Building a WindowFarm (Part 2)

After the decoupage dried my brother and I got together again and started to hook up the airlift watering system.  As I mentioned in part 1, we did a bit of improvising with the tubing sizes.  After trying various configurations we decided that the tubing was too cramped and we needed to try something else.  We consulted this helpful airlift troubleshooting guide and decided to get hard acrylic tubing to replace the flexible tubing we were using.  Things were looking up, but we were still having issues with the airlift.  We were getting an initial splash up the tube, then occasional spluttering, but very little water (usually none) actually made it all the way to the top.  We eventually figured out that the problem was too much air.  I unplugged one of the two tubes coming from the pump and, well, see for your self:

Now that we’ve got this thing up and running, the next step will be to actually put plants in there.  If anyone’s interested in seeing this bad boy in person, we’ll be showing it off at Pumping Station: One’s birthday party next Saturday.  See you there!

Building a WindowFarm (Part 1)

This weekend I started building a WindowFarm with my brother.  Building it together is actually his Channukah present (just don’t ask which year’s).  We used the ‘mini’ version 2 instructions that will yield a single column WindowFarm holding three planters.  The instructions are not the best, but they’re totally sufficient if you’re willing to wing things a bit.

I didn’t start taking pictures until we were already underway.

Instructions, materials and tools laid out.

We cut holes in the bottom of each water bottle so they can stack and drain into each other.  We also cut holes in the side to insert the net cups (and so the plants have room to grow).  The instructions specify that you should use Poland Springs 1.5 liter ‘eco design’ bottles.  They don’t really explain why, but the reason is that they get narrower in the middle and that holds the net cups nicely in place.  We used another brand of water bottles that had a similar narrowing in the center.

Net cups placed inside water bottles

Then we started cutting tubing for the air lift.

Gilad, cutting tubes.

We didn’t buy all the different types of tubing the instructions call for so we had to improvise to get the air pump needles attached to the tubing.  Liberal amounts of teflon tape were used, followed by testing for air leaks in a nearby cup of water.

Testing for air leaks

The aquarium pump has two outlets.  Each one gets a tube with an air pump needle.  These were inserted into holes at the bottom of the air lift tube.  This will carry water to the top of the WindowFarm which will drip through each planter and back into the reservoir at the bottom.

Bottom of the air lift tube. Those blue plastic pieces are check valves.

Sarah and her furry assistant taped up the bottoms of the bottles.

Sarah, taping the bottom of the bottles so the roots don’t photosynthesize

Then they got all artsy on ‘em.

Sarah and her friend decoupaged the bottles. Pretty!

New Year, New Ginger Champagne (Bonus Round: Ginger Gin Infusion)

This year my brothers and I continued the tradition my oldest brother started four or five years ago: brewing up a batch of ginger champagne on January 1st.  Ginger champagne takes a year to ferment at minimum, so it’s perfect for New Year’s Eve.  It also gets better with age (in theory).  Our success record has been kind of spotty, especially when trying to age the champagne, but I feel good about this year’s batch.  The recipe we follow (from Wild Fermentations, occasionally adapted) is meant for 1 year, so it’s possible there’s something we should change if we want it to be good after a longer ferment.   This year we decided to add an infusion round to the festivities: we used the extra ginger to make some ginger-lime infused gin (side note: the blog we got this recipe from, boozed and confused, is rapidly becoming one of my favorites).

Ginger Champagne

Ingredients:

• ~1.5 lbs ginger
• 12 cups white granulated sugar
• ~3/4 cup lemon juice (this was the juice of three lemons for us)
• 1/2 TB vanilla extract
• 1 packet Champagne yeast (we used Lalvin EC-1118)
• 5 quarts water

1. Boil water (in two pots if you’re like us and don’t have one pot large enough).
2. Peel and grat the ginger.  We weighed it after peeling and it was roughly 1.25 lbs, or 4 cups (2 in each pot).
3. Add sugar, lemon juice and vanilla extract (split between pots).
4. Let cool (this was when we made the ginger-lime gin).
5. Once it’s cooled down to a bearable temperature, remove some ginger brew (about a cup) and add the yeast.  Once it starts going, add the yeast to the pot(s).
6. Siphon from pot(s) into your fermentation vessel(s).
7. Woo! (optional)

There are more steps after that, but not for another 2 months or so.  In September we’ll be bottling the brew and it should be ready for next NYE.

Sanitizing the equipment

Ginger-Lime Gin

Ingredients (we tripled everything because we made a batch for each brother):

• 2 cups gin (we used beefeater)
• zest of one lime (roughly 2 tsp for us)
• 2 heaping TB of chopped ginger (we used the leftover ginger peel from making the champagne)
• 2 TB agave syrup or honey (we’ll be adding that this week)

I won’t include the steps since I’d basically be lifting the recipe straight from boozed and infused.  Their site is fantastic.  If you’re into this sort of thing, be sure to check out their booze infusion index.

Ginger and lime zest

Filling up the jars

Pretty.

Learning Linux: Switching Wireless Drivers

Before I get to the meat of this post I’d like to introduce what I’m hoping will be an ongoing series here I’m calling “Learning Linux.”  I’ve been using Linux (Ubuntu, to be specific) as my main OS for some time now, but my approach to learning Linux tools and internal details has been fairly haphazard.  In order to make my learning more effective I’ve decided to apply some structure based on a trick for learning foreign languages I learned from my dad.  I’ll be keeping track of both things I learned serendipitously and through necessity, and writing short explanations of them here in order to reenforce the learning.  If you see anything wrong, please say so in the comments.

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Recently I upgraded my Ubuntu installation to the latest release (12.04, Passionate Panda).  As often happens after an Ubuntu upgrade, my wireless card stopped working.  In order to feed my addiction to cat pictures without being chained to a router I had to switch out the wireless driver I was using (bcmwl) for a new one (b43).  I looked at a couple different solutions, but this is the one that ended up working for me.  In the process I learned about a couple new commands.

modprobe: modprobe is used to add or remove modules from the kernel.  It’s smart enough to know about dependencies, so if you tell it to add a module you shouldn’t need to also specify its dependencies.  The author of the link above uses modprobe to remove the wl module and add the b43 module using the -r flag.  I had already uninstalled bcmwl via apt-get, so I only used modprobe to add b43.  The modprobe utility also has a couple of related files.

• /etc/modules: tells Ubuntu which modules should be loaded automatically at boot time.  I had to add b43 to this file otherwise I would have to use modprobe manually each time to load the correct wireless driver.
• /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf: is exactly what it sounds like.  Any module on this list will not be loaded.  I added my old driver on here, as well as a couple other drivers that other articles suggested might be causing conflicts.

lspci: you can use lspci to find out information on the pci devices your system is aware of.  I used lspci to determine that the problem was in fact the wireless driver (my assumption) because lspci showed that the system was aware of my wireless card.

lsusb: similar to lspci, lsusb lists information about your USB devices.  Handy if a USB device isn’t available for some reason and you want to check if your computer is aware of it at a low level.

Simple trick to help learn a foreign language

Deana and I are currently teaching ourselves Spanish in preparation for our trip to Argentina.  We’re using a couple of tools to help us learn, but there’s one low tech technique I really like that I learned from my dad.  It’s just two lists that you carry with you (we’re using a shared google docs spreadsheet, but pencil and paper works just fine).  One list is words in English that you wanted to use but didn’t know in Spanish.  The other list is the opposite: words in Spanish that you didn’t know before.  You write down new words on your lists as the day progresses and then at the end of the day you write in the translations.  We’re going an extra step and also making flashcards with them.  It may sound like a simple trick, but my dad used it to successfully teach himself Spanish in just a couple of weeks shortly after college (well enough to impress my native Spanish speaking mom, anyway).

Edit:  I’ve been asked to include a screenshot for clarity.  Enjoy!

Pickled

Today we visited my brother at the Growing Home farm in Merseilles, IL (that’s pronounced “Mar-sails”) and pickled our brains out. Everything we pickled was fresh from the farm including the wild plums which we harvested ourselves. In the end we each ended up with a quart of wild plum jam, tomato and eggplant relish, pickled onions and grilled pickled sweet peppers. Oh and he sent us home with a small jar of the beet and turnip sauerkraut. It was a good day.

Credit for the pictures goes to Deana.

Wild plums ready to be picked

We pitted these all by hand

The peppers after roasting

Packing pickled peppers

Close up of the tomato and eggplant relish

From left to right: peppers, wild plum jam, onions, tomato and eggplant relish.

How I failed the Stanford online NLP class

One of the most frustrating aspects of my professional life are projects that are unplanned and unmanaged.  Even the most interesting project can quickly become a painful burden if no one takes the time to do some thinking and planning before plunging headlong towards a fixed deadline.  So it is not without a certain amount of embarrassment that I must admit the obvious: poorly managed personal projects suffer the same fate.

When I first heard about the Stanford NLP class I was pretty excited and signed up a couple months before the class started.  I knew it would require a time commitment, but figured that I’d have enough time to handle the lectures and assignments.  And I did.  Or rather, I would have, if I had done even minimal planning for it.  I didn’t, which is why the course is half over and I’m still on week one.  This post is an effort to come clean with myself on how that happened and salvage some lessons so that this doesn’t happen again.

The first thing I realized?  If my process (ha!) for starting new projects involved more planning I would have had a chance to say “gee, do I have two nights a week to commit to learning NLP?” and would have been forced to make the decision between taking the course and making room in my schedule.  In short, I need a much more thorough planning phase before I commit to a new project.  Here are the tools I’m going to use: a project goal statement, a step by step outline, and a calendar consultation.

Project Goal: A statement of what I intend to accomplish.  It’s ok if I don’t actually accomplish this, or if goals change over the course of the project.  This is mostly to help crystallize my thoughts on the project and keep projects manageable.  I don’t really have time for giant open ended projects right now and any project I can’t state the goal of in a paragraph probably isn’t ready for me to dive into.

Outline: Once a goal is defined I should be able to outline some concrete steps between where I’m starting and where I’d like to be.  The outline will be very high level — major milestones on the path to the goal.  Each step should have a rough time estimate in days.  Most of my projects don’t have the same time constraints that my professional work does and this maps pretty well to how I work.

Calendar Consultation: Once I have an outline with step by step estimates I’ll be able to look at my calendar and determine if I have the time for a commitment the project entails.  Being able to look at my calendar and say “I don’t have the time to do this right now, but I will in 2 weeks” will be a massive improvement over the shoot-from-the-hip style planning I’m doing right now.

Of course, to be able to look at my calendar and determine my actual workload will require that I actually know all of my commitments.  That brings me to my second takeaway: I need to do an audit of all my open projects.  I plan to subject all my current projects to the same type of planning process I just described.

All that up front planning is all well and good, but how will I know if it’s working?  While I suspect I’ll be able to tell whether or not I’m getting more things done holistically, I’d much rather add a little structure and generate some data I can analyze.  Each project should have a post-project debriefing, much like the thinking that led me to write this post, where I  try to explore some of the lessons I learn from the difference between my planning and reality.

I can’t say that I’m happy with the way this has turned out, but it’s not a total loss.  I may not have learned much NLP, but I think I’m starting to learn some valuable lessons about how to manage me better.

Thank you to Matt Baker, Deana Rutherford, Gilad Shanan and Nick Shaskevich for reading drafts of this.