Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Brewing and Blades
June 27, 2019
axes beer brewing smithing

Last night Ken and I convened at Troy’s house for a typical brew flavoring session. We had about 2.5 gallons of unflavored product that we wanted to portion and add fruit to for flavoring.

We had a lot of luck with some lemon and lime fruit juice concentrate last time, so most of what we made was with these, but one was plain and another was sweetened with black sugar. We added blueberries, blackberries, cherries, and even some dragonfruit in various combinations until we had 7 distinct concoctions. We’ll wait a few weeks to see how the flavors are progressing, then figure out how to strain out the fruit, which tends to decompose and turn to sludge if left too long.

The Mind
June 26, 2019
games cards

I watched a video yesterday of a group of people explaining and playing a card game called The Mind. I was intrigued enough to buy this cooperative game for myself, in spite of the game’s simple concept.

The Mind consists of a deck of 100 cards that are numbered simply from 1 to 100, 8 cards that are labeled as levels 1 through 8, four cards representing “lives”, and a handful of cards marked as “throwing stars”. These are the only things you need to play the game.

New Digs
June 25, 2019
elixir asymptomatic server blog

Things are still settling down, but I think I’ve finally completed the first step of my migration of Asymptomatic into this new server.

While I’m sad to leave Habari as the software that operates this site after so much good that it did for me and others, I think it’s time for this site to serve the two functions it always has: Allow me to write and let me experiment with the technology that is of most interest to me at the time.

I Wood
May 30, 2017
birthday tools wood arduino

With my exploration of things in the small microcontroller space - like Arduino, NodeMCU, ESP8266, Teensy, etc. - I've been considering a handful of projects that really need some kind of casing.  I've always been enthusiastic about natural cases for technology devices, and my latest project idea includes an opportunity to produce a case in natural wood.

What I am intending to build is a small alarm clock for Riley.  It will have a small white-pixel screen, with a resolution of 15x7.  The pixels can be dimmed and animate, and should be able to display a time reasonably well, along with some animations for alarms and different events.

Success with Phoenix
May 25, 2017
Brewfest website Phoenix Elixir

I've rewritten this year's Brewfest website using an old design I liked on top of Phoenix.  Phoenix is an MVC framework, like Rails, but for Elixir.  The rewrite has been interesting.

The design requirements include displaying a single-page website that describes the Brewfest, while capturing information from brewers about themselves and the beer they plan to bring to the fest to share.  I wanted the "login" to be extremely simple so that brewers didn't need to go through a whole enrollment process.  The information they enter should also go through an editorial process before anyof it is published to the site.  Some nice-to-have features include displaying ticket sales information/graphs, and the ability to edit the single-page site content from an administrative area on the site (protected by a preset http-authenticated login).