Declan's Blog

I was visiting my buddies Rebecca and Chip in STL and he said he was working on a making a timelapse device with a RaspberryPi.  This got me inspired, so I built one too.

Parts:

RaspberryPi v2

Camera Kit for RaspberryPi

The camera kit is just a floppy ribbon cable with the camera on the end of it, so it’s hard to position.  I looked on Thingiverse.com to see if anyone had created a RaspberriPi case with a camera holder that I could 3D print.  I didn’t find exactly what I was envisioning, but I did come across this:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:162594

RaspberryPi Camera Holder that slots into the Ethernet port

It’s a really cool little arm made up of 3 pieces that you connect with 2 screws.  The arm holds the camera at one end, and sticks into the Ethernet connector at the other end – no electronics, it just is the right shape to fit nicely and stay put.

Here’s my little rig:

I had it in a box case, but I dropped it and it broke 😉  I need to get another one somewhere, or 3D print one.

Now that I had the physical setup done, I followed this blog post to set up the software:

Simple timelapse camera using Raspberry Pi and a coffee tin

The same author has a great post on using an app called BerryCam to help setup where the camera is pointed:

BerryCam – Use your iPad and iPhone to control your Raspberry Pi camera

The author goes further and gets the whole device stuffed into a coffee can with a battery pack, which I’ll get around to at some point.

I modified the python script so it names the captured files sequentially by date and time rather that the default setup.  I found this a lot easier to work with when I wanted to stuff the pictures into a timelapse video.

Now, the SD card on the RaspberryPi I have is only 8G, so it’ll fill up if I don’t drain it, so I rsync the files off to another, bigger machine once an hour with a cronjob.  I had to learn the “–remove-source-files” rsync switch and that helped a ton.

At first, I just wanted the timelapser to watch out toward the West and capture the clouds and sunset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DplUSQ3jJlw

Then I had to idea to stick a dish of birdseed out in front of the camera to see what would happen, and I got some really neat pictures of local birds!

More pix here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdpix/sets/72157644050932461/

Here’s how I have the camera positioned:

This took some trial and error, and the BerryCam software referred to above helped with positioning a lot.

I finally secured the camera to the deck with cable ties:

Hope this makes sense!  It was pretty easy to do, thanks to the blog posts I link to above.  I have a wifi adapter in the RaspberryPi – this might help you get that set up properly.  Also, when the camera is taking a picture, it lights up an LED on the camera board.  I thought this might cast a color on low light frames, so I disabled the LED using these instructions.

Have fun making one, and let me know if I can make this post more clear!

My mouth is on fire!!!  And I’m happy 😉

So this time I wanted to experiment a little more.  I got 4 tri tips and marinaded 2 of them in red wine, pepper, salt, garlic, ancho, and a few more spices.  I’d had a few beers and wanted to get them in the fridge overnight, so I may have been a bit too generous with the spices 😉

I decided that I’d rub 2 of the tips, and leave the others plain.  I mixed up some pepper, salt, sugar (just 2 teaspoons), chili flakes, ancho, garlic, and onions and rubbed that on one plain and one marinaded tip.

Then into the smoker with all 4!

On our trip to Santa Maria, I’d picked up a couple boxes of red oak sticks, so I cut those down and used 3 chunks.

I could probably have just used one!  After 3 hours, while I’d had plenty of smoke, the wood looked only half burned.

I let the meat temp get over 135F this time, to firm the meat up a bit and to see what the flavor might be like if it was less rare.  When I checked, some of the pieces had even gotten up to 145F.

Out they come, and into the pan for 30 mins of foil covered resting.  Next came the slicing!  Here’s the plain:

It was a lot firmer and easier to cut thin than the rare tips I made last time.  The beef flavor really came through.  Next was the rubbed, non-marinaded one:

While it tasted great, I should have skipped any spice hotter than black pepper.  The heat just detracted from the beef flavor and the rub flavors were too complex for such a great piece of meat.  Next was the marinaded non-rubbed:

I’m trying not to cut my glove, and fingers, open 😉  The wine smell and flavor were very strong.  Quite salty too.  Last was the rubbed and marinaded and, again, there was too much going on in the flavors.  I’ll take it a LOT easier on the rubs next time.

Here’s the bunch all together:

I didn’t slice it all because I’m going to chill it down to see if I can slice it even thinner.

My wife mixed up a little Santa Maria salsa to add to the meat:

All in all, a pretty good Saturday!  😉

In researching tritip for my smoking experiment, I learned that it was “invented” in Santa Maria, CA, so I’m sitting in a hotel here now!  I live in San Diego, so the wife and I jumped in the car and drove 5 hrs north and started hunting for good tritip.

Our first stop was at the Rancho Nipomo, and it’s been the best one so far!  The tritip is sliced very thin, and made into a sandwich.

I was more interested in the meat than the bread, but then the owner, Richard, came over and said he forgot to tell us about the salsa that we HAD to put in the sandwich.  Wow!  It’s a pretty simple, fresh tasting salsa – made with canned tomatoes.  The combo was excellent.  He also had us try a hot salsa, made with Manzano peppers.  I think I’m still sweating!

You can tell he loves what he does.  He threw in a pulled pork sandwich

and kept bringing us over other stuff to try, like the amazing chili on some chips.  My wife had the pork with a red sauce and nopales.

It was great, with a good heat.

For Saturday lunch, we tried out Jocko’s in Nipomo, CA, but failed to read that the BBQ pit doesn’t open til 4, so I got a pretty good bbq sandwich.

Next, we headed up the coast, stopping for a bit to see some Butterflies:

And llamas:

But the pony ride was a lie!

Very disappointing 😉

We headed back to Arroyo  Grande, CA to the Oak Pit BBQ.  I couldn’t decide what to get, so I got the sampler, which at $15 isn’t too bad!

Pork rib, beef rib, tritip, pulled pork, and sides.  Oh, and corn muffin.  mmm! Like Rancho Nipomo above, their tritip was not cooked rare.  It was good, but not as good as Rancho.  Or mine 😉

Elaine was missing vegetables, so she got a salad.  A tritip salad!  😉

The cook was VERY nice and told us that they smoked on red oak, just like I’d learned from my research.  I asked where I could get some and he pointed across the street to a market.

So now I have a trunk full of red oak pieces that are too big to fit into my smoker.  Elaine thinks my solution will be to cut it down, but it occurs to me that maybe the REAL solution is a bigger smoker!  😉

On Sunday morning we got up and headed back to Rancho Nipomo for more BBQ!  Here’s a tri tip sandwich with the proper salsa:

Also tried his ribs, which were very good!  Not as smokey as I like, but still great!

And here’s a picture of that super hot sauce I mentioned above:

I got 4 tritips from Major Market in Escondido, 2 plain and 2 marinated. One was wine and pepper, the other just wine, I think.

I put Emeril’s steak rub on them all. Mostly it’s salt and pepper. They range in weight from 1.77 lb to almost 3 lb.

I put them on at 10:30a, hoping I can get them to a 2p Super Bowl party.  I’m sticking to around 225F and will start pulling them at an internal temp of 130-135F

11:20 and I’m at 115F internal temp on the 1.77 lb one, pit temp is hovering around 226F.  Worried that I might have put it on too early.

Oh yeah, woods are cherry, oak, and hickory.  The hickory was a huge chunk – hope it doesn’t overpower everything.  Also wonder if I should have rubbed the marinaded pieces, but I like a good crust.  I haven’t done much beef before, just lots of pork.

12:00p and the smallest is at 129F.  I’m going to let it get to 135F.

12:30 and I pulled the small one at 135F, and the next size up at 133F.  I left the others to heat up some more:

1:00 and the other two were 133F, so time to come out!

I let each of them rest for 30 mins, then cut!

SO GOOD!!!

Thoughts later:

So I brought most of the tritip to the Superbowl party and it was a big hit.  People I didn’t know hugged me.  Grown men cried.  Someone snagged a bunch to take home to her husband 😉

I’m thrilled with the results.  The pepper rub really accented the beef.  It was really rare, which people liked a lot.  I brought some buns and horseradish sauce, but no one used it – there was so much flavor in the slices alone.

One of the cuts had a really chewy vein of tissue which didn’t detract from the flavor, but sure lengthened the chewing time 😉  Not sure what I could do about that, other than make smaller slices.

Slicing was kinda hard, so I ended up with much thicker slices that I wanted.  I need to work on my knife skills so I can get it thinner for sandwiches.

The marinaded tritips didn’t seem to taste much different from the plain ones.  That pepper rub probably didn’t give the other flavors a chance.  Maybe I’ll do a rubless one next time.

I did this last year and didn’t document anything, so now I am!  SCIENCE!!!

So, we got a 17 lb Foster Farms fresh turkey from Costco.  We stuck it in the freezer because we got it about 10 days before Thanksgiving.  We pulled it out on Sunday night and let it thaw in the fridge mostly, with maybe 8-10 hours on the counter.  Even after leaving it out most of this morning, there was a little ice left in the cavity.

Really, I’m not drinking.  Yet. For all things smoking, I rely on AmazingRibs.com, a great resource for beginners and experienced folks.  I followed most of the instructions on turkey here. According to Foster Farms’ website, they don’t inject anything, so I was responsible for salt content.  I am a little worried I might have too much, but we’ll see.  I dry brined with salt a day ahead – just a little sprinkled on the skin and rubbed in.  When I got it out of the fridge this morning, the skin looked pretty dry on top, but the rest of the skin was still pretty wet and soft. I made a batch of AmazingRibs’ Simon & Garfunkel Spice Blend & Baste (can you guess what’s in it?) and put it in some olive oil to blend into a wet rub.  I put a little salt in the rub too – this is worrying me that I have too much salt over all.

Then I got all up under the skin and worked it in.

I had trouble last year because I ripped the skin near the leg and it looked not pretty:

And I did pretty much the same thing this time:

Dang it.  The skin is very thin there.  Elaine suggested stitching it, but I didn’t want to make a Frankenturkey. Next, I’d tried injecting last year and it came out great.  So I combined the little rub I had left with low sodium chicken stock, salt, sugar, and butter – I’m getting hungrier typing this…

Years from now I’ll look back and wonder what the hell I was doing with that moustache…  It’s for Movember, a men’s health charity thingybob.  Please Donate!  😉 Now into the smoker, which has been pre-heating and has the water tray in already:

I covered up the legs and wings for the first hour with foil to keep them from getting over cooked:

Then I remembered I was supposed to put aromatics in the cavity!  I quartered an onion, put in some fresh rosemary, lemon peel, and garlic:

I used oak and cherry wood and sealed it up!  I got the temp up to 325ish (it keeps jumping around up to 340) and let it smoke:

An hour later I popped it open to get the foil off of the legs and wings:

That back wing was tricky to reach!

The color is beautiful!

It’s all sealed back up now, and 3+ hours in the meat temp is at 130F! An hour or so later and it’s done!  163F in the deepest part of the breast.

A proud daddy!

Up close:

Now it’s time to rest and get to the Thanksgiving party!

I’ll try to get some carved shots in an hour or so!

I’m back!  Daaaaamn!  It was good!  Not too salty or dried out like I feared.  Very tasty and moist!

Not too smokey at all.  My buddy made a rotisserie turkey and mine definitely had a smoky flavor while his had a more poultry one, so they were both good.

Plated smoky awesomeness:

Dueling Carci!  😉

So, overall I’m very happy with the results.  The butter injection didn’t seem to impart a butter flavor, but it sure was juicy.  The skin wasn’t crisp, but I couldn’t expect that after an hour or so of foiling so we could get to our party.  It was still tasty but the smoke was super strong in the skin.  I wonder what a lighter smoke would produce.  We WERE drinking some heavy beers, so the heavy smoke complimented that well.

I knew this would be a long day, getting to PEI was going to take 3 flights from San Diego, but I had NO idea…

The United hop from San Diego to SFO was nice, I got a security line with just a metal detector, so no opt-out and free molestation.  I mistakenly took this as a good omen! 😉

I had about a 3 hour layover until my Air Canada SFO to Toronto flight, so I got some early lunch and boarded on time.  I was in my window seat next to a very friendly elderly lady with a neat accent who looooved to talk – but I’m a friendly guy and humored her while subtly trying to stick in my earbuds to get my zone of silence going.  She wasn’t having any of that, so I chitchatted with her a bit, learning that the lady on the aisle, who was doing her best to NOT engage, was actually her daughter and that they’d been trying to get home for a couple of days because of airline problems.  I tried telling her about my Montreal trip recently to relate, but she had plenty of talking pent up because her daughter was DONE with her 😉

After a bit I noted that we’d been sitting quite a while.  The door was closed, but we hadn’t backed out to taxi.  The captain came on and said there had been an accident and that the runway was a mess and they were waiting on instructions…  An accident?  I broke the rules and fired up my phone.  CNN had nothing, so I did a twitter search.  I was confused and thought the accident was at our destination, Toronto, but as soon as I searched SFO I had tons of hits.  Wow…

After about an hour or so total, they told us the airport was closed and we had to deplane, but to stick around because the flight wasn’t canceled.  My seat mate needed a wheelchair assist, so I was the last person off the plane.  Her daughter was NOT happy, but hey, at least we weren’t in a crash!  They’d had a really hard week, so I felt bad for them.

We couldn’t see the crash from our plane, but as soon as we got out of the plane we could see it from the gate.  I had my camera and long lens and got this:

SFO Plane crash

SFO Crash zoom

I walked around a bit and shot people in the bar watching TV reports about the crash outside the window:

Meta – SFO Bar showing the crash that’s also outside the window

We all hung around the gate, occasionally getting updates from the Air Canada gate folks.  These mainly were “we have no idea what’s gonna happen, but don’t go too far.”  This went on for a few hours until, and I swear I am not making this up, they said “your flight is canceled, your bags are on carousel 9, we are closing the gate, go home.”  As one, the crowd angrily repeated “GO HOME?!?”  Mind you, a lot of these people are Canadians.  They don’t GET mad…  It was getting ugly.

Eventually we got the message to get our bags and go to the ticket counter to rebook.  I did so and joined a growing group of folks at the Air Canada ticket counter and was stunned to see 8 agents all in a huddle behind the counter doing their best to make no eye contact with the growing crowd.

Air Canada ticket counter with 8 agents

Eventually the herd of agents pushed forward one agent, named Augusta I believe, who addressed the crowd saying that they didn’t know anything, the airport was closed, everything was a mess, and they didn’t know how to help us.  Also, all hotels are booked, so don’t even try to get one.  She was very brave, and took a lot of abuse from the crowd, but she was just out of her depth – as was the whole airline for the next several hours.

I went to find an outlet so my phone didn’t die and called the Air Canada 888 number.  It was totally swamped, but they had a neat feature to put in your number and they’d hold your place in line and call you back.  I did that, was told it would be 30-40 minutes and hung up.  I checked in with Elaine and she did some research on hotels, and I tweeted out that I might be looking for someplace to crash in SF that night.  I know, bad choice of words… No pun intended, I assure you.  I was getting pretty discouraged and depressed by this time, but all of a sudden I had nearly 8 offers of places to stay from a whole range of friends living around SF!  This really bolstered my mood and I am very grateful to have such wonderful friends!  Especially for the ones who also offered a lot of good beer.  😉

Air Cananda called back as promised and a very cranky, overworked, and rather rude lady barely listened to my story and booked me on a series of flights that would get me to PEI on Monday at noon. WTF?  I asked her to try again, and she came back saying that’s all they could do.  It was still Saturday!  No offer of a hotel, or hotels, and I was going to have to route through Vancouver, then Montreal to get to PEI.  Wow… I took the booking because that’s all I could do.

I checked the Air Canada ticket line again, and they still seemed baffled.  I saw my seat mate and her daughter by the kiosks looking unhappy and checked in.  The daughter was furious.  Not only did she have her mother in a wheelchair, but also their 5 bags now.  “They are doing NOTHING for us!  What if my mother has to go to the bathroom, or lie down?  Who will watch our bags?  Where can we go?”  I offered to watch the bags for her, but she was afraid to leave the ticket counter in case anything changed.  I checked in with her a few times until they disappeared at some point.  What a stressful situation for them!

So now what?  Well, I booked all of this through United originally, and I’m Premier Silver there, so let’s see what they can do…  I find their ticket line and boggle at the number of people:

United line

Daaaang…  I find the Premier Silver line and shuffle forward slowly.  For THREE HOURS!  United agents were handing out slips of paper with the United 800 number to see if we could get through there before getting to the front of the line.  BTW I didn’t, but I now twitch every time I hear their hold music.  Over and over and over.  Ok, so 3 hrs pass sloggingly, and I get to talk to a wonderful dude named Patrick who told me he couldn’t help because Air Canada had taken control of my tickets and he couldn’t pull them back.  He was super nice about it, and gave me tons of info, but in the end he directed me back to Air Canada.  Yay.

Air Canada’s line was only an hour long, so I did my time there and got to an agent who said she could get me on a redeye to Montreal tonight, assuming it was allowed to take off!  SIGN ME UP!  This was the same flight one of my colleagues was going to be on.  It was also the flight a couple I met in line needed to take to then go to Vancouver.  SFO to Montreal to Vancouver – what should be a 2 hour direct flight was going to be an 8 hour nightmare that they were desperate to take.  The agent also booked me on an 8a flight from Montreal to PEI, but said the connection was tight and my checked bag would slow me down at customs, but there was a chance I’d make it.  She booked me on the 2p as well, just in case.

I grabbed a late dinner and headed over to the gate for the redeye flight, meeting up with my colleague, Chris.  As we sat and chatted waiting for the plane, the gate people were calling up individuals who would walk away seemingly angry.  I think I even heard a Canadian say a bad word in anger, so I was worried that they’d over booked and I was gonna get nuked.  Eventually we started boarding and as I was about to get on I saw the Vancouver bound couple being told they weren’t going to be on this flight.  They were really upset.  I did get on though and saw lots of open seats, so I figured they’d end up making it.  But nope we taxied out, sat on the tarmac for a really long time, then eventually took off.

I talked to the attendant, asking why the other people didn’t get on when we had plenty of seats and she said that because the crash had taken the one long runway at SFO out of service, there were only 2 short ones.  Our plane had to be weight restricted to work on that runway, so they bounced people off, and that long time sitting on the tarmac was to burn off enough fuel to let us be light enough to take off!  I can’t imagine the math they must do to make all this work.  I’m just glad I finally got out of SFO and could get to my conference!

I don’t sleep well on airplanes, so it was a looong ride, but we eventually got to Montreal and I sprinted through to try to make that early flight to PEI.  This wasn’t going to happen:

Long Montreal airport corridor

Montreal airport has super long corridors and terrible signage.  So I missed the early flight and realized I was facing another 6 hours til the next flight.  I fleetingly considered grabbing the city bus and having lunch with my Montreal buddy Amy, but then I sat down for a moment and almost passed out from lack of sleep and food.  I punted and found the perfect Montreal food:

Montreal bagel and lox

Then I found my gate and sleepily hung out until my blessedly uneventful flight to PEI!

Landing in PEI

I know a plane crash is a big deal, but how about some contingency planning, Air Canada?  Or calling up some reserve staff for handling the long lines and phone hold times, United?  (BTW, implement that call back feature Air Canada has working.)  How about opening the airline lounges for elderly people who need someplace to recover from the stress?

The mood at SFO wavered from relief that we weren’t in the crashed plane to panic that no one knew what we were supposed to do next.  Just some messaging other that “go home” would have settled some expectations.

On Sunday June 23rd, my daughter and I were due to fly home from Montreal, through Chicago, to San Diego.  Our flight was UA3466 at 6:31p from Montreal, and UA1061 at 8:45p from Chicago.

My aunt Frances passed away recently, more about that here.  Frances was a founding member of the Glasnevin Musical Society and many of her great friends are also members.  Frances left specific instructions for her mass, and one of the Society friends took over and organized the whole thing, including liaising with the church folks.  She was awesome!  They sang at the service on Saturday and they were beautiful!  I captured some of the sound on my iphone.

Hail Queen of Heaven [audio:mass1.mp3]

Kyrie Eleison [audio:mass2.mp3]

The Lord’s My Shepard [audio:mass3.mp3]

Seinn Alleluia [audio:mass4.mp3]

Ave Verum [audio:mass5.mp3]

Sanctus [audio:mass6.mp3]

If I Can Help Somebody [audio:mass7.mp3]

Va Pensiero [audio:mass8.mp3]

Ag Criost An Siol [audio:mass9.mp3]

Jesus Remember Me [audio:mass10.mp3]

How Great Thou Art [audio:mass11.mp3]

I’ve been a very happy user of the Twitter client Tweetdeck for a long time. I’m on 0.38.1 because I don’t want to upgrade into the mess it has become. But finally, some features are not working well on my aging version- threading is a mess, and some images won’t render – so I’m looking at where to go next.

On mjgiarlo’s recommendation, I’m trying out the Chrome extension version of Tweetdeck (TD). Right away this requires that I run Chrome, and I already do, but a lot the people I support do not, so I can’t help them as much as before. It installed just fine, and once I remembered my TD login, my account connected well. It did forget my notification settings (NO SOUND!!!), but that was easy to fix.

Having TD as part of the browser is really different from it running as a separate app. First, I have to remember to fire it up in a tab – this is probably automatable, but not something I normally do. Next, I liked having TD in its own window, so I pulled that tab out as its own window. My default window size only held 3 columns, and I like to see 4 – my main twitter list, the @declan column, the DM column, and the Home/All tweets column. Easily fixed by expanding the window, but I have to manually do this every time I fire up Chrome now. Kind of a pain in the butt.

When I click links in a tweet, it opens in a new tab, but in the same window as TD, covering TD. When using TD as a client, links would open in my browser, over on the right side of the screen, and leave TD where it was. The current tab switching is visually jarring.

I’m also noticing that the scrolling of the columns is annoying. While I’m off reading something from a link, the TD column has moved and I lose my place in the list of tweets. I have to scroll back down and find where I left off.

The screen is a little busy too. Well, a lot busy. I don’t mind white text on a dark background, tho I know many who do. I do mind the chunky font – I think the client was smoother. Maybe I can tweak something in Chrome to deal with this, but will it mess with everything else? Also, as I’m reading from bottom to top of the column, I move the mouse pointer up to the next tweet, and the reply, RT, etc. icons pop up dynamically on each tweet. Again, visually jarring.

The scrolling wheel/swipe action in the columns is very nice. The client version was always more jumpy.

Hitting Enter in a tweet puts in a carriage return rather than sending the tweet – so I have to leave the keyboard to click on send. Different, but not terrible.

I’m going to try it out a few more days, then maybe look at some other suggestions I got. I use Echofon on the iphone and have played with the desktop client a bit. I really miss the multi column tho. Hootsuite comes highly recommended, as does MetroTweet and Janetter.