Category: Weblog

In the lobby of building I work in, there is a Starbucks Coffee. Earlier this week, I noticed a new item in the refrigerator.

Yes, it looks like a Doubleshot in a Monster sized can. With a bunch of ‘energy’ ingredients tossed in. Of course, I bought it and brought it home.

The drink is chock full of all kinds of stuff.
2000 mg maltodextrin – Maltodextrin is a type of sugar that digests slowly for a longer release into the bloodstream, meaning providing more energy over time
1800 mg taurine –
450mg of L-Carnitine – L-Carnitine hepls convert food into energy
180mg of Inositol – more commonly know as vitamin B8
325mg of Panax Ginseng – Ginseng is used widely in Asia as an energy booster
90mg of Guarana – the Brazilian seed packed with more caffeine than coffee beans
Also, vitamins B6 and B12 are thrown in as well to round out the B-complex.
The can is the equivalent of roughly 225 mg of caffiene.

I popped the can open and poured it out. The drink had the familiar mocha color. The can I picked up was Vanilla flavored. It was the only flavor they had.
After a big swig, I was happy to find that it didn’t have the bitterness I usually find in energy drinks. But it didn’t actually taste like coffee at all. It tasted like a melted vanilla shake. The sweetness wasn’t overpowering and you got the subtle mouthfeel of some milk, but overall it was fairly watery. It reminded me of the Java Monster I tried a while ago.
I hope the coffee flavor tastes more like coffee.
Realistically, even if I did like the coffee, I probably wouldn’t drink a can of this. There’s just too much caffeine for me. When I drink coffee, I rarely drink more than half a cup, meaning ~30 mg of caffeine. That’s enough to rev me up a bit. If I drank 225 mg of caffeine, I’d probably spend an hour in the bathroom and then not sleep for a couple days. I have friends that could probably drink one of these as a nightcap as they hopped into bed, but my tolerance is nowhere near theirs.

Due to interest, I looked deeper into the Cakesters from Nabisco.
I expected that nutritionally, both Nilla and Oreo flavors would be the same. When I took a look, I found a little difference.

I was surprised to see that the Oreo flavor had more calories than the Nilla flavor. 10 calories more per cake than the Nilla. After reviewing the ingredient, it must be the chocolate that’s in the Oreo Cakesters.

Someone mentioned about remixing the Nilla with the Oreo into a new Cakester. After sharpening my chef’s knife, I started to slice the Cakesters.

Due to my extreme cooking skills I was able to remix the Cakesters as you see. Unfortunately, it do not significantly improve the flavor. They were still soft and sweet, but nothing special.
The Cakesters are still selling 3 packages for $2 at Walgreens, making them exceeding cheap as experimental objects. Any other ideas?

Cakester is not a new social community site for cupcake lovers.
Cakesters is a new kind junk food from Nabisco that tries to combine famous cookies with snack cakes.

Nilla Wafers and Oreo Cookies are some of the most iconic and classic cookies on the market. The Oreo Cookie has been around for almost one hundred years. Nilla Wafers are not quite as old, having originated in the 60s.

The cakesters look like little sandwiches. They are soft to the touch and about the size of a regular Oreo cookie.

The filling is creamy, quite a bit different than the traditional Oreo filling. The filling doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t taste like Oreo ‘stuff’.
The cakesters are chocolaty and vanillay and pretty good. But they don’t make the cookies they are based on. They taste like generic cupcakes in a new form. Oreos have a specific slightly sweet flavor instead of the cloyingly sweet flavor of the cakesters. Nilla Wafers have that thin, crisp layer of flavor on the top of the cookie which is completely missing in the cakester.
Overall, the cakesters are pretty good as junk food. They are soft and moist, and you get three good sized cakesters in a package. But if you are a cookie purist, stay away.

Recently I went on a four day rafting trip. Before I went, I made some beef jerky. Here’s how I did it.
My method is based on my father’s method, as I was taught as a boy.
We start with a few pounds of flank steak.

Flank steak is a long cut. I cut with the grain as thin as I can, a little less than 1/4 inch thick. I cut about 3 pounds of beef.

I gathered up all the ingredients.
1 1/2 cup Soy Sauce
1/2 cup Worcestershire Sauce
1 cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons liquid smoke
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon onion powder
I actually smoke the jerky, but if you aren’t going to smoke it, you can add 2 teaspoons of liquid smoke.

Once the marinade is mixed up and the beef is cut, you’ll need a container to soak it in.

I soak the beef at least overnight. The salt in the sauces will cure the meat to help preserve it as well as let the flavor get deep into the meat.

The next day, I set up my smoker and laid out the strips.

After about 6 hours, the jerky was ready. It depends how dry you like your jerky. I tend to like is a little dryer.

When you fully dry out the meat, you have basically preserved for a good long time. It’s interesting to think that preserving meat like this was an essential task our ancestors used before the invention of refrigeration.

Wandering through the aisles at the supermarket, I spotted a bag of Mint Crisp M&Ms candies. Obviously, I had to give them a try.

The bag has some nonsense about Indiana Jones on it. I can’t seem to understand what Indiana Jones and Mint Crisp M&Ms have to do with each other. I mean I understood why Shrek junk food is green (Cheetos, Snickers). But I can’t seem to figure out this marketing tie-in.

The Mint Crisp M&Ms come in three colors, dark green, light green, and white. The are different icons on the candy, some sort of reference to the movie. Maybe there is some sort of party game I just understand where the masks and skulls matter.

The candies themselves taste great. They taste like a mini Thin Mint cookie! The colors all taste the same though.
Inside the candy is a little core center of cookie of some type. From the ingredients list, it looks like the center is made of rice, like the crispy cereal. There is just a tiny crunch when you bite them.
These are well worth the effort to track them down. Grab them before the movie promotion is over and they disappear.

I’m a professional TV engineer. For the last 15 years or so, those of us in the profession have been talking about the end of analog television. Next year, on February 17th, television stations will turn off their analog broadcasts and switch to digital only.
For TVs that use rabbit ears or a rooftop antenna, they will need a digital TV tuner. We engineers refer to it as an ATSC tuner, but most will simply call it a HDTV or DTV tuner. If you have cable or satellite TV, you won’t need this.
For a while, I’ve wondered what these inexpensive tuners would be like. When I saw my first tuner years ago, it was around $500 and had terrible performance. This weekend, I stopped by radio Shack this weekend and picked up a Digital Stream DTX9900 DTV tuner. The box cost $60. BTW, the government is offering $40 off coupons to people to help defer the cost.

The tuner itself is fairly small and light.

The tuner takes the input from your antenna and converts to either video and audio on RCA jacks or a channel 3/4 RF signal. Very straightforward and simple. For me, I used the RF signal since it was the simplest cabling.

We have a very cute TV in the kitchen that Michele that uses rabbit ears. She doesn’t want a new digital TV, she wants me to simply make it better. So, it gets the DTV tuner.
I hooked things up in about 5 minutes and got good signals right away. The picture looked good. We are in a class A contour so we get great reception. The key is a good antenna. I use a traditional UHF loop antenna and it seems to pick things up well. If you are a distance away, you are probably going to need a yagi style antenna.

I was pleased to see a fairly good user interface. The Info button brought up data about the channel, show, and even reception strength.
The picture was good, but on some channels with poor reception, the picture broke up. With analog channels, the picture would get snowy and the audio start to fuzz with poor reception. With digital channels, you get the cliff effect, where the picture pixelates and in some cases freezes or drops altogether.

One of the benefits of digital television is that broadcasters are sending data along with the picture, such as seeing what’s coming up next on the channel.

Here’s a short video of using the tuner.
Overall, the tuner is impressive. I think the average person will be able to use it and get better pictures than they have now. Some people will have problems if they are in areas with poor UHF reception, but that’s an antenna problem.

If there is one rule for modern life I would share with you all, it is ABC.
ABC – Always Be Charging
Whether it’s you laptop, your Nintendo DS, or your mobile phone, you should take every opportunity to keep it fully charged.
As you might imagine we have a lot electronics at Cruft Manor to keep charged. I have tried many ways to keep the charging under control. I’ve built mini-charging stations for the girl’s Nintendo devices. I tried to keep the the phone chargers straight and organized. But in the end, all became a tangle of wires.
I finally bit the bullet and invested in Chargepod from Callpod. And I choose the word invested carefully, the Chargepod is not cheap. Starting at $50, the Chargepod is a bit of a luxury item. You do not ‘need’ it as much as ‘desire’ it.

The Chargepod replaces all your chargers with a unified system. A single power supply plugs into the wall and feeds the hub. The hub splits the power to up to six different devices. You need an adapter from the hub to each different device. As you can see above, I have it charging 4 different mobile phones and a bluetooth headset.
The setup works great. Gone are the tangles. Every device has it’s place. It all works smoothly. And it fits on the small table Michele bought for our phones to sleep on.
Callpod just released a new adapter for the iPhone that avoids the need for the USB cable.
The core issue is the need to purchase the adapter cables. With different connectors on devices, the number of different connectors for charging is huge. Callpod charges $10 a pop for adapter cables. That adds up quick. You can find some better deals on Amazon or eBay, but it’s still expensive any way you buy it.

The only other thing is the glow. Electronics manufacturers are enamored with blue LEDs these days and find reason to stick them in everything. The Chargepod does not avoid this fate. The blue LED light up whenever a adapter is plugged in, meaning it’s on all the time, filling our dining room at night with a low blue glow. I don;t think this is really necessary. Almost all devices tell you when they are being charged. We really don’t need all these LED lights that don’t tell me anything.
Overall, I’m happy with the Chargepod. It’s a well made item that delivers on it’s promise, but the price is too high for it’s benefit, making it a welcome luxury, not an essential.

Here’s what it looks like to write about a non-blogging conference. This is regarding the NAB Show for television and radio that I am attending in Las Vegas. This is my 16th time in 18 years to go to NAB.
This is an email that I sent out to my co-workers about interesting things:
Besides the usual array of monitors, MPEG compressors, proxy viewing, and ‘breakthrough’ products, here are a few things I saw.
Clustermedia Labs – Voice recognition of people and events in video footage by analyzing voiceprints
GameCaster – A setup that allows recording of video inside videogames by the use of traditional camera hand controls
Bug TV – Class-R – Ingest of multiple video streams via Final Cut Pro
Bluray/DVD Duplicators – There was a literal army of these robotic duplicators on the floor. Anyone know how to choose?
Telestream – Episode Engine Pro – can do transcoding of JPEG 2000 files in a distributed environment at 7-8 times real time
Studio Network Solutions – Postmap – Snoops and indexes varied file systems to find files and search via various attributes. Similar to Mega/Cobweb…
Digital Rapids – CarbonHD does realtime ingest of JPEG 2000 HD files. Actually a DDR, but the files are ready for immedaite access. Stream Z HD platform coming for faster JPEG 2000 transcoding.
Nano-spindt – High Frame Rate FED Monitor – runs at 240 frames per second – amazing look
NHK Ultra HDTV – In the back of the Central Hall, the NHK booth is showing new demos of their Ultra HD system. A must see.
Overall, the post side of the house has tons going on and the South hall is packed. The more traditional areas like lighting, jibs, transmitters are calmer and not so packed.