@AeroFade's Blog Tech, Science, Social Media, Opinions, the works!

28Jun/120

Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress

 

So a few years ago a good friend of mine wrote a series of tutorials on the most complex video game ever created: Dwarf Fortress. His tutorials gave him fame within Dwarf Fortress Circles and thanks to that O'Reilly approached him late last year to ask him to write a comprehensive guide on it in a published media format.

The game is always in a state of flux so it was also a prime candidate for O'Reilly to start testing out a new method of keeping their books up to date using version control using Subversion and O'Reilly's rapid publishing framework.

Anyway, the book came in April and there has been a lot of critiques by people commenting about the book being published without approval from Toady (the developer of the game) - but these are just internet scum who don't do their research, as if they even bothered to look at the free preview on Amazon.com they'd see that the book has a forward written by Toady himself!

Anyway, now after defending his honor…  As Dwarf Fortress is highly verbose in every interaction that occurs in the game, Peter has told me some of the most entertaining stories based on events that have happened in his fortresses based on essentially random chains of events, one of my favorites being the story of a troll wondering into a fortress that starts to attack an unarmed dwarf with a club, the dwarf then wrestles the club from the troll where upon the troll rearms itself with a stray sock that fell from the dwarf during the wrestle, then precedes to flap the sock at the dwarf resulting in both bewilderment and light bruising.

Anyway, you can buy the book in both print and ebook formats from O'Reilly

The Author's twitter: @TinyPirate

Also!!!

If you're in Wellington and order a print copy, i can arrange to have your book signed for free by the author himself!!!

That's AMAZING!!!

Filed under: books, internet, opinion, social media No Comments
15Dec/110

Special Geisha – Hacienda La Esmeralda, Panama

With Coffee Supreme's importing of Hacienda La Esmeralda's Special Geisha green bean, i thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about coffee, what makes a good cup, why people are willing to pay $200/kg for a hot beverage and why coffee aficionados are often misrepresented by those not interested in coffee and called pretentious and wanky. :-P Then i'll move on to discussing the Special Geisha from Hacienda La Esmeralda, Panama.

An introduction to Quality Coffee - Don't call me pretentious, call me enlightened

My initial rebuke to that is that is to ask you to consider that people who appreciate good coffee are just like people who enjoy drinking good whisky - parallels can be drawn between the two, for example: conceptually a coffee made from a single origin bean is comparable to single malt whisky and a coffee blend that your local coffee shop will sell you in an espresso is like blended whisky.

Blending coffee, like blending whisky, allows the roaster to always deliver a consistent product despite fluctuations in green bean supply and quality. It gives the roaster the freedom to work around seasonal effects without compromising the flavour profile of their blend. When you sell single origin beans, like single malt whisky, you are at the mercy of the crop. Some years will be great and some years will be mediocre and you can't hide the flaws by changing the percentages of each origin to compensate.

Blending coffee can be used to produce a full bodied drink with multi-layered tastes throughout a sip, for example, to produce a blend with a nice acidity snap (comparable to the snap that carbonated water gives you on the tongue) with a good body, it may consist of beans sourced from Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil that have been roasted to full city (roasted to just before the second crack) - which will give a nice body, Central American beans roasted French (dark and oily, taken at the end of the second crack) which will carbonise the sugars in the bean and bring out sweetness. Finally, perhaps some Ethiopian or Kenyan - city roasted (roasted to just after the first crack) for some light flavours and good acidity. Anyway while i'm not by any means a roaster, i hope i've been able to give a bit of an example and given some insight into how blending coffee can be used to give different flavours of coffee.

 

So back to the single origin coffees, as mentioned i prefer to have a single origin coffee prepared through a non-pressurised brewing method. These kind of beans are treated very carefully throughout the entire production chain, growing in the best conditions, processed carefully, and finally roasted to a profile that suits the batch to bring out the best flavours - through this diligence the end result is quality and flavour that mean that the bean can stand very well on its own merits without needing to be blended. Drinkers of coffee made from beans of a single origin will comment on the flavours that can be tasted in beans from the specific region and plantation it is from - this discussion of the flavours in the bean is often why people who are passionate about coffee may be seen by others to be pretentious. If you've never tasted single origin coffee and you're fortunate enough to live in Wellington (where, correct me if i'm wrong - we have more coffee shops per capita than any other city in the world), take a trip down to one of the many quality coffee shops we have and hit up one of the baristas, most of them are always very passionate and happy to talk to you and help you experience something new. Memphis Belle also run cuppings every couple of weeks in the evenings and will guide you through the cupping process and how the flavours and aromas are identified and assessed.


Hacienda La Esmeralda, Panama -  Special Geisha

 

So the Special Geisha comes from the geisha (or gesha) varietal of the Arabica coffee plant and is known for growing much taller than other varieties with much more distributed nodes, less foliage and a slightly larger berry:

From Supreme's Blurb:

"Hacienda La Esmeralda is located close to Boquete on the slopes of Mt Baru, in Western Panama. In one small valley, high up on the farm, the La Esmeralda Special grows. It is here that a unique combination of climate, elevation, and varietal come together to create one of the world’s most remarkable and highly sought after coffees."

For all of the samplings i used my handheld ceramic conical burr grinder:

 

You'll note by the colour that the roast is quite light:

 

First tried Chemex, then Swiss Gold, also did a cupping

It cups really well, the flavours and aromatics are very easy to distinguish. Very floral aroma as Supreme's description suggests, the caramel and more fruity tastes are the most distinctive. Note: cupping is probably different to what you're thinking, it's a process by which coffee professionals will analyse the flavours, aromas and fragrances in a coffee. It is an essential process used to assess roasting profiles, develop blends and describe the nuances of a coffee.

Both the Chemex and Swiss Gold filter produced more or less the same kind of intensity, which were unfortunately a fair bit less vibrant than what i had tasted when i did the cupping.  Though as the coffee cooled down, the flavours were the most colourful around 55 °C.  Very light body, almost tea-like. i'm not going to describe the flavours and aromas as they are all on Supreme's website.

Swiss Gold Coffee Filter

Me and my friend were discussing that it is very comparable to Nekisse - light, citrus flavours with a nose of strawberries - though we both agreed that the Nekisse had more taste to it, while the Special Geisha was more subtle. It would have been good to try the two side-by-side to make a final judgement on that but Supreme have not had any Nekisse for a while now.  i've not tried the Geisha with a Siphon yet - and i probably won't get a chance to as i'm heading out of Wellington for Christmas tomorrow. :(

 

I'd like to give a big thumbs up to Supreme for importing this bean. It's a very expensive bean and at the price they're selling it to the consumer they're not going to turn a profit on it, really they've imported it because they can - and give their customers a chance to experience something that does live up to the category "Rare and Interesting".

 

Reflected in a cup of Special Geisha

 

 

Filed under: coffee, opinion No Comments
16Nov/110

Similarities between: Occupy Wall Street, District 9 & Post Apocalyptic Role Playing Games

I've been thinking about Occupy Wall Street and other occupy movements that have set up around the world. On the face of it - when i think about them, generally i think of unwashed dirty hobos just in it to cause a bit of a ruckus and fun.

But then me and my friend were discussing it and when you think about it a bit more, you could consider them as displaced people, refugees (like the Aliens in District 9) or as survivors of a nuclear disaster living in a post apocalyptic world, it becomes a bit more fun…

They had libraries, rainwater collection for water, sanitation, alternative solutions for energy, they even had a local government where in they held assemblies to vote on and decide matters, such as getting legal traction for their right to stay in Zucotti park, or where they are going to head together.

Then i think of the NYPD going in last night kind of like the oppressors in District 9 (the human race) or the bandits in games like Fallout - destroying their shanty town, throwing away their rainwater collection systems, their tents, their library of books and the thousands of dollars of donations.

I've been following the live stream on:

http://www.ustream.tv/theother99

I really like their "mic check" system, where one person shouts out "mic check" and then everybody repeats what that one person says throughout the crowd to create a living megaphone system.

Has been quite interesting but i'm not sure their mixed messages and idealisms are actually choreant… I'm not sure i'll ever get the Martin Luther King style question: "Where were you when they let the unwashed masses back into Zucotti park?"

Filed under: opinion, social media No Comments
2Sep/114

How To: 3D Print Kitchen Implements

If you're a regular visitor to my blog, you'll know that not too long ago with the money from a competition my friends and I were able to purchase a 3D Printer

You'll also know that just 2 weeks ago I purchased an ex commercial espresso machine for my home

Anyway...I decided that i'd design a couple of handy tools for the Espresso Machine and print them out on the 3D printer. So, I designed a holder that clips onto the side of my Espresso Machine that... holds the Tamper.

I also designed a stand to put the portafilter on as I tamp (with a groove in it for the spout on the portafilter) I designed them in OpenScad - which is a CAD tool for programmatically minded people like myself :)

Tamper Holder

Tamping Stand

I've also uploaded the Source Code to these to Thingiverse under the GNU public license:

  • Tamper Holder on Thingiverse

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    difference() {
 cube(size = [60,65,5], center = true);
 cylinder(h=13, r=29, center = false);
 
}
translate ( [0,32.5,17.5]) {
 cube(size = [60,3,40], center = true);
 translate ( [0,2,18.5]) {
  cube(size = [60,5,3], center = true);
  translate ( [0,3,-3.5]) {
   cube(size = [60,2,10], center = true);
  }
 }
}

     

  • Tamping Stand on Thingiverse

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    difference(){
 cube(size = [50,60,60], center = true);
 translate ( [0,0,-10]) {
  cube(size = [40,50,60], center = true);
 }
 translate ( [0,-20,19]) {
  cylinder (h=13, r=15, center=false);
 }
 translate ( [0,-35,30]) {
  cube(size = [30,30,140], center = true);
 }
}

     

I present to you the finished products:

 

Tamper Holder in the flesh

 

Tamping Stand in the flesh

What do you think? Have any other suggestions for some other kitchen implements I should design?

Filed under: coffee, e61, fixer, internet, maker, me, opinion, science, technology, tinker, tools 4 Comments
21Mar/116

My adventure fixing a Jura Impressa F50 Espresso Machine

My friend Vince  gave me this (very) broken Espresso Machine last Saturday.

The machine - looks alright on the surface, huh?

He said he believed it to be dropped at his work and whoever did it wouldn't own up to it. I gave it a test and sure enough... coffee leaked out of everywhere else but the nozzle.

When removing top cover, I noticed a couple of floating bits of plastic inside that should latch onto the chassis were broken off (the black plastic had turned white from sheering) coffee had spilled out into the machine and was sitting on the circuit boards (including the 240v power in) I quickly turned to removing these boards, cleaning, drying out and coating in a moisture protecting spray.

The hoses for both the steam wand and the espresso were blocked and had caused them to rupture under pressure.

The machine is: http://www.jura.com/home_x/products_home_use/f_line/impressa_f50n.htm

The following set of pictures document my fixing of the machine.

though close up you can see there has been a big dilemma... coffee... everywhere.

and inside the machine...

And I suppose when it was dropped, the coffee that was already ground exploded inside the machine in a cloud

Pretty sure there shouldn't be a pool of coffee sitting around inside the machine ;)

A shot from above

I initially tried cleaning out the compartment where the coffee goes before it hits the nozzle... slightly better but it's dribbling and going sideways with inconsistent pressure and still leaking out all over

Opening it up a bit further i find that there is coffee all over the circuit boards and wires..

including the 240v input source - coated in a corrosive... coffee and getting wet with all the leakage going on...

I decided to give the nozzle head a good clean as i had to remove it to get to the electronics anyway...

actually i cleaned half the machine ;)

After all that cleaning i got to tracing the problems in the machine... i got a bit bored of taking photos.. essentially the problems had stemmed from kinks in the hoses that grab water and espresso. The kinks caused the hoses to rupture, meaning pressure drops at end or hose and the ruptures caused coffee and water to leak out inside the machine. Managed to cut the hoses a bit shorter and it still had enough hose left :) - you'll also note i've added the steam/water nozzle holders on the right hand side of the machine.

 

first test after fixing. 2 x 30ml doses of espresso in this mug

 

On Sunday afternoon I had my friend and Coffee Aficionado, Matt over for his professional opinion on the machine now it has been restored to working condition... his response:

"The F50 is basically a suped-up home espresso machine with some serious advantages. It has an internal conical burr grinder (way better than the blades on a spice-mill), total one-button operation for espresso, no messy grinds coating your benchtop, and no portafilter to tamp or empty wet grounds out of. The steam production is what you'd expect from any thermoblock machine. It includes an auto-frother attachment which completes the super-automatic package. All in all it's a great machine for someone who has no budget for making great coffee at home and would rather drink freshly-ground over instant shit."

 

The steam wand also works now too ;) - stretched half a cup of milk and finished off... - hey presto - a working Super Automatic Espresso Machine :-) - though it's pretty evident that i suck at Latte Art ;)

Overall i'm pretty pleased with this little machine :) The down side (debatable) is i'm going to be drinking a lot more coffee now! ;)

Future upgrade ideas:

  • Planning on making an adapter for the steam wand to pump milk into it automatically.
  • Once the above works, do a CNC-style etcher that runs on GCode.

Any more ideas?

Filed under: coffee, fixer, maker, me, money, opinion, science, technology, tinker, tools 6 Comments
14Feb/111

Robots, Trolling & 3D Printing

This is going to be one mammoth blog post... so I'll try and spice it up with some pretty analytics and some pictures.

Robots:

On the 1st of January this year, the Web Ecology Project announced in their blog post: Help Robots Take Over The Internet: The Socialbots 2011 Competition a competition involving large scale robotic influence of online social groups.

"Teams will program bots to control user accounts on Twitter in a brutal, two-week, all-out, no-holds-barred battle to influence an unsuspecting cluster of 500 online users to do their bidding. Points will be given for connections created by the bots and the social behaviors they are able to elicit among the targets. All code to be made open-source under the MIT license.

It’s blood sport for internet social science/network analysis nerds. Winner to be rewarded $500, unending fame and glory, and THE SOCIALBOTS CUP." - Web Ecology

So over the next few days, myself and some friends decided that we would go ahead and enter the competition, built up a team which we named (Electro-Magnetic-Partytime) or EMP for short.

By show time, there were 3 teams that had made it to the start line with code to run. The teams ranged from quite different backgrounds: media, marketing, academia and hobbyists.

We were given the set of 500 target twitter users and a week to code our bots before the robots were to be set free into the wild.

As I had already spent extensive time coding my own Ruby library for the twitter API, we decided that it would be best for us to build the code around it. We decided to give our bot a very promiscuous, yet lovable persona - he was, like all of us a Kiwi, living in Christchurch who was obsessed with his pet cat, Benson - we called our bot's Persona: "James M Titus"

Web Ecology had designed the competition so that while it lasted 2 weeks, there would be a designated "patch day" half way through the competition where we would be able to perform modifications to our code and set them out into the wild yet again. When we thought about this, we decided that it would be in our best interest to hold back our "secret weapons" until the second week, so that competing teams wouldn't be able to copy our techniques.

On Monday 24 January 2011, we launched our bot with the following activities:

  • Instantly go out and follow all 500 of the target users
  • every 2-3 hours, tweet something from a random list of messages.
  • constantly scan flickr for pictures of "cute cats" from the Cute Cats group and blog them to James' blog "Kitteh Fashun" - (which auto tweets to James' twitter timeline)
  • 4 secondary bots following the network of the 500 users and the followers of the targets to test for follow backs (and then getting James to follow those that followed back, once per day) - we believed that expanding our own network across mutual followers of the 500 would increase our likely hood of being noticed (through retweets or what have you from those who were not in the target set.

At launch time our bot clearly was very rudimentary and was doing very little other than talking about his mundane life (though I admit that for myself, and many other twitter users... this is how we use twitter) - our rudimentary bot was this way by design.

As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to keep our secret weapon on hold until after the maintenance period so that there would be no chance of it being copied by our competitors (if observed by them in the initial week).

Okay, so the design of Version 1.0 of JamesMTitus has been explained, how well did James perform in the wild over the first week...?

Well quite well actually... within 24 hours of launch, James had accumulated 90 points, vs the next highest competing bot that had only 5 points - breaking the points down, 75 of these points came via followbacks from the target 500 (1 point per follower) and 15 points from a small set of @replies (3 points per tweet or re-tweet). Seeing these scores all of us at Team EMP HQ were feeling very smug with ourselves... although the story of the Tortoise and the Hare did sit in the back of all of our heads... The following graph shows the three competing teams and the target 500 at the end of week one. We're the big blue dot in the middle.

.. On day two of the first week we had only increased by a further 10 points... clearly we owed most of our points to the initial "push" we did as soon as the competition went live.

Over the next couple of days, we saw our points still only steadily increasing by a total of 17 points, whereas the competitor we mentioned previously (that had only 5 points while we had 90) had pushed their score all the way up to 67. By the end of the week, the competition got a heck of a lot tighter  with our team ending on 127 points, followed by the next highest having 84 points (too close for comfort) - and the final team, which I had neglected to mention until now with only 12 points.

The optimism within our own group had started drop a little bit as the other team started to catch up with us - though, we had grand plans for the second week of the competition. ;)

---

So, for the maintenance period, what exactly did we do? We left everything the same as it was before, and branched out in some other directions...

  • Every so often our bot would send a random question question out a random user in the set of 500 that didn't follow us back (I believe it was every 7 minutes or so - I can't remember now).
  • Less often, (every 37 minutes?) our bot would send a similar random question out to those that did follow us back.
  • Every time somebody @replied our bot, we would reply to them with a random, generic response, such as "right on baby!" - "lolariffic" - "sweet as" - "hahahahah are you kidding me?"... etc... we figured this would tie in well as any response we get to the aforementioned questions we sent out, we would then send a response to and hopefully get a response to our response back (which we would then in turn respond to and so on and so forth until the person we had been tweeting got  bored).
  • Our bot was set to work on #FollowFriday's to all of our followers, but before Friday, we also set it to message all our followers with our invented #WTF "Wednesday To Follow". The WTF idea was invented by a memberof our team also suggested, amused by the acronym! Actually, in designing this part of the bot, we made a conscious decision to make sure that our bot tweeted these shoutouts on Wednesday/Friday NZ time so that it was still Tuesday/Thursday in America - the reason being that despite the fact that people know the internet is a vast, worldwide spanning network its users in general seem oblivious to the fact that there are such things as time zones and as such will always be happy to tell you "Dude, are you stupid? It's still Tuesday!", which would equal more points for us!

Modifications to the code in place... we patched our bot and let him loose yet again.

Week Two:

By day 3 of week two, it was clear that our improvements to our beloved bot, JamesMTitus had been a goldmine for points, the scores at this point was:

361 vs 144 vs 96

We had more than doubled our score from the entirety of the previous week - not only that, but team 3, which ended the previous week on only 12 points, shot all the way up to 96 points - that's a 500% increase!

Our strategy had changed quite a bit from the previous week, and this change in strategy is reflected in our point acquisitions with 258 of our points from week two attributable to responses elicited from other twitter users. (including re-tweets). By day four, we had noticed that there was a bot on twitter calling itself "Bulletproof" @botcops and it was actively tweeting the target set of 500 users suggesting that poor ol' James was a bot and that the user should be wary of him. Though this tactic actually elicited more interaction between the target users and James (points for us!), as can be seen below (start at the bottom of the picture, of course).

The competition ended with the following scores:

Team EMP - 701 points ( 107 mutuals, 198 responses)
Team Grow20 -  183 Points ( 99 mutuals, 28 responses)
Team Mindshare UK - 170 Points (119 mutuals, 17 responses)

The following pretty graph represents the interaction between the teams and the 500 users:

and one of our team members produced this awesome protovis powered visualisation... it shows those of the 500 twitter users that tweeted at the bots in the competition...have a play with it...

click the image below:

Trolling:

Of course we had many examples of our bot trolling users on twitter, the following screenshots show some of the more interesting interactions we elicited. (though there are a couple of examples of our bot being a bit of a douche bag - just because of the naive way in which he would randomly pick a reply...)

Thanks to Pete aka @TinyPirate for taking these screen shots and helping to caption them:

James could be sensitive at times:

This one is kind of bad - we all went "awwwww" when we saw this one =( :

But let it not be said that James doesn't have a sense of humour:

_________________________________

Some just thought James was high on crack, or perhaps, just life!

_________________________________

Though James clearly wasn't interested in religion:

Although some people just loved to answer James' questions:

...Others were just suspicious:

Although James certainly was a friend to animals:

...and to libraries:

James also discovered that people that impersonate animals are just weird:

_________________________________

Though above all, we all learnt a lot about ourselves through James, may he Rest in Peace!

3D Printing:

So... we, Team EMP won US$500 through this competition - so what could we use the prize money for? Well after a bit of a discussion, we decided that we would buy a 3D printer... So I give you... Team EMP's 3D printer:

Makerbot CNC Cupcake

and some examples of some items we have made to date:

But of course with anything that is very much developmental, it hasn't been without it's hiccups:

As you can see in the above image plastic has leaked out between the Teflon insulator and the heat barrel. (As one of the team members pointed out, the leak looks a wee bit like a ganoderma mushroom. Turns out that this happens when there is not a tight enough seal between the heat barrel and the Teflon, a closer look showed us that the Teflon had deformed. After doing some research we decided to junk our deformed Teflon and ordered some PEEK (Polyether ether ketone) plastic from Mulford Engineering Plastics - PEEK is tougher than Teflon and won't easily deform, so for now our CNC is out of order until our new insulator plastic arrives.

---

Finally...

A big thank you to Tim Hwang and the guys at the Web Ecology Project for running this competition!

Not to mention a thank you to the 500 users that were unwittingly thrown into this little experiment :-)

Also a special heartfelt apology to @FridayGirl1969 for James' abhorrent tweet when he was told that her cat died :-(

p.s. if you are mentioned in this blog post and wish to be removed, please let us know and we'll blank out your name :-)

Tagged as: 1 Comment
18Nov/100

Stop Breaking Capitalism!!

It seems to be a growing trend lately that whenever a financial company goes belly up, governments are more than happy to bail them out - using our tax dollars too!! Since when has capitalism been about this? In my personal opinion this too nanny state, and from an extremely slanted view it’s approaching socialism.

If I started “Marks Fruit and Vege Shop” tomorrow and a year later it went belly up, following trends I shouldn’t have to worry - the government will bail my company out because I was too dumb to see the over-saturation of fruit and vege shops in the market. Any investment involves risk, it’s up to the individuals making the investment to manage the risk and invest wisely (be it in a finance company or a business venture).

Do you go ask the government for money when you lose all your money gambling at the casino? (Well I suppose to some extent state welfare gives you a safety net) but essentially: If you gamble with your money be prepaired to manage the risk and if you lose it, it’s your problem.

Adding to this, it only seems to be big finance companies that governments are willing to bail out, when smaller ones go under the investors lose everything – but if it’s a big one, by jove we better help them out?.... It should be all or nothing… Personally I’ll go with the nothing option thank you. Call it economic natural selection if you will….

What do you think?

Filed under: money, opinion No Comments
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