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Viking Mead with Mandy
Many years ago I tried brewing a traditional honey mead. I made all kinds of calculation errors and used ghetto honey — the end result was watered down, tasteless and thoroughly unsatisfying.
Recently a shop around the corner had a good deal on bulk honey so I decided to have another go at it. I got [...]
Posted in Homebrew Leave a comment
Pylons + FastCGI on Hostgator
This article can only be considered a work in progress; it took many tries to get it right and I don’t remember the exact steps. So I’ll explain the process as best possible, and please leave comments if I’m missing anything.
My plan was to get a Pylons app running on a simple shared hosting account. [...]
Posted in Code 2 Comments
Quebec Maple Wine
I’ve always wanted to make a maple wine. It’s the Canadian spin on a traditional Viking mead — but using maple syrup instead of honey. Maple is full of sucrose and all ready to be fermented into delicious booze.
It’s also worth noting that when the zombie apocalypse drops and we’re all living in tree forts [...]
Posted in Homebrew 3 Comments
Update your website via SMS
This is done with old technology, but it still has such a wow factor I want to write about it.
You can easily update a website via SMS.
The middleman is Twitter. Set up a Twitter account (make it private if you want, but better keep it open!)
Set up your Twitter account to receive SMS text messages. [...]
Posted in Code Leave a comment
No Name Berry Shine
For the first experiment in my newly founded Clinton Brewery, I turned to the lowest common denominator.
It’s been years since I last brewed and I wanted to re-familiarize myself with the process. I wanted to study the prowess of a common yeast strain (EC-1118) at various gravity levels. I wanted to assess the viability of [...]
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CakePHP + Wordpress
So this is a very common issue. You’re building a site in CakePHP. Client wants a blog. Why code a blog from scratch when you can just use Wordpress? But then you have them play nice together within the same environment.
There are already several articles online about how to accomplish this, but here’s my particular [...]
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Homebrew Primer
I started my first batch of homebrew in 2002 in a big house on the Danforth. We were a poor students looking for cheap beer, with nothing but Google and our own resourcefulness to get us started. We bought some basic brewing equipment and it took a few tries, but within several weeks we were [...]
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PHP GD Library on Snow Leopard Macports
I recently went through a hellish upgrade to Snow Leopard and had to reinstall all my macports.
When I emerged all the graphic imaging functions in a PHP project had died… no warnings, no error messages. After experimenting a bit I realized that the standard GD library wasn’t installed.
Apparently in Snow Leopard macports, GD library doesn’t [...]
Ontario Spruce Pale Ale