Category: Personal Projects

A culinary cure

Bummed from my disappointing week and feeling the effects from skipping too many meals and eating irregularly during the week, I devoted some time on Saturday evening to making a good dinner. I had a mango and two plantains that I had purchased for experimentation, and they were starting to get the point of either use or refuse. Examining the other contents of my fridge and freezer led me to my creation: mango salsa chicken, fried plantains, and a fresh spinach salad.

The fried plantains were the easiest. I just put some oil in a pan and fried the plantains until they looked done. The salad was easy, too. Salads just take a while to prepare each of the pieces. In this case it was mango, tomato, celery, spinach, and walnuts. In retrospect, it was all easy. The chicken was just topped with some regular salsa and large mango chunks and fried in a pan for a while. After cooking, I topped with some more salsa. That was it. I prepared two chicken breasts so that I would have lunch the next day, and it turned out to be a fantastic meal. The wine was a Chateau St. Michelle Riesling, which happens to be my current favorite for casual dinner meals.

An invention of mine

Here is a video of something I put together not too long ago. It’s me using a laser pointer to control a mouse on my projector. I have a projector that I hooked up to my computer. I also hooked up a webcam and wrote some software that analyzes the camera  image to pick out the bright red dot. Then I use it as an input device. It’s pretty simple, and works very well. I wrote a little paint program, and a dart game, and the game missile command, which makes a lot of sense in this kind of environment. Eventually I’ll put a few more games together try for multiple point recognition so I could do group activities and games with it.

Mmmmm. Sushi.

Last week I went to a new place called Sushiya with some friends. They had some pretty tasty sushi, and I felt inspired. This weekend I created some masterpieces at home. While I really love raw fish, it’s not easy to acquire and I don’t think I’m capable of handling it safely enough to not get in trouble. So the sushi I made didn’t have any raw fish in it, but I was still able to make a wide variety of rolls. Here’s a pic of most of the rolls. I didn’t have enough room on the plate for everything.

Starting from the lower right, we have shrimp. Next is a fat roll of krab, avocado, and cucumber. Next is smoked salmon from my aunt and uncle, followed by cucumber and cream cheese. I played around with the seasonal fruit on the next roll, which is peaches picked from a nearby tree. After that is an inside-out roll with krab, avocado, and cucumber. Finally, there’s a roll with krab and mayonnaise. There was also a roll with krab, cucumber, and cream cheese, but that didn’t make it onto my platter.

I mixed some wasabi and soy sauce and had a small plate of sesame seeds and watched a movie while I went to town on the sushi. It was a great night. In case you were wondering, the peach sushi was good, but not with the soy sauce.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

  • 4 Tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup pineapple juice
  • 5-7 pineapple rings (or you could use tidbits artfully arranged)
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 8 Tablespoons butter (they get used for different parts)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 1/2 Cup flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 400.

Get a cake pan and put it on the stove at medium low heat. Melt the 4 tablespoons of butter inside the pan. Then add the brown sugar until it’s melted. Turn off the burner and then mix in the pineapple juice until it’s an even mixture. Arrange the pineapple rings in the bottom of the pan in one layer.

Melt the 8 tablespoons of butter (about 1 minute in the microwave) in a bowl, stir in the milk and egg, and beat well.

In another bowl, add all the dry ingredients and stir. Combine the two bowls and stir until even.

Pour the mixture in the bowl over the pineapples in the cake pan and spread it evenly in the pan (it’ll be hard to do).

Bake for 35 minutes. Let it cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, maybe even longer. Gently separate the cake from the edges of the pan. The next part is the flipping, which can be tricky. The easiest way is to place a plate upside down on top of the pan. Pick up the two together, and flip it over so the plate is right side up, the cake pan is upside down, and the cake is sitting on the plate with the pineapples facing up.

 

Brownies

  • 4 eggs, beaten until fluffy
  • 1 Cup sugar
  • 1 Cup flour, sifted
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 12 oz package of chocolate chips
  • 2/3 cup butter
  • 2 teaspoon vanilla

Melt together chocolate chips and butter (microwave for about 1 1/2 – 2 minutes). Beat eggs and add in everything else. Put in greased 8×12 (or 9×13 works, too) pan and bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes until everything but the center comes out clean with a toothpick (this way the last little bit will cook after you take it out of the oven and it will be soft and moist without being overdone).

 

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

  • 3/4 cup butter, softened
  • 3/4 cup white sugar
  • 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 cups rolled oats
  • 1 cup raisins
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
  2. In large bowl, cream together butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs and vanilla until fluffy. Stir together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Gradually beat into butter mixture. Stir in oats and raisins. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased (greasing the pan makes the cookies spread too thin) cookie sheets.
  3. Bake 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or until golden brown. Cool slightly, remove from sheet to wire rack. Cool completely.

 

Cooking is all about the timing

And getting the timing right on dishes you’ve never made before is TOUGH. Tonight I tried three things I’ve never done, and somehow it all managed to work out. The first part was the pork loins, which I had never done in the oven on broil before (I recently got a broil pan, so I’ve been experimenting with it). To go on that I prepared a red wine, shallot, and butter sauce. As a side dish I made broccoli with cheddar cheese. In the end, it all came together, and I had a delicious meal, but it was rough deciding how long to do each thing and when to start and stop processes.

The red wine sauce was the hardest. I started out with a little butter and cooked the diced shallots until they were darker. Then I added about 1/2 cup of red wine and reduced it. Finally I added a stick of butter and mixed. Unfortunately, the butter melted too much, so it was a softer sauce than I wanted. I put it in the freezer to harden a little. Meanwhile I had boiled some broccoli, put it in a glass pan and shredded cheddar on top. It went in the oven, which was already broiling the pork, and doing a fine job of it. Since I give myself permission to criticize my own work, I have to say the cheddar could have used a minute less in the oven (it was underneath the pork, so it wasn’t getting the brunt of the broiler, but it still melted the cheese a little too much), the fat around the loin was slightly crispy, and the wine sauce was slightly runny. But if I was sitting at the table and someone set the plate in front of me, I would have thought it was a fantastic meal and wouldn’t have even noticed. This is definitely one I’ll be repeating.

Surgery on my baby

Yesterday my projector was acting up in a very unfriendly way. There was something wrong with the lighting. It was uneven with a couple lines through it. Worse, when I moved the projector, the lines moved, and I could hear a part moving around inside. Eventually, percussive maintenance no longer affected any change in the image. My only real option was to take it apart. Projectors aren’t cheap, and they are built of complicated and sensitive parts, so I was reluctant to open it up. My first thought was a flaw in the light bulb. I took the bulb out and examined it, cleaned out some of the accumulated dust, and tried again. No luck. Then I removed the case to expose the inner workings. I couldn’t see any problems immediately, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. Since it was approaching 2am, I decided to call it a night and worry about it the next day. Just in case, I ordered a new bulb, which will be delivered early next week. It turned out that the bulb was not the problem, but it’s too late to cancel the order, and it will be nice to have a backup bulb anyway.

Today I decided to give it another try. I dismantled it again, and this time turned it on while dismantled. It is incredible how much light comes through a tiny aperture. I could not look at it without some kind of protection. By following the light path, I was able to discover the problem.

The light goes through a very small square, perhaps half a centimeter wide. It enters this light tube composed of four small rectangular mirrors. The tube is about 3 centimeters long, and the four mirrors are attached along the long edges with some sort of glue. What had happened was that the heat from the lamp had weakened the glue, and one of the four sides of the square had dislodged. This led to the dimming because the mirror was no longer directing the light, and it explained the lines because the mirror was partially in the path of the light.

I was able to extract the square and, using scotch tape (bless the stuff), reconstruct the square tube and replace the fourth side. I am concerned that the scotch tape will melt or otherwise not hold, but if that happens I’ll look for a more formidable adhesive. I put everything back together, and my projector worked as well as it ever had.

It was a little intimidating working with an expensive piece of equipment whose mechanisms were mostly unfamiliar to me, but I’m glad that I was able to figure it out and fix it without damage.

Typical me

A few days ago at work it was snowing. I don’t have a window in my office, so I was getting regular updates on the rate of snowfall by more privileged coworkers. The terms they used were wildly inconsistent, though, and I thought there had to be a way to determine the actual rate of snowfall that wasn’t “kinda coming down softer now.” So I ran a little experiment. I took a black piece of paper and taped it outside in the courtyard. Then one coworker with a camera and a view of the courtyard hooked the camera up so that it was looking across the courtyard at the black piece of paper. I wrote a little bit of software that would take the image, analyze the part with the black paper, and see how many pixels were above a given threshold. The theory was that the varying levels of snowfall would block the paper as the snow fell. In other words, the falling snow would appear as white spots on the camera in front of the black paper. Then I could just count the number of white spots at any given second and have a number that represented the rate of snowfall at any given time.

Sadly, the weather made a mockery of my experiment and by the time I had set it up and was ready to test, it had stopped snowing. Still, it was fun to try out, and I think it was working correctly and just needed some tweaking, though the importance of such a task in the grand scheme of things is right up there with grooming shag carpet or arranging my spice cabinet by region of origin.

Computer Lights Show

Back in college I occasionally did DJ gigs. It was a lot of fun and I did some pretty neat things to make it easier. I had a remote control for my WinTV card and I remapped the buttons to control WinAmp, so I could control the music while I was dancing on the floor. Another thing I did was build some lights for inside my computer case.

When I originally built it, the lights were controlled by the internal serial port, and I wrote some software to advance the lights. I was even able to integrate the sound volume into it and had some rudimentary beat detection going so that the lights would change on the beat. Unfortunately, the system slowly degraded over time. The first problem was that the beat detection didn’t work when I upgraded from Windows ME to Windows XP. The next problem was that the external power supply died. Finally, I switched to Linux, so the software I had written to control it wouldn’t work.

In January 2007 I cleaned things up quite a bit. First, I connected the power to the computer’s power supply, thus removing the dependence on an external plug. Next, I set it up with a 555 timer chip and inserted a potentiometer to vary the speed of the flashing. I had to replace a light bulb, but the refurbishing took only a few hours. Now it seems to be working fairly well. See the pics and the video. There are 5 lights throughout the case, and they flash in order.

The circuitry is very simple. I have a decade counter which increments every time it gets a pulse. Each time it increments it turns on a different transistor, which powers a different light. On pin 6 it goes to the reset pin so that the decade counter only counts 1-5 over and over again. The 555 timer provides the pulse to the decade counter. If you want more details about the circuitry, contact me.

Video of the computer lights show in action (Windows Media Video (WMV) format, no audio)