It’s been a while… My last post was a long time ago. I my defense, I’ve been working on a project, and that took up a lot of time. Now that that’s done, I may just post to my blog every now and then…

Let’s start with something simple… Cats and laptops. Here are a few pictures of my cat that I’ve taken over the last few months.

The last picture is the prelude to the next picture – a while after I took the previous picture I needed my laptop again. Here is what I found on the screen:

Remember the Galileoscope that I tried to sell you on a few weeks ago? The organizers of the project just announced that production has started. It will still take a little time for them to start shipping, but that’s a major step.
Can’t wait to get mine.

It’s not too late to place your order. This is a very unique chance to get a great small telescope for less than a the price you would pay for a toy telescope. Support them.

This post is different from my other posts, even though it may look like an ad, I consider it to be a public service announcement. When was the last time you looked at the stars, enjoyed details on the moons surface, or were just in awe about Jupiter’s moons?
In case you didn’t know, 2009 is the official International Year of Astronomy. Here is some more information about the Galileoscope:

The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed as a
Cornerstone Project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009
(www.astronomy2009.org). For just $15 plus shipping, you get a 50-mm f/10
refractor that can be put together in less than 5 minutes and gives great
views of the celestial wonders that Galileo first glimpsed 400 years ago
and that still delight stargazers today, including lunar craters and
mountains, Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus, Saturn’s rings, and the
Pleiades and Beehive star clusters. The Galileoscope comes with a 25x
eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens and incorporates features such as achromatic
optics, stray-light rejection, and a 1.25-inch eyepiece holde so it can
accommodate standard sized eyepieces. It has a symmetrical plossl
eyepiece normally found only on telescopes costing at least 10 times
more. It attaches to any standard photo tripod (not included).

Accompanying the kit are educational materials based on active inquiry,
cooperative learning, testing of ideas and predictions, and hands-on
experimentation. You can download these free activity guides, and order
small numbers of Galileoscopes with payment by credit card or PayPal, at
www.galileoscope.org. Museums, schools, astronomy clubs, and other
institutions wishing to place orders of 100 or more can get a discounted
price of $12.50 per kit and save on shipping.

To initiate a large order of 100+ kits, simply fill out the Request for
Quotation form at:
https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/sites/galileoscope.org.gs/files/Galileoscope-RFQ.doc

Amazon.com has a bunch of indie music samplers available for free (’til the end of the month). There is good music, there is fantastic music, and there is one song that’s just so out of this world (The Conchord’s Hurt Feelings – if you love he show, you need that song

Just click on the add below:

I needed business cards. The usual recommendation is to go with one of the free offers (e.g. VistaPrint or HP), but that’s not me…

I wanted cards that would not only show off some of my more creative side, but also cards that would stick out – figuratively and literally.

In the past, I’ve had the Moo mini cards, but they don’t make for good business cards because of the restricted space on them. I needed to fit more information on a card. Moo also makes business cards so I started to collect a few images that I wanted on the backs of my cards, and worked on the design.

When I received the cards in the mail, I was impressed with the print, but also the paper quality. The cards stick out for two reasons: They look great, and they are of a different size than the regular US business cards: They are a little wider, but not as tall (I use them in portrait orientation).

Take a look:

Because I don’t want late night calls from people I don’t know, I’ve removed part of my phone numbers, and my street address. The actual cards of course do contain that information.

All the images that I’ve used are in my Moo set on Flickr.

I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks – this is pretty obvious when you take a look at the graph from TwitterCounter.com:

Once I started to tweet more, my follower count went up.

While playing around with different Twitter tools, I came across MyTweet16.com, which allows you to display the first 16 tweets of any Twitter user. I of course was curious about what I had to say when I first signed up for my account.

What I found was pretty interesting: For my very first tweet, I did not use any of the “normal” ways to use Twitter: It was not the web interface or any of the established Twitter clients – instead, I used a program that I wrote myself. I completely forgot about that. Who else can say that they tweeted first with something they created (besides Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the founders of Twitter)?

I used the book Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) to get some exposure to Flex, and the first few examples in the book are about using the Twitter API.

So, without any further ado, here is my first tweet (copy&pasted from MyTweet16.com:

Playing with Flex for the first time (that's how I twittered this). 12:33 PM Jun 3rd 2008

Please follow me on Twitter.

It’s this time of the year again… No, I don’t mean tax time, it’s time to renew my Mozy subscription. That of course requires that I rethink my commitment: Do I want to subscribe to the service for another year? Do I get my money’s worth out of my subscription? Unlike with other services (e.g. cell phone plans, cable TV, …) this is actually an easy one: Mozy is the best thing that ever happened to my backup needs (that really cheap DAT tape drive that I bought about 12 years ago is a close second). There is really no question if or why I should renew.

I take a lot of pictures, and of course these pictures are digital. If something should happen to the data that I store locally, I need a reliable off-site backup. I used to keep a backup disk in my office, but it just got too cumbersome to always carry the disk back and forth and to update it frequently enough. Mozy takes care of all that. Automatically.

After the initial setup, it only requires me to check every now and then that all the important directories are covered. I also do occasional restores, just to make sure that my data is there – my assumption is that a partial restore is sufficient to verify that that’s the case.

My only complaint was that whenever a backup was running, it saturated my Internet connection, but since I figured out how to throttle the upload bandwidth that Mozy will use, that’s no problem anymore. It’s a configuration setting that I just did not notice at first.

Just for the record, I’m using Mozy on a Mac, but I assume that the Windows software is as reliable as the one that I’m using.

If you want to give Mozy a try, here are a few links. I even have a coupon code for you that’ll save you a few bucks: Use the code APRIL when you sign up for one of the non-free plans. Just type the code into the referral box at sign up to get a 10% discount. If you just want to give it a try, use the free plan. That allows you to get a feeling for what Mozy is, and how (well) it works. You have 2GB of storage space.

• 
  Mozy Unlimited Backup


• 
  Mozy Online Backup – 2GB Free


• 
  MozyPro

I still have a few stacks of punch cards at my mother’s house, while cleaning out my office last week, I found a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, and then of course, I have a ton of negatives and slides…

CBS has posted David Pogue’s report about how our data dies because we either can no longer access it or because the original media used to store data is falling apart.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Let’s see how long it takes until we no longer have a Flash player that can play that video.

I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I do care enough about the coffee that I make at home that I did a lot of research to decide what kind of machine and what brand and model to buy. In addition to the hardware, there is the software, and I try to get freshly roasted beans. Unfortunately, my favorite local coffee roaster sold his business, and the new owners cannot reliably deliver the same quality of coffee.

So, how can I make sure that I always have freshly roasted coffee beans available? Or, as some of my friends would put it, how can I waste even more time on my morning cup of coffee?

Of course, home roasting is the answer to that question.

How to turn a bag of green coffee beans into something that can be used in a coffee maker or an espresso machine? After some serious research online I noticed that one company name came up again and again: Sweet Maria’s Home Coffee Roasting Supplies.

More after the jump…In addition to the 5 pounds of the Espresso Monkey Blend, I also got the espresso sampler pack (this is what’s left, I already went through three of the samples):

OK, I have green coffee beans, and I want to end up with something like this:

How do I do that? My first attempts were not very successful – I tried to use a hot air popcorn popper. There are numerous reports online from people who are able to use such a cheap device to roast some fine coffee. My popper however did not get hot enough. I was not even able to get to the first crack stage of the roasting process.

There are a bunch of other methods like pan roasting, or fire roasting, but I wanted something simpler, something that would just work. I can always spend some time in the future on a home build propane heated roaster. I decided to go with an entry level home roasting machine:

Let’s roast a batch of beans… First, take the batteries out of the smoke detector.

The FreshRoast is not a machine to roast a large batch of coffee, it can do about 2 1/4 oz. at a time. That’s not much. I usually do three batches in a row (with the required 20 minutes of cool down time in between the batches).

It’s fun to watch the coffee get darker and darker. At the beginning, the beans are greenish, and look more like split peas than like roasted coffee.

Within a few moments in the hot air stream, they slowly start to turn brown. At first we have something that looks like roasted peanuts. This is the stage where the beans release a grassy smell, which turns into the smell of hay.

The beans get moved around the roasting chamber by hot, rapidly moving air.

Once the beans dry, some of the chaff comes off the beans, and the air stream will move these light pieces of bean skin to the chaff collector.

A slightly darker shade of light brown.

An even darker shade of light brown.

A light shade of medium brown.

A medium shade of medium brown.

A darker shade of medium brown.

The experts of course know that we are moving through the different roasting levels of cinnamon, half city, New England, full city, … And, I’ll stop trying to make up descriptions for the different roasting levels.

I usually stop the roasting during or shortly after the second crack stage. The beans will have a slightly shiny surface at that point, because some of the internal oils will have traveled to the surface.

After cooling, and some more chaff removal, this is what the beans look like:

The FreshRoast Plus 8 has relatively good chaff collector. After the top cools down enough, it’s very easy to get rid of the collected chaff.

The beans are ready to be used for espresso after about 12-24 hours.

CRAFT: Volume 10 is the last one in print. Looks like people are no longer reading printed paper. Or, maybe too many of the CRAFT issues landed on the junk mail pile…

The silver lining in this is that my MAKE subscription will get extended by two issues.