Busy start of the year has kept me from brewing but here's one for hoppy happy days. Probably not fully cleared yet after two days of cold crash, but I couldn't not take a taster...

I made 18 L of beer wort with Simpsons Maris Otter, Viking Munich Light, some caramel malts. Also prepared 4 L of lemon-ginger-raisins-hops infusion with 250 g dark syrupy sugar. Save for ginger and hops, this is what Finns make for May Day and what goes for 'mead' (sima) according to the everyman. The infusion was kept for two days, sterilised at start by boiling the water and adding ingredients.

Combined both into fermenter with 1 L starter of good auld fresh Sahti yeast for fermenting at 14 °C and bringing the temperature up for an extended diacetyl rest.

The ritual yielded brightly coloured, cloudy beverage with the strongest representation yet from the spices. This recipe has now seen a good four revisions :)

Cheers and sunshine to all!

Been on this thing for 10.000 kilometers and no idea how much the previous pilot put on the belt: time for new belt, and let's pop in a Malossi Delta Clutch while the beetle's backside is suitably exposed. That's on the books for Wednesday.

Would love to hear experiences on the clutch on stock settings and springs if we have CVT enjoyers among us 😊

Happy 20th anniversary to this Vespa GTS 250. Tank full of gas from last season. Had it inside plugged into a maintenance charger till today. Started right up. Ride merry and ride safe, all 👊✊

Had some leftovers from a sahti x stout run I recently made for a birthday bash. Not enough of the crucial Viking Malt Chocolate Light to replay the well-received recipe, though, and the hops box was on its last crumbs of whathaveyou. I decided this is the time to be brave...

Bought a bag of frozen blueberries (200 g). Mashed a dark brew with a colourful ensemble of malts (Simpsons Maris Otter pale, Simpsons Premium English caramalt, Viking Black malt and Chocolate Light, and Tuoppi rye caramel malt). Infused the blueberries in 1,5 L of water (no boiling) with 20 g of Amarillo pellets. Realised my only option for first hops was Citra – well at least it's high in alphas, in we go at T minus 45 minutes. Brought the infusion to boil and added to the wort at 20 minutes. Scraped the last of a Kent Goldings bag for a 15 min addition.

I've never been a fan of beer with seasonings, so this is quite the experiment. We'll see what kind of animal comes out the tap in due time.

I'm so baffled I had to ask – why this behaviour?

cd /var/www/html
tar czf ~/package.tgz admin/* api/* mobile/*

I do this, and the resulting package doesn't include a couple of hidden files – api/.htaccess and admin/.htaccess. However...

cd /var/www/html
tar czf ~/package.tgz *

This time the hidden .htaccess files are there.

Does anybody have enlightenment to offer as to why?

A whole month of the summer missed waiting to get my 2006 Vespa GTS (called Beetle due to the custom matt black paint job) serviced. Rear brake was intermittently dragging and I couldn't figure out the cause.

Turned out it was a slightly loose terminal bolt on the rear axle 😗 Must have been a pothole I hit hard at the top of the season. Mechanic tightened the bolt and ol' Beetle is good as new, nothing needed to be replaced and all it cost me was an hour's labour, very reasonable.

Changed the air filter to celebrate the second coming of season '25. The pic is from today's hop to the woods, made timber and firewood with a group of friends - I was there first 😄

Happy days! My new beer is done. This is a battle-tested recipe with lemons and ginger. This time I also had 10 g of fresh lemon balm in the seasoning infusion. This guy:

Works really great as a beer component, sharing to spotlight this herb with you all! There's a Wikipedia page that describes the many aromatic compounds it imparts. It's perennial (pic is from my garden), grows in a slightly invasive manner so you only need to plant very little to get enough for many brews. This was a warning :)

Another new twist was a helping of Weyermann spelt wheat malt. I expected the nutty spelt flavour from it, but the taste profile ended up so multi-faceted that I'll need more tastings to pinpoint it :D All in all, a distinctive flavour to this beer. Fermented to bone dry very smoothly.

Me & My Mom Outfitters proudly presents 😁 This thing has been in the making for a whole year with a lot of difficulties encountered, but it's finally done. The one thing I miss when hammocking is the protected lounging quarters of a tent. But here it is now!

We have a waterproof floor that pegs to the ground, ultralight mosquito net for walls and the roof bit out of monofil fabric. The roof has slots for spreader poles, which I'm still to make out of aluminium. Branches work too. Zipper entry is reinforced with monofil. The tent is supported by the hammock ridgeline and suspension alone, so setup is quick and effortless. The vibe upstairs is rather psychedelic without a tarp on top :D

The hammock is also self made, with a monofil inner layer to carry the load and a slightly longer silnylon outer layer to stop wind and form a little air gap that holds body heat.

Summer vacation has just begun – adventures await...

Title.

I'm hoping to move on to Idiocracy pretty swiftly but need an overture.

Another well slept hammock night. Slept like a baby after sauna and hot tub and ~ 02.00 BBQ supper: in the morning I woke up without having shifted or moved one bit – still holding the tin I keep my earplugs in :D

Katos mokomaa, Mastodonissa pomppasi ruudulle Suomen Amiga-käyttäjät. Sama instanssi, jonka diskettilehtiä minä ja moni saman ikäluokan Amiga-hörhö klikkaili 1993 eteenpäin. Mainostanpa riemuiten tännekin!

The weather's been terrible over the midsummer festivities – bad enough that my family decided to skip any attempts to enjoy the main festive day of juhannus and instead chose to drive the eldest's house moving load to her new place :o)

Yesterday looked like a surprisingly decent piece of summer, so I ran to the woods for a moment of peace and, as it turned out, solitude – the place is a campsite for a group of friends, but I had it all for myself. Cooked food, enjoyed my own spruce tip beer, played the djembe to get it to battle tune after a head replacement, got the tent sauna going and swam in the lake. Good times.

I've been planning to brew a beer with spruce tips and did some research to decide how to go about doing it. The gold standard in spruce tip syrup making is half a glass jar of tightly packed fresh spruce tips with the top half of the jar full of white sugar. This goes on a south-facing window and the sun supposedly melts the sugar and as it runs down, it captures the taste and healthiness from the spruce tips better than any other method.

Looked up the melting temperature of pure white sugar: 160 °C. Got a bit doubtful of the aforementioned method (wife has also tried and failed). So my plan would be to pack the tips and sugar on top in a tall kettle and melt the sugar in the oven. Tips go in a mesh insert, so after the sugar has melted, I could pour hot water into the kettle, dissolve the sugar in the water and lift out the mesh insert with the tips.

Today was the time to act it out. Spruce tips from the back yard, 1 kg of sugar. In the oven set at 160 °C, and yes indeed, sugar melts and the aroma from the spruce tips is amazing and appetising!

The beer has 4,75 kg of Viking Sahti malt mix, 1 kg Viking wheat malt, 1 kg Viking Munich Light and 250 g Simpsons Premium English Caramalt in a 19 liter mash. For hops I used Challenger from the start of the boil and some Simcoe for the last 20 minutes. It all came together to make a lovely pale brew.

The spruce component ended up as 2 litres of surprisingly dark green-brown liquid. I made sure all sugar was dissolved and dunked it into the fermenter first, followed by the wort. Both were filtered with reusable coffee filters.

My last doubt was that the spruce tips might contain stuff that would kill the yeast, so I made a starter with some of the spruce-sugar liquid. Sure enough, it got on bubbling like a champ!

I've been looking for it in reviews, official information, Lemmy and all. Nothing has come up. So let me ask the big obvious question here as an AR curious power user:

What is the FRAMEBUFFER SIZE (not the resolution of the physical display hardware) when using XReal One and One Pro as a USB-C monitor? Is it limited to 1920x1080 (which would me meh) or can one go higher?

When I first got the OG Quest, I setup a thing where a Raspberry Pi beamed a huge (in excess of 7000 x 3000 pixels) Herbstluftwm workspace over VNC on the Quest. The Quest VNC app was 3DOF only, so no peeking closer to see fine details, and of course the Quest didn't quite have the screen to make this usable, but the idea still tickles my fancy. Asking this to find if the time has come to try again :)

The front shock absorber on my Vespa GTS 250 has been dying fast since the season started. A new one is on its way. I'll stay with the Carbone Sport but the replacement is going to have a black spring instead of red.

Looks like the shock comes with a tool for rotating the bit at the bottom that sets preload for the spring. As seen in the pic, the previous owner (bless the guy - the bike is customised with great execution) opted to tighten it a notch. I love the feel as it is, so I'll need to adjust the new one to the same notch.

Now, the tool is not very long, and I'd imagine it'll be hard work to work against the spring with little leverage. Does anybody know how stiff is it going to be - can I expect to be able to set the preload after installation with the provided tool, or should I do it beforehand when I can put the shock in a vise and use a more substantial tool?

I've been chasing more maltiness with this recipe and it's now getting to be in the ballpark of a couple of favourites - Plevna Dry Stout and Sinebrychoff Porter. This 21 l run had 6,7 kg of malt of which 500 g was 1300 EBC Black Malt and 1 kg was 400 EBC Chocolate Light from Viking Malt. The chocolate in particular is a great find with strong and unique taste.

Active malts in the mix are 1085 g leftovers of Simpsons Maris Otter Pale and Viking Sahti malt for the rest. 75 g Challenger and 15 g Citra hops for the duration of the boil. The recipe calls for 90 g of bitterness and of course I forgot to buy hops, so I had to fill in with the Citra.

Yeast was the Sahti standard fresh yeast, so I can call this a sahti-stout. Friendly, smooth mouthfeel as it always delivers. Next go at the recipe will need a new moniker though, as I want to try Alzymologist's malty lager critters :)

SOLVED: I was stupid. One litre less water in the kettle meant my temperature probe wasn't touching the water and strike temperature ended up being higher than intended, which obviously obliterated the enzymes and no sugar was produced.

First total failure of my homebrew journey, and I have no idea why... I was really looking forward to this brew, a pitch-black stout with smoked wheat, chocolate malt and black malt. For yeast, I was anticipating to try Alzymologist's speciality.

However, it's been four days in the fermenter and I've pitched three yeasts – first the Alzymologist (made a starter), then my usual fresh yeast without a starter and for the last desperate attempt some dry wine yeast – I can only come to the conclusion that my wort is poison. Not a sliver of CO2 has been produced. First yeast did produce heat in the wort for a day, but no CO2. Tried heating the wort, agitating and all, but it remains dead.

Some little changes in my process were made – 18 liters instead of 19 for mashing so that I could fit 900 grams extra malt in, and strike temperature up by one degree to 72 °C due to less water and more grain. Tomorrow evening I'm going to have to dump 20 litres of fine wort down the toilet and plan another brew day. Damn, this loss hits like having to bury a pet...