‘Guru Brew Two’ has been bottled, and as with anything you do a second time, it went without a hitch. I knew what I was doing and now that my brewing operation has been migrated to the shed, it makes for a perfect man-cave. If I dragged a stool out there I could have be blogging this from there right now.
These babies will sit quietly for the next few weeks while we’re on holiday – I’ll have to instruct our house sitter to not sample the delights!
After a successful first attempt, ‘Guru Brew Two’ is underway. I’ve managed to secure a small fridge (thanks Milkie & Brownie) which I am using for insulation purposes and have set up my operation in my shed. I’m using a 20 watt lightbulb and a thermostat to regulate the temperature and I have it sitting at about 25 degrees. When demand calls for it, the fridge can be used to keep the beer cool!
It will be interesting to see how this one goes. Once this brew is out of the way I might try a stout.
I happened to wander outside tonight at about 11:15pm and gazed up at the night sky. Right there in my field of view was a spray of comet dust stretching across the sky. Unfortunately it was too dark for my camera to get a hold of anything useful, but there’s plenty of pics on Flickr.
From the nucleus to the end of the visible tail was about a hand’s length when you hold your arm out towards the sky. It’s supposed to be viewable for quite a while yet so get out there and have a squiz!
This bash script should create a .mp3 file for all .wma files in the current directory. Note that you need mplayer and lame installed – a ‘sudo apt-get install lame mplayer’ should sort that out for you. Remember to chmod +x convert.sh your script to run it.
— convert.sh —
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "$i" && lame -m s temp.wav -o "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3" ; done
rm temp.wav
Note that the encoded MP3′s will have no ID tags on them. I’ll try to work that out when I’m more awake … Zzzzz …
Today Bob, Pete and I went on the Speights Brewery tour, followed by a lunch at the Speights Ale House. A tip for locals – if you are planning on going on the tour, visit the office first (on Rattray St) and sign up for the loyalty scheme. It doesn’t cost anything and you (as the loyalty card holder) get in for free when you take someone else.
A well thought out plan would be to combine loyalty card holders to get a group of people in for half price 
When we were in the UK, Linda bought me a Firebird Outlaw Radio Controlled Glider as a birthday present. It was great and it flew really well. The aerial came off it so I ended up leaving it behind with a RC enthusiast, who managed to fix it and has it flying in his fleet.
I happened to see the exact same model at Dick Smith Electronics over a year ago, and so I forked out the $80 for it (it was discounted as it had been repaired and resold), flew it once and then stuck it in the cupboard. I remembered it the other day and since the weather has fined up a little now, I decided to take it up to the park for a fly.
This weekend I flew it, but the battery in the handset was weak and it ran out of grunt while I had the glider very high (about 200ft I guess). As a result, the high wind up there carried it quite a distance. Fortunately I had my car with me so I got in it and chased after it. Thankfully I managed to get it back!
Tonight I’ve just got back from another flying session – there was hardly a breath of wind at ground level, although higher up there was a light breeze, perfect for gliding. I have a little helicopter doo-hicky thing that you can fling up into the sky with a rubber band and it comes back down to earth like a sycamore seed. This was great for checking to see if there was any wind higher up.
Now all I have to do is find someone locally who I can buy some more sets of batteries off – the charge in these packs is supposed to last for 10 minutes, but you can extend that if there is a bit of wind by playing around on the gusts.
Uncategorized | GuruBob | 
January 29, 2007 9:03 pm | 
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