Vetter "33"

Well, it's been a while since my last post. It's amazing how much of your time planning for a wedding, getting married, going on holiday for a couple of weeks and then trying to sort out everything that you've been putting off for the past month takes. Actually, no it isn't. Anyway, here's to picking up where I left off. I wanted to write some posts about food and drink.

There are many beers in the world. Dark and light, thick and thin, strong and weak. However there are only a few beers which can claim the title of "the strongest beer in the world", one of those is Vetter "33" made at the Vetter Brauhaus in Heidelberg. It's a pretty dark thick concoction and surprisingly doesn't taste all that bad (in that it's actually drinkable). I've made a few strong beers in my time, but never anything approaching 33% abv. Usually the issue with strong beers is that the yeast can't keep up and dies before all the sugar has been converted, leaving you with a sweet and sticky mess. The other problem is they end up tasting a bit like cheap wine, and by that point you'd be better just drinking wine.

Vetter they have managed to make a strong beer which tastes like beer. It's got a nice roasted malty flavour followed by the kick from the alcohol when you swallow. I'm not sure what kind of yeast they used to get it that strong (possibly champagne?) but it must have been hardy stuff. I don't think that they cheated (ice distillation and the like) so fair play to them. It's not the type of beer you'd drink often, or have more than one glass a night. Sharing a glass with friends it was pleasant enough to sip and pass around. If you're in Heidelberg and like beer then I recommend stopping in for one, unless you're on your own or driving, it's certainly an experience.

Jaunty Jackalope

I'm both impressed and disappointed with the new released of Ubuntu: 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope. Upgrading from 8.10 on my desktop wasn't flawless and a fresh install on my Mini 9 didn't quite go according to plan. My desktop upgrade was especially annoying as things almost worked, however Gnome and networking become a little flaky, and Amarok went into a complete huff with me. A complete reinstall later and I'm totally won over. The tweaks and improvements to Gnome are great and things feel just that little bit nippier. To be honest doing a fresh install doesn't take much longer than the upgrade so I'm inclined to give up on upgrades in future and do a fresh install every 6 months.

On my Mini 9 I had decided to do a complete fresh install, I don't really have much on there so there wasn't much to loose and I thought that a clean install would be better in terms of space and performance on the little device. I also wanted to try out the Netbook Remix Installer. After creating a USB drive and starting the install process I was a bit miffed to find that there was no partitioning options which allowed you to encrypt the drive. For a distro designed to be used on small portable devices I see it as a massive oversight. Netbooks are exactly the kind of device where full drive encryption would help protect you if it was lost/stolen. No impressed with the UNR installer I went back to the standard alternate installer and went through the process of installing Ubuntu and adding Netbook Remix on top. I did have some initial difficulties with loosing my Gnome applets which turned out to be a bug in the desktop switcher application; there's a good post on fixing the issue over on the Ubuntu Mini blog which I've mentioned before.

Mettbrötchen

I'll just back from a rather excellent long weekend in Weinhiem, Germany. Among other touristy and holiday type things I also drank some beer and ate a lot of excellent food. For that reason I want to do a few food and drink related posts, after all, this blog was initially intended to be mostly about food and drink.

I did eat Currywurst while I was there but seeing as I talk about it a lot anyway I'm not going to write about it. I'm going to stray away from my favourite food obsession (sausages) for the first post, despite eating a lot of them.

While at the supermarket in Weinheim I was dared by my friend (Adrian, who I was staying with) to try a German snack delicacy: mettbötchen. Never to shy away from a challenge (especially a food related one - I never learned my lesson from the orange eating contest...) I was keen to give it a go, I also wanted a tasty mid morning snack. Mettbrötchen in essence is a roll filled with seasoned raw pork mince and onion. At first it doesn't sound appetising (and I'm sure there's some "rule" about not eating raw pork) but once you have one in your hand the smell of fresh meat, onion and white pepper has you salivating. It's a pretty tasty snack. The seasoning on the pork and the onion create a really nice flavour together and the texture difference between the mince and the crunchy onion is great (different textures within food is something which I really like and feel is generally over looked by a lot of people).

As the mettbötchen was chilled I thought that it also made it quite refreshing. It was a pretty cold, wet and miserable day but I couldn't help think that on a hot sunny day a mettbötchen would really hit the spot. My main meat snack of choice is the steakbake. Served hot (well, at varying temperatures between "burn your face off" and "cold and soggy") it makes a good snack for Scotland's average weather conditions, but on a hot sunny day it just doesn't hit the mark. A mettbötchen on the other hand, with it's cold soft mince, would go down a treat. The question is: can I convince Greggs to start selling them. I'm thinking not, raw pork mince isn't going to go down well with your average customer. Which leaves me thinking that I might be able to find a friendly butcher to create one for me, but alas, they're unlikely to have the onion to go with it. I suppose I could start making my own, but it takes away the quick easy on-the-go appeal, that and my co-worker might start looking at me funny and talking behind my back when I nip down to the butchers for some raw pork at lunchtime.

If you're in Germany (or anywhere else - let me know where if in Edinburgh!) and you see mettbötchen then I strongly* recommend that you try one. The Germans have got it right once again.

* Disclaimer: I don't really know if eating raw pork is advised so if you've got a sensitive stomach you probably want to wimp out give mettbötchen a miss.

GPS on the Mini 9

The Mini 9 is such a great little device that it would seem a shame not to give it some sort of GPS functionality. My original thoughts were that it would be cool to hack in some sort of internal USB GPS dongle in a similar manner to this post. After a bit of thinking I started leaning away from internal GPS towards a detachable USB dongle which I could also use as a data logger when out walking/skiing/boarding or whatever.

As it happens my brother has recently bought just that; an i-gotu. The only problem was seeing if it would work with Ubuntu. After a quick bit of searching I found some instructions on getting it working as a usb dongle with gpsd. Putting it together into an easy little script gives you:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe navman
`echo -n "0x0df7 0x0900" > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/navman/new_id`
gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0

Using the device with tangoGPS I was able track my location really well.

The second part of the i-gotu functionality is to track your position while away from a computer and then download the GPS data from the device. This allows you to take it with you while out walking/skiing/snowboarding/whatever and then see where/when/how fast you were. It also would let you geo-tag any photos which you took easily. To download the tracks from the device I used igotu2gpx. It does pretty much what it says on the tin; lets you download tracks from the i-gotu in GPX format. I didn't have any trouble using it and was able to download my tracks and view them using Viking. Unfortunately at the moment igotu2gpx only lets you download tracks and view the device information; you can't change the settings or delete tracks. Ultimately this means that you would still need a windows box to use the software which comes with the device to get any decent amount of use out of it, and that's the main reason I haven't rushed out and bought one for myself.

Until I know that I can read and write to a device I need to keep looking before settling on a GPS solution. After playing around with the i-gotu I think that an external tracker is probably a better option than hacking an internal receiver.

Intrepid Ibex on the Dell Mini 9

I've not been particularly quick at following up my first post about my Dell Mini 9 so here's a quick post about installing a proper version of Ubuntu. Installing Ubuntu onto the Mini 9 really is a piece of cake. I followed this awesome how-to over on the ubuntumini blog - which is generally a excellent resource for all things Ubuntu Mini 9 related. The steps for installing Ubuntu are basically; make a bootable USB stick, install Ubuntu, fix the sound, install netbook remix (if you like) and then do whatever you want after that.

The main difference that I made to the install guide above was that I setup the SSD to be encrypted. I might just be paranoid but on a small portable device encryption seems like a no brainer. There is a slight overhead but compared to the issue of loosing something with potentially all your online banking and email passwords it's nothing. I did run into a few issues though. I chose to follow the installer's encryption setup, however I also wanted to install without a swap partition (thrashing the SSD aside turning over 4Gb (2*RAM size) of a 16Gb SSD to swap seemed a waste). I tried a few times but whenever I installed without a swap partition I couldn't unlock the drive. No great trouble in the end (other than a wasted couple of hours waiting on various installs) as encrypting the partitions meant that I was using LVM. LVM made it really easy remove the swap partition and then extend the root one using lvextend and resize2fs.

Google Streetview Comes to Edinburgh

Google have finally got around to putting up the streetview images captured in Edinburgh when the Google cars were out and about. It also looks like they've updated some of the satellite images as well. It's pretty neat seeing this come to somewhere which you know. Being able finding out exactly what part or side of the road shops are on will be handy.

I saw a couple of cars driving about when they were taking photos and it didn't take long to find myself on the streets of Edinburgh. Here's me and my brother cycling past it while it's stuck in traffic.

Dell Mini 9

I've been putting off buying a little netbook since Christmas and I finally snapped a couple of weeks ago. Dell were just about to launch their new 10 inch model and were offering £50 off the already ridiculously cheap Mini 9. A few weeks later a little package from Dell popped through my door (actually, it wasn't that little, I still had to open the door and sign for it). I opted for a fairly basic model with a 16Gb SSD, 0.3 mega-pixel webcam and no bluetooth. I also opted to pimp the RAM up to 2Gb, although unfortunately that's not something Dell offers; apparently something to do with Windows XP licences, even if you go for Ubuntu like I did. No great loss as it's not a hard thing to do and is probably cheaper to buy your own anyway.

I've decided that rather than writing a big long post I'll split up my thoughts on the mini into parts. All that means is I'll probably write a couple and then never get around to finishing the series off. Anyway, here's the first part.

Out of the Box
From Dell you can opt to have the Mini pre-installed with either Windows XP or Dell's own version of Ubuntu. I wasn't really bothered about either as I knew I wanted to put a full Ubuntu install onto it so I could tailor it to how I wanted it. I choose the Ubuntu option as I didn't want to pay extra for a Windows licence I'd never use, and I wanted to see what the Dell version of Ubuntu was like.

In the box from Dell you receive a few things including your Mini, the AC adapter, a drivers CD and a Dell Ubuntu CD. There's also the instruction manual and little guide on using Ubuntu which looked handy for people new to the OS. On the initial boot you're asked to setup some basic information (name, language, country etc) before being let loose on the Ubuntu desktop. Things generally didn't seem all that different to a standard Ubuntu install and the Dell desktop launcher looked pretty useful for getting to things quickly and easily. There's a lot of software installed by default as well as handy utilities for controlling wifi and bluetooth which you would otherwise have to install yourself. I didn't spend a huge amount of time playing around with the default install as I was eager to get cracking on setting it up how I wanted. One thing that I was immediately impressed by was how well the wifi worked. In the past I've always had some issues with setting up connections and dodgy signal strength but the Mini is totally rock solid. The number of additional networks which it picked up compared to mu old laptop was pretty amazing. I've also just realised that I don't know if the wired ethernet port works...

All in all, out of the box looks like it would work great for a normal use up to all the usual netbook type stuff. I've not seen Windows XP running on a Mini but I can imagine that the interface wouldn't lend itself nearly as well as Gnome can be configured to do. One thing which I did think was missing from the default install was out the box hard drive encryption. As a small portable computer losing (or having it nicked) it an increased possibility and it would be nice if more people were protected without them having to do anything. That's one of the reason why I had already decided I was going to wipe it and start again. Getting Ubuntu installed wasn't all plain sailing, but was good fun. Hopefully I'll post up with some details of the install soon.