Shack Attack

Does Your Grandfather Look Like a Monkey?

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Adventures in Sous Vide

My Christmas present to myself was an laboratory PID controller, which I've hooked up to a rice cooker to make a sous vide cooking rig. If you haven't heard about it, sous vide involves vacuum-sealing food, and then heating it in a water bath for a prolonged period of time. Advantages include dummyproofing (because the water bath is set to the desire temperature of the food, there is no possibility of overcooking),
increased flavor and juiciness (the bag traps the juices and aromatics), and speed (once it's done, just sear it and eat). It's great for making cheap cuts of meat taste like filet mignon, getting consistent results with tricky food like chicken and fish, and saving prep time when you're on the run.

You can try sous vide without any special equipment, as described here. I wouldn't try eggs or anything that needs high precision, but an improvised stovetop setup should do most meat and veggies fine. To get the most out of it, though, you'll want a temperature controller, which regulates the power input to a rice cooker or crockpot to maintain a constant temperature. If I was loaded with cash, I'd buy the $400 Sous-Vide Supreme (produced by two of my favorite low-carb advocates), but my $140 setup is approximately the same in functionality (albeit not as pretty).

Jewish Grandparents and Shiny Toys

I'm down in San Diego dropping my sister off at school and visiting my awesome super-Jewish grandmother. We showed her an iPhone and an iPod, and besides disparaging our playlists, I think she really got a kick out of them.

Shack, Interrupted

This blog will be on temporary, maybe permanent hiatus, while I'm in Japan. You can read about my year in Japan at dshack.net.

For the Dre fan / road cyclist subset

dznuts bag balm. From Hugger Industries' Flickr stream via Bike Hugger.

Odd Japanese Coke Found in the Company Fridge

I moseyed into the Six Apart kitchen Friday afternoon to grab a soda, and this caught my eye:

 Being both a Japanophile and lover of soda, this can (bottle?) was calling me. It's got the approximate  shape and capacity of an aluminum can, except that it has a screw-top, which is way nifty. I'm not particularly excited about its ability to keep <12oz of soda fizzy for an extended period of time, since I down a can pretty fast, but it seems genius for an under-the-radar flask (or for drinking soda near a computer; the small opening and screw-top seem like a good spill deterrent).

Aaah....tasty! It's diet coke, but for some reason they mix aspartame and sucralose as sweeteners, rather than use one or the other. The flavor was fairly indistinguishable from American coke, though I think the small, round opening changes its character a little, and makes the carbonation a little more pronounced.

(Props to Beau for the soda and the iphone pictures)

Feeling Less Than Secure

Google Reader was a non-stop stream of unsettling news this morning.

First up: Apparently pacemakers can be disabled remotely. What? We're outraged at the prospect of cars or iphones having a remote kill switch, but somehow we let one in our grandparents slip by unnoticed? (via BB)

Next: With a couple hours and $100 of equipment, a University of Amsterdam security researcher cloned and altered a 'Fakeproof' british microchipped passport, which supposedly compares biometric information about the holder against a secure, international database.

The tests for The Times were conducted by Jeroen van Beek, a security researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Building on research from the UK, Germany and New Zealand, Mr van Beek has developed a method of reading, cloning and altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for use at airports.

Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.

From The Times Online via BB

And finally, the New Yorker has a typically well-written article on a horrifying new strain of treatment-resistant superbugs that may kill us all. The culprits? Globalization, unsanitary hospitals, and over-use of antibiotics.

Ten years ago, the Institute of M edicine of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., assessed the economic impact of resistant microbes in the United States at up to five billion dollars, and experts now believe the figure to be much higher. In July, 2004, the Infectious Diseases Society of America...estimated ninety thousand deaths annually in U.S. hospitals owing to bacterial infection, more than seventy per cent had been caused by organisms that were resistant to at least one of the drugs commonly used to treat them.

Drawing on these data, collected mostly from hospitals in large urban areas which are affiliated with medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than a hundred thousand cases of gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria. No precise numbers for all infections, including those outside hospitals, have been calculated, but the C.D.C. also reported that, among gram-negative hospital-acquired infections, about twenty per cent were resistant to state-of-the-art drugs.

The researcher's eventual conclusion:

“We can temper things, we might be able to slow the rate of emergence of resistance, but it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to conquer it.”

Full article at The New Yorker

Perfect Google calendar syncing on the iPod Touch.

I recently got an iPod Touch, and while it does plenty of things well, one feature sorely lacking was good calendar syncing. I don't ask for much- I want events scheduled online to be reflected on my ipod, and events scheduled on the ipod to be reflected online the next time it connects to the web.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't want me to do this with Google Calendar- they would rather have me pay $99 a year for their so-far-not-so-hot MobileMe service. Because of the lack of a cellular data connection, I can't just use Gcal through Safari (plus, I like a lot of the features of the native calendaring app, like alarms), and if I used my work's Exchange server, it would overwrite my personal calendar.

Enter NuevaSync. This free service offers "direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar." Setup is easy:

1) Create a NuevaSync account

2) Tell it whether to sync your Google Calendar, Contacts, or both (no tasks support right now)

3) Add it as an Exchange account on your ipod or iphone.

So far, I'm sold- the service is in beta, but I've been using it for about a week with no problems, and it does exactly what it's supposed to do: let me see and edit my calendar wherever I am, regardless of web access. Add an event in the subway station on my ipod? Once I get wi-fi, it's in my google calendar. Add an appointment from Gmail? It shows up on the ipod. Just another entry in the saga of how the ipod Touch is good enough for most of us.

Life on the ipod isn't quite perfect yet, though. There's still the issue of how I can't send mail from every address I want to, like in gmail, and I need to sort out which contacts I really want access to (less than in my gmail address book, essentially, but more than and from different circles than my company exchange book).

The Couchbike

Amazing- motivated people investing time and effort the kind of thing friends and I have always joked about doing. Rent one here.

The Bicycle Forest, the guys behind this, are pretty nifty- besides the Couchbike, they also produce BikeCAD, a mountain bike design program, and host a gallery of homemade bike mods.

(thanks, Web Urbanist!)

I Heart Digsby

I'm going to take a little time to talk about my all-time favorite IM client, Digsby. Like many, I have a few different internet communication services going- a Gtalk/Gmail account, AIM, Facebook, a Jabber service at my work, and twitter.

I've tried serving them all out of one program with limited success- Trillian did most things pretty well, Gtalk did Gmail and AIM great (as did chatting straight out of the gmail web client), but left out any other functionality.

However, I just discovered Digsby, an amazing cross-platform client that serves up about any account you  can think of. Not only does it let you chat across services, but it shows you facebook updates in a way that makes sense, and lets you interact with Gmail messages without opening up a browser (not even Google's own IM client does that!).

Here's Digsby on AIM (SMS and file transfer work fine):

And here it is doing twitter:

You can see exactly what sort of facebook updates are waiting for you:

And my favorite, gmail. Actually, any of the clients can be displayed as tiny icons in the taskbar as well as from the sidebar, but gmail is my favorite, because I can see a snippet of the message, and instantly archive it (I've been working on the theory of Inbox Zero lately) if it's something I don't need to deal with.

All in all, a sweet client, and the best part is that your preferences and accounts sync across computers! Digsby runs a free server that stores user settings, so when I get home from work and boot up, my digsby client behaves exactly the same as the one on my work laptop. Genius!