I.D.E.A.

Wednesday, Rachel and I dined at Blue Ribbon (on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.)  We both enjoyed it very much.  We decided to go because of Brooklyn Dining week(most of the restaurants are offering $20 pre-fixe meals…some even cover two people for that price!)

We ordered one of the $20 pre-fixe meals and selected Duck Terrine, Beef Brisket, and Bread pudding for our options.  We also ordered the much talked about Bone Marrow and Oxtail marmalade, and Grilled Catfish so we would have enough for two people.

The highlight of the meal for me was the Bone Marrow and Oxtail marmalade.  This was brought out on a large oval plate…and on the plate were 3 cross sections of bone with the marrow still inside.  Surrounding the bones on the plate was the Oxtail marmalade and pieces of toasted Challah bread.  The barrow was opaque white with the consistency that was a cross section of gelatin and fat.  The marmalade was a reduction of beef broth with small chuncks of Oxtail meat.  So, I first tried the marrow by itself and it was very bland.  I then spread some of the marrow on a piece of bread and followed it with some of the marmalade, and finally sprinkled a bit of coarse kosher salt on top.  This tasted amazing!

I know the name and the description of the plate doesn’t do it any justice.  You’ll just have to experience this yourself.  I’ve heard from my friend Mark that when most restaurants close for the day, the chefs and the staff frequently make their way to Blue Ribbon in Manhattan and order this dish.  Now, I know why!

So far, all the basic functionality seems to be fine. I just tried to use the Backup plug-in and it did’t do anything so I have to troubleshoot that. Not a big problem.

Here’s my attempt to re-create what my mom made from time to time when I was a kid. I use to hate it because the bitterness was too much to handle, but now it’s what I usually order when I go to Chinatown. (Supposedly, as one grows older, one loses taste buds. Maybe this explains why I can go beyond the bitterness and actually enjoy this dish.)

Here’s the recipe..

Ingredients

• 2 bitter melons (aka bitter gourd; the greener the less bitter; don’t buy any with yellow coloring because it means the melon is old)
• 1 TBSP salt
• 1 pound of thin (maybe 1/4 in.) slices of beef
• 1 TBSP soy sauce
• 1 TBSP chinese cooking wine
• 1 TBSP water
• 1 tsp corn starch
• 2 TBSP canola oil
• 1 inch of ginger (julienned)
• 2 TBSP black bean sauce

Directions

1. Cut the bitter melon in half length-wise and scoop out the seeds and the white pithy center
2. Cut the melon into 1/8 in. slices
3. Put the melon pieces and the salt into a bowl and mix well (this will help draw out some of the bitterness. Let this sit for 30 minutes.
4. Slice the beef into 1/4 in. strips and put it into a medium sized bowl (we’re going to marinade the beef in this bowl)
5. In a small bowl, mix the soy sauce, water and cooking wine
6. Stir in the cornstarch and mix well
7. Pour the mixture onto the beef and mix until the beef is well coated. Put in fridge to let it marinade
8. Rinse the melon in some water and drain well
9. Heat the canola oil in a wok or frying pan
10. Add the ginger and sautee for 30 to 60 seconds
11. Add the bitter melon, a pinch of salt and sautee for a few minutes until the melon is just a tad soft on the outside but is still crisp on the inside (if you want the melon to be softer, you can blanche the melon first before you sautee it)
12. Add the beef and the black bean sauce
13. Sautee until the beef is done…probably a couple of minutes
14. Add salt to taste

Just put a serving of this over a bed of steamed white rice and you’re good to go! Enjoy.

GORP

• Raisins
• Peanuts
• Chocolate pieces

I’ve been aware of MTASC for awhile now but haven’t tried it until today.
It all started out with a search for an Eclipse plug-in for Actionscript. I chanced upon this page which contains a great tutorial for acquiring and testing out all the tools you’ll need to start compiling .swf’s.
These are the pieces you’ll need:

• Eclipse – open source IDE
• ASDT – eclipse plug-in for Actionscript development
• MTASC – open source Actionscript compiler
• Flashout – eclipse plug-in that gives you a function similar to “Test Movie” in Flash

MTASC comes with all the classes for MX and 8 (the site mentions its successor, haXE, which will support Flash Players 6-7-8 and 8.5 as well as Javascript and Server-Side scripting.)

I had a little bit of trouble working with Flashout on my Mac running OS X Tiger. When I was trying to configure Flashout in the Eclipse preferences I kept getting an error message saying that it couldn’t find the FlashoutMTASCPreferences class. It turns out that Flashout requires Java 1.5 which doesn’t come with Tiger. This page gives you the fix. Essentially you have to download Java 1.5 from Apple’s site and then you need to point the CurrentJDK folder to the 1.5 folder.

OK…it’s late and I’m trying to prepare for my trip to the Post Office tomorrow. I hate waiting on lines, I don’t have a postal scale, and I’m trying to figure out how much postage to put on my letter. I have 4 sheets of 8.5 x 11 copy paper in a regular envelope…let’s say the envelope weighs the same as a sheet of paper…so I need to figure out how much 5 sheets of paper weigh.

Performing a quick Google search, I came across this site.

Basically, the weight of the paper that is listed on the ream(500 sheets) is the weight of 500 sheets of 17″ x 22″ paper (not 8.5 x 11) !
So, from one sheet of 17 x 22, you get four sheets of 8.5 x 11. This means that a ream of 20 pound 8.5 x 11 paper actually weighs only 5 lbs.

5 lbs x 16 oz/lb /500 sheets…one sheet of paper weighs 0.16 ounces
.Check out the USPS Domestic Postage Calculator.

So my postage should be $0.39 because I’m a tad under 1 ounce…but just in case my paper is of a heavier weight, I put $0.63 postage on the envelope…enough for 2 ounces.

Snowman

Originally uploaded by miles_meow.

Here’s a photo that I took on the corner of Lafayette and St. James in Brooklyn. We just had a huge snow storm. Weather reports say that we got around 26.9 inches of snow…which would make this the biggest storm in NYC history.

“In New York City’s Central Park, the National Weather Service said 26.9 inches of snow had fallen, the most since record-keeping started in 1869. The old record was 26.4 inches in December 1947.”

I’ve been doing a little more experimentation with EAGLE and the included .cam files. I found that these should be more than sufficient for my needs (two-layer PCB, top and bottom soldermask, top and bottom solder stop and top silkscreen.) I just processed the ger274x.cam and the excellon.cam job files, uploaded my design to FreeDFM and they recognized all of the file contents. FreeDFM will analyze your design and correct or suggest fixes before you submit it for production.

To run these .cam job files:

1. open up your .brd file, then
2. from the menu: File -> CAM Proecessor (a new window will popup)
3. from the menu: Select File -> Open -> Job…
4. EAGLE should already be showing the contents of the ./cam directory under the main directory where EAGLE is installed, if not, navigate to it. Choose the gerb274x.cam file
5. (Click through the tabs and make sure “mirrored” is not checked! I made the mistake of submitting the files with the top layers as normal and the bottom layers as “mirrored” and the boards came back wrong.
6. Click on the Process Job button
7. from the menu: Select File -> Open -> Job…
8. Choose the excellon.cam file (make sure “mirrored” is not checked)
9. Click on the Process Job button

List of files created from the two jobs:

• combined3.plc – top silkscreen
• combined3.cmp – component side copper (top side)
• combined3.sol – solder side traces (bottom side)
• combined3.stc – top soldermask
• combined3.sts – bottom soldermask
• combined3.gpi – Photoplotter info file
• combined3.drd – NC drill file
• combined3.dri – Drill station info file

You should download GC Prevue from www.graphicode.com. This is for Windows only. After you install, run the program and from the menu “import” all of the files that you generated above. You should see all the layers and the drill holes in the right place. (One way to make sure that your top and bottom layers are correct is to write text on the top and bottom traces layer…this way you know your GERBER files are right when you see the top layer text as normal, but the bottom layer text as reversed)

Here’s an article about the history of the Gerber PCB making process and the file format.

Addendum:
We submitted the files to pcbexpress and they said that the .drl file was not the NC drill file. I had to run the excellon.cam job file to generate the .drd file.

Recently I had to use Eagle to adjust a colleague’s PCB layout. To install it on a Mac, first download and install X11. Next download Eagle from cadsoft and uncompress the file. You should now see a directory. Inside, there’s a readme.txt file that tells you to run a bunch of commands in the terminal so that you can use the ‘install’ script that’s in the directory…but immediately following these commands it says:

NOTE: the installation procedure described here is not mandatory.
You can just extract the TGZ archive to any location of your choice
and use it there directly. All the ‘install’ script does is to copy
the program and man-page to the default location and set up a
symbolic link to the executable in /usr/bin/eagle.

So, just copy the directory to your /Applications directory and you should be set.

Now (drumroll), in order to run Eagle you first have to start the X11 server. After X11 is up and running, double-click on the ‘eagle’ file in the ./bin directory in Eagle’s main directory. That’s it.

After creating your schematic and pcb layout, you need to generate the appropriate files to submit to a PCB manufacturer. Most of these places will require Gerber files. I’m submitting my designs to PCBexpress and I found these easy to follow directions on their site…to generate Gerber files from Eagle, download these .cam job files and follow these instructions.
These .cam files will generate the appropriate Gerber files for you to submit. For a two layer PCB (traces on top and bottom), you’ll use E1.cam or E2.cam. Here are the files that are commonly generated with the .cam files downloaded from pcbexpress:

.bot – bottom traces
.top – top traces
.bsk – bottom silkscreen
.slk – top silkscreen
.smb – bottom solder mask
.smt – top solder mask
.drl – drill tool file

Happy PCB designing! There’s something satisfying about laying out component and solving the puzzle of connecting them together without crossing wires.

Rachel wanted an external charger to charge up her iPod nano but Apple sells iPod one for $30! I wanted to see if I can cook something with the stuff in my miscellaneous electronics closet.

Disclaimer: This info is provided with no guarantees. If you don’t know what you’re doing, do not try to put this together.

I found a 5V (1A) power supply that I purchased to use for microcontroller projects. I bought it from allelectronics (part number: PS-513) and it was only $4.50.

I didn’t have a female USB plug, so I bought a USB extension cable from Target for $8.

You’ll also need a multimeter, a soldering iron and some heat shrink, 1/4″ diameter. (You can use electrical tape, too.)

1. Cut the male phone connector off of the power supply. Remove an inch or so of the the outer insulation and you should see four wires. Red/Black => +5 and Yellow/White => GND. Strip the Red and White wires. I plugged in the power supply and the voltage measure 5.2V. The USB specs indicate that USB hubs will supply voltages in the range of 4.4V to 5.25V (more specifically 4.7V to 5.25 V for High power devices and 4.4V to 5.25V for Low power devices.)
   
2. Cut the USB extension cable. I just cut my 6′ cable in half. One should haver the male connector and the other should have the female connector. We’re going to use the half that has the female connector. Remove some of the insulation, the metal foil, and shield, from the cut end and you’ll see four wires. Red is +5 and Black is GND.
3. Now, connect (just twist together for now):
   • Red (power supply) to Red (USB cable)
   • White (power supply) to Black (USB cable)

   

4. You can do a little test before plugging in a real device. Take the other section of the cut USB cable (the one with the male connector) remove the insulation, and strip the red and black wires. Plug the male USB connector into the female USB connector. Plug the power supply into the wall. Take a voltage reading from the red and black wires you just stripped. If you see +5V then you’re set! If you see -5V then you’ve misconnected the wires between the power supply and the USB cable(w/ female connector)

Now you’re ready to plug in your USB device. I have a “broken” mobiblu MP3 player. It doesn’t play music anymore, but it still responds to charging. I plugged my power supply into the wall. I plugged my mobiblu into the female connector of my homemade charger…and voila the mobiblu shows that it’s charging from a charger! If you don’t have a device that you can test on, make sure that you check all the voltages before plugging in something expensive…like your iPod. If you have a USB light or something try that first.

So now all you have to do is tidy up your work by soldering the connections you made and heat shrink (or tape up) the section of exposed cable and you’re project is complete.

You can do this with any regulated 5V power supply. There are lots of places you can get them. Jameco has them.

Some more info on USB specs (including pinouts and voltage specs).

Good Luck!