Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve setup a page dedicated to tracking the home brewed beer I make. The link to view it is in the page navigation at the top of my blog. I plan to add in sub pages for each beer I brew that provides more detailed information including recipes and ingredients, etc as I have time so be sure to check back for updates.
Today marked two significant changes which affected my little bubble within the gigantic world of open source. Though one of them only affected me and the other affected everyone else in the KDE community. So let’s start with the more important one…
I hope you didn’t think I was going to lead with the thing that only affected me? No no…I’m talking about the re-branding announcement. Though from everything I have noticed so far (Dot article comments, follow up blog posts, etc) I think most of what was outlined comes as no surprise to the community. It seems many of us already felt that KDE was the community all along anyways. I think this is a great step forward for us all with regards to helping better communicate who we are and what we create. Plus I’m sure it will make for a great drinking game of some sort at Camp KDE…every time you slip and use an old phrase like “K Desktop environment” or refer to our upcoming software compilation as just “KDE 4.4″ you have to take a drink? I dunno, we’ll come up with something 
As for part 2 of this post, the other thing that happened today was that I finally got around to upgrading my home desktop computer to Kubuntu 9.10. Unfortunately things didn’t go 100% smoothly so I wanted to share a quick fix in case anyone else runs into this. The upgrade process seemed to go fine until the reboot. But after restarting my machine I was greeted with a plain black screen. It appears this is due to some issue with Nvidia proprietary drivers not working right off the bat from an upgrade. To get the Plasma Desktop working again I simply had to:
Now I’m back to my normal graphical login screen. It’s getting late so I will probably have to figure out how to re-enable the Nvidia drivers in the morning. I assume I should be able to just go into the KMenu -> Applications -> System -> Hardware Drivers and re-enable them. If nothing else this has kept me from wasting too much time playing video games for a day or two haha.
Not too long ago I wrote a blog entry about brewing beer, more precisely, about making extreme beer. The book I discussed in this entry was written by Sam Calagione, owner of the very popular Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, and goes into great detail about how to take the centuries old boring beer recipes out there and give them a twist to make something much more unique and interesting.
Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (right)
One of the cool things about the book is that he gives away the recipes for several of their most popular beers to let home brewers could try their hand at making them…so for once we’re talking about “free as in speech” as it relates to beer
Last night I was out with some friends grabbing dinner before going to a concert and we stopped at a craft beer bar in DC. You’d never guess who happened to be there…. (ok actually you probably know already). Sure enough Sam was there promoting a new beer from Dogfish Head called “Black Thai”. Talk about an extreme beer…this is an Imperial Stout flavored with Thai basil, edamame and blackberries that clocks in at a 9% ABV. I think I caught him right as he was delivering a round to his friends and family but he was kind enough to stop for a quick picture anyways.
First of all I just wanted to say…
Second, I’d like to let everyone know that the number of people registered to attend grew by over 17 people in the last week alone! I’d like to think this is due to some increased KDE-Promo efforts, but the most important part is that people come regardless of how they learn about the event. Make sure you go register at http://camp.kde.org to come join us.
Along those lines, if you’re reading this we need your help. The Americas are vastly under represented within the KDE project. At the promo sprint Cornelius challenged us to get 100 people from the Americas to attend Camp KDE. I believe we can achieve this goal but it won’t happen unless we get the word out to people living in these countries. So if you know anyone living in the western hemisphere please remind them of this event.
Speaking of spreading the word, have you seen the Dot post about the Camp KDE “Be Free” Contest? This is a great opportunity for people to share their KDE story with the community. What are you waiting for? Submit your entry today (and tell your friends to do the same!) and win a free trip to come join us in sunny California!
Well hello there KDE community, my name is Justin Kirby and thanks to Lydia I’ve managed to get my blog added to Planet KDE. I suppose I should spend a minute telling you who I am and what I’m doing. In the day time I work for a contractor that provides bioinformatics support to the Cancer Imaging Program which is a part of the United States Government’s Health and Human Services division. Mostly I help them with utilizing some open source tools developed by the Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) to collect interesting sets of medical images to help researchers find better ways to find and cure cancer. Very interesting stuff and quite rewarding to know that the work we do eventually helps improve the lives of so many people.
Switching topics, I’ve been using KDE for a while and as some folks already know I am married to one of the e.V. board members so KDE is often the subject of conversation around our house. I’ve been to a few face to face meetings (KDE 4.0 release event and GCDS) as an end user but a few months ago I finally decided I needed to find a way to contribute. I had considered doing this many times in the past but my lack of programming knowledge always deterred me. As it turns out, I’ve since found that you don’t have to know a thing about writing software to be a KDE contributor.
I fired off an email to the KDE Promo team on their mailing list asking how I could get involved there, hoping that since I didn’t know how to code maybe I could help promote the great work the developers are doing. The team responded and put me to work right away. Jos gave me some ideas for Dot articles and before I knew it I had published something. I also started working on cleaning up the number of unused listservs floating around the mailman site but that’s not quite done yet. Hopefully I’ll be bugging the moderators of the lists that seem to be dead sometime soon to see if they agree that their list is no longer needed.
Now I find myself in Stuttgart, Germany at the Promo Sprint. It’s been great fun and we’ve kept insanely busy since arrival. Troy and Stu covered most of the activities in blog posts for the first two days, but today we spent a great deal of time debating the rebranding topic and are very close to having formal documents ready now outlining these new guidelines and brand mappings. We also started building some mockups of the KDE web site redesign and continued working on our informational conference handout materials. Last but not least we had a very interesting discussion about finding ways to bring in even more new contributors to the KDE community. One of the items that came out of that was an idea to send regular updates about “junior jobs” opportunities on the Dot. If anyone out there has any tasks they’d like help with that might be well suited to a potential new contributor please let me know and we’ll help you spread the word!
Last night I finished a book called “Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home” by Sam Calagione. Sam is the owner of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. They have a couple different restaurant/brewpubs around our area and I’ve tried many of their beers so I am quite sure the guy knows what he’s talking about.
Anyhow, “extreme brewing” is the idea of taking standard types of recipes for making beer and then twisting them in some direction that deviates from tradition. In most cases it seems to be adding massive amounts of additional malts or sugars to increase the ABV or dryhopping your beer with insane amounts of hops but the book also suggests experimenting with non-traditional ingredients to add new flavors as well. Anything from adding cinnamon to kiwis to lemongrass and well…you get the idea. The more unusual and extreme the better!
I feel like even before I read the book I had an itch for this type of thing. I’ve always been interested in high gravity beers ever since I tasted my first Belgian beer and even back when I was getting in trouble for sneaking beers from my parents basement during high school I never really did care for the taste of mainstream American beers like Coors, Miller, etc.
So now finally I get to start to experiment for myself. The process is already underway in one of my recent brews. I bought a Black Ale Kit from Austin Homebrew Supply and then added a whiskey soaked vanilla bean to it. The whiskey helps pull out the vanilla flavor from the bean and also adds a smokey flavor of its own. It’s aging in the secondary fermenter as I type this and should be ready to bottle in a week or so. I also just ordered AHS’s American IPA kit, but purchased an extra ounce of Yakima Golding hops for dryhopping and am also going to try adding in an extra half pound of brown sugar to up the gravity a bit. On the less extreme side of things I’ve also got a holiday spiced ale that’s almost ready. Or maybe it was kind of extreme by default? It’s got spices like orange peels and cinnamon in it.
I sense an awesome winter season of tasty home brews ahead…if only I had a fire place to hang out in front of or something. Or maybe I can achieve that by sharing the beer with friends who have one? Any takers?
I’ve set out on a mission recently to be fully capable of performing all my work duties via Kubuntu. While it seemed totally possible at first I’ve come to realize there are certain tasks I’m responsible for where I can’t get by without Windows. In any case, that hasn’t stopped me completely as KRDC has been an easy way to get access to a Windows environment in those scenarios where I need it. But one thing has been a real pain until today, and that has been the inability to print to my local printer from these remote sessions. After some googling (with little success) and reading RDesktop MAN pages (KRDC uses this for RDP connections) I got it all figured out though. Here are the steps in case you ever find yourself needing this functionality:
That’s it! Super easy. If you are unsure of the name of your printer (which I wasn’t to start out) you can find that by going to the KMenu, choosing System Settings, hitting the Advanced tab, and then the Printer Configuration icon towards the bottom. Your printer’s name will be listed under the Local Printers line in the left window.
In a few weeks KDE will be hosting a sprint in Stuttgart, Germany. The sprint is going to be dedicated towards marketing, promotion and improving our booth setups at conferences. This will be my first real sprint as a participant so I’m pretty excited to dive in and see what I can do to help as well as get to know some of the other people in the community. The full agenda is posted on the techbase wiki.
Automatic syncing of Gmail Contacts and Calendars on the iPhone has been possible for some time now, and is a fantastic feature. I’ve always got my iPhone with me and it’s insanely nice to be able to add and remove new contacts or events via my phone on the go. However it always bugged me that you couldn’t get “push” notification of email over this same Active Sync/Exchange connection. I’ve been leaving my iPhone set to check for new messages every half hour until now, but apparently Google has recently added the ability to sync Email as well! I guess if I was more of an iPhone news junky I’d have found out three weeks ago, but I just noticed this morning when Google posted a link to their blog entry about it on the Gmail home page.
Wedding Fireworks taken by Katie B.
Well after an absolutely amazing wedding and honeymoon it’s now time to return to reality and get back to the grind. Here’s what’s on my plate.
Regarding KDE activities my next tasks are to draft a notification email to send to KDE list admins/moderators to inform them of potentially inactive lists we’re considering shutting down. I’m also investigating attending the upcoming Marketing/Promo sprint to be held somewhere in Germany, likely around mid-November. That should be loads of fun and a great way to get to know that group of people better.
In the world of beer brewing I’ve got a lot going on right now. I just started drinking a brown ale that I made. Unfortuantely some corners that I cut while brewing that night seriously degraded the quality. I will probably end up dumping most of this batch. Fortunately I went to a brewing party not long after I made the brown ale so I now have 4 different varieties of beer nearly ready for consumption. One is a german ale (which is what I contributed on brew day). Then 3 other buddies of mine also brewed stuff…a scottish ale, a smoked porter, and a pumpkin ale. We all mixed and matched after bottling so everyone has some of all 4 batches. I’m excited to start trying them all out in the coming weeks. Last but not least, my brother expressed some interest recently about brewing so for his birthday I am hooking him up with some equipment for brewing. I think that brings the number of people that I’ve helped rope into taking up this hobby to 3 now
