Healthy Green Chili Experiment

You can use any meat you want or no meat with this recipe, but I am using a deer and pork mixture of about 90:10. So largely deer. Mostly a little pork for some fat.

Ingredients

• 2lbs deer, pork mix (use whatever you want)
• 4 cans of beans (1 kidney, 1 chili, 2 great northern)
• 4 bell peppers (I did 1 of each; green, red, orange, yellow)
• 1 large onion
• 3T olive oil
• 2 Jalapenos
• 6 garlic cloves (or more if you like)
• 3 zucchini
• 6-7 large celery stalks
• 2 15oz cans of diced tomato
• 2-3 cups of spinach (pureed with northern beans)
• 2-4 cups of water
• Frozen corn (or canned if you want and as much as you like or have room for)

Spices

Preparation

You will want to coarsely chop up the veggies and while doing so you can be browning your meat with the olive oil, garlic, and some water. After the meat is close to being done browning add the spices in. I do anywhere from a tablespoon to 2 of each of the spices other than, garlic salt, and oregano, they both had about 3T. Just let that cook until it smells good, and while that is happening puree 2 cans of the northern beans (or whatever you want) with the spinach. Either don’t drain or add some water. Add the puree to the meat and stir. Then add the veggies.

Now it is just a waiting game of letting it cook. At this time I am tasting and tweaking the spices which I added most of the tweaks in the previous additions already. Let it cook/simmer for about an hour probably. Pull it off whenever the veggies are tender, I am guessing about an hour.

Enjoy and tweak

We Should Start Seeing Difference Surfaces With Built In Wireless Charging/Power

The future of wireless charging/power is in many different surfaces. We are already starting to see cars that are equipped with wireless charging which is very useful. If it works like the JBL Nokia Speaker Dock where the NFC also initiates the BT connection to start music playback (or at least I assume that is how it works) then it will be awesome.

But how great would it also be if when we walk into work and sit down at our desks we could just set our phone down on the desktop and it would charge? Instead of having to have a wired charging pad the wires are all hidden away somewhere and the desk itself is plugged in.

Let’s Take Wireless Charging Into The Bathroom

Now lets imagine that our bathroom countertop is connected into our homes power and the whole surface is capable of wireless charging. Now you can have your toothbrush, shaver, detailer, or even wireless straighteners, curlers, etc all charged up without wires. I don’t know about you but the car and bathroom are two of the most annoying places to have multiple wires hanging around.

Wireless Charging In The Living Room

This one seems it might be a bit trickier as you likely don’t have standard built in that you put your devices on. Instead a lot of tend to put our devices on coffee tables and end tables. So maybe we have a retractable cord on our coffee table that we can plug in when we need it and have our laptop, tablet, or phone just sitting on the coffee table charging. Or if we get really extreme have our floor setup for wireless charging and the coffee table serve as a sort of pass-through that can bring it up to the level. Hopefully by that point we have wireless charging that has a longer range but still an idea.

Another Exciting Use of Wireless Power is The Kitchen

Here I am talking more about wireless power than wireless charging, which I am not sure how it works but just stick with me. Right now I have a microwave, toaster oven, Kitchenaid mixer, and coffee pot on my counter. I would love it if none of them had any cables but instead the counter top was powered up like the QI charging and these items just powered by sitting on the counter. To take this even a bit further, it would be cool if we can get maybe 1-2 foot range on the wireless power for things like hand mixers which are not in contact with the counter when they are in use. Of course these could be battery powered instead and charge on the counter but who leaves those out on the counter?

Bengals Going to The Superbowl?

Not likely, sadly I expect they lose in the first round. That said I think the Bengals can beat the Patriots because of how their defense has been and because Patriots likely won’t be able to stop Green, Jones, Hawkins, and Gresham. Would be quite amusing to see a San Fransisco and Cincinnati Superbowl happen again as that is the only team the Bengals have played in their 2 Superbowl appearances. I imagine we will see a high scoring game in the first round of the playoffs this year.

So let me know below what you think of the Bengals or general thoughts on who will be in the Superbowl XLVII.

The Good Things About Working With Surface RT

The form Factor: It is light, thin, and versatile.

Weighing in under 2lbs with the touch cover is a pretty impressive feat with a 10.6″ screen and several usable ports like the USB, HDMI, headphone, and microSD. Oh and there is a built in kick stand that does it’s job elegantly and hides away nicely. This baby can easily slip into my girlfriends purse, a backpack, or just be carried around and the keyboard is a nice protective cover. Granted I haven’t dropped my Surface yet so I don’t know how much protection it will offer in reality. With the touch cover you can easily use the Surface like a full fledged laptop on a flat surface like a desk, table, etc. Also with how solid the kickstand is, it is easy and comfortable to use the Surface in your lap. The lap position isn’t as versatile as a laptop because it is not as rigid as a laptop and only has one angle but it is still very usable. The 16:9 is wonderful in landscape for media and in portrait it is nice for longer websites and Nook or Kindle reading.

File System

Doing web development, I obviously deal with a lot of files. Having Skydrive nicely integrated and having a full featured, easy access file system is a great asset when developing.

The App Ecosystem

Hold on a second and let me explain. The ecosystem isn’t there just yet for everything but, being a Windows machine you can clearly see that the device has developer minded people behind it. There have already been a lot of code editor apps to hit the marketplace and this excites me. I haven’t found one that I like as much as Notepad++ just yet but I know it will be there shortly either with an update to the already impressive list of editor apps or a new one coming along.

Full Screen Browser, Multi-tasking, Charms, Gestures, Snap, and App Switcher

I lumped these together because in my use they are the bread and butter of what makes the device such a joy to use and they all basically go hand in hand. As a web developer I am obviously excited about the future of web apps. I have never been a fan of native apps, even when I was on iOS. Oops started drifting, back on. The full screen browser is just beautiful, it really just puts the web in front of you without any other junk. The multi-tasking is similar, tied in with how you switch apps it is just out of the way and just works fast and fluid. Instead of having a cluttered desktop with various sized windows stacked on top of each other things just get out of the way and are a simple flick from being front and center again. And of course if someone is chatting you up, you need to check emails, or are testing your mobile sized web work then snap is a beautiful answer to that. The gestures and charms really tie everything together. Instead of hunting around for where an app put it’s settings or other core functionality, you know they are a flick from the right away. Also a short swipe from top or bottom will bring you the other options the app brings and they will get out of your way when you are done.

Built in Remote Desktop is Second to None

Lets face it, in its infancy Windows RT does not have everything you could possibly need as far as apps go so you have to get on your desktop. But wait, instead of walking all the way up stairs and pausing your movie you can just RDP. As a bonus if you are remoting into a Windows 8 machine you even still have all of your wonderful gestures. RDP to a Windows 8 machine feels like you have full Windows 8 on your Surface RT with a bit of lag in a few areas.

The Bad Things About Developing on Surface RT

I can sum this all up in one word. Apps. While RDP is a good solution, it isn’t always the desired one. I need some Ruby on my RT for SASS, filezilla, and more browsers to test on. Sure there is browser stack but it isn’t the same.

So if you open up the Facebook app and go to messages you have an option to pin it to your start screen. You should also change your settings if you haven’t already (I hadn’t) to allow for push notifications on messages.

UPDATE:
The Facebook apps push notifications do not appear to be working at this time. I tested on an HTC Titan with WP7 and a Lumia 920 with WP8 with no success. Hopefully Facebook fixes this as it will make this post much more useful

This really makes me want to try to cushion on a different machine and even just was a different microphone because I’m not sure if the software is bad or fish microphone really to scatter mirror will.  Talking directly into the microphone works to sort also some of your options are nice for correcting words.  That is when it works in a patent suit attention of the haven’t even though it has to come at a dinner and hendershot speaks of the period.  The only a reason I could see to use dictation is as you’re missing fingers will perhaps or to use as a creativity tool because of the brain processing for speech rather than typing or in addition to tucker.

Overall it looks like the software is pretty good and I have spoken this entire post without doing any corrections as you can see from the first paragraph it is miserable the differences May 1 paragraph was about 2 feet and from a safe hand of this last paragraph of his was my mouth right up to the microphone.  Th fifth.Publish

Mobile

• Motorola SLVR
• Palm Treo 680 PalmOS circa 2006 (my first smart device) – bought eBay 2007
• Blackberry circa 2005 (don’t recall model but it sucked and so far my only downgrade ever) – bought eBay 2009
• iPhone 3gs circa 2009 – bought AT&T 2009
• Samsung Focus circa 2010 – bought AT&T 2010 (gave my girlfriend my iPhone)
• HTC Titan circa 2011 – bought AT&T when the iPhone upgrade was up

Desktop OS

• Windows 98 flea market build – bought 2001ish
• Windows XP custom build – bought 2003ish later to become an Ubuntu dev server in house
• Windows XP custom build – built 2006
• Upgraded(downgraded) to Vista on that machine with student discount in 2007 after a month switched to Ubuntu
• Solely Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and only used Windows when I had to for class
• Officially swore off MS and was loving Linux and my Palm Treo sometime in 2007
• 2009 Upgraded that old machine to Windows 7 after using it in my job and actually liking it

I currently use Windows 7 and 8 on a day to day basis. Along with OSX Snow Leopard on a weeklyish basis and my Linux box is in a closet:(. With Windows 7 and WP7 coming around I started to actually become a fan of MS products. Before I used them because it was there. When I realized I had a choice, I switched to Linux. There was also some FreeBSD and CentOS installs in there but they were short lived as I preferred Ubuntu. But enough of that, on to the Surface.

Touch Cover

Enough cannot be said about the touch cover. It keeps my screen protected and provides a surface to lay my Surface on where I definitely don’t have to worry about scratches or anything. And on top of all of that it is a top notch performer when it comes to typing. I compare it to going from my Treo’s physical keyboard to the iPhone’s onscreen, although you don’t have to look at the keys like an onscreen. It is also nice that you get a lot of the typical large keyboard keys like volume, media controls, home, end, delete keys across the top as well as a couple of Windows 8 specifics like search, devices, share, and settings. The track pad works but is nothing new or exciting.

Screen

The screen as you know has a relatively low resolution but I can’t honestly say that it is any sort of hindrance, other than the amount of tiles you can have on the start screen. The picture looks great and fonts are crystal clear even when zoomed all the way in as I am right now while typing. I never thought to do this but it is actually kind of nice as it makes it extremely easy to see while typing and the screen automatically moves with the cursor when I get to the edge of the screen or start a new line. Oh hey I just found a fun feature for when I am writing these blogs. If a word is misspelled with the red squiggly under it, I can tap it and it gives me suggestions on a new spelling and it was correct. I also really like the 16:9 for a few reasons. Having a wider screen is great for when I am coding as I use the split screen but it is also great for movies and shows. When you flip it up into portrait (which I don’t do much) it is nice for Kindle books and long web pages to read.

You can see above when a word is misspelled you can tap on it and get choices to correct it or to add it to your dictionary

Front and Rear Facing Camera on The Surface

They exist. There isn’t really anything to write about here other than they are there. They were clearly just made for video chat and they do a good job of it but you won’t want to be taking any pictures with them and not just because you look foolish. The angle on the back one is nice as my boss does fight with that a lot with his iPad and cover when trying to set it up for hands off use. (SIDE NOTE: I also just noticed that when I tap a misspelled word I have the option to ‘add to dictionary’)

Surface Ports, Kickstand, Buttons and General Physical Feel

Despite what people might say it is super nice to have a USB port on hand. You can charge your phone, plug in a mouse you have laying around, or plug in one of the 100 other USB devices you have. The headphone jack does what is expected and playing through headphones is surprisingly loud, luckily it automatically turns the volume down when you plug in. The speakers have good sound quality but are a bit quitter than I would like. I have yet to use my HDMI port but if I ever buy a cord that might change. I love the feel of the VaporMG and the kickstand is solid engineering. One thing that did surprise me is how well you can actually use this in your lap. To do so you have to have your lap fairly flat because at angles it obviously gets a bit dicey.

Software on Surface RT

Most of the software is nice but some of it is still a bit buggy. The Surface as is lacks a lot of great apps which I know is a bashers go to but at this point it can be a real turn off depending on your setup. As a web developer there isn’t a lot for me to work with on here currently but I actually find using the built in Windows RDP to be the best solution for that anyway as I don’t have to deal with file storage decisions or transfers or syncs, none of that because I am remoted into my development machine. However, I know that won’t be the case with everyone, and even I still need to setup my home VPN if I want to remote while away. The people, mail, and messaging hub can be slow and the messaging hub even failed to finish retrieving messages for me just a moment ago. Upon initial setup I even had to uninstall and reinstall these (they are a bundle) because my Facebook and Twitter stuff was stuck in limbo and wouldn’t actually sync.

Gestures, Charms, Menus, and Multitasking on the Surface RT

Like this keyboard I can’t possibly say enough but the Search Charm. One unified search for any app and the OS alike all a simple flick from the right away is brilliant and it works so well. It does take some getting used to though. Realizing that the Charms are for much more than just the OS is something that will grow on you but you will likely feel limited in a lot of apps until you realize that. One Charm that has so far been a love hate is the Device Charm. When I am listening to music and want to throw it up on the Xbox I just flick left | tap device | tap Xbox. And bam it is up on my Xbox in a few seconds. Sometimes it takes like 10-15 or so seconds which is a slight annoyance but the real problem has been with video. I can get video to work just find almost all the time but when it does mess up, like say it stops playing on the Xbox it sometimes won’t list the Xbox in my device list anymore. I have had to restart my Xbox to fix this one time. Flicking from the left to switch apps is ridiculously fast and I personally haven’t been able to force much lag unless I was switching with video and games and had a lot going on and even then we are talk 1-3 second lag.

To Wrap Things Up

I think that the Surface RT is a great product that needs more software for it. For me it has completely replaced a 17″ HP and a 10.1″ Eee PC though it couldn’t fully do this without the RDP so if RDP isn’t an option for you then you might want to look at the Yoga or MacBook Air, or wait for Surface Pro maybe. Obviously, all of those carry a bit higher price tag. Any review that just constantly rips on the Surface RT is either purely just looking for visits or bought a laptop/hybrid when they actually needed a toaster or something else completely unrelated.

This is what you get when you click to upgrade a device

Come on. I can’t believe how hard AT&T pushes the iPhone. They make it look to not tech savvy people that it is the only phone that you can upgrade too. Sorry for the little rant but this page annoys the crap out of me every time I see it. And I thought that after 5 years they might finally stop forcing it as the default device, but they have not. I think they made it even harder to try to find any other device actually. The iPhone 5 is great. One of the best phones but please just give people a chance.

One thing that makes it especially funny is that when they launched the first Lumia devices they said that it was going to be the biggest launch ever. Bigger than iPhone and promoted heavier. Yet we still have this page. 75% of the page is taken up by some form of iPhone and you have a couple of crappy other devices in the corner with one tiny link to get to more devices.

• Big channel locks
• Monkey(pipe) wrench
• Copper tubing cutter
• plumbers tape
• New dielectric union (and maybe a male to male galvanized nipple)
• Torch
• Solder
• Flux

Don’t let the list scare you. I was worried about the torch and solder but it is much easier than I thought, thanks to the internet. You can get solder(sweating) kits at Lowe’s for pretty cheap.

If you are a homeowner then chances are you have had some things that needed repaired, replaced, or updated somewhere along the way. Since buying a place earlier this year I have already had a handful of those projects including; fixing a leaking, wobbly dishwasher with broken racks, fixing a leaky icemaker that made little to no ice cubes, laying a subfloor in the attic, and one of the trickiest for me to figure out was extremely low hot water pressure throughout the house. Since we moved in the hot water pressure was low but it got to the point where you couldn’t really take a shower. You just had a few dribbles falling on your head which made for unnecessarily long showers.

Figuring Out The Cause of Low Hot Water Pressure

I can’t even imagine how many Bing and Google searches I did for figuring out hot water pressure problems. Over the course of a couple of months there were several search/research sessions that lasted for multiple hours trying to figure out how I could fix my hot water pressure. But almost nothing that I found seemed to be very relevant. I was able to find something about a dielectric union on a forum somewhere but, there was no end answer or pictures or anything so I was still left in the dark. I am hoping that this write-up here saves at least one person hours of searching.

Giving Up And Calling A Plumber

The water heater is probably about 12 yeas old so at one point I figured it was time to just throw in the towel and have it done professionally. I got a few quotes on full replacement and was not very happy with the prices. However, there was one helpful company that was actually straight forward with me and instead of making me pay for someone to come out and try to sell me a warranty he said he knew exactly what it was and it would be a couple hundred to fix. He didn’t tell me it was the dielectric union but he said it was the connection on one of the lines on top of the water heater. This got me searching around trying to figure out if we had a dielectric union and/or what they look like. I had little to no success on finding this information so I also searched a lot on how to replace a water heater myself.

Somewhat Blindly Digging In

One morning I had nothing to do so I decided to fix the water heater myself. Not knowing what I was replacing exactly and not having the tools to do it I just took the precautions suggested in some videos for the gas line and such and started removing things from my water heater. I successfully disconnected the exiting hot water line and discovered that it was most likely the problem. However, without a monkey wrench I was unable to remove the piece that I assumed was the core problem and I was unsure what the piece was called, making it hard to find a replacement.

Before you get started, make sure that you turn off the gas, shut off the water supply to the heater, shut the gas line going to the heater, release the pressure in your tank, and have some backup plans for if you make a watery mess.

Getting started, finding the cause of the low water pressure. You can see I detached the hot water line here.

At this point I am feeling pretty good about myself and thinking that it can be a pretty quick fix once I get the tools.

Here you can see that the dielectric union is completely done for. I don’t know how any water was making it through there.

At this point I still didn’t know that this was a dielectric union but I was pretty sure that it was the problem. So now I needed a replacement part and the tools to actually replace it. I thought I could just buy one of these things and a monkey wrench and be done with it. I found out I was wrong. After traveling to 4 different stores I ended up going to a plumbing in randwick store to find what I needed and the guy behind the counter told me it was a dielectric union and that I had more work than I had thought. Turns out I was going to have to cut some copper pipe and learn how to solder. So this information ups my needs list to include; solder, torch, and pipe cutter. Back to work.

You can see why my hot water was having some trouble getting around my house.

Now we need to cut off the old female dielectric union. For me, I needed a male to male nipple which was about 6 inches long so I had to make sure that I figured that in when cutting. Using a small copper tubing cutter I quickly had the pipe cut and ready to solder the new dielectric female end on. The nut needs to go on the pipe before you do this so it can be screwed down. I grabbed some masking tape to get the nut out of my way.

I taped this up so that it was out of my way for soldering on the copper part of my dielectric union.

There are plenty of videos and resources to find how to sweat(solder) copper tubing so I am not going to go into details on that but here is one that I looked at before operating.

Here you can see I have screwed in my nipple and dielectric union male part to my water heater and ready to solder.

In the above picture the white parts on the nipple and dielectric union are where the plumbers tape comes into play. Read the instructions on applying the tape because it is important. I had to undo all of the screwed in parts 3 times because I screwed up the plumbers tape and had a slight leak. It is really annoying to have to undo your work because of leaks. You can see that I used this configuration to hold the dielectric union in place to do my soldering. I didn’t have an extra set of hands or any tools to hold it in place while soldering but this worked splendidly. I think I applied the solder on too heavy but it is doing the job so I will let that slide.

This is just after I soldered the dielectric union on and it is ready to tighten down.

At this point you will just untape your nut and fasten it down onto the other part of the dielectric union.

Conclusion

Replacing the dielectric union ended up being a much easier job than I though that it was going to be. Once you have the right tools and have done your research it isn’t too bad. So stop sitting under a shower head that is only dripping out and get the nice high pressure warm shower that you deserve. This is certainly one of the best decisions I have made. I think grand total it cost me about $50 but that is mostly on tools that I can use again. And including driving around and everything it took me about 4 hours but I bet I could do it in 1 now.

The Good Software

The Microsoft Surface is super easy to setup and beautiful to see all of your data instantly synced up on your first login. This is of course assuming that you take advantage of the services offered by live.com, which if you do not then you should check them out. The built in apps are pretty basic but beautifully done and very fast. The app store also has a decent amount of useful free or cheap apps already which was a nice surprise. Angry Birds space, I have to say is quite fun and got me hooked unlike the others in the series. The gestures take a little bit of practice but when you get them down they become quite natural. The task switching swipe from the left is just unparalleled. Having a full on Windows machine is a small and sleek package is pretty cool. You still have the full on familiar control panel, desktop, task manager (actually improved), and of course a file manager. The new task manager is awesome on Windows 8 with a much better breakdown of what exactly is going on and where. The software keyboard is nice with the multiple configurations which work nearly perfectly for the different ways you might interact with your Surface.

The Good Hardware

I had a live account for about 6 years before I looked at what it actually had to offer. And it gets better by the day. The touch cover is super thin, comfortable, sleek, and actually a joy to type on. I use a clunky Logitech wave which has pretty hard keys so I was worried that I would not like the touch cover at all, I was wrong. I equate it to the switch from Palm Treo and Blackberry to my iPhone 3gs. The magnet on the keyboard and on the power cord are nice but the keyboard one is much better. It has already come in handy to have a usb port to charge my phone in a pinch. Surface’s lowish resolution screen still looks beautiful. I did have my doubts on that and I have yet to hold it next to a New Ipad but I think it is much less of a deterrent than I thought that it would be.

Software Fails So Far

For whatever reason the people and message hub will not sync my facebook and twitter accounts fully with my live account but it works fine with my girlfriends live account, TweetTRO doesn’t load at all, and Xbox Music has had problems on some songs. I feel like the switch to portrait/landscape is a little too sensitive sometimes. Lastly, moving tiles around on the homescreen with touch took a little bit to figure out and can feel a bit bulky when trying to move a tile from one end to the other.

Hardware Issues

The camera quality is pretty low, which I knew and didn’t really care too much about, but it could turn some people off. Also the speakers are not really all that loud but of course can be taken care of with speakers or headphones.

Overall Take Away After One Day With Surface

The hardware is extremely nice with only the camera quality being something that I could see being a deal breaker to some. The software is nice but the apps will certainly benefit from some more development. The touch cover is insanely good for typing on lap or on a solid surface.

If you are wondering, I did one type test with the 10 fingers fast test on this touch cove and got 57 words per minute with 6 errors and 55 correct words. I am not a super fast typist but I have hit as high as 89 or so on that test in the past.