Experimental Coffee Chili

I have just too many chili recipes on my computer. Struck by an epiphany, that all the recipes involve broth/wet ingredients and spices customizing the “chili powder”, I’d experiment following the basic recipe of Carroll Shelby and Wick Fowler. These two recipes are identical except for their spices. Both include:
* two pounds of ground beef
* eight ounces of tomato sauce
* sixteen ounces of water.
I started with the same, substituting one pound of beef with a can of beans. Meat is expensive these days. Call beans a filler, it cheaper. Here’s my recipe.

Lyndell’s Experimental Coffee Chili

INGREDIENTS:
1 lb ground turkey
1 cup (8 oz) hot water
1 1/2 tsp instant coffee

1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tbsp cayenne
2 tbsp quick chili powder (Fiesta Spices)

1 15.5 oz can kidney beans
1 8 oz can tomato sauce

DIRECTIONS:
1. Brown the meat. Drain the fat.

2. Heat the water and stir in the instant coffee.
3. Measure and dump the spices into the coffee.
4. Pour the coffee and into the pot. Boil a while.

5. Drain and rinse the beans.
6. Add the beans and tomato sauce.
7. Boil again.
8. Lower head and simmer a while, uncovered.

For shying away from complex chili recipes, this is looking long and complicated. The common ingredients among chili recipes makes me appreciate Marissa Mayer entering cupcake recipes into a spreadsheet to determine the best mix of ingredients. I split the ingredient list into three sections. It follow the three major steps, but this ain’t a three-dump chili recipe. Really!

I use instant coffee because it’s instant, except for heating water for two minutes, and easy. You can use your regular coffee instead. Make is strong. I measure and dump the spices into the coffee, thinking premixing the spices in liquid will improve mixing in the pot. I didn’t time the boil. Seeing this mixture boil, I decided to let boil a while instead of adding the beans and tomato sauce just yet. It’s a proper Texas chili, except for the coffee. The first chili recipe I used (Kroger Hot Chili) calls for undrained beans. Many recipes call for broth or undrained beans. I drain and rinse the beans to remove the goop. I avoid the broths, too. As I realized before, chili has some form of wet ingredient such as beer, coffee, broth, tomato sauce, even water. I make a healthy and kosher chili. Lard and pork produces and recipes are not considered. [LBJ's Pedernales River Chili](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Pedernales_River_Chili) omits the traditional beef suet on doctor’s orders. Tomatoes and onions are substituted.

Didn’t time the boiling and simmering, either. The extra boiling and simmering lets more water evaporate. I’ve added no thickeners like flour. Doesn’t seem right. Adding the flour in a Shelby/Fowler recipe made for very thick stuff.

I’m loosing interest in making spice mixes, or measuring so many spices. The various chili recipes differ mostly on spice. The term “chili powder” confuses. Is it powered chili peppers, or a blend of spices for making chili? Technically it’s the ground pepper. I haven’t found the classic chile peppers ground in the grocery stores I shop, so I tend to use a chili spice blend when the recipe calls for “chili powder”. I have a few spices left over from prior chili recipes, so I decided to measure and use some. It fills out the Fiesta Spices Quick Chili Power I like. It is convenient and has no anti-caking agent and comes is a bottle instead of a little pouch.

This chili turned out a spicy. I think I could taste the coffee this time. The cayenne makes for mild heat. Forgot I had habaneros.

Double

The Double may be the cleverest telepresence robot available. More svelte than other robots. However, I don’t think it’s the best for a museum/gallery application. Professional photography would better present the art, than the iPad’s front facing camera. Though the double would offer a different form of interaction and offer the space and context that the isolation of professional photography would eliminate. It is impressive they have already sold-out their first production run.

Habanero-Cayenne Chili

I made one of my best pots of chili, hitting the right amount of spice. My Nuclear Habanero Chili was too hot. It’d take you head off, figuratively speaking. Forget the hot peppers, it too mild, of course. This chili was just right.

I needed to cook my ground turkey without taking ten minutes to run to grocery store to buy a can of beans and tomato sauce. I remembered I had this recipe that required neither. “There’s a recipe for that!”; the recipe on the bottle of Bolner’s Fiesta Brand® Quick Chili Mix.

Quick Chili Mix
For Delicious Chili, ready in a jiffy!

INGREDIENTS:
1 lb. Ground Beef
1 tablespoon oil
1 cup water
4 tablespoons Bolner’s Fiesta Brand® Quick Chili Mix

DIRECTIONS:
Brown the meat in the oil. Add the water and Chili Mix. Bring the chili to a boil, then lower heat and simmer till the meat is tender.

I didn’t want to use so much of my chili mix. I measured a generous three tablespoons of chili mix, then made up the difference with Cayenne powder. I had pieces of Habanero that might add up to one pepper. I chopped a Habanero and added it before the simmer. I don’t want that to cookout the taste. Two positive reviews, one stating, “It’s the best chili he’s had in a while.” Meets my standard of meaty and spicy.

iTextbooks

Apple’s announcement January 19 claims to reinvent textbooks. I consider that statement hyperbole, but that is part of Apple’s showmanship.

Apple Reinvents Textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad

January 19, 2012

Apple today announced iBooks 2 for iPad, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging, and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, full-screen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, and unrivaled navigation. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore, with most priced at $14.99 or less. And with the new iBooks Author, anyone with a Mac can create iBooks textbooks and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Starting today, iBooks 2 is available free from the App Store and iBooks Author is available free from the Mac App Store Read more: apple.com/education

iBooks 2 does take e-books to a level that Kindle and every other reader doesn’t; multimedia. Kindle is great for straight reading, maybe a few illustrations. It’s a commodity. Reader apps are already available on every platform competing amongst each other in a large market. There are hardware e-readers for many of these same apps. Multimedia is still new among e-readers. A few examples of interactive books for the iPad come to mind are:

• Push Pop Press created “Choice”
• Atomic Antelope created Alice for the iPad
• Green Eggs and Ham.

The video currently on apple.com/education looks a lot like a demo of the Push Pop Press book “Choice”. The other are interactive children’s books.

The problem with each of these, is they were deployed as separate apps. A large collection of app e-books is inconvenient to management with many icons scattered on the home screen. E-books should be collected into an e-book reader. Mail, iBooks, Kindle/Nook et cetera all collect content into a their respective apps.

The clever thing about multimedia textbooks, is multimedia is a natural resource hog. That compels the hardware upgrades. Multimedia justifies the performance upgrade. Mere text in plain books don’t. Amazon added multimedia playback to create the Kindle Fire. Most tablets support multimedia playback, but Apple differentiates by putting multimedia in books.

Hawaii

September 5, 2008 I quoted a Cookie fortune left is a cubicle a couple days earlier,

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

and I elaborated:

After telling a gal on the phone, while looking at my beach calendars, I gotta’ go to Hawaii for the Feast next year, y’all are scaring me regarding airport security. I should toss my paranoia of in the river, afterall, Hawaii is a non-stop domestic flight.

This year, I’m seriously considering going to Hawaii for the Feast of Tabernacles.

I hadn’t flown since 9/11 until flying to Florida last fall. I hadn’t needed to fly really. I would drive for visits to Dallas, or attending the Feast of Tabernacles in Texas. For Florida, I had to. I didn’t have enough paid-time-off leave to drive two days to Florida. Thinking there is no way to get to Florida in time. I realized I could fly, so I flew. It wasn’t so bad. I was just fascinated by watching the clouds and the scenery outside the window. Even though the flight was an hour and a half, I didn’t watch a full episode of Star Trek on each flight. Good thing I didn’t sit by that cute girl a few rows in front of me. She would have been annoyed by me leaning over to look out the window. I took a few pitchers and marveled at the number of ships at sea.

I’ve long been fascinated with the tropics. Many years I’d buy a tropical island calendar. A long decoration fantasy I’ve had for my residence is a three panel poster of a tropical beach; white sand, green palm trees, blue water.

Mr. Richard Aimes encouraged us to stretch outside our comfort zone and mentioned Hawaii. That set in motion a desire and will to attend the Feast of Tabernacles in Hawaii. Now, I’m planning, learning the geography; important since the direct flight to Honolulu I always looked up lands me on the wrong island for the Feast. I assumed the big island. The big island is Hawaii. Honolulu is on Oahu. The the Feast site is on Kauai. The Keck Observatory, by the way, is on Mauna Kea on Hawaii Island.

Delete, no, for real

Deleting a file in WIndows, Mac, GUI desktops on *nix don’t actually delete the file. They normally just move the file to the Trash or Recycle Bin.  Even emptying the Trash or Recycle Bin doesn’t completely remove the file.  It’s only marked as free space.  EFF elaborates on the subject:

Secure Deletion | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project

 

 

 

Copy from DOS Command Prompt

Knowing a few simple tasks can expedite technical support. Many people consider Microsoft Word the lowest common denominator while others prefer plain text for everything. Plain text is universally accessible and doesn’t require a large application like Word to view. Plain text is well suited for sharing troubleshooting information from ping and traceroute. It’s quite unnecessary to take a screen capture of ping or traceroute. It’s doubly unnecessary to paste that screen capture into a Microsoft Word document. That text can be copied from the command prompt. Inconveniently, the familiar keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting won’t copy text from the DOS Prompt on Windows.

Microsoft offers instructions:

1. Right-click the title bar of the command prompt window, point to Edit, and then click Mark.
2. Click the beginning of the text you want to copy.
3. Press and hold down the SHIFT key, and then click the end of the text you want to copy (or you can click and drag the cursor to select the text).
4. Right-click the title bar, point to Edit, and then click Copy.

Now the text is in the clipboard. You can paste it anywhere, including the body of a ticket. To preserve layout, paste the text in Notepad, then attach the file to the ticket.

Seven Tips for Server Preparation

I work with customers regualarly, and thought a setup guide would help customers get started with ease. This documentation is based on my expereince with my own server and helping customers with their new servers.

Password

Be sure to change your password. Use a combination of letters, numbers, even symbols. You can even mix captialization. Don’t use names, birthdays and other trivia that can be dug up out of public records. Conventional wisedom has stated, don’t write down your passwords. Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson senior program manager for security policy at Microsoft suggests write down your passwords.

If I write them down and then protect the piece of paper–or whatever it is I wrote them down on–there is nothing wrong with that. That allows us to remember more passwords and better passwords.

Bruce Schneier — a notable security technologist and writer – agrees and explains,

We’re all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.

Firewall

Firewalls block network connections. Configuring a firewall manually can get very complicated, expecially when invovling protocols like FTP. FTP opens random ports on either the client, or the server. A quick way to deal with this is to use the system-config-securitylevel-tui tool. Over course, ssh, web server, ftp, mail and all the ports the control panel uses need to be open.

Mail ports

• 25 – SMTP
• 110 – POP3
• 143 – IMAP
• 465 – SMTPS
• 993 – IMAPS
• 995 – POP3S

web server ports

• 80 – HTTP
• 443 – HTTPS

cPanel ports

• 2077 – webDisk (unsecured)
• 2078 – webDisk
• 2082 – cPanel control panel (unsecured)
• 2083 – cPanel control panel
• 2086 – WHM control panel (unsecured)
• 2087 – WHM control panel
• 2095 – webmail (unsecured)
• 2096 – webmail

Personally, I closed the unsecured control panel ports 2077, 2082, 2086 and 2095 closed. Using SSL protected ports better protects passwords and data. To access secured control panel pages without browser popups warning about invalid certificates, buy proper SSL certificates (explained below).

Other

• 22 – SSH (secure shell – Linux)
• 53 – DNS name servers
• 3389 – RDP (Remote Desktop Protocal – Windows)
• 8443 – Plesk control panel
• 19638 – Ensim control panel

DNS

DNS is a naming system for computers and services on the Internet. Domain names like “theplanet.com” and “orbit.theplanet.com” are easier to remember than IP address like 70.87.6.117 and 70.87.6.16.

DNS looks up the A record to retreive the IP address for a domain name. PTR records are used to lookup the domain name associated to an IP address.

Hostname

Pick a hostname for your server. It can be anything DNS allows, but some names are better than others. Hostnames such as “accounting” or “hackme” may draw unwanted attention. The hostname must be resolvable by DNS, so “example.theplanet.host” will never resolve since there is no such top level domain of “host”. “host.example.com” or “server.example.com” are examples of the proper form of a hostname. Don’t use “www”, that may conflict with a website on your server. Of course, replace “example.com” with the domain name you registered.

In cPanel, the hostname can be easily set in “Networking Setup”. In PLesk, the hostname is set in “Server Preferences”.

A Records

You may want to create common subdomains such as “www”, “ftp”, “mail”. Log into Orbit and use “DNS Administration” to add an A record for your server’s hostname. If your server’s hostname is “host.example.com”, add an A record for “host”.

PTR Records

Many ISPes configure their mail servers that recieve email to lookup the IP address of the senders email server in the reverse DNS and checks to see that the domain name matches the email servers host name.

You can look up the PTR record for your IP address. in Linux and Mac use the “host” command on the console or in the Terminal.app. On Windows use “nslookup” on the Command Prompt. If the results of the PTR record lookup don’t match the server’s hostname, open a DNS change request asking that the PTR or reverse DNS be configured. Please include both the IP address and the server’s hostname.

SSL Certificates

Getting SSL certficates is optional, but it has advantages. SSL encrypts passwords and data sent on the network. The certificates will also assure your customers that they are visiting the right site. A visible benefit is that the web browser won’t popup warnings for invalid SSL certificates. Browsers won’t trust SSL certificates created by the server. It’s really a bad habit to click past those security features.

When ordering, please have a domain name and a working email address. Remember, any website using SSL Certificates should be assigned its own IP address. More information can be found on our support portal.

Protect Your Data

An old adage says:

Better to have and not need it, than to need it an not have it.

Data loss can happen to anyone. I recently experienced a hard disk drive failure at home. It’s certainly disruptive trying to recover data without a current backup.

There are a number reasons data can be lost. We won’t name them all, but just imagine what would happen to your business if you lost just some of your data.

Control panels include backup functionality and can be configured to automaticly backup regularly. For example, cPanel and Plesk will backup to an FTP site, therefore network backup is a good match for customer’s using control panels. There’s no excuse for neglecting backup when configuring your new server.

Know the Mail guidlines

Some Internet Service Providers are very particular about email sent to them. As a mail server administrator, you may experience frustration when your server’s emails are not accepted by ISPs that aggressively combat spam. To better prepare for your server’s operations, you may want to verify with the larger email providers that your messages will meet their criteria for valid traffic. Read what a few of the larger postmasters have to say:

• Hotmail
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Comcast

Move In!

Now that the server has been prepared and the data protected, you are ready to migrate your content. The documentation provided by the vendors are a great resource. Here are the links for our control panels:

• Plesk
• cPanel
• Ensim
• Helm