Bumblebeer is ready. The current batch has 70% regular IPA bottles and 30% with a a hint of orange.
Bumblebeer is ready
BeetleCam is back!
Beetlecam is an RC all-terrain vehicle with a DSLR pan-tilt mount created by Burrard and Lucas. It marries two of my strong interests – robotics and photography. I would be interested to see how an autonomous version of the same vehicle would fare – something that would explore the wild and keep track of the different species of wildlife it encounters.
They’ve captured some awesome pictures that are both alluring and playful.
Do check out their teaser video and for more information head on over to http://www.burrard-lucas.com/
I’m a generalist with a passion for Robots, Data, Startups and Hackery.
Bumblebeer
My best friend and I got together last weekend to brew our first beer, Bumblebeer. The origin of the name is a mystery but it’s here to stay. We used the Everyday IPA homebrew kit from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. The entire process took us over 3 hours and it was really fun. The instructions on the website were fairly comprehensive and got us to the final step with little confusion.
A few things to watch out for:
- Temperature. Temperature. Temperature. The mashing process and the wort are highly temperature sensitive. If you are using an electric stove top (we did), it requires more effort to keep the liquid temperature within range.
- For the 1 gallon brew mix make sure that you have two 8 quart pots.
- Have good company or a good book. There is a lot of waiting involved.
Here are a few pictures from our brewing process.
Where the mind is without fear
I was recently introduced to this mashup by Imogen Heap and Vishal-Shekar. It’s an awesome song with some really powerful lyrics.
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
By Rabindranath Tagore
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
EOL and Mercurial
I’ve setup Mercurial as the SCM at my workplace and we’ve been migrating our workflows over from SVN. We’ve come across some issues that have helped us better understand how Mercurial works. I learnt an important thing about imposing control on line endings in our toolkit.
The Mercurial extension ‘eol’ is a mandatory tool if you have developers on Windows and Mac machines while your software is built for Unix. The different type of line endings (CRLF and LF) can break scripts in Unix. Configuring the extension was fairly straightforward following the instructions listed here - http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/EolExtension . A few important things to note:
- The .hgeol file in the top level directory is mandatory if you want EOL control for that repository. I configured my file with just the two lines:
[patterns] ** = LF
- If you want an existing repository to be influenced by the ‘eol’ extension, you need to purge the working directory and reinstate its contents for the line endings to change
Purge using
hg co -C null
Reinstate using
hg update
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
- Randy Pausch
Food
Do you live to eat or eat to live? I’ve been on both sides of the saying and I now believe that what we eat defines how we live. I’ve been following Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and it’s been an eye opener for how little we know about the food we eat. And it’s even more embarrassing for how little we care to know about our food. I’m guilty of this and I know a lot more people who’re on the same boat with me.
Here’s a little push to your wake up call.
Rise of the Machines
I gave this talk at Quanda Convergence on Mar 4th. I was pleasantly surprised with the response the talk received. It was a very good gauge to ascertain if people in general were ready for having more robots in their everyday lives and the answer is an overwhelming YES!
The talk focused on my work in robotics and the kind of questions people asked me when I told that I build robots. While most of them were paranoid as to when we should welcome our robot overlords, others were skeptical if robotics was there yet. We’re somewhere in between today and this talk examined the topic in a lighthearted manner. It touched the various movies that had robots as a centerstage and linked them to real robots or intelligent systems that we have today.
So, when will the robots rise?
Rise of the Machines
View more presentations from vikasreddyenti.
Baked Grapes
I’ve had about 2 lbs of grapes sitting in the fridge for over two weeks and unfortunately, they’ve started to over ripen. While my usual routine is to throw them out, I decided to bake them today instead. I found the recipe here particularly useful – Baked Grapes . While the recipe suggests that the baked grapes be eaten with yogurt, I over salted mine to make it a standalone dish.
Here are the grapes prior to the bake process.
And here they are again after being baked for 15 minutes at 450F. Besides the change in color, they’ve also gotten a lot more crunchy and salty – just the way I like it.
