A while back I picked up a refractometer from Northern Brewer to use instead of the hydrometer I'd had for so long. While it was certainly a great deal more convenient I was starting to get suspicious about it's accuracy. So I pitted it against my hydrometer in a challenge to the death! Spoiler: the refractometer matched the hydrometer point for point. And, in point of fact, neither of these instruments was killed during the challenge. Read on for boring tables and such.

Back in the middle of winter and I decided to brew another beer. I choose (more or less at random) a low gravity session brown extract kit from Northern Brewer: the Dry Dock SS Minnow.

Last year my brother and I made a stout for a Saint Patrick's Day party. It was so successful, we decided to do it again.

A cyser is basically a mead made with apple juice. Doesn't that sound great? I hope so, because I've got one bubbling away right now.

I have [re-]built a simple HTML widget that will show whether or not the City of Minneapolis has declared a snow emergency.

I recently got my hands on an old NETGEAR ReadyNAS 1100 with firmware 3.01c1-p6 installed. The first thing I did was force a completely reset to factory defaults (by holding the reset button in for 30 seconds while powering the device on). When I then went to log into the unit in order to set it up I found that the default username/password combination ("admin"/"netgear1") didn't work. I browsed all over the interwebs looking for information but everywhere I looked (including NETGEAR forums where other people have had this problem) the mantra was "reset to factory defaults and log in with admin/netgear1". But that very simple tactic didn't work. Finally, I did some Googling on the firmware version which eventually led me to this five-year-old posting which gave me the hint I needed:

I hosted a big brew day in my backyard and lots of people made lots of beer (well, wort, anyway). Ian produced 10gal of all-grain IPA which he gave away half. I stayed home with a gallon of the the very last bits. I call it my Trub Ale.

I hosted a big ol' brew event in my backyard today. Several people showed up and over twenty-five gallons of wort was brewed. For my part, I brewed-up six gallons of Northern Brewer's Winter Warmer.

I want another beer to serve at my upcoming Halloween party. Something suitable for a chilly autumnal night yet something that will be ready in four weeks. This is it: Northern Brewer's Nut Brown Ale!

It's time, again, for the annual themed Halloween party!

A friend found this old recipe for Peach "Brandy" (which is really more of a peach wine since it's not distilled) and I decide to give it a shot.

I finally got around to brewing a Kölsch kit that I had got from Northern Brewer a while back. Of note here is the first us of my converted keg boiler and DIY wort chiller.

I downloaded some e-books for my girlfriend's Kindle and was disappointed with the poor quality of meta data in the mobi files. I rapidly discovered that editing these files was not a trivial process. I downloaded Calibre, on the recommendation of everyone, but found it to be extremely wanting. I briefly considered MobiPerl, got as far as the description ("a collection of tools for generating and manipulating MobiPocket files written in Perl [emphasis mine]") and knew instantly that there be dragons.

(And, besides, I don't have any MobiPocket files written in Perl. Haha! Linguistic ambiguity is funny!)

Consequently, I spent the last two days building a simple, direct, no-nonsense mobi file meta-data editor. Download it, run it (no install necessary), open a mobi file, edit whatever data you see fit, and save it. It works just like you think it should.

Requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (v4.0).