Posts on nocalla.com

Calibrating brewing equipment

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hypothesis

As per my previous post about reviewing my red ale recipe, the question arose as to whether I was measuring my volumes correctly in the fermenter and kettle. I decided to test this and calibrate the markings on same.

Method

My good friend, the IKEA jug

I filled an IKEA 1L jug up to the 1L graduation and poured it into both the kettle and fermenter until each was full. After each 1L was added, a new graduation line was drawn on the side of the vessel using permanent marker.

Reviewing my red ale recipe

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Observation

I’ve done two batches of the red ale (which I wrote up one run-through of) and I’m pretty happy with the flavour, but one thing that has vexed me is the quantity. I ended up with about 17L of beer at the end of the last batch, where I was expecting something closer to 25L.

Hypothesis

I think that if I play with the Brewer’s Friend website, I can increase the final yield without altering the flavour too much.

Gig thoughts: Amanda Palmer - National Concert Hall, 28th May 2018

Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Setlist

Support by [[Andrew O’Neill]]

In My Mind
Map of Tasmania
Astronaut
Ampersand
Missed Me
The Killing Type
A Mother’s Confession
Mandy Goes to Med School
Drowning in the Sound
Vegemite (The Black Death)
Coin-Operated Boy
The Bed Song
Poem recital by [[Neil Gaiman]] - The Mushroom Hunters
Brick ([[Ben Folds]] cover)
Death Thing
Half Jack/Zombie ([[The Cranberries]]) mashup
The Ride
Ukulele Anthem

Thoughts

This gig was the Monday after the Abortion Referendum. Lots of positive vibes about the result.

Logo Removal: A success and a failure

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over-obtrusive branding bugs me. Especially if it’s on something that I ends up in my eyeline for extended periods. I decided to do something about two offenders - my mousemat and my headphones.

My mousepad is the Corepad Deskpad XXXL, which is a great product. It’s enormous, so you can spread mouse and keyboard into whatever position is most comfortable and use the mouse on lower sensitivity easily without falling off the desk. Two gripes with it - it shows dust up a lot and the logo is enormous. The first problem is fixed with cleaning and the second…well let’s see.

Foamcore Insert: Discworld Ankh-Morpork

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a major learning process and I knew I didn’t have the skills required starting out to do this one justice, so I saved it for game number 4! Discworld Ankh-Morpork (unfortunately out of print since the death of Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books) is one of my very favourite games (only one that gives it competition is Cosmic Encounter!) so I wanted to do right by it. After learning a bit about removable parts of inserts while doing my Codenames insert, and my Mysterium insert I decided I wanted to incorporate that idea into Ankh-Morpork too in order to speed up set-up and improve the use of table space.

Lessons from buying a house: The Mortgage

Sun, 19 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So You’re Going to Buy a House

Money is kinda important in the house-buying progress. You might be lucky enough to be able to buy a house with cash, but most people need a mortgage to do so.

Please note that I am in no way qualified to give financial advice, this is all based on my own understanding of the mortgage process and my own experiences of same. If you follow my advice and end up in debtor’s prison or indentured servitude, that is completely your own fault - absorb this information at your own risk!

Foamcore Insert: Codenames

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This one turned out extremely well! I improved my cutting technique, so I don’t have the rough edges of my Mysterium insert and I made the angles a bit less of a headache than in my Avalon insert.

The big strength about this insert is that it reduces setup time to…nearly zero. You take the card box and main insert out of the box, plonk them in front of the spymasters and lay out the cards. Makes for nice quick cleaning up too.

Foamcore Insert: The Resistance Avalon

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

No in-progress shots of this one, unfortunately. I learned a lot of lessons from my Mysterium insert and I’m much happier with the finish on this one, though I do have some unfortunate glue spill-over around some of the joins. The big challenge with this insert was the angles for the separators for the big cards - major heartache getting those right!

Inspiration from Mike Holzman over on Boardgamegeek, but I added the angled piece for the Lady of the Lake and Crown cards which allows them both to be seen at once. My core desire for this insert was that I wanted as many different components as possible to be visible at once to allow for easy grabbing.

Foamcore Insert: Mysterium

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Mysterium is a very enjoyable cooperative game that combines Cluedo with…Pictionary? One player is the ghost and gives clues to the other players about each player’s unique combination of murderer, location, and weapon to solve the crime. The ghost player cannot speak though - they must give their clues by presenting the other players with “vision” cards. These cards are super trippy and oblique. It’s a fun game and always great to get to the table.

New obsession: foamcore boardgame inserts

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Some boardgames are a pain to set up with multiple bags of tokens to hand out to players, draw decks to separate out and place around the board, or pieces to assemble - all of this slows down the amount of time it takes for the game to get from the box to the table (and vice versa when clearing up). As a means of speeding up game setup, I’ve been looking into making custom inserts for board games.

Firewatch

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This game is beautiful.

I could leave the review at that and it would almost be enough - the star player is the environment (of course, as you barely see another human for the duration of the game) with its crisp colours, sunset-illuminated vistas, and its unforgiving paths. That said, there’s beauty in the script too, with an introduction that crushes your feelings to a pulp before you do anything but click a few times and a constant warm dialogue between the protaganist and the co-worker in the neighbouring tower.

Brewing an Irish Red Ale - Bottling Day

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After two weeks in the fermenter, it was time to bottle the Irish Red Ale. My checklist is below.

Bottling Workflow

Wash the following with standard detergent:
- Bottling bucket
- Siphon tube
- Filling tube
- Bottlecaps
- Spigot
- Paddle
- Thermometer
- 500ml bottles (31)
Wash the following using VWP:
- Filling tube
- Siphon tube
- Bottlecaps
- Spigot
- Paddle
- Trial jar (tall pint glass in this case)
- Hydrometer
- Thermometer
- Bottling bucket
- 500ml bottles (31)
Assemble bottling bucket
Attach tubing to fermenter spigot

Brewing an Irish Red Ale - Brew day

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The ingredients from my ingredient shopping arrived really quickly - I placed the order on Thursday at 17:30 and they arrived on Saturday. Impressive work from The Homebrew Company!

I put together the workflow below and printed it out so I’d have something to follow along with on brew day. It really helped pinpoint things to focus on and times when I’d be able to prepare the next step while waiting for target temperatures.

Brewing an Irish Red Ale - Ingredient Shopping

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now - time for a change!

I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…).

Clearing the Backlog #2: Deponia Doomsday & Tower of Guns

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Since the last entry on the backlog, I’ve sunk a few more hours into Sheltered. It grew on me after a while, with the slog of getting resources being quite gripping. I accidentally overcrowded my shelter and killed half the posse through suffocation though - didn’t realise the oxygen filtration system wouldn’t keep up! An enjoyable game, but think I’ve had my fill of it.

Onto the next game…

Deponia Doomsday

Boardgame Night: Codenames & Catan 5-6 Player Expansion

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group.

In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing - e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too - there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total.

Clearing the Backlog #1: Action Henk, Train Valley & Sheltered

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I settled in for a wet Friday evening at home alone and cleared a few games from the list…with mixed results.

Some miscellaneous items were on the list that I had actually played, but missed with my initial categorisation - an easy few points gained!

Action Henk

This was surprisingly fun. I honestly thought it would be awful, going by first impressions from the store page. It’s a pleasantly challenging racing game involving a corpulent action figure who can slide on his bum. You see what I mean about the first impressions now, I hope. The online multiplayer didn’t work so well - I think it has a limited player base - but the single player mode was engaging enough that my 67 minutes in game went by without me noticing it. I didn’t finish the single-player mode, but enjoyed what I played of it.

The Game Backlog

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have quite a large [[Steam]] game collection. 231 games. A ludicrous amount of games.

As well as the games I’ve anticipated and obsessed over, I have random one-offs that were on sale, games that were included in various bundles, and freebies. Some of the ones I got on sale have been played less than the ones I got for free. I’d go so far as to say that most of the games in my Steam library are unplayed (I then went and checked - not the majority, but a pretty hefty sum: 92 out of 231). This really only hit home recently, as I decided to reorganise the categories in the game library and found myself completely at a loss about certain games.

My Computer (2016)

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently upgraded my computer build, replacing the graphics card, CPU, CPU cooler, RAM, and motherboard (rig details at the bottom of the post).

The goal is to be able to hit some high graphics settings in AAA games going forward.

So far, it’s working very well, though I haven’t stretched it yet really. I’ve played Arkham Knight without any performance issues, but nothing more current. I’m looking into overclocking, since it’s apparently very feasible with this system. The Asus motherboard has a built-in utility for overclocking, but I’m scared of taking the plunge - I’ll do some more reading before risking exploding my shiny new computer parts.

Test Post - Please Ignore

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

First blog post! Thanks for joining me on a journey into a random grab-bag of my thoughts. I intend mostly to use this site as a catch-all commonplace book for whatever I’m currently obsessed with. Enjoy the ride.