Food/Drink

By way of Quente Cafe we get a link to a very interesting project showing a guy that not only built a jet engine, but uses it to keep his beer cold in his shed. Not a project most of us will be building, but an interesting use of his jet engine. And be careful, as he says "The risks should be obvious but it is worth pointing out that beer is a very dangerous substance when used without due care." If you go up one level of his site, you'll see this is the same guy that brought us Star Wars in Ascii.

This link from Gizmodo talks of a true coffee geek. His web site goes into the very fine points of roasting coffee, and you can tell, this guy loves his job and his coffee, he also really knows his stuff. Pretty interesting read if you're a coffee lover, especially if you ever plan on roasting your own coffee or becoming a barista yourself.

This is unofficially BBQ week for me. Tomorrow I plan to eat at one of the top rated BBQ place in San Francisco (Brother-In-Laws), but I have to admit, it'll be tough to beat Memphis Minnie's (his setup is very similar to my own using a CookShack smoker, which I'm using a lot more over my Brinkman upright water smoker). Then Friday I'll be smoking up ribs and pulled pork for about 12 co-workers and friends. Finally, Saturday I'm going to be a judge at the West Coast BBQ Championship which is a Kansas City BBQ Society sanctioned event. So as you can see, I'm not just a tech geek, but a BBQ geek as well :) and to honor my personal BBQ week, todays link shows you how to build your own smoker.

Here's a cool Popular Science article that shows you how to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen. After you have the ingredients mixed, the liquid nitrogen turns it into ice cream in only 30 seconds. According to the author, this is the best ice cream he's ever tasted due to the rapid freezing process which minimizes ice creams graininess.

Ever wanted to make your own astronomical images like those from the Hubble? Take a look at this site that provides instructions and the software (Photoshop Plugin) to create your own images from the raw data from the Hubble Space Telescope. While there, take a look at some of the beautiful images in their user's gallery.

Trying to get a couple projects together for Fourth of July. Yesterday we had the Make Your Own Fireworks Show, today we'll be highlighting America's dessert, the apple pie. Now here's a really cool article that shows you how to make an apple pie, without apples. Using a chemical process to simulate the taste of apples instead. Sounds kinda gross, but probably not too far off of all this processed, packaged stuff most of us eat all the time anyway.

Here's a site that shows you how to make a beer cooler (holds a pint) using a peltier CPU cooler, some nifty hardware hacks for the power, and power over CAT5 so he can carry his cold beer out in the backyard. The CAT5 cable probably would get in the way in the backyard, but he does have battery backup for ultra portability (considering how power hungry peltier coolers are though, I'm sure the batteries won't last very long).

This article is a perfect complement to our order pizza from the command line story. It's a pitcher, that notifies the wait staff when a pitcher is low on beer (or whatever other beverage is in the pitcher). Set your local bar up with these pitchers, and never be sitting around with an empty pitcher looking for a waitress (or heaven forbid, walk up to the bar to get a refill).

Wow, here's an open source project that extremely geeky. Install Pizza Party and you can order pizza from the command line. Example: pizza_party -pmx 2 medium regular This will actually order a pizza from Dominos.