Author: Lisa

Military Intel, Russia, and COVID

As I’m reading that Russia tripled their reported COVID death toll, I cannot help but recall an old rule of military intel analysis. If the report is a good thing (e.g. amount of grain produced this year), halve it. If the report is a bad thing (here, the number of people dead from a virus), double it. I never took the maxim literally, but rather thought of it as a reminder that ‘the bearer of bad news’ was not something you wanted to be within the Russian government. Thus numbers picked up from internal reports were apt to be CYA inaccurate.

Not sure if that rule was meant to apply to revised numbers (basically our fake numbers are off by a power of ten, so we’re going to adjust within the half/double rule to produce stats that are within the realm of possibility) or if not (reality was so readily apparent that the official numbers had to be revised close to reality).

Rübæus Clone Recipe

We picked up a six-pack of Rübæus this evening and both love it. It smells like raspberries, it tastes like a nice cream ale blended well with a lot of raspberry flavor (reading that they use 3,000 lbs of raspberries in a batch … even without knowing the size of “a batch”, I think there are a LOT of raspberries per ounce of beer produced). So I’m working on synthesizing a clone recipe from a few clone recipes out there. This is sized for a 5 gallon batch

Grain Bill:

Quantity Grain Color
7 lbs Marris Otter 3°L
1 lb Honey Malt 25°L
1 lbs Wheat 2°L
1 lbs CaraMunich 50°L

Brew: Mash at 153°F for 60 minutes. 0.5 oz Magnum at 60 minutes. 1 lb whole raspberries at flame-out.

Yeast: WLP060 American Ale Yeast Blend

Secondary:

Quantity Ingredient Addition Time
3 lbs Whole raspberries (crushed?) Secondary 2 weeks

Xocoveza Clone Recipe

Work in progress recipe — original source https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/stone-xocoveza-mocha-stout.492778/. This is sized for a 10 gallon batch

Grain Bill:

Quantity Grain Color
20 lbs Pale 2-row 2°L
2 lb Roasted Barley 550°L
2 lbs Caramel 60°L
2 lbs Chocolate 350°L
2 lbs Munich Light 10°L
20 oz Flaked Barley
1 lbs Flaked Oats

Brew: Mash at 151°F with 40.6 quarts of water for 60 minutes. Sparge 5.53 gal water at 168°F. 90 minute boil with the following additions:
2 oz Challenger hops @ 60 minutes(bittering)
2 lbs lactose @ 10 minutes
2 oz East Kent Golding @ 10 minutes (aroma)

Yeast: 2 pgk SafAle OS-05

Secondary:

Quantity Ingredient Addition Time
4 Pasilla Chili Peppers Secondary 1-2 weeks
2 tsp Nutmeg Secondary 1-2 weeks
5 Cinnamon Sticks Secondary 1-2 weeks
6 Vanilla Beans (cut into 1″ pieces) Secondary 1-2 weeks
8 oz Cocoa Nibs Secondary 1-2 weeks
small amount Coffee Beans Secondary 2-3 days

Air Venturi Avenger Tuning Tests

We tested various regulator pressure and hammer spring combinations to see where we get the best accuracy. Using 19.91 grain H&N Barracuda Green pellets. Looks like 1200 psi with the hammer spring two turns in wins.

1200 psi:

Hammer spring at 1 turn:

Left side of top right target has hammer spring at 2 turns.

Right side of top right target has hammer spring at 3 turns.

1400 psi:

Hammer spring at 2 turns.

Hammer spring at 3 turns

1800 psi:

Hammer spring at 1 turn

OwnTracks WebSockets MQTT SSL Error

A few weeks ago, we stopped getting location updates from OwnTracks on our phones. Checking the status, I see an error indicating that the connection failed because my certificate does not have a SAN. Which … true, it does not. I knew some consortium agreed that all certs should have SAN values (and RFCs had been updated to reflect this new direction). Evidently version 2.2.2 of OwnTracks has added SAN verification. I reissued the certificate from my CA and added a SAN. I had to put the cert on both my MQTT websockets reverse proxy and the mosquitto server; but, once both were using the new cert, OwnTracks connected and cleared through the queued updates.

Meatless Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza

Scott always wants a bacon cheeseburger — and, occasionally, I make him one. But that’s more of a “out at a restaurant” meal … and we’ve not been out at restaurants for a long time. A few weeks ago, I got the Impossible meatless ‘ground beef’ stuff to make meatball subs. It’s a little expensive to make a couple of burgers (8$ a package, and I’d use three or four packs to make a handful of burgers), but I immediately thought of bacon cheese burger pizza.

I mixed up my usual pizza crust — about four cups of white flour, a third of a cup of vital wheat gluten, yeast, water, and about a tablespoon of olive oil. Crisped up a few rashers of the MorningStar Farms fake bacon. Then I sautéed the Impossible ‘ground beef’ in the pan

I made a smokey maple barbecue sauce, sprinkled the crumbles, then added cheese.

Baked for about 15 minutes at 550F and then topped with the fake bacon.