Losing Steam?

I am looking at updating and slight revisions on pour over brewing methodology, looking at accurately using the proper amount of water the following question seemed applicable;

If I bring 20 ounces of water (2.5 cups) to boil in a kettle, and promptly remove it from the heat, is the amount of water lost (by volume/mass) a negligible quantity?

To be more precise about my own intent for this knowledge; if a pour over guide for coffee brewing is indicating that there should be twenty ounces of water at 195-205'f, should I go through the steps of weighing out twenty ounces of was-just-boiling water, or will the displacement of water to steam be relatively non-impacting of the coffee extraction and final cup.

What are the various ways in which more steam will be displaced, and how can I conserve mass to minimize variability and improve consistency extraction to extraction?

One of the prolific mods, rumtscho♦, came to answer with;

Hario Buono Kettle

This depends on the time you need to bring it to boil (water evaporates long before it starts boiling), the surface area of the water, and your definition of "negligible". Best test it with your own kettle.

My kettle needed 2.5 minutes for boiling it, and lost 11 g out of 560, not quite half an ounce. It will probably lose some more while cooling. If you use an open kettle, a very wide kettle, or heat the kettle slowly, you will lose more.

This is good to know, and answered my question without saying it. A commenter below added the following, which made all the difference;

In rumtscho's measurement they lost about 2% of the volume - I expect based on the many factors involved this may vary from <1% to 5% or so. Even 5% water loss should not be enough to substantially affect the taste of the coffee unless your taste is very sensitive, but you can feel free to add 2% if you want to get a bit closer to the target (so 20.4 oz). – Derrick Coetzee

Insofar as I am not brewing coffee with lasers or thermal spectrometers, I'm a glad to know that this is a dead-end for concerning myself with revisions.

Update on 6:32AM by mfg

Worried about water loss and pouring the right amount? Brew too much, thus displacing air in the kettle and preserving thermal insulation. Pour into a twenty ounce container. The end.

Why, How To - Resources for Squarespace export to Wordpress

So I will be trying out a Wordpress install of nomfg.com. I've currently got a nomfg.wp landing page at mfg.wpengine.com. We will see how this goes. Squarespace offers numerous options for importing, and numerous ones for export as well.

That is, numerous as in for as many journals as you have woven together to make a page, you will also need to do a discrete export thereof. And you will lose you pictures. And you will lose your tags. Did you use Squarespace plugins? Gone.

Oh well. I am not alone in this. Mind you, this is not a general complaint about Squarespace. As every resource I've found sings in concert; Squarespace is a great personal blogging platform and a great wysiwig hosting/CMS for a small site that isn't meant to have special needs. If you have a question, they have 24/7 support with 1 hour turnaround times; often faster, and with email and dashboard alerts. I've never experienced such a friendly, dedicated support staff who are actually interested in feature requests.

But if you keep going, if you keep blogging, and you hit that three year mark, you're going to see the limitations of wysiwig. Squarespace is great for an on-rails web building experience where you're fenced in to make sure you can do a lot but without allowing you to bork your site. That said, if you can't bork it, you probably can't do much else either. Eventually, you need to jump the rails and start building.

I am going to do that. WPEngine is offering a free hosting package for attending Wordcamp Columbus 2012, and I am taking them up on their offer. Please bear with me as I try to make the transition from Squarespace to Wordpress. I may not stay there; I may go after Drupal or some other set up, but I want to give the others a try.

So to start building, and hopefully not from scratch, here are some resources I am hoping to start with;

• Moving from Squarespace to Wordpress - Rob Pickering - A discussion of the Why and the How
• How to Import from Squarespace into Wordpress - Greg Freeman - A how to with Wordpress plugin to get the images from the sqsp site to wp

Weekend = @Wordcampcbus 2012

Woot! I won a ticket to Wordcamp 2012 here in good ol' Columbus:

@WordCampCbus: @mfgink A local foodie who knows what StackExchange is? You're definitely in. Email your name columbus at wordcamp dot org for your ticket!

I won some books twice in a stack exchange sweepstakes, and nomfg.com has given me a good place to lay down my thoughts and cooking exploits (and gave my partner a good method of thoroughly vetting me); but I guess I never saw them as doing much more together than cross-pollinating each other. Maybe I should have been thinking bigger

I feel bad about my winning tweet;

mfgink: @wordcampcbus I need a ticket so I can ditch squarespace!

I love Squarespace, and it has been a great home for awhile. But I'm looking to up my skill set, and I'd like to learn some CMSs that you can build with (I've tried with Drupal on a local WAMP install to some extent, but haven't had a good chance to get too much done other than learning about cron and how it can break your shit if you're dumb like me). Squarespace as a hosting/CMS solution is great if it works for you, and at ten bucks per month (what the hell about that recent hike from eight?) for a reliable service with responsive customer support and simple, detailed analytics they've been a great home for the past three years. Better than tumblr anyway.

The Wordcamp sessions and schedule look really good, in light of my n00bishness to the whole thing. They've got their advanced sessions for Marketing, Power Users, and Devs; and they've got a Beginner track for n0bby types like squishy little me! Now my partner will be at the not squishy, not-for-the-faint-of-heart sessions. 

Anyway, looking forward to my second camp (the first having been BaconCamp 2011). I'm going to get started over on mfg.wpengine.cm ; see what I can see in the next 24 hours. Tickets are $40 and you get $20 loaded on a food card, and some kind of wpengine hosting plan for life.

Anyway, if you're interested in expanding how you blog, and you're near the 614, check it out;

Backlinking support for @femfreq - Just mean ol' link-bombing #funwithseo

Backlinking Campaign for Anita Sarkeesian references, if you have any good links, bomb the comments:

• Feminist Frequency - About
• Kickstarter - "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games"
• Wired - "Feminist Take on Games Draws Crude Ridicule, Massive Support"

I'm not generally a big fan of twitter or other social media hawking of anything of value, in particular my opinion. So rather than participate directly in the screaming and parsing and advocating and paternalism, here's a dose of my normal kind of broad support. Similar to Santorum Awareness Day, just as you should know what Santorum is (it might save your life), you should get a real feel for what this whole divisiveness was about.

I chose an explanation of Ms. Sarkeesian's primary project (tropes vs. women, etc), the Kickstarter that kick started it all (totally funded), and a brief summary of the events since. Please note that it's not only important to straighten out and shore up Google, but it's important to shine a light on the actual work she's been doing.

I encourage any readers (wherever they may; twitter, facebook, blogs, whatever) to backlink to the first two and third unless you find better articles or ones that are better suited to the way you support her work and her steadfastness.

we can do better than thisComment Moderation is my policy (please no bullshit about Nike Air Maxes, Frank Ocean, or UFC 148), but I should be all over it today;

• If you find good links to summaries, post them in the comments!
• If you know of a great collection of resources that support the work of elucidating tropes, post them in the comments!
• Feel like putting a youtube embed of femfrequency in the comments? I think they support that, if not link to it!
• So I'm sure my site isn't big enough to do all the lifting, is yours? Post a comment to your blog if you're doing a backlinking effort! (Just include a femfreq link as well for your cert)

Not a big fan of ol' factory reset of my @HTC Evo 3D to fix sync

Seems unnecessary to have to factory reset a phone to fix a problem that arose from nowhere

I have to say after about ten months of ownership that I am a big fan of my HTC Evo 3D. Yes, the 3D screen is gimmicky and not too useful, but the phone is a great piece on its own and fixed a lot of the previous generation of Evo problems.

The Evo is snappy, has plenty of memory in spite of all the garbage Sprint ships it with, and it has yet to blink with any form of heavy lifting. It has good hardware and specs and the HTC interface you either hate or love and hate (the home screen dock at the bottom has a perma customize button, a feature duplicated in the home menu or by long-press on the home screen; and it can't be reconfigured despite users' outcry).

Anyway, I recently had to contact Sprint due to a week or two of SMS fails and have them reset my position on the network. During that time, my sync functionality with my primary google account (the one the phone uses for the market and mail and chat and basically any google app, including my favorite, Reader).

Initially I thought the account had been hacked. Logging in to google, though, the password was correct and the user name. When I went to the accounts screen, it said there were troubles with HTC Sync and it was unavailable. So I installed the desktop app to see if I could get it working, no dice. When I contacted Sprint to reset me on the network to fix the SMS issue, they informed me that there were no knowledge base issues with Sync and they couldn't help me.

When I asked to verify that my insurance was still active, I was informed that the primary account holder (yes, I'm n a family plan with my mom) had removed it last November, even though they told her I still had it last month. So I mentioned bringing it into the store and they said they wouldn't be able to help me. I can't see how this wasn't a defect of the phone, but according to them it wasn't their problem. It probably wasn't?

Anyway, that issue was in addition to a shorty headphone jack that started pseudo-shorting. When your headphone jack gets worn, it starts to short out and get staticky or disconnect. With the Evo 3D, however, and maybe this isn't actually a shorty jack, the voice control takes over and it tries to act out voice commands incessantly.

This means no walking or bike riding or even standing while listening to headphones. You are likely to inadvertantly voice dial ex-girlfriends, text gobbledigook in the form of poorly translated voice-caps to former employers, and get maps to random places when all you wanted to do was listen to some Cat Stevens during a power outage.

So I did what any self-effacing person does in the face of computer problems; factory reset. Rebooting hadn't worked, powering down did nothing. So I had to do a factory reset, no big I guess, it wasn't my first rodeo. Still, redoing all those settings and breaking the phone back in is a pain in the ass. The lack of a cohesive or obvious way to back up all my apps and settings was annoying, but at the end of the day, a reset isn't too bad.

Still, my headphone jack remains shorty. My phone is unreliable with listening to music, which the Sprint customer service rep upon me preparing to shovel out $200 and sign a contract was all to eager to assure me that it wouldn't be.

What's that drag?

I love my life right now. I just feel some kind of awful, but I don't know why. I can't be of very much use to anyone if I am some flimsy projection of myself around them. If there's a reader with a hint on shifting their perspective, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Click to read more ...

I wonk, hence, the prescience

You may have noticed a new category on nomfg: wonk

I don't like politics. I don't like people thinking of me as partisan or ideological. I try to evaluate all claims honestly and with personal reflection. Often I fail to strike that reflection on the first chime. Like a recipe, thought often takes me a few experiments to into a working draft.

Nonetheless, as I ask any reader to suffer the drafts in Apron, I will be pushing more into a wonk category.

Update on 12:20PM by mfg

This means I am generally abandoning the civil disobedience category. It's too specific and not quite accurate.