Category: General

shadesofmauve:

darthfruitbasket:

Attn coffee drinkers who follow me.

With my roomie gone work at home we’re kinda considering a grinder + French press combo, but where do you even start?

Anybody got a favourite of either of those?

I use an insulated French press and a Capresso burr grinder, but the latter is ridiculously expensive and we only have it because my sweetheart is in the fancy coffee industry. The French Press is like this, except that mine has an ‘Intel Inside’ case badge from when I was building my computer on it. The only problems I’ve ever had with French presses mechanically are that on some models the knob on the top of the plunger comes off (Mom and dad have a pretty metal insulated bodum one that I made a new knob for out of game modeling epoxy) and that if you regularly empty the standard glass-and-metal ones by flinging the contents out into the yarden you might eventually hold the metal only and fling the glass interior out into the yarden with the grounds, smashing it.

(this is why my parents no longer use glass French presses. :P).

Really, the grinder probably makes more difference to your brew than the press. And if she’s been drinking drip, any press+grinder (even standard grinder, rather than burr) will be an improvement (imnsho) – the French press method makes coffee with a lot more body, and you know your water is hot enough when you make it that way. Normal drip coffee makers have heating elements that slowly fail over time, so after a few years the water really isn’t hot enough to extract a good brew.

If she has specific models she wants to compare, I can run ‘em by E and see if he has any insider knowledge. :)

My wife got me a http://www.zassenhaus.com/ grinder – which she’d done lots of research on and which is apparently very highly rated. I find it produces a nice even grind, which is the thing that is important…

I just use a bog standard French Press from Bodum which isn’t exotic or exciting, but you don’t really need exotic or exciting. The cheap second hand one I have at work produces very nice coffee :)

So a while ago I started to consider getting some sugru – because the cable that ran between the cassette adaptor I use in the Prius and the ‘phone had started to split. Unfortunately, and in what is the story of many repairs in my life, I didn’t quite get there in time. Indeed, the day I was actually getting in the car to go and buy some it finally broke.

So then I decided I’d get a new plug to go on the end – and there it might have ended had I not remembered what a spectacular pain in the ass soldering these modern cables is – since they don’t have real insulation but instead some kind of paint on the wires. So whilst I was at <spit> maplin </spit> I picked up some stereo cable. Then I opened up the cassette adaptor and realised why it’s always seemed a bit quiet.

Years ago I had a pair of speakers which were wired the same way: i.e. wrongly (made, incidentally, by my ever-favourite ‘Waltham’ brand – I used to have lots of cheerfully awful Waltham kit – I had a black and white TV where you couldn’t ever get the aspect ratio quite right, a radiogram that played cassettes at just the wrong speed, and a vast number of very, very cheap cassettes which really did seem to be made from stickytape and rust* (< You really should click that link, Tim Hunkin just rocks. As does ‘The Secret Life of Machines’)).

I must assume that it is much easier for the folks making them to just slap the three wires on any-old-how in their poverty-wage-make-so-many-a-minute Chinese factory than it is for them to carefully solder the three cables on in the correct place and order (and yes, I do feel bad about buying these things).

In any case, despite the fact that moron-me bought a 2.5mm jack instead of a 3.5mm jack (yes, yes I’m an idiot) – and thus now have an adaptor attached too, it’s made quite a difference having it wired correctly.

Of course, it’s not really a patch on a proper audio input, or to be frank having the later Prius with Bluetooth that actually does audio, but it’s still much better than it has been, and I no longer have to wind the volume up really high to hear the streamed audio.

In other news, it turns out that Subsonic really is very good (the app has a bit of a habit of crashing if you stop it and ask for a different album, but the server side seems pretty good).

* ISTR reading that it’s actually BASF powder – because they couldn’t get sticky tape and rust to work well enough – and that the BASF folks were so paranoid about someone stealing their formula that they were there – just out of shot – making sure no-one absconded with any of their precious mag-tape powder.

Bummer really doesn’t cover it. I’m feeling spectacularly low about it all, and I’ll probably gain (financially) from it. I can’t imagine how the disenfranchised, unemployed and/or disabled people feel at this moment. Essentially England (because it is England) have voted to keep kicking the sick and the poor.

So. It seems that the conservatives are likely to win this election. I didn’t expect the left to be hugely ahead or anything, I expected a fairly close election. I really didn’t expect what currently looks like the conservatives looking so strong (at 61 seats left to go). It’s an astonishingly depressing start to a day.

The upshot of which is that unless you’re rich, white, healthy and male you’re fucked in this country.

The irony is this is actually pretty good for me, because short term it’s likely the Conservatives will prop up the housing market, and we want to sell and leave. They’ll continue to destroy the NHS – they’re planning to cut more nurses – which will mean I can mostly continue to get work as an agency worker. Tax wise, it’s unlikely to make a huge difference.

But Gods, it’s depressing. I’d hoped something that the UK could reverse the hideousness and stop it’s vile slide into becoming something unrecognisable from what I grew up with. Apparently not yet.