Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!
This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.
First Snow
Isn’t it gorgeous?
Posted on Nov 24, 2008 - 03:23 PM Categories: Grand Rapids, Local, Photoblogread more | 0 comments
Using the Vacu Vin Wine Vacuum to Keep Coffee Beans Fresh
I had a (retrospectively quite obvious) brain storm the other day that I wish I had had several years ago. You can use the Vacu Vin wine preservation system to keep coffee beans fresh too. It’s awesome.
Basically, Vacu Vin is a Dutch company that came up with an easy to use vacuum apparatus that sucks the air out of partially-empty bottles of wine. The oxygen in air oxidizes and acidifies the wine, and makes it turn sour. With most of the oxygen removed, wine stays fresh for much longer. I’ve had a Vacu Vin vacuum pump thing for a little while now, and it’s great - no longer am I forced to drink a full bottle of wine in one sitting, just so it doesn’t go bad.
My brainstorm was: you can do the same thing with coffee.
- Wash out and dry an empty bottle of wine. The type of wine doesn’t matter, but the color of the bottle does: the darker the glass, the less light can get in to spoil the beans. Alternately, keep your coffee in a dark kitchen cabinet. Make sure the bottle is completely dry on the inside - you don’t want water in there, letting you coffee beens rot.
- Make or find a suitable funnel. If you already have a funnel with a wide-enough mouth for coffee beans to easily fit through, then great. If you don’t, I would advise making one for yourself. The easiest way to do it is to cut the top off of an empty plastic bottle. I used a Coke bottle, and it worked great.
- Using the funnel that you’ve made or bought, pour the coffee beans in to the empty bottle. A regular-sized wine bottle will hold 750ml of coffee beans, or about one pound.
- Use the Vacu Vin pump and stopper to suck all of the air out of the wine bottle. It’ll take a couple strokes, depending on how many beans are in there; you know you’re done when the stopper makes a clicking sound.
That is pretty much it. I had been keeping my coffee beans in a clear semi-airtight plastic jar for a long time, and I think this will keep them a lot more fresh than with my previous system.
Photos
This is the vacuum-sealed bottle, with beans.
This is the funnel I made. I used a steak knife to cut the plastic bottle, so it’s not very nice-looking, but it does work well.
This is the Vacu Vin stopper and pump. You can get them on Amazon or any type of “foodie” store.
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Foosball Tournament
My friend Josh and I entered a foosball tournament Tuesday. It was great fun, but we both got totally smoked. Josh and I were, I think, the best players among our friends in college, but these guys (and one woman) are on a completely different level. Some of them play competitively, in tournaments around the country.
Anyway, here’s a YouTube video of what we were up against: the snake shot. It’s the fastest of the foosball shots, and pros can get it moving at up to 35 miles per hour.
I think between us, we blocked two or three of those shots the whole night.
Posted on Nov 21, 2008 - 05:10 PM Categories: Friends, Personal, Videosread more | 1 comments
After the Wedding
This photo is from a week ago today. My wife’s brother got married, and we went to Pittsburgh, PA for the wedding. I took this photo after the reception, when the bride, Julie, came back to the house to recuperate a little before heading out for the night.
I think it really expresses the joy, the weariness, and the “phew” of the wedding day.
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Pitchfork 0.5.5 MPD Client Mirror
I’ve used Pitchfork MPD Client to listen to music for a long time. It’s a frontend to the media server I keep in the cabinet underneath the TV, and lets Lauren and I control what music is played in the house. It’s nice because it’s easy to use, and web-accessible.
Anyway, I was doing a reinstall recently, and found that the main Pitchfork website, http://pitchfork.remiss.org, was down, and had been down for a little while.
I was able to find a mirrored version of the install package, and so I’m mirroring it here: http://lukemcreynolds.com/files/pitchfork-0.5.5.tar.bz2.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone. If you need some help installing it or have any questions, leave a note in the comments.
Posted on Nov 06, 2008 - 10:22 PM Categories: Geekread more | 7 comments
Some Great Engrish
I bought a really cheap outdoor thermometer from Woot a couple weeks ago, and it came in the mail today. The thermometer itself seems like it’ll do the job pretty well, but I loved the Engrish used for the instructions on the back. I scanned the back of the package that it came in: you can check it out below. (Click the picture for a larger version.)
My my favorite lines are in the “Care and maintain” category: “This product is rainproof but don’t put into the pool” and “UV resistance use for a period of time the outlook will little faded”. I also like “No electric wave pollution”, next to the little photo on the right. I really have no idea what that means.
Posted on Nov 06, 2008 - 03:35 AM Categories: Geek, Personalread more | 0 comments
Barack Obama Is The New President of the United States, and I Could Not Be Happier
This is just amazing. This is the type of thing that we’ll be telling our grandchildren about in the years to come. (Especially if you were lucky enough - as I was not - to be in Grant Park, Chicago last night.)
For me, there are three things about this that make me extremely happy, almost giddy.
- America’s international stature: renewed For a long time, when I was overseas, I felt apologetic about being an American. I was embarrassed by my president and ashamed for my country’s actions. At the time, during George W. Bush’s terms in office, my country’s president and actions reflected poorly upon me. I have confidence that that will no longer be the case with an Obama presidency.
- Barack Obama is smart Not only was he the president of the Harvard law Review, but he taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. As a former law student, I feel I know a little bit about how hard that is to do, but how important it is as well. The man fully understands the Constitution, and he understands the historical importance of the the President in interpreting it. For once, it seems, we’ll have a President and (hopefully) a Cabinet that will respect the Constitution, because they know it, understand it, and love it. That’s amazing.
- Everything else He’s 50-some years old, but he plays basketball like a champ. We’ll have two little kids in the White House again. Children growing up in foreign countries will see the American president on TV and think, “That man looks just like me.” Michelle Obama is one of the classiest ladies I’ve seen, period. He’s an actual, practicing Christian, who believes that God calls us to take care of the poor. The list goes on and on…
Thank you America, and may God bless Barack Obama.
Posted on Nov 05, 2008 - 02:02 PM Categories: Personal, Politicalread more | 0 comments
YourFonts.com is Sweet
So, I checked out YourFonts.com today. YourFonts.com lets you make a font out of your own handwriting. The process is easy: you download a template, write all the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation in your own handwriting, on the printed-out template, and then scan the template. The template that I filled out looks like this:
Then, you upload the scanned image of your template to yourfonts.com, and they’ll make a font out of your handwriting. I did the whole thing in about 15 minutes - it’s way faster than I thought it would be. Then, you just install your font. Below are some screenshots of my desktop, etc. using my own handwriting.
This is my desktop - almost all the text uses my own font now. Click for a larger image, 1680x1050 pixels.
This is how the font integrates with Dolphin in KDE 4.1.
My handwriting isn’t particularly special - it’s rather childish, actually - but it’s always fun to be able to personalize things. I’m not sure if I’ll keep my KDE McReynolds-ified or not for the long term, but it’s certainly a lot of fun for the short term. 
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ExpressionEngine Google Sitemaps
I had a little bit of trouble making a sitemap for Google for this page. The ExpressionEngine tutorials didn’t seem to make much sense to me, for some reason. Eventually, I stumbled on to the official sitemap specification at sitemaps.org. Once I read through that, everything made a lot more sense.
Anyway, here’s what I put in my EE template to produce my Google sitemap. You can see its results by going to http://lukemcreynolds.com/sitemapgroup/. If you look at the source, you’ll see that it’s all legit XML.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>{homepage}</loc>
<lastmod>{exp:stats}{last_entry_date format="{DATE_W3C}"}{/exp:stats}</lastmod>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="front_blog" limit="100"
disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"
rdf="off" dynamic="off" status="Open"}
<url>
<loc>{homepage}content/{url_title}</loc>
<lastmod>{gmt_edit_date format="{DATE_W3C}"}</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
{/exp:weblog:entries}
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="static_pages" limit="500" disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"
rdf="off" dynamic="off" status="Open"}
<url>
<loc>{homepage}static/{url_title}</loc>
<lastmod>{gmt_edit_date format="{DATE_W3C}"}</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
{/exp:weblog:entries}
</urlset>
This is in the “index” template of the “sitemapgroup” template group. If you’re going to be using this for yourself, remember to set the template type as XML.
Incidentally, I submitted this site’s RSS feed to Google, as well. Now, whenever I post a new article, Google is automatically notified. Isn’t that convenient?
Let me know by e-mail or in the comments if you find any errors or optimizations for this.
EDIT 1/7/2009: I’ve updated this sitemap to work with EE’s Pages module. (This one works with EE Core’s Tome module.) ExpressionEngine Google Sitemaps Using the Pages Module
Posted on Oct 18, 2008 - 06:01 PM Categories: ExpressionEngine, Geekread more | 0 comments
New Project: Pinstripe Hoodie
Lauren and I went to Detroit this weekend. While hanging out in Royal Oak, we went in to Incognito, a vintage-y/indie-y boutique. They had a lot of great stuff - Lauren bought a pair of earrings - but nothing really caught my eye. That is, until I found an awesome pinstripe hoodie. It was slick as all get out, and cost approximately four times more than I would actually pay. Here are two photos of the hoodie, taken from 80’s Purple.com. (The one I saw was navy instead of black or grey, however.)
So, I was bummed: no sweet hooded suit sweatshirt for me.
Then, it occurred to me: I’ve got several semi-crappy suits and suit coats around. I’ve been collecting them, on and off, for several years, shopping at Goodwills and St. Vincent DePauls and Salvation Armies and thrift stores around the United States. A matching suit/coat combo usually runs $10 or less. Why don’t I just make my own pinstripe hoodie?
I’m going to. I have no previous sartorial experience in the least, but I’m motivated, and two of my friends have sewing machines. It’s going to happen.
Posted on Oct 15, 2008 - 06:25 PM Categories: Art, Hoodie, Personalread more | 0 comments
