Making cocktails with Mixel

I had sort of an anti-New Year’s resolution this year: drink more alcohol!

Well, not exactly. What I resolved to do was to learn how to make cocktails at home. Until now, my homemade adult beverages consisted mainly of Seven & Sevens or the occasional Moscow Mule. But sampling a wide range of other cocktails on our cruise last year, plus tasting my brother-in-law’s homemade limoncello over Christmas encouraged me to learn a little mixology myself.

After stocking my home bar with the basics (vodka, gin, tequila, rum, whiskey, etc. etc.) and mixers (simple syrup, lemon/lime juice, etc. etc.), I needed recipes. There’s no shortage of web sites on the internet (like liquor.com) for cocktail recipes, but I also wanted a good mobile app for my iPhone. After trying a few, I found Mixel.

Mixel doesn’t just tell you how to make cocktails. If you stock your bar and fridge with the ingredients you have on-hand, it will tell you what you can make as well. You can search recipes by name (“whiskey sour”) or ingredient (“grenadine”) and filter the results by ingredients you have on hand, different packs, drinks you’ve tried or bookmarked, etc. The app has about 500 built-in ingredients and you can easily add your own. It’s a lot of tapping, but you can add the ingredients, measurements, steps, notes, even customize the icon (glass type, liquid color, garnishes, etc.). You can also add and organize your own recipes into packs and even add multiple bars (I guess if you have one at home and one at the summer house?). If you don’t have an ingredient, you can add it to your shopping list (although that’s a list internal to the app and doesn’t integrate with any grocery shopping apps).

As you might have guessed, it’s called Mixel because of the pixel art graphics which take me back to my King’s Quest days. You can change the color scheme and turn off the pixel font if you want, but I really like the look of the app (I’m using a dark theme, as you can see in the screenshots below).

Mixel is a free, with in-app purchases (for more recipes than the basic 80 included in the free version). After using it for just a day or so I decided to go all-in with the Premium pack.

Building the PiDP-11

PiDP-11Three and a half years ago I built my PiDP-8 kit and it’s been happily blinking away on my desk ever since (it also runs my Pi-Hole). Earlier this year, on episode #698 of Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcast, Steve mentioned that Oscar Vermeulen had come out with a new kit, the PiDP-11! I loved the experience of building the PiDP-8 and the quality of the final product so I immediately signed up on the mailing list to be in Oscar’s next batch of orders.

A week later I received (and submitted) my order form. While I was waiting for the kit to arrive, I picked up a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ kit and 32gb SD card. Following the instructions in Step #1, I prepped the SD card with Raspbian (Jessie Lite) and downloaded and installed the PiDP-11 software. Since the RPi 3 B+ is a lot more powerful than the RPi 1 B+ in my PiDP-8, I decided to consolidate and move my Pi-Hole and Retro-Pie installations onto it as well. With the Pi ready to go, I just needed the kit …

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Going all-in with Nest cameras

I seem to go through technology re-orgs every four years or so. To start off 2019 I decided to re-do my security camera setup.

My first cameras were installed in 2010 (Foscam outside, TRENDnet inside). In 2014 I switched my indoor cameras to Dropcams but since Dropcam (now Nest) didn’t have an outdoor solution at the time I went with PoE TRENDnet dome cameras outside. While this solution was perfectly functional and served me well for the past five years, it was a bit of a pain having to use two different apps to view the indoor vs. outdoor cameras. Now that there’s the Nest Outdoor (released in 2016 and then the IQ Outdoor in 2017), and I also have a Nest thermostat and smoke detectors, it was not a tough decision to consolidate and go with more Nest cameras.

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“Ralph Wrecks VR” at The VOID

Yesterday we spent the day over at Disney and after finishing up early at Animal Kingdom we headed over to Disney Springs for lunch. After eating at Terralina we went over to The VOID and played “Ralph Wrecks VR” … WOW!

The VOID bills itself as a “hyper-reality … whole-body, fully immersive VR experience” and it delivers. You put on a VR helmet and equipment vest and then get to walk around the virtual world by actually walking. You’re not tethered to anything, you’re completely detached and free. If DisneyQuest was still around, this would fit right in.

Unlike my first (disembodied) experience with the Oculus Rift, you can look down and see your body, your arms, even wiggle your fingers. Check your wrist and you can see the scoreboard flip up. You can talk to your team members and see their mouths move as they talk back to you. You can reach out and touch the wall, grab a railing, press buttons on a control panel, and it all syncs with the VR world in the helmet without lag. It’s just incredible! We chose “Ralph” over “Star Wars” because this was wife’s first immersive VR experience (and she’s not really into Star Wars). It was a great family experience and there was no dizziness, no motion sickness, it was seamless. The vest even had some force feedback mechanisms so you could feel things hitting you, or get shocked. The best part? Pancake/milkshake gun … oh yeah, come get some! My daughter and I will definitely go back to try the Star Wars experience.

My only complaint is the wait time. We had 1:30pm “reservations” but had to wait in three separate staging areas for about 20 minutes each, so by the time we actually got to play it was after 2:30pm. The experience itself was about 20 minutes and they only have a certain number of “arenas” so I guess I should have expected that (plus, they were only running “Ralph” in one arena, so the “Star Wars” line was moving faster.

Happy New Year 2019! (with a sports update)

Happy New Year!

Last year on New Year’s Eve my Cleveland Browns finished their perfect 0-16 season. They closed out the 2018 season just shy of a winning season with a 7-8-1 record and Baker Mayfield broke the record for most touchdown passes by a rookie quarterback in his first season.

Baker Mayfield sets rookie quarterback TD pass record

Both the Browns and Bucs will be looking for new coaches this year (Hue Jackson was fired back in October and Derek Koetter was fired on Sunday after the Bucs finished with another 5-11 season).

The Lightning closed out December “unbeaten” (just a single overtime loss) and are the #1 team in the league going into the new year.

The Cavs are back to losing now that Lebron James is gone (again), sitting at the bottom of the Eastern Conference with an 8-29 record.

The Rays aren’t getting a new stadium anytime soon, which is making people wonder how much longer they’ll be in Tampa Bay.

Coming up in 2019, the Indians will host the All-Star Game for the first time since 1997 when Sandy Alomar, Jr. hit that homer and was named the game’s MVP (I was watching down at the Field of Dreams at Nautica). I hope to get up to Cleveland in July to attend (I’ve already got my annual Arizona spring training trip planned).

What about my New Years’ resolutions? I’m going with something counter to the norm. Instead of drinking less (which I don’t do a lot of anyway) and inspired by the drinks I had on our Thanksgiving cruise, I’m going to learn how to make more cocktails! 😀

 

Capturing the Cosmic Cuttlefish

October: it’s fall, but we’re still seeing temps in the high 80s here in central Florida. The Browns have played 4 overtime games in the first seven weeks of the NFL season. The Lebron-less Cavaliers have lost their first four games of the new NBA season. And hockey has started again (the Lightning are 6-4 and currently drubbing the Blackhawks 4-1 as I write this (they set an NHL record 33 shots-on-goal in the second period alone))!

Ok, enough of the fall sports update, it’s time for another type of update: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish was released last week.

Just like back in April (and every time before that), the upgrade process itself was smooth: I issued the do-release-upgrade command and the whole process took just under 20 minutes to download the new packages and execute the reconfiguration. I then re-applied my customizations to a few affected configuration files, rebooted the server, and was back in business:

$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.10
Release: 18.10
Codename: cosmic

$ uname -r
4.18.0-10-generic

So far I haven’t run into any post-upgrade issues (which has happened to me the past few times, being an early adopter), but I’ll update this post if I do have any problems.

Coming in the spring … 19.04!

Nest Protect smoke/CO2 detector

Nest ProtectWhen I installed the ADT Pulse system in 2011, it came with monitored smoke/heat and CO2 detectors. Since then I’ve been paying the monthly monitoring fee to ADT and have had to deal with inexplicable false alarms (usually in the middle of the night and ADT’s answer was always “just change the battery”). This was in addition to two (non-ADT) wired smoke/CO2 detectors elsewhere in the house. I’ve had Nest (formerly Dropcam) cameras in my home network setup since 2014 and the Nest thermostat since 2016 so I’m not sure why I waited so long to get the Nest Protect.

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The Browns have a better record than the Pats?

September is winding down so it’s time for October playoff baseball, week 3 of NFL football, and the impending start of the hockey season.

But can you believe it? Thanks to their game 1 tie with the Steelers and their incredible first win in 635 days over the New York Jets this past Thursday night the Cleveland Browns currently have a better record than the Patriots and the Steelers!! I’ll enjoy this while it lasts (“we’re #1-1-1!”).

AFC East and North standings

AFC East and North standings

The Bucs are undefeated as well and take on Pittsburgh tonight on Monday Night Football. Let’s hope for some more Fitzmagic!

Meanwhile, over in baseball-land my Indians clinched the AL Central (for the third time in a row) two weeks ago. The Tampa Bay Rays, who have the same record as the Tribe, however, are going to miss out on a wild card spot thanks to their position in the tougher AL East (the Red Sox are on fire this year).

AL playoff standings

AL playoff standings

Still, not a bad showing this season for Tampa Bay.

Go October sports teams! 😀

No more plywood!

A year ago we were bracing for the approach of Hurricane Irma. We had installed impact windows in 2008 and replaced the overhead garage door in 2015 but had never gotten around to replacing the entry doors. So last year at this time we were boarding up those doors with plywood:

But today, the impact-rated doors we ordered from Home Depot back in late April were finally installed:

So now this week, if Hurricane Florence turns and threatens the Tampa Bay area, I won’t have board anything up!