or One File to Rule them All. Having tried both, I found I preferred to have separate files. I have a "main" file called gtd.org, which I will talk about later, and one file for every context. For example, there is cs225.org and cs421.org for two of the classes I teach. There is ielite.org for a research group I am a part of. I have a subdirectory students/ where every student working on a project with me has their own file.

My main reasons for splitting the files by context are to prevent needing a top level header for everything (or else mixing unrelated projects and tasks together), and to keep the file sizes managable.

My file headers contain the TODO tags, a directive to have log drawers, and an agenda format string. The last item is the file tag. Here is the header for CS 225.

#+SEQ_TODO: TODO(t) NEXT(n) STARTED(s) WAITING(w) DELEGATED(e) APPT(a) MAYBE(m) | DONE(d) CANCELLED(c) DEFERRED(f)
#+STARTUP: logdrawer
#+COLUMNS: %40ITEM(Task) %17Effort(Estimated Effort){:} %CLOCKSUM
#+FILETAGS: CS225

Each file has a subset of these top level headers:

Tasks
Projects
Someday/Maybe
Reference
Meetings
Appointments
Archived Tasks
Archived Meetings

## Meetings

I want to be able to keep track of meetings I go to, and especially meetings I am in charge of. For this, every agenda file has a top level header * Meetings

Each meeting has this structure:

** <2018-09-11 Tue 10:00-11:00> Admin Meeting
*** Tasks
*** Agenda
*** Notes

The headline is level 2, contains a date stamp in the header itself. This causes it to appear in the agenda, and the agenda view automatically knows to remove the date when it displays the meeting.

If I am in charge of the meeting I will fill out the agenda, and have a task to email the agenda the day before. Tasks that arise during the meeting as a result of decisions get filed under the respective file-level task or project headings. The tasks here are only tasks directly related to running the meeting itself.

The reason I do this is because of a super convenient function org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift with default keybinding C-c C-x c. Set up the first meeting with the proper date stamps for the meeting and any tasks that will recur (like sending the agenda) and then duplicate it, shifting the dates into the future as you do so.

Appointments

An appointment is very much like a meeting, except that I don't expect to need to take notes or organize it. I use this for office hours.

Tasks

This heading is for all tasks that do not belong to a project. I use the SCHEDULED property to set a start date, and a DEADLINE for real deadlines. One thing I do differently than classic GTD is put a start date on all tasks (unless they are in someday/waiting). I learned this from the Manage Your Workday Now book written by Michael Linenburger I also like to have an effort property.

Projects

A project is just a list of tasks, but I insist that there be one task marked NEXT instead of TODO. There can be a header in the project for reference information if need be.

I'll talk more about task and project processing in a future article.

Next Actions!

There will be followup articles about other aspects of this. Currently I plan to write about the actual task workflow and the emacs lisp code I use with it.

Brew 1: Kama Citra Session IPA

Mattox Beckman — Sat, 22 Sep 2018 05:00:00 GMT

It's been a long time since I've made the time to brew beer; over a year, in fact. So it's time to start again. I'm going to reset my "brew counter", so this is brew number 1.

This is a kit beer, from MoreBeer, called Kama Citra.

I brewed it in a Robobrew v3 (the first time using it!), and I'll write more about that later.

Recipe:

Grains

9 lbs Rahr 2-Row
1 lb Caramel 40

Hops

0.5 oz Centennial (60 min)
1 oz Cascade (20 min)
1 oz Cascade (10 min)
2 oz Citra (flamout + 10 minutes)

Dry Hops

1 oz Citra
1 oz Cascade

Yeast

One package Nottingham

Mash Schedule

Sacc rest: 66 C for 60 minutes (15 L)
Mashout: 75 C for 10 minutes
Sparge: A bunch of water from 55 C to 75 C. See notes.
Cooling: immersion chiller with ice bath recirculation

Log

Brew date: 2018-09-22

Liquid in fermenter: 18 L.
O.G. 1.035 (!) (Target was 1.050)
Pitching temperature: 20 C
Time to onset of fermentation: 2 hours

Notes

This was the first time using the Robobrew, and not everything went smoothly. (Over all, I really like the Robobrew though!) The mash out took a very long time; I'm not sure if it's because I used two plates for the bottom of the malt pipe, or if the malt was ground to finely. The sparge took well over an hour. I'll have to do some research to see what other people have done with this.

Using SQLite Instead of CSV

Mattox Beckman — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 19:40:00 GMT

I hate CSV files. They seem like a simple and easy way to store data when you first get started, but they quickly become unwieldy. If you have more data than fits in 80 characters per row, or if you need to quote some of the data elements, or if you need to feed your CSV file to other programs you start to lose whatever advantages you thought you were getting in the first place.

There are programs that let you do SQL like queries on a CSV file, but if you are going to go that route, why not go the whole way?

So I've decided to try an experiment. Instead of using CSV or flat text files to store data, I'm going to use sqlite3 for a while and see what happens. I'll keep a directory ~/data in which I'll keep the data files.

So next time I need to make a list of TAs? Into a database. I imagine that I'll write a few scripts to make common things easy, but I don't know what they are yet. Check back in a few weeks or so.

The Renaissance Programmer

Brew 2: Strawberry Cider

Recipe:

Sugars

Yeast

Log

Brew 2: ESB

The Recipe:

Grains

Hops

Yeast

Mash Schedule

Process

Log

Brew date: 2018-12-15

Use Variables for Frequent Targets

Use variable names in your shell

Use subshell tab completion

Trick three — use zsh extension to cd.

Using Org-mode for Task Management, Part 1

Files

Appointments

Tasks

Projects

Archives

Next Actions!

Brew 1: Kama Citra Session IPA

Recipe:

Grains

Hops

Dry Hops

Yeast

Mash Schedule

Log

Notes

Using SQLite Instead of CSV

Trick three — use `zsh` extension to `cd`.