Cooking has been foreign to me for the last few months. I don’t have an aversion to it, but I’ve just been eating out or at work more often lately. I dare say my reentry to the cooking world scores high on style points. I read an article in the Bold Italic about Antonia Richmond’s adventures in cheese making around San Francisco. Having a love of cheese and just having moved to the city, I was inspired to also attempt a simple Mozzarella. Rob was enthusiastic to make cheese too when I mentioned it to him, so it was set, Sunday afternoon we were to make cheese.

According to the article and other Internet wisdom, making cheese at home can be pretty tricky–but Mozzarella seems within reach. I purchased the liquid vegetable rennet and some calcium chloride at Rainbow Grocery, and Rob acquired the requisite high quality fresh milk. Bi-Rite has a kit which includes everything needed except for the milk, but it cost more than twice as much as the separate ingredients, and we already had a thermometer. The list of ingredients was not long, but the process did require a commitment to stirring. Rob got the recipe and milk, I got the weird cheese making stuff.

So we poured in the milk and calcium chloride and nothing much happened. We stirred and heated for a while before it was time to add the rennet. A little bit of that stuff, and a few seconds of stirring and something weird happened. It was as if we were making cheese! The milk turned to curd, and we had made some real progress.

Despite the fact that the recipe seemed to call for breaking up the solid pieces whenever we thought we were finally making progress, we persevered. We stirred and stirred and eventually we had cooked it enough. We hung the cheese to dry. When it had fully drained, we cut the mass of curds into slices. The questionable recipe now indicated we should microwave it until it just starts to melt, then quickly stretch it and work it into a ball. Gloves are recommended, because the cheese is hot at this point, but having no gloves, nor interest in wearing gloves, an alternate technique was needed. Adapting a trick I heard about this summer, I ran my hands under cold water for a few seconds, then picked up the cheese and pulled it. As soon as I started to feel the burning again, I set it down and ran my hands under cold water. After a few stretch and fold cycles it had clearly become something new; real fresh mozzarella. After a cold saltwater bath it was ready to marinade and eat!

I think next time we’ll stretch it less, because it was a bit tough, but delicious other than that. Overall, it was a success.

More Photos

I’m excited to note I’ve updated my Publications page with an exciting bit of work that was recently published in IEEE MultiMedia!

Helen and Heiko asked me to contribute to this article about the Nuage Vert project. Abstract included and link to IEEE article below. Check it out in your July-September issue of IEEE Multimedia or get it online (fee based).

Editor’s Note

Nuage Vert [Green Cloud] is a major environmental artwork that engages light and public participation. A stunning and important work, Nuage Vert has won many accolades and several prestigious prizes, including the 2008 Golden Nica in Hybrid Art from Ars Electronica, the 2008 Green Prix from ZeroOne, and the 2009 Award from the Environmental Art Foundation. The implementation process is particularly interesting as the team found new and successful ways to work with lasers that will benefit future artists.

—Norie Neumark

Helen Evans, Heiko Hansen, Joey Hagedorn, “Artful Media: Nuage Vert,” IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 13-15, July-Sept. 2009, doi:10.1109/MMUL.2009.54

Today I had a great time going to Maker Faire in San Mateo. It really is inspirational for one’s own projects to see other neat work being done.

I’m currently busy working on a couple of things, but I realize it has been a while since I’ve posted updates on anything I’ve done. Back in September of last year I put together a DMX-512 level converter breakout board for my EasyLase USB.

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I’d previously ported and debugged the DMX portion of the driver for the board just using TTL level loopback adapters. I also went on to build the Wonderwall project using the DMX output of the EasyLase, but the level shifter and RS-485 transceivers were all on a solderless breadboard. That needed to be corrected. :)

I’m rather proud of the size of the board–especially being made of all through-hole components. It neatly plugs in to the existing headers, and I think it looks right at home where it has been mounted on the board. All the schematics to build one for yourself are available on the Müller Elektronik website. Enjoy!

I relabeled all of the bookmarks in my bookmarks bar today:

I know the usage of the symbols is non-standard, but I love looking at the beautiful text ornaments and the space efficiency. I know I’ve seen this concept somewhere else, but I just can’t remember where.

Mouse over so you may see to which link each symbol correlates.

☺

Update:
Looks like it comes from Merlin Mann circa 2004.

Though I’ve had the WordPress client for iPhone installed on my phone for a long time, I’ve never really felt like I could make a reasonable post because I had no way to integrate photos the same way I do when posting from my laptop. Fortunately, last week I ran across an app simply titled “Gallery” that lets the user upload to a Gallery2 image gallery, like the one embedded in my site. So now, perhaps, it’ll be reasonable to blog on the go. As if I couldn’t wait to get home because I’m such a frequent writer here…

Alas, an example photo:

On my way back from Cape Canaveral I realized I’d be traveling pretty far, coming from the coast all the way back home in Santa Clara. So, I decided to see both oceans flanking the continental US in one day, for it wouldn’t be much further to travel. I woke up and saw some birds with Mo in the Atlantic in the 30 minute break from the rain. Then headed west, first by car to Orlando, then by plane to DFW, then again by plane to SJC, then again by car to Santa Cruz. I reached the Pacific before bed and also took a photo. It was lots of fun, and probably will be a while before I travel so far again.

Cocoa Beach • Santa Cruz

(2463.6 miles apart)

A while back I posted a bookmarklet (QTYouTube) to load H.264 versions of YouTube videos that the QuickTime plugin plays to avoid using Flash. It has proven very useful to some, but it turns out just recently a better solution has been introduced!

ClickToFlash version 1.4 and later includes functionality to automatically load H.264 versions of YouTube videos, without the need to do anything special.

ClickToFlash is a WebKit plugin that prevents all flash content from loading in Safari. This excellent software prevents runaway CPU usage, and if you’d like to see the Flash content, simply clicking it will cause it to load.

As of version 1.4 a feature has been incorporated to do exactly what the QTYouTube bookmarklet did, replace the flash with a QuickTime compatible H.264 video. With the default settings, control-clicking and choosing “Load h.264″ will load the QuickTime version. You can also go to the Settings (from the Safari->ClickToFlash menu) and choose “Load H.264 videos from YouTube” to automatically do everything for you.

I really want to thank Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, Troy Gaul, and the rest of the team working on this for the excellent plugin and incorporating this feature!

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to acquire a pair of Shure E5 in-ear earphones, which I’ve greatly enjoyed. They’re fantastic headphones, and also some of the most sensitive around. Not only do they just need to drive a tiny bit of air between the diaphragm and my eardrum, but they’re rated at 122 dB/mW and have an impedance of 110 Ω. They’ve always been a joy to use with my iPod, but plugging in to my laptop has always meant I had to endure an unreasonably high noise floor, and be careful not to turn the volume up beyond a couple of notches, because any higher would certainly induce pain. Because they’re effective at blocking out external noise, I usually listen at a low volume, but despite this I found I was experiencing ear fatigue after even short periods of listening. That hiss was terribly wearing.

Just recently I purchased a Presonus FireBox from Charlie–most likely just as part of my audiophile addiction–and indeed it is a great device. The 24bit/96khz DAC is quiet and outside of the noisy electronic environment of my MacBook Pro. The headphone amp in this thing goes to 11, both figuratively and literally. This is a point of safety concern. Of course there is the standard warning about not listening to audio at a loud volume for extended periods of time, but in this case I feared plugging my E5s into the FireBox. Setting the volume to anything above zero was too loud. I was concerned I might accidentally turn the volume to a dangerous level.

So the solution to all of this was not to buy more expensive equipment, but just stick some resistors inline with my headphones. I decided to build an inline attenuator pad to drop the signal down by about 20db. This solves the above mentioned problems elegantly. It requires I turn up the volume a bit to listen which keeps the signal to noise ratio low on the laptop’s internal headphone output, and gives me a safety margin on the FireBox.

Construction wasn’t too involved, but it was a bit tricky to keep everything within the small dimensions I wanted to maintain. I used SMT resistors to minimize space, and had to scavenge the female 3.5mm jack from an extension cable to find one that was narrow profile.

I got most of the design info I needed about making audio pads from this article. It turns out, they’re just simple voltage dividers. I’m confident I didn’t actually get the 20db I wanted, but it does indeed drop the signal an appropriate amount. I used 150Ω shunt resistors with 680Ω series resistors.

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I am a bit concerned that the solder joints may crack with repeated pluging/unplugging, but I guess I’ll only find out from prolonged testing.

This whole problem of over sensitive headphones is usually solved by sticking a passive volume control inline with the headphones. In fact, new Shure headphones ship with one of those in the box. I chose not to go that route here, not only because I didn’t want another volume control to fiddle with, but because this way I couldn’t accidentally leave it turned up when plugged in to the FireBox.

Overall I’m happy with the result, despite the fact I had to use clear heatshrink to house the pad instead of red. Perhaps i’ll upgrade housings later :).

Let me know if you know of a commercial source for headphone fixed attenuators or you built your own.