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Coldbrew Deluxe Recipe (V1)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:29:00 +0100

This cold brew is creamy and caramel sweet, but you don’t need a dentist appointment after consuming this delicious human rocket fuel concoction.

⚒️ Equipment

1000ml swing top glass bottle for end product (shop at IKEA for KORKEN)
measurement cup at least 1 liter
teaspoon (but more cool is a digital scale with 0,1 gram accuracy)
measurement glas 100ml (science lab style is the best)
small glas tea cup and tea spoon
water boiler/kettle
spoon
funnel
coffee-filter holder for paper coffee filter
cheesecloth
sieve
paper masking tape + permanent marker (for label)

📋 Ingredient list

50 ml cream 30% fat (shelf stable is ok)
500 ml water (roomtemp)
500 ml cold-brew coffee extract (see chapter Cold-brew coffee extract)
3 teaspoons cane sugar (diluted in water) - Around 12,6 grams total
20 ml tap water (for the cane sugar concentrate sirup)

This ingredient list dilutes the coffee extract by 1:1 with plain water. Which gives a good taste/caffeine kick. If you want more caffeine kick you can use 2 parts extract on 1 part water. Using only coffee extract is not recommended taste wise and high caffeine content.

☕ Cold-brew coffee extract

Cold brew is fantastic because it’s less acidic and naturally sweeter than hot-brewed coffee. The base recipe is simple, but there’s a lot of room to experiment with ratios and flavors.

This sub-recipe is the “Classic Cold Brew Concentrate” it creates a strong concentrate that you will dilute when serving, which is the standard way to make cold brew.

Ingredient	Metric	Imperial	Notes
Coffee Grounds	125g	1 cup (whole beans)	Must be coarsely ground (like coarse cornmeal or sea salt)
Filtered Cold Water	1 Liter	4 cups	Use filtered water for the best flavor
Ratio (Coffee:Water)	1:8 by weight	1:4 by volume	This is a strong concentrate

WARNING: You may consume this concentrate but be prepared for a panic attack because of the maximum amount of caffeine is extracted from the ground coffee. You will not sleep ;-).

🛠️ Brewing method

Grind the Coffee: Grind your coffee beans on the coarsest setting possible. This is crucial—too fine a grind will result in cloudy, over-extracted, and gritty coffee.
Combine & Steep: Place the coarse grounds in a large container (mason jar, pitcher, or French press). Pour the cold water over the grounds. Stir gently to ensure all the grounds are saturated.
Wait: Cover the container and let it steep.
- At Room Temperature: 12 to 15 hours.
- In the Refrigerator: 18 to 24 hours (a slower, gentler extraction).
- Tip: Steeping for longer than 24 hours can start to extract bitter flavors.
Strain (Filter): The next day, strain the coffee to separate the grounds from the liquid.
- Best Method: Pour the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve lined with cheesecloth, a nut milk bag, or a paper coffee filter. You may need to do this in batches and filter it twice for a clean brew.
- French Press Method: Slowly push the plunger down. You may still need to filter the final liquid through a paper filter or cheesecloth to remove fine sediment.
Store: Transfer the concentrate to an airtight container and refrigerate. It will keep well for up to 1-2 weeks, but the flavor is best in the first week.

🧊 Serving and Diluting

The liquid you made is a concentrate and is typically too strong to drink straight. You need to dilute it.

Dilution Ratio (Concentrate:Liquid)	Resulting Strength
1:1 Ratio (Our Recommendation)	Smooth, strong, and balanced
2:1 Ratio	Very strong (for a big caffeine kick)
1:2 Ratio	Lighter and less intense

🥤 Classic Cold Brew Serve

Fill a glass with (crushed) ice.
Add 1 part Cold Brew Concentrate and 1 part cold water or milk (dairy or non-dairy). An extra variant with a dash of dairy cream makes a dream!
Stir till it splashes and a vortex is seen and enjoy your beverage!

🚀 Instructions

Instructions how to brew the Coldbrew Deluxe Recipe v1.

Create cane sugar concentrate (sirup)

Start by boiling the 20 ml water in a water boiler or kettle. Place the 3 teaspoons (or ±12 gram) measured sugar in the tea cup and stir until all granules are dissolved.

Combine all the ingredients

In a vessel and stir with a spoon until uniform. Funnel it into the 1 liter swing top bottle and label with date of creation. Keeps around 1 week in the fridge. Don’t forget to label the date with some masking tape and a permanent marker!

📸 Pictures

A Love Letter to FreeBSD

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:18:00 +0100

Credits and copyright

This post is credited by Tara Stella original posted at https://www.tara.sh/posts/2025/2025-11-25_freebsd_letter/ on 2025-11-25. I repost this with given permissions, with some small formatting changes to fit my blog.

Post

Dear FreeBSD,

I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are coherent. You are deliberate. You are the kind of system that doesn’t have to shout to belong.

You carry the quiet strength of the greats, like a mainframe humming in a locked room, not chasing attention, just doing its work, year after year. Your base system feels like it was built by people who cared about the whole picture, not just the pieces. Your boot environments are like an old IBM i’s “side A / side B” IPL, a built-in escape hatch that says, we’ve thought ahead for you. You could be, you should be, the open-source mainframe: aligned with hardware lifecycles of three to five years or more, built for long-term trust, a platform people bet their uptime on. Your core design reminds me of Solaris in its best days: a stable base that commercial and community software could rely on without fear of shifting foundations.

And make uptime a design goal: a thousand-day uptime shouldn’t be folklore, it should be normal. Not a party trick, not a screenshot to boast about, but simply the natural consequence of a system built to endure. Mainframes never apologised for uptime measured in years, and neither should you. Apply updates without fear, reboot only when the kernel truly demands it, and let administrators see longevity as a feature, not a gamble.

I know you are reaching further into the desktop now. I understand why, and I can see how it might widen your reach. But here I find myself wondering: how do you keep the heartbeat of a rock-solid server while also embracing the quicker pulse of a modern desktop? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I’m too new to you for that, but my first instinct is to lean on what you already have: the natural separation between CURRENT and RELEASE. Let those worlds move at their own pace, without asking one to carry the other’s compromises.

And now, with pkgbase in play, the stability of packages matters as much as the base system itself. The base must remain untouchable in its reliability, but I dream of a world where the package ecosystem is available in clear stability channels: from a rock-solid “production tier” you can stake a business on, to faster-moving streams where new features can flow without fear of breaking mission-critical systems. Too many times in the past, packages vanished or broke unexpectedly. I understand the core is sacred, but I wouldn’t mind if some of the wider ecosystem inherited that same level of care.

Culture matters too. One reason I stepped away from Linux was the noise, the debates that drowned out the joy of building. Please keep FreeBSD the kind of place where thoughtful engineering is welcome without ego battles, where enterprise focus and technical curiosity can sit at the same table. That spirit, the calm, shared purpose that carried Unix from the PDP-11 labs to the backbone of the Internet, is worth protecting.

There’s also the practical side: keep the doors open with hardware vendors like Dell and HPE, so FreeBSD remains a first-class citizen. Give me the tools to flash firmware without having to borrow Linux or Windows. Make hardware lifecycle alignment part of your story, major releases paced with the real world, point releases treated as refinement rather than disruption.

My hope is simple: that you stay different. Not in the way that shouts for attention, but in the way that earns trust. If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux. If they want a platform that feels like it could simply run, and keep running, the way the best of Unix always did, they should know they can find it here. And I still dream of a future where a purpose-built “open-source mainframe” exists: a modern, reliable hardware system running FreeBSD with the same quiet presence as Sun’s Enterprise 10k once did.

And maybe, one day, someone will walk past a rack of servers, hear the steady, unhurried rhythm of a FreeBSD system still running, and smile, knowing that in a world that burns through trends, there is still something built to last.

With gratitude,
and with the wish to stay for the long run,
A newcomer who finally feels at home.

2025-11-25 by Tara Stella

Beer Cellar

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post keeps a list of beers I have brewed with bottle numbers and links to the recipes. I use a bottle numbering scheme so I can keep track of the different beers and the brews are unique. They consist of 3 numbers which can be written with a permanent marker on the bottle cap.

Bottle numbers are created on bottle day as follows (old style):

New style (since 2023-12): <year last two numbers (two digits)><follow nr (one digit)>
Old numbering (before 2023-12):
- For month 1-9: <day (2 digits)><month (1 digit)>
- For month 10-12: <day (1 digit)><month (2 digits)>

They are sorted from new too old.

Bottle ID	Beer	Bottled at
252	Happy, hoppy & Red	2025-06-22
254	Sniper IPA	2025-05-02
253	Fruity weirdness	2025-05-02
251	Red Saison	2025-05-02
241	Breugels Bruin	2024-02-10
232	Red Unity sparge IPA	2024-02-10
231	Red Unity	2023-12-15

277	Jerry’s Mr White	2023-07-17
176	Beer-n-grapes	2023-06-16
166	Double red fruity	2023-06-16
312	Breugelse rooije red ale	2022-12-30
183	Redish winter ale feb ‘22	2022-03-18
311	Apple Red Ale	2021-11-25
211	Autumn Dry Irish Red Ale	2021-11-25
104	Rye not so pale ale	2021-04-10
101	Malty Ipa	2021-01-10

Open-source is NOT free support

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:17:00 +0100

Open-source software doesn’t mean its free as in breathing air, getting free support and complaining when a feature is not present even not donating to the effort. (Re)licensing open-source is a different hot-debate, i’m a developer not a lawyer but for me open-source is a philosophical thing. Open-source maintainers and contributors should be respected (,and respect each other) in the sense it’s mostly pro-bono work. Which maintainer wants to get flamed and payed nothing for keeping their hard work free and open-source?

About

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t like to talk so much about myself but you can find my proffesional profile on LinkedIn. Or have a look at any of the social media platforms I’m using. Which are at the bottom icons of the site.

If there are any problems with the website feel free to drop an issue on Github.

Welcome to the comfy dark side of the internet

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So you have never seen the dark side of the internet? Get comfy!

DISCLAIMER

The information provided is for general informational purposes only. In no event I will we be liable for any loss or damage, including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage, or any loss or damage whatsoever arising from loss of data or profits arising out of, or in connection with, the use of this information in this blog post.

Stay safe!

welcome to comfy box!

Take your shoes off and make yourself comfortable. It’s safe here. Welcome home.

The Internet is dying a slow and painful death. Will you do what must be done?

Join comfy box, and take back the Internet that was stolen from you.

If you’re reading this, it’s not too late. You wouldn’t have found this place if it was.

You’re safe here. Welcome to what the internet used to be.

The Internet as it used to be, is dying a slow, yet ever quickening death. Colossal tech corporations and media companies have consolidated the average person’s experience of the Internet to a couple of dozen of preferred websites, at most. These corporations rope their users in with enormous systems designed to learn what keeps their users hooked on to their services for the longest period of time, spending as much money as possible. The dopamine rollercoaster of likes, followers, upvotes, comments, or whatever else, ruins the ability to delay gratification and destroys attention spans. Everything is monetized, from artistic expression, to political ideologies, and even the accessibility of information. The constant stream of outrage bait, disinformation, fear, and paranoia that is present on the average social media “feed” is radicalizing millions and destabilizing the fabric of society. And worst of all, these systems of censorship and sanitization hide the history of the Internet from us. Too much of our shared culture and history has been left behind to rot and wither away, or is outright burned.

You can do something about this.
You do not have to participate in these systems. Even if they “already know everything about you” – you are under no obligation to continue giving anything to them. You have absolutely zero excuses.
You know that scrolling through an infinite feed of the highlights of other people’s lives and the various injustices and controversies happening in our world today is unhealthy. I know you can feel it.
You do not have to be a cog in the consumerist machine, and fall victim to the mental poison that is advertising in the 21st century. In fact, if the goods you are interested in are digital, you have no reason to buy anything at all.
You have the ability, right now, to discover what has been taken from you, to take back your privacy and freedom, and to express yourself however you would like to.

Nothing has to be like this. All we need, is You.

Welcome to comfy box. An internet community, dedicated to the Internet as a whole. Dedicated to all of the things it can offer you, and all of the ways it can harm you. Dedicated to the preservation of history, and the cultural artifacts that the users of the Internet have produced. Dedicated to the freedom of information, no matter the source. And, most importantly, fighting for the former Internet that was stolen from the generations which finds the current Internet omnipresent in their daily lives.

We’re here to spit in the face of the corporate coup of the Internet, and have some fun while doing it.

Original text from: https://comfybox.floofey.dog/help/about/
Open directory at https://nnty.fun/

Peppers '24

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I love peppers, and this year i’m taking a community garden sabbatical. I will put my north facing balcony full of peppers. I’m using my previous build growing box but sowing the peppers laboratory style in petri dishes with a heating mat.

I needed to add some cardboard between the petri dishes and heating mat because the water would evaporate to fast. And adding some extra cotton swaps on top sprinkled with water. It only took 10 days to sprout them all !

Growlog

10-01-2024: Sowed in petri dishes
17-01-2024: Most sprouted except for no 4,7 and 9
20-01-2024: Planted sprouts in seedling tray (also did sprout viability counting)
24-03-2024: Transplanted from seedling tray into small pots

Varieties

Naga black: 10/11 sprouted
Spanish: 13/15 sprouted
Serrano: 7/15 sprouted
Jalapeno own seeds: 2/16 sprouted
Jalapeno: 15/16 sprouted
Spanish small: 14/16 sprouted
Spagetti: 13/15 sprouted
Banana: 15/15 sprouted
Mini purple: 6/15 sprouted
Small pepper unknown: 15/15 sprouted

Images

10 January 2024

20 January 2024

21 January 2024

28 January 2024

7 March 2024

Your digital data needs backups and love

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Patrick Lindenberg on Unsplash

Back in the days when I started using a computer Microsoft Windows 95 was new and shiny. Cloud, smartphones and always connected to the internet was not a thing. We needed to backup our work on floppy disks. Many years later the USB memory stick was available to make our data portable and could store many many more data then fitted on a single floppy. I can still remember buying a 128 MByte Kingston USB memory stick at a computer fair. It was expensive, like in 40 dutch guldens or so. During that time (re)writable compact disks I also did use for data which only hold around 700Mbyte. And later on the DVD which could hold around 4 GByte per disk. I had a illegal copy of Microsoft Encarta encyclopaedia on CD and used it so much and with the low quality disk I had I literally used the disk until it died. I only had just one copy, so it was lost. Luckily it was not own generated content/data/media, so it was no big loss.

Many years later my computer had a windows crash it did probably run Windows 2000 (NT) or Window 98 i don’t remember exactly. I did reboot my system and it started to “eat” my data on the second personal data harddrive. Some sort of disk check/recovery which “restored” the state of the filesystem. You can almost guess it, my data was gone. Only some disk “check and repair” folder/files where left. At that time I didn’t know about digital forensics like PhotoRec, so it was lost forever.

When I started to backup some own data it was stored on DVDs and used them for a year of 3-5. And didn’t had a duplicate on other type of media somewhere. Then it broke and was unreadable. Luckily life didn’t depend on the personal data, but if it was used for a company or serious personal projects it could also be a serious financial or intellectual property loss.

Nowadays I’m a little paranoid about the safety of my personal data. I try to automated all the things so I can sleep and the computer is at work for me to safeguard the data. Yes offline (and offsite) backups need manual labor, but it is worth the effort.

Tomorrow 31 march 2024 it is World Backup Day. In case somebody reads this, when you have something of value as digital data always have multiple copies. When media dies or something bad happens you will thank yourself for putting effort in a (simple) backup strategy.

Bad things can happen for example when a Crypto Locker malware just changes files on a shared (corporate) network drive and your files will be taken hostage. Even if you pay the (major) randsom you don’t know if you get the decryption keys and the tool/algorithm to reveal your “secured” data again. It is even worse when the randsom payment has a time limit, then the bad guys will publish and/or sell your data on the dark-web. If your ID card was on that network share you have serious problem (again). Restore from a crypto locker could be “as easy as” putting a filesystem snapshot back. Which can be done in a zippy with ZFS and BTRFS copy-on-write filesystems. But if you have a windows server and the samba share, you need another solution to restore the historical data. It even gets more worse when a network drive is like 30TB or something, when loading the data from an offsite backup (if you have that in place). You will have downtime!

Digital data needs backups and love. Even if you read this after World Backup Day. It is food for thought.

As a bonus a short explanation of my personal data setup and software I use:

Dedicated NAS hosted at home
- “Vanilla” FreeBSD OS with ZFS filesystem
- Syncthing “central server”
- rclone nightly cronjob for offsite backup sync to Google Drive
- 14 TB ZFS RAID-Z mirror data integrity and automatic snapshots
iMac, macbook desktops: Uses Syncthing to my NAS
iPhone smartphone: Google drive for file storage “read-only” as data is nightly synced from the NAS

“Keep them bytes safe!”

Red Unity

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So I had to get rid of some old malts. And came up with this irish-red IPA like recipe.

Brewlog

Bottle ID 231 + Bottle ID 232 (Extra dryhop)
ABV 5.6% (75% efficiency)
IBU 27.5
EBC 15
Yeast: Fermentis SafAle-S04
Fermentor target: ~30 liter

Mash scheme

Single infusion low temperature mash for a dry beer with brew bag and solar pump for recirculation.

Type	Time	Temperature (celsius)
Mash-in	-	64 degree
Beta amylase	1.5 hour	65 degree
Flame-out	-	76 degree
Boil	60 min	100 degree

Fermentables

Amount	Ingredient	Color
4 kg	Ale	7 EBC
1.5 kg	Flaked oats	4 EBC
1 kg	CaraRed (Weijermann)	40-50 EBC
1 kg	Caramel malt - Vienna	30-60 EBC

Total 7,5 kg malts.

Hops

Time	Amount	Variety	Alpha Acids
60 min	40 gr	Pilot UK (pellets).	10.4 AA

Pictures

Solar pump for wort recirculation

Mash in with brew bag

Mash-in color

Mash-in low temperature

Resulting color after some mash-in time

Sparge and collect wort

Two beers from one batch, right one is with different hops and sugar

Chiller

Siphon to fermenter

Breugels Bruin

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Brewlog

Bottle ID: 241
Brewed at: 14 Januari 2024
ABV: 6.5% (75% efficiency) -> measured after cool 11 Brix (5.8% ABV)
IBU: 33.6
EBC: 40
OG: 1.063
FG: 1.014
Style: Old Ale
Yeast: Fermentis Safbrew Abbaye BE-256
Fermentor target: ~30 liter
Brewers Friend recipe

Mash scheme

Step mash single infusion with medium body mash scheme extra protein rest and thick mash-in. Inspired by “The Brewmaster’s Bible - Step-Mashing - For a medium bodied beer”.

Type	Time	Temperature (celsius)
Mash-in (thick)	n/a	55 degree - 20 liters (2.5 liter/per kg malt)
Protein rest	10 min	50 degree
Saccharification rest	60 min	67.7 degree
Iodine starch test	n/a
Mash-thinning	n/a	75 degree (extra water addition)
Mash-out	10 min	75 degree
Lautering & sparge	n/a	75 degree (extra water addition until ~32 liter)
Boil	60 min	100 degree

Fermentables

Amount	Ingredient	Color
6 kg	Pale Ale	7 EBC
1 kg	CaraWheat (Weyermann)	110 - 140 EBC
600 gr	Brown Sugar	38.5 EBC
250 gr	Chateau chocolate	1000 EBC

Total 7,25 kg malt.

Hops

Time	Use	Amount	Variety	Alpha Acids
60 min	Boil	40 gr	Target	10.4 AA (26.07 IBU)
10 min	Boil	10 gr	El Dorado	11.7 AA (2.66 IBU)
0 min	Whirlpool	25 gr	El Dorado	11.7 AA (4.88 IBU)

Pictures

The digital afterlife

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

- image by Dan Meyers - Unsplash.com

What about the digital traces we leave behind on the internet after we pass away? When your most important accounts are secured with multi-factor authentication it is impossible to recover. People who are left behind probably have no clue how to access your most important internet accounts and data of value like family pictures.

My most important account is my private Google account. Where I have stored my contacts and e-mail, and a backup of data of value for me. The backup is synchronized every night from my FreeBSD server with rclone. Because I only use exclusivly Apple products for desktop, laptop and smartphone purposes I also have a secured Apple ID.

Apple has the “Legacy Contact”. And Google has the “Inactive Account Manager”. So your account and data can be recovered with your death certificate or is released after account inactivity.

I’m a little paranoid so for every internet account I create a different password and store it in a Keepass encrypted database. On macOS I use MacPass. On Windows at work I use KeePass XC with Chrome browser plugin.

I also backup the QR-codes used with 2-Factor Authentication smartphone apps like Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authentication. And extract the TOTP-secret from the QR-code to place in Keepass so I can generate the 6-number security codes on my iMac and MacBook with MacPass. When my Smartphone gets lost or broken, I can still generate the “military-grade” security codes. But luckily Google Authenticator now has a cloud backup feature (which I don’t use).

I’m to paranoid for storing my passwords and secrets in the cloud like Lastpass announced a security incident December 2022.

For extracting the TOTP-secret data from stored QR-code image/screenshot on a mac. Assuming you are a power user and installed the Homebrew package manager. No you don’t want to use an online service to extract the TOTP-secret from the QR-code for obvious reasons!

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jerry@Jerrys-iMac ~ % brew install zbar
jerry@Jerrys-iMac Downloads % zbarimg google-qr-2fa.png
QR-Code:otpauth://totp/Google%3AXXX%40gmail.com?secret=ecbazdoxjob5b56vhpjdmz6eioeqousc&issuer=Google
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0,03 seconds

As you can see the QR-code contains a special formatted URL. Where most important key=value is secret=XXX. This secret must be inserted in you MacPass/KeePass XC OTP secret field. This otpauth protocol URL specification is not well standarized. See also github.com/google/google-authenticator wiki Key Uri Format

For the security researchers among us, making a physical copy of the TOTP-secret can also be a security hole. But I encrypt the QR-code images in my Keepass database. Or print them out on paper. When losing it, you can lose your account! A potential security problem is far worse than out-locking yourself from your most important accounts. Choose your “security poison”.

The just-in-case box

You should prepare for the worst and create a small box with printed information like:

Internet (e-mail) accounts like: Google, Apple, Microsoft
Most important phone numbers like work, clubs, friends, family etc.
List of subscriptions with client or contract numbers
List of contacts to send a death notice to
Smartphone pincode
Smartphone SIM-card pin/puk code
Computer password(s)
For the digital (crypto) paranoid:
- Yubi hardware encryption key
- Server and/or desktop full disk encryption keys
- Screenshots or copies of 2-factor QR-codes (TOTP secrets)
- SSH private keys
… and the list goes on and on

The box could contain an USB stick FAT32 formatted (synced every 31 march on World Backup Day) for maximum OS compatibility. My USB stick also contains an encrypted Keepass password and account database.

So how are you prepared for the digital afterlife?

Jerry's Mr White

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The base of this brew is a Brewferm Mr White brew kit for “witbier” a top-fermented barley/wheat beer brewed mainly in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is a kit for 20 liters, and was split into two ~9.5 liter wort batches in the fermenter.

We measured around 10 brix of the 20 liters which is 5.2% ABV. The kit stated it was around 5.5% ABV. So the brew was not bad. Also the bottle prime sugar for carbonation adds a little alcohol to the end product.

The bottle ID is 277.

Ingredients

The Brewferm Mr White brew kit contained unscrapt malt: Wheat and Barley. And unmalted Wheat and Oats flakes. And two types of hops.

We added extras for the 20 liter brew:

Amount	Ingredient
1 pcs	Lemon juiced
20 grams	Dried sweet orange peel
500 grams	Flaked wheat

For the Jerry’s Mr White the following ingredients are added:

Amount	Ingredient
200 gr	Raw local honey
1 pcs	Lemon juiced
75 grams	Amarillo hops (as dryhop with 9% Alpha Acids)
105 ml	Smokey Scott Whisky (40%)

Schedule

29 May 2023: Brewed
16 June 2023: First siphon and ferment with honey, dry hop & whisky
17 Juli 2023: Bottled

Pictures

Grain milling with drill

Mash in

Dry milled grains

Brix measurement

First ferment settle

First syphon

Lemon juice second fermentation with honey

Dry hop with Whisky in bag

Ferment with honey and dryhop with whisky

Double red fruity beer & Beer-n-grapes beer-speriment

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

These experimental micro-brew beers use the Breugelse Rooije Red Ale as the “base beer”. So I have an active yeast/brew and then topping it of with homegrow/homemade fruit juice. The fruit juice was made by pasteurisation at 70 degrees celsius. And preserved in the freezer at -18 degrees celsius, ready to be used for brew time.

During bottle at 16 June per beer 500ml of Mr White batch was added for active yeast.

Double red fruity

A nice amount of Red currant berries where given by a collegue and pasturized at 70 degrees to get rid of the wild fermentation bacteria and yeasts. The berries where frozen first for preservation and to break the cell walls to extract more juice from them.

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 Beer amount: 2250 ml
Juice amount: 1250 ml
 ---------
 Total: 3.5 liter

End result: 3250 ml (with 19,5 gr cane sugar for bottling [6gr/liter)

Beer-n-grapes

The beer-n-grapes contains red grape juice which was a little sugared during juice extraction. The grapes where very sweet and not much tangy sourness.

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 Beer amount: 1775 ml
Juice amount: 1600 ml
 -----------
 Total: 3.375 liter

End result: 3750 ml (with 22,5 gr cane sugar for bottling [6gr/liter])

Pictures

Golang HAN talk 2023

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On 27 Januari I did give a guest lecture and workshop at the HAN Univerity of Applied Sciences for the Embedded Systems Engineering education about the Go programming language (Golang). The exercise consisted of a TCP server and “simulated IoT clients” running code in parallel with goroutines.

The slides: golang-han-talk-2023-slides.pdf
The exercise manual: golang-han-talk-2023-hands-on-workshop-manual.pdf
The solution: final_solution.go

Breugelse Rooije Red Ale

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:59:59 +0100

Brewlog

Bottle ID 312
ABV 5.2% (80% efficiency)
IBU 25.75
EBC 25.75
Yeast: Fermentis Safale-US5 Dry Ale
Fermentor target: 30 liter

Mash scheme

3 step-mash

Type	Time	Temperature (celsius)
Mash-in	-	45 degree
Protein rest	30 min	50 degree
Beta amylase	1 hour	63 degree
Alpha amylase	30 min	73 degree
Flame-out	-	78 degree
Boil	60 min	100 degree

Fermentables

Amount	Ingredient	Color
5.375 kg	Château Pilsen 6 (Castle malting)	3.5 EBC
500 g	Dark crystal malt (Thomas Fawcett)	320 EBC
500 g	CaraRed (Weijermann)	50 EBC
425 g	Carahell (Weijermann)	30 EBC
350 g	Rolled oats	4 EBC

Total 7,14 kg malts. With 1425 gr speciality malts which is 20% of the grain bill (this excludes the 350gr rolled oats).

Hops

Time	Amount	Variety	Alpha Acids
60 min	30 gr	Pilot UK (pellets).	10.4 AA

Timing

Brewed at: 4 December 2022
First syphon at: 12 December 2022
Cold crash (outside) at: 12 December 2022

Pictures

Overwintering Peppers '22 experiment

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

NOTICE: This experiment failed again. The peppers where almost free of aphids. But probably central heating and darkness killed them. No more tries to overwinter peppers for me! I just sow them very early in Januari.

So I finally found a good overwintering peppers tutorial (Pepper Geek on Youtube) with peppers plants grown outside. I’m going to try again and do my best to keep them alive until the 2023 grow season starts.

Normally I had big issues with aphids because they did hide in the soil taken from outside to inside. Even after de-foliage and trimming the aphids got alive when new leafs where forming.

I did sow them this year myself in Januari, in my custom build Grow and go box prototype.

We will see in the upcomming months…

Grow and go box prototype

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I love peppers and own a community garden. Because my appartement living room is north facing there is not much heat and light from the sun. So I decided to build a growing box with some scrap materials I had laying around. The specifications:

Transparent plastic box with lid
72 watt 12 volt power supply
54 watt led strips mix of white, blue and red
Cardboard
Thin rope
12V PC fan
Duc/transparent tape
Plug tray for planting
Thermometer
Philips Hue smart plug as timer. Scheduled from 7h-18h so 11h of light.

For sprouting I used:

Heating mat 5W
Plastic petri dishes 55mm
Kitchen paper towel
Cotton pads
Tweezers

It took approximate 7-10 days for sprouting. The best sprouted seedlings where transplanted as soon as possible.

I control the grow box humidity by leaving the lid with a small airgap by moving the grips up. The heat of the led strips is contained within the box and heats the box between 20-25 degrees celsius. No external heat is applied.

Images

Led panel taped on cardboard with fan

Growbox closed with Nero the cat inspecting

Philips Hue smartplug as timer

Petri dishes on heatmat

Petri dish sprouts

Planting the seedlings in a tray at 30 januari

Growbox light at 5 februari

Planting plugs at 19 februari

Planting plugs at 26 februari

Transplanting seedlings at 16 march

Growing progress 8 april

Growing progress 21 april

Grow light 27 april

Redish winter ale feb '22

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Attempt for a malty and sweet irish red ale low in alcohol. The beer came out a little less red then expected but is probably due too the chocolate malts. The red color oxidized fast till amber/brown. The taste came out smooth and malty, luckily the bottle fermentation didn’t produce much carbonation.

Brewlog

Bottle ID 183
ABV 4.57% (75% efficiency)
IBU 24.99
EBC 18.31
Yeast: Fermentis Safale K-97, dry ale yeast. Sedimentation: slow, Attentuation: high.
Fermentor target: 33 liter

Mash scheme

Single infusion mash with initial water temperature of 73 degree celsius. Mash at 66 degree for 90 minutes. Using the Brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) for filtering and brew-speed. BIAB works as a good filter so the mash will not cool significantly. I don’t use a filtering bucket anymore because making a filter bed takes too much time to settle and the wort cools by 10-20 degrees during this step.

I heated the wort to 78 degree and sparged spent grain with 80 degree water until running clear. Topped to 33 liter during cooling.

Fermentables

Amount	Ingredient	Color
4 kg	Pale ale	7 EBC
1,65 kg	Pilsner	3 EBC
200 gr	CaraHell (Weyermann)	25 EBC
200 gr	Abbey Malt (Weyermann)	43 EBC
200 gr	Flaked Oats	4 EBC
100 gr	CaraRed (Weyermann)	50 EBC
100 gr	Pale Chocolate (Thomas Fawcett)	612 EBC
20 gr	Dark Chocolate	1120 EBC

Total malts 6,47 kg. With 820 gr speciality malts for color and flavor which is 12,67% of the grain bill. Calculated as follows: special malts/(total/100).

Bottle prime sugar approximate 70 grams.

Hops

Time	Amount	Variety	Alpha Acids
50 min	35gr	Pilot UK (pressed flower)	9.93 AA
50 min	~10 gr	Cascade (old hops)	6.6 AA

Dry hopped afterwards with a few handfulls for approximate 2 weeks.

Timing

Brewed at: 19 februari 2022
Second fermentation and dryhop: Not registered
Bottled at: 18 march 2022

Pictures

A tale about open-source software experience

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 10:30:00 +0100

This blog post is about my personal experiences with open-source software.

Linux is not an operating system (OS) as most people think it’s only a monolithic kernel with many advanced specific technologies. This means the user-space applications and tools come from other places like the GNU project. That is why Linux is also written as GNU/Linux.

There are exceptions like Alpine Linux which try to not use GNU applications and GNU C library (glibc) in their base OS. It feels more like a BSD operating system than a Linux distribution. Alpine uses its own package-management system, apk-tools, which originally was a collection of shell scripts but was later rewritten in C. It is a solid, lean and minimal OS which can run from servers to embedded devices.

I started approximate 17 years ago with a Linux distribution called Knoppix Linux on a ‘Live’ DVD. A Live distribution can be used without installing it. I bought the DVD on a computer fair for just a few euros. It is a desktop Linux distribution and was created by Klaus Knopper. And to my surprise it is still developed today. It first saw daylight 21 years ago. I experienced some issues with installation on a machine back in the days, but the live DVD was fun to work with. It got me interested as an alternative to Microsoft Windows.

Time passed after having trouble getting Knoppix running from my hard-drive properly. And I bumped upon Ubuntu Linux 5.04 a long time ago. I remember running Ubuntu on my desktop computer until 8.10. Things where very hairy at that time, closed source components where a pain to install (and will always be). It took me a few days during Christmas to get the Nvidia graphics card driver compiled for the Linux kernel Ubuntu was using. I had no clue what this fuzz was all about. But you need to install the kernel C headers and must make sure you are downloading the correct Nvidia installer. There must be one part a closed source binary blob and one part which compiles against your running kernel. The Nvidia drivers have been partially reverse engineered but didn’t work that smooth to run a desktop properly.

The Linux kernel is ‘designed’ in a way that every release can break things very badly. So upgrading your kernel means recompiling your closed source Nvidia driver every damn time. Or embedded systems stuck with an ancient vendor shipped buggy kernel. This is very annoying but you get used to it.

I did extensive distro hopping and have had experience with Slackware which is a do it yourself (DIY) distribution and you need to be hardcore to compile and debug stuff on your own. Especially when you want bleeding edge software. This was long before the stack-overflow generation, yes really i’m this old. We’ve got only mailing-list and the man pages back then. I had no desktop, just a window manager named Fluxbox. And also Openbox which is a clean rewrite of Fluxbox in C++ instead of C. After being annoyed to use a mouse to control my windows I switched once again from ‘desktop’ software to a tiling window manager which is awesome IMHO so you have full control of your machine from your keyboard only. This was matrix-style computing, and even had my terminal sometimes configured with black or transparent background with green coloured text. I felt desktops where bloated and user unfriendly. RSI related issues are mostly due to incorrect mouse use, so I didn’t suffered these problems. I felt when not using the mouse I AM the computer. Everything I could think of to control, just needed to use a hotkey and not touching the mouse for extended periods of time. You need real brainpower for this, because all those features behind hotkeys can get complicated. Just like flying an airplane with all those knobs and gauges.

Arch Linux was a fairly new distribution which does only rolling releases and never gives out a stable release. Except those who are distributed as installation media like CD/DVD/USB stick. It ships all software pre-compiled like kernels, libraries and applications. But it is only for power users. It can be run on desktop, server or embedded appliances. The documentation is extensive and available in the form of a wiki which is actively maintained by the community.

In my opinion the Linux desktop is still not widely adopted and failing because the Linux ecosystem is constant in flux and scattered across different communities with very diverged ideas how things should be developed and work for end users. A desktop is a complex beast, and for getting complexity to work API and ABI stability is a must.

Linux desktop is a story on itself. But I try to explain it in a nutshell.

In the open-source world everything is free but usable under the terms of a open-ish license. With so many people on the globe connected to the internet it is natural to have different ideas. They form communities around their own ideologies and get followers. The most dominating desktops today are still KDE and GNOME where GNOME suffered a major (community) split between version 2 and 3. This split was caused by version 2 a conventional desktop interface and version 3 a complete rethink of how a desktop could be used. It has a MacOS-like layout, so the idea is basically stolen in my opinion.

The Linux distribution ‘Elementary OS ’ is worth mentioning as it looks and feels mimic macOS. And tries to stabilise APIs to build software against. But I have read somewhere the software build for Elementary is hard to run on other distributions.

I’m an Embedded Systems Engineer who has experience in building products using open-source components. I have love-hate relationship with open-source because most of the time documentation lags behind the actual released software. Or there is no documentation at all. Then ’the code is the documentation’. A product is only complete when the documentation is in sublime condition.

But approximately two years ago the FreeBSD operating system got my attention again to use it on my own build and managed NAS server. Especially for the ZFS filesystem features and OS stability. I don’t look back to use Linux on my fileserver ever since. The BTRFS filesystem is worth mentioning as a Linux alternative to ZFS but it has its own odds compared to ZFS.

The FreeBSD operating system has sublime documentation compared to the scattered Linux ecosystem. It ships with a handbook. Everything is managed on a central place, which is good so all users and developers know how to use and what expect from the operating system.

On the desktop I strictly use macOS nowadays because I felt Linux desktop took me too much time to maintain and keep running after updates broke my configurations. The macOS desktop is rock-solid and never crashes, even CPU consuming tasks will not lag the snappiness of the desktop experience. Yes a MacBook or iMac has its price, but that price i’m willing to pay for simplicity of the macOS desktop and stability.

Under the hood macOS uses BSD and closed source components and feels like a mix of (Free)BSD and Linux, so using this as a desktop I feel home. Also using other closed source software is recent years no problem at all. And Apple products are well documented with the knowledge base. And if you want to use open-source software on macOS you probably need Homebrew, the missing package manager, and a good terminal like iTerm2.

Be open minded to try something unknown, get good at it and use what fits your needs.

Parts of this blog post are based on writing from Wikipedia. So this post is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 which is the same as text on Wikipedia. The logos are copyrighted and i’m using the under the fair use terms. It is different compared to the rest of my blog which is license under CC0 (public domain). And I heavily rely on linking to Wikipedia for the curious reader.

Apple Red Ale

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:59:59 +0100

The Apple Red Ale beer is a split from the Autumn Dry Irish Red Ale . It includes 48% pasteurized apple juice I got from an apple tree of a collegue during the second fermentation. The batch size in the fermenter is 10,5 liters. And final bottles where 24x 33cl (7,92 liters). The Bottle ID is 311.

It was dryhopped with a few handfuls of old cascade flowers.

Pictures

Fermentation containers (30 liter)

Apple juice bag (5 liter)

Fermentation

Bottle cleaning