CJC.org

Notes on the Home Theater PC build.

This machine is to replace the older Series 2 Tivo with the build-in DVD player, mainly because the building’s cable set up will have a odd-ball channel line-up. A Tivo HD will be around $100 (after discounts), plus a couple hundred dollars in subscription fees.

The timing is also to fit in with the new TV season, as well as news about the pricing on, say, Asus EEE nettops with the Nvidia ION chipset. A homebrew machine with ION, plus a bigger drive, faster ION, Blu-Ray, etc., costs about the same as the Asus.

The important bits and pieces were picked up from NewEgg. The bits are:

• Zotac ION Mini-ITX N330 (dual-core Atom). The ION should be able to decode 1080p video without hiccup.
• Rosewill RS-MI-01 BK Mini ITX case. This is a bit larger Mini-ITX case, mainly to allow for a full-sized optical drive, instead of a slim drive. It also has 2 3.5″ bays. The PSU is a nice addition, though it turned out to be unnecessary (and in the way).
• Lite-ON Blu-Ray drive.
• KWORLD ATSC TV Stick UB435-Q. This is a USB digital TV tuner, which works well enough.
• nMEDIAPC HTPCKB-B RF wireless keyboard and WMC remote control.
• Plus the usual big drive and 4GB of memory.

Assembly went relatively well, though the Rosewill case, even if larger than the typical Mini-ITX, is a bit tight. The included PSU wasn’t actually needed, as the Zotac motherboard comes with an external power supply. For that matter, the PSU would have gotten in the way of the CPU heatsink. The external 3.5″ bay, with a regular hard drive in it, stuck too far in the back; the SATA cables got in the way of the CPU fan in this case. But the case has an internal 3.5″ bay and the drive fits there nicely. Shorter SATA cables would have been nice, but I didn’t bother. Note that the Zotac’s CPU fan screws directly into the heatsink fins; there are no screw holes. Other note: the case front panel LEDs aren’t glaring, which works nicely in the HTPC context.

The heatsink fan is necessary, I think. Without the machine really doing anything, the heatsink fins were hot to the touch. Who knows what it would have been with the machine trying to process HD content? With the fan, the fins were cool.

The operating system is Windows 7 beta (build 7100 specifically). Of course, I’ll install the released version of Win7 when that comes out. Installation went without a hitch off a USB flash drive boot.

Zotac BIOS update caused a minor hiccup with the CRC checksum failing after the flash (and recognition of only 950MB or so of RAM). In the flash program options, make sure the flash writes to every part of memory to fix this. Also, make sure the BIOS doesn’t start up with numlock enabled, as the wireless keyboard doesn’t have a numlock indicator; password entry failed until I realized this was the issue.

Additional codecs/software should be installed for Win7 to be able to open MKV files, specifically the CCCP codec pack. 720p playback of a test file went without a hitch after the pack was installed.

The HTPC is hooked up to an older Toshiba 46HM84, which is a 720p DLP rear projection set. The Nvidia control set has it at a weird resolution, 1176×664. Additionally, the “display type” within Media Center has to be set to “Projector” to deal with overscan issues. Everything looks better now with this setting. Possibly, a new TV would fix this, but there’s no need for that right now. Maybe when the current bulb burns out.

In terms of media center functions, recording scheduled shows works, as does playback of downloaded content. Netflix doesn’t have an add-on for the pre-release Win7 — I believe they’re going to come out with a fancy one when Win7 is officially released — but playing movies from within a browser seems to work fine. Same for Hulu Desktop. I haven’t tried Amazon’s streaming service yet.

Live TV works fine, though the antenna with the USB tuner stick might be better. I ordered a second tuner, a hybrid one this time, because I didn’t realize that the building’s cable signal is purely NTSC analog. Media Center should be able to handle multiple tuners (I believe up to four with Win7), so we’ll see how that works, and how annoying it’ll be to set up a custom channel line-up for the building’s cable.

Other software: UltraVNC so I can do stuff without having to turn the TV on. uTorrent, well, because.

I haven’t tested Blu-Ray yet, since I don’t have any disks. I should pick one up. I’m thinking of the Planet Earth series, since that’s something we’d actually want to keep. Netflix will cost an extra $4/month for access to the Blu-Ray collection.

The wireless keyboard includes a trackball in the corner, with mouse controls on the sides (e.g., a trigger-type left mouse button underneath the trackball, and a scroll wheel on the left side). The mouse has to be activated by clicking on one of those buttons instead of just rolling the thing. The remote also has a trackball, which is kind of awkward and makes the buttons kind of smaller and less ergonomic. The Tivo remote is light-years ahead in terms of usability compared to this, i.e., commonly used WinMCE buttons are too small, and so on. It’s a hefty remote, though.

So, the Tivo is going to get retired really soon. I had already suspended the account when we moved to Philadelphia because it wasn’t clear what kind of TV service was in the building (and Verizon FiOS TV wasn’t available yet). I’m going to forgo the CableCard thing: I don’t see anything useful for the high additional cost, since the building gives access to basic and extended channels (e.g., Discovery, FoodTV, etc.) The current line-up of Tivo HD devices also doesn’t have any with a Blu-Ray drive, so we would have to get a dedicated Blu-Ray player with a new Tivo.

My impressions so far is that Tivo is more polished in the things it does, but it does less than a modern Windows Media Center HTPC. It’ll cost about the same as the homebrew machine, once you account for the stand-alone Blu-Ray drive. I’ve had a Tivo since the early days, around 2000, but I think we’re at the end of the road now.

Anyone want a Tivo Series 2 Humax with a built-in DVD burner?

Update: the second tuner arrived today. Yay, Newegg, shipping from New Jersey. WinMC required manual configuration to get it working, though: it’s a hybrid tuner, WinMC would detect the digital part and ignore the analog part. Interestingly, the cable line-up was already there, specific to this particular building.

Oh, throw in the second tuner, and this Blu-Ray equipped dual-tuner HTPC comes in at under $650, albeit I’ve deferred paying for Win7 until later.

Update 2: Blu-Ray is working, though it took a bit of effort. The drive came with a bundled version of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD version 8. PowerDVD8 required at least 1024×768 for the display, which is a problem on a 720p TV. Changing the PC to one of the 1080i resolutions got PowerDVD8 to start up, but lead to a driver incompatibility error having to do with the ION chipset.

I tried PowerDVD9 with the same 1080i mode and got the same driver incompatibility error. I tried an alternative like Nero, but the trial version didn’t support HD playback (which is stupid, since this is what people will be testing). Looking at reviews of the ION, I was encouraged that some of them used PowerDVD to test Blu-Ray playback: someone out there got it to work.

Eventually, I tried setting the screen resolution back to a 720p mode. PowerDVD9, unlike v8, started up fine, and played the Blu-Ray test disk I picked up. I don’t know what the original problem was.

Note that Cyberlink’s Blu-Ray test program still showed that I wasn’t supposed to be able to play Blu-Ray. In one instance of the test program, it showed the driver incompatibility. In the other, it showed that and a HDCP failure, even though Nvidia’ control panel showed a valid HDCP pathway.

Of course, I now have to pay for PowerDVD, but at least there’s one working version for my setup. “Planet Earth” in HD looks gorgeous.

Nowadays, I seem to get to these posts about a month later. We were in Phoenix in March, one of those spouse-tags-along-to-conference trips. We also went up to see the red rock cliffs of Sedona for a day. As usual, pictures:

The area’s main places of interest we went to: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Scottsdale, the Heard Museum, and the day trip to Sedona, with a stop at Montezuma’s Castle along the way.

Note that it was 90F in Phoenix, and very sunny. Cleveland at that time, not so much. Actually, given how unseasonably cold it was in Key West the previous month, this was the first time we’ve experienced shorts-and-t-shirt weather this year. Very nice. Probably not very nice by August, though.

We were staying near Squaw Peak, about 15 or 20 minutes north of downtown Phoenix. My brother recommended visiting Taliesin West, and it was an easy drive on local routes from there. Wright’s office, still preserved like he had left it, was interesting, with a huge work table and a wealth of natural light from the desert sun filtering in through sailcloth ceilings (now a white, translucent plastic). The whole room was a giant lightbox, washing out any shadows. The rest of the living areas were similar, integrating indoors and outdoors, though in a sort of difficult to work with 1940s style. There are ideas you want to take for your own house, not copy wholeheartedly: the light is fantastic, and you can certainly work with the environment rather than in spite of it (we saw green lawns in front of the various desert McMansions we drove by), but you’d ways to power and run computers, and maybe do away with the, well, Frank Lloyd Wright furniture.

That afternoon, we went down to Scottsdale and stumbled upon the weekly artwalk in the gallery district there. Ate at a Mexican restaurant. Not much to say beyond that it’s a nice walking town. One of the galleries apparently had real Rodin and Degas sculptures, as opposed to the run of the mill local artists’ works and dolphin sculptures.

While Grace was attending the conference, I spent part of the day at one of the local coffee shops. Entertainingly, I overhead three conversations happening near my table that reinforce certain stereotypes of the American southwest: there was a small Bible study group on one side, and across the aisle was a pair talking about how to do no-money-down/foreclosure real estate investing in the still hot (to them) Phoenix market. The Bible study group left, to be replaced shortly thereafter by another pair. One was a life coach, the other the life coachee. I don’t recall if they got into The Secret, such as it is. But the coffee was good, breakfast was cheap, and the wifi was free.

One interesting museum is the Heard Museum, specializing in Native American culture. There’s a mix of older artifacts — Apache baskets, various figurines including the interesting “storyteller” motifs — and contemporary art by Native American artists. One part of the museum featured an exhibit on the forced assimilation of children through boarding schools, in a less multicultural era. The museum guide had to spend some effort stopping a group of Chinese tourists from using their camera flashes, but was generally informative about the displays and the various tribes in the American southwest. The only lacuna was what exactly constituted a different tribe. Linguistics and geography?

The highlight of this trip was Sedona, a few hours north of Phoenix. On the way, we saw the intriguingly named “Montezuma’s Castle” on the map and decided to detour there. This was a pleasant surprise: the “Castle” is one of the largest, best preserved cliff dwellings in the area. The highest portions are still well preserved, though, as ordinary tourists rather than certified archaeologists, we were restricted to the marked paths well below the cliff dwellings. The larger portion of this village has deteriorated to the point of being only outlines of walls near the cliff base.

The main feature of Sedona itself is the red rock landscape surrounding the town. I hadn’t seen this landscape before in real life; only in movies. It actually is an amazing place, and the cliffs rise unperturbed over the modern clutter of the highway and outlet mall just south of town. The map that they give you when you get to downtown Sedona is vaguely useless and confusing. It took a while to figure out that the tourist trap section is only a small part of the map, and the most of the long main street is the standard residential/commercial portions, complete with supermarket and hardware stores. Distances weren’t well marked, and we actually though it’d be reasonable to walk from point A to point B, not realizing that down that first hill was only a fraction of how far we needed to go. Thankfully, the parking lot where we put the car was free, and not too far away. The Google Maps client for Blackberry was far, far more useful than the paper map we got, though the tourist office did give us a tip on the best place to take pictures of the landscape: halfway along the airport road, you can see the whole town.

The other good tip we got from the tourist office was to forgo the little trolley tour and sign up for a 4×4 off-road tour. We opted for the Pink Jeep Tours. This was a couple hours of kidney-shaking fun as the jeep climbed up and down dry creek beds and boulder falls, all the while receiving a geography lesson from the driver on how the red rock formations actually came about, over millions of years of flowing waters. Even though we were in the midsts of the desert, I was reminded of the Norman Maclean’s closing paragraph of “A River Runs Through It”, about the river carved out by the world’s great flood and the rocks from the basement of time. And there we were, surrounded by unimaginably old rock, sediment from a Permian sea.

The tour was timed to reach a high vista at the start of the photographic “golden hour”, just before sunset when the red cliffs deepen in color. The other group in our jeep had a cheap disposable camera for this ride, which seemed to be a waste. For my part, I was an idiot who hadn’t recharged the battery on the Nikon since Key West the month before, and I was on the last blinking bar just before the jeep tour started. By the good graces of capitalism, a photography store in the tourist section keeps a supply of SLR batteries fully charged (the last charge date handwritten on the package), just for idiots like me, and it was only about $20 over B&H’s price for an uncharged battery. I think of that $20 as the dumbass tourist-photographer tax.

I finally got around to upgrading. Much less painful than I thought it would be.

Given that we were in Key West at the beginning of February, I’d like to blame something sexy like “writer’s block” rather than the more pedestrian “laziness” for the long delay in getting this post out. But, yeah, “laziness” is a far better explanation.

Cleveland, at the beginning of February, was god awful cold: single digit temperatures, windchills down below -20F, Lake Erie frozen over out to snow-obscured the horizon. Florida, in our imagination, was blue sky and turquoise water, like we found in Turks and Caicos last year. But that trip was two months later and at a more southern latitude, and we had the bad luck of arriving in Key West when they were experiencing their worst weather in several months.

Of course, “worst weather” there means mid-50s to low-60s plus rain, so it’s uncomfortable wearing shorts: far better than Northeast Ohio at the time. We took advantage of that by doing the cultural attractions — museums, Hemingway’s house, simply walking around and seeing the town — during the first two days, which was a good thing in that it wasn’t hot and sticky during all the walking. Key West has a long cultural history (in contrast, T&C was primarily a salt works and pirate hideout, and is now mostly a beach resort and a budding center of off-shore banking), so there’s a lot to see. We had bought a book of tickets for a lot of these attractions, which reduced costs by a bit.

The main two things are Hemingway’s House and the Little White House. Hemingway’s House — situated near one of the lighthouses, so he could find his way home after a night of drinking at the Sloppy Joe’s bar among other places — is a good way to see a big Depression-era house in this town. Roaming throughout the house and its grounds are almost 50 polydactyl cats, all of them quite comfortable with the steady stream of tourists visiting their house. The Little White House is on the grounds of the old Navy base — now a condo development, because the port is too small for the Navy’s modern ships — used by Truman a vacation spot and out-of-Beltway office, with serious decision making being done over friendly late night games of poker (you can’t have any hint of gambling in the White House). You have to be part of a group to go through it, but the guides will give a very good talk about Truman’s time there, and its political significance (with some mention of the city’s front-line status during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the port being the USS Maine’s last American port of call before meeting its demise before the Spanish-American War). It’s still used occasionally by the government, so the Secret Service apparently forbids any sort of picture-taking there (in 2001, Sec. of State Colin Powell held a week of peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan).

The minor museums we went to were the local aquarium — where you can see feeding time for their sharks and living conch up close — and the Wrecker’s museum. Early Key West’s economy consisted of salvaging ships that wrecked on the poorly mapped Keys, and, for a time, before the system of light houses was installed and before steamships allowed the shoals to be bypassed, the city was the richest per-capita in America. The Wrecker’s museum is a small one, with artifacts from a recently excavated wreck, that was not fully salvaged because of technological constraints of the time (most of the ship was in water that was too deep for the pre-scuba age), and a modest replica of the old lookout towers used in the city to spot ships in trouble. You can get a decent view of the city from up there. There’s a thing also called “Pirate Soul”, which, I suppose, is edutainment, somewhat different from the hushed atmosphere of a proper museum. It’s a quick walk through, and they do have a couple of relatively unique artifacts there: a real pirate’s chest (complete with trick lock) and a real Jolly Roger from that time.

Having culture and history doesn’t mean that there isn’t a swath of the tackiest tourist traps running down the spine of the old town. The daily cruise ship port calls disgorge their passengers right into this maelstrom of souvenir shops, rude t-shirt emporiums, and Caribbean-themed stands that line Duval Street. I don’t believe the ships stay long enough to let those passengers partake of the numerous bars, though: you have to visit and stay in a hotel for that. There’s apparently live music at almost every establishment, every night, and we saw retirees stagger drunkenly down the street in a 55-and-better version of the bar crawl. I have no idea what Duval Street will look like during Spring Break.

We did take two boat excursions towards the end of the week. One was on a sail boat doing a snorkel/eco-kayak tour of some of the islands further west. The weather was improving, but still a bit too cold for snorkeling, though we did try. Unfortunately, the snorkel location wasn’t that interesting, so there was little incentive to tough out the colder water. The kayak tour was through the channels between mangrove growths: mostly plant life, with a talk on the natural history of how mangrove trees build up new land. We did see some birds as well as the shadow of a nurse shark cruising beneath our boats.

The other excursion was a day trip by fast catamaran to the Dry Tortugas, where we have the partially built Fort Jefferson, a Civil War-era fortification and the largest masonry construction in the hemisphere. It’s the “Dry” Tortugas because there’s no source of fresh water in these islands, but the 19th Century Navy decided it was worth building a strong fortification and anchorage there, as it would have allowed naval control over Gulf of Mexico and the important American ports on the south coast. During the Civil War, enough construction was completed to allow its use as a Federal prison. It was never finished because new technology — steam ships — made the cost of finishing and maintaining a base in such an inhospitable location too high to be justifiable. It was used as a coaling station later, but, I suppose, the advent of an oil-fired Navy made the fort, again, obsolete. Now, it’s a bird sanctuary and snorkeling site, where you can swim around the entire fort (the water was great, though I didn’t go in: after the chilly experience from the day before, I was more interested in just walking around and taking pictures). Note that our perky guide, one of the catamaran crew, was kind of useless and not that well informed, though it apparently was only her second week or so in that job. The self-guided tour with the old Parks Service signs was approximately as useful.

Food-wise, we had good Cuban food and seafood throughout the trip. The best Cuban place was an off-the-beaten-path location. I think it was this one. There are apparently three main makers of Key Lime pie in town, and, being on vacation, we had pie every day we were there. The best one was on Front Street, just west of Duval Street. There was real meringue, and it was cut to order and served from a whole pie. The other two key lime pie locations both pre-sliced their pies, and used a whip cream fringe. And I think they may have started out frozen, from shortly after production, but I’m not sure. Certainly, the one with meringue wasn’t frozen; I don’t think you can freeze meringue well.

Being an old city, Key West has its share of ghost stories. We went on one of those ghost walks, and passed by the church’s graveyard (ghost of sea captain and his daughter), stopped near a funeral home (weird-but-disturbingly true story of Carl Tanzler), listened to stories of Robert the Doll in front of the Artist’s House B&B, and looked into the darkened windows of an abandoned theater. The guide (who, incidentally, during the day plays a wrecker at the Wrecker’s museum). I actually thought the tour would be a bit longer, and go to more places than we wound up doing. That night, the locations were within a few blocks of the La Concha hotel, from where we started. Maybe the Carl Tanzler story took a bit too long. There were also interestingly credulous people on the tour; at the church’s graveyard, we were encouraged to take many pictures with our digital cameras, because spirit lights apparently appear in a lot of these photos. Someone even showed the results to the guide, even those these are clearly artifacts recorded by cheap digital cameras with lots of flashes going off in a small area.

To get to Key West, we drove down US 1 from Miami, but that first trip over the causeways was in the evening and obscured by rain. It was sunny on the return trip — our best weather was on the day we left — and we had spectacular views of turquoise water surrounding the myriad islands along the route. On the mainland, we stopped at Coral Castle, the hand-placed collection of megaliths of one crazy and determined guy. Like Carl Tanzler, we see the results of unhealthy (but far more wholesome) obsession. Neat stuff, and a chance to touch sun-warmed coral rock before heading back to the frozen grounds at home.

This is the third attempt (Thanksgiving was #2) of the no-knead bread technique popularized by Mark Bittman earlier this month.

Going mostly by weight:

Flour (370g bread flour, 100g spelt flour)
Water (350g)
Salt (10g, about 1.75 teaspoons)
Yeast (0.25 teaspoons)

The approximates the 3 cups of flour to 1.5 cups of water ratio, and resulted in a drier dough upon mixing than did the earlier attempts, when I used the 1-5/8 cups water amount from the actual NYT article. Fermentation was about 20 hours, and the resulting mass was very similar to the amount with the extra water, but a little easier to handle (less sticky). I didn’t have the specified cloth towels (only terrycloth), so I used a Silpat and some plastic wrap for the final rise. From what I can tell, the towel is only used to make the dough easier to handle when you plop it into the hot pot. The Silpat is non-stick so it should be fine to use.

Oven temperature was kicked up to 500F, from the 450F used on the other attempts. Because of this, I unscrewed the plastic handle off of the Le Creuset, which is only rated to 450F or so (some sources say 400F, but I haven’t had a problem at the higher temp). I replaced it with a wadding of aluminum foil to keep in the steam. The lid was on for 30 minutes, then off for 15 minutes.

I also put a dab of canola oil in the pan after I got it out of the oven. This is to deal with the sticking issue I had on the first attempt (on #2, I sprayed with Pam before the pot went in the oven; this resulted in some of the oil burning by the time it was ready to receive the dough).

Note that removing the handle from the lid vastly increases the burn hazard risk for this adventure. Do a practice run in removing the lid while the pot is cool. I have to find a better way to pop off the lid when it’s hot.

Here are the pictures:

The crust turned out much better on this attempt than on the previous ones. Before, the crust was tan and thin. With the higher oven temperature, I got a nice brown crust that had a bit of thickness. While it was cooling, you can hear a crackle from the crust.

This was tasty bread, eaten about 15 minutes after it came out of the oven. The crust was a little more rubbery after it’s sat around for half a day, though. I suppose that’s what’s expected of this type of very basic bread.

Main conclusion? Bake at the higher temperature. I don’t think the flour:water ratio would make much of a difference, but I’ll go with the 1.5 cups to allow a little better handling.

Here’s another good discussion of these techniques.

To use with the Windows telnet server, when something locks up the screen, etc.

Microsoft’s reference

Also, SANS has a write-up of various wmic commands, in particular “wmic process list brief” for the “ps” equivalent, and “wmic process delete” for the “kill -9″ equivalent.

Turkey, fresh, about 12lbs from Westside Market, brined and prepared along the lines of this Good Eats recipe, but using a turkey roasting bag. The brining was done in one of those giant XL Ziploc bags. Note that the big Ziploc had a slow leak, and it was a good thing I put the whole thing in the roasting pan as it sat in the fridge overnight. The aromatics were placed in a little bag of cheesecloth to facilitate removal.

The turkey meat came out fine. The skin wasn’t that brown and crisp, though, possibly because I put the roasting bag on a little too closely, rather than leaving more slack for it to expand. Next time, leave a little more slack for the dry convection heat to work: there was little danger of the plastic bag coming in contact with the top of the oven.

Stuffing: apple chicken sausage and acorn squash stuffing. The sausage and the squash were on-hand ingredients. Add in a standard mirepoix.

Roasted sweet potatoes: four large sweet potatoes, approximately 1″ cubes, plus olive oil, salt, paprika.

Both the stuffing and sweet potatoes (in separate casseroles) went in the oven about 45 minutes before the turkey was expected to be done.

Garlic mashed potatoes. Standard boiled potatoes, mash with garlic, butter and half-and-half. Sprinkle a bit of parsley and sage on top later.

Steamed cauliflower, broccoli, carrots. A little bit of a misfire, in the sense that they were a bit raw. I started the steaming, but forgot to set the timer, and then took the veggies off the heat prematurely.

Brussel sprouts, sauted with balsamic vinegar. Somewhat “eh”. The sprouts wound up a little overcooked.

Cranberry sauce: around 24oz of fresh cranberries, plus 1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, 1 orange rind. The rind was taken out a bit before the cranberries completely cooked down, because the sauce was becoming a bit bitter. A little more sugar was also added.

Mushroom gravy. Baby portobellos, some garlic, a bit of finely chopped onions, 1/2 cup of soy sauce. Sort of following this, but without the wine, and with the addition of the juice from the turkey (the roasting bag is good for keeping the juice in one place: just snip the corner of the bag, and drain out it out into a bowl, for fat separation). This worked pretty well, though there was a bit of a timing problem because the turkey is done and sitting there, and you need time to reduce the gravy, which you may not have. We used the expedient of corn starch.

Apple crisp. Following this, but reversing the proportions of flour and oatmeal. There was a misfire, in the sense of not properly creaming the butter and sugar to begin with. This resulted in “lumpy” crisp mix, rather than something crumbly, before going into the oven. I don’t think anyone noticed, though.

Pumpkin cheesecake. I can’t find a link to the recipe I was sort of working off. Basically, I used a six-inch high-walled springform pan, 8 ounces (by weight) of graham crackers and enough butter to hold it all together to make the crust. 16 ounces of Neufchatel cheese (or whatever that company was calling its lower fat cream cheese), plus one cup of low fat cottage cheese (hey, new technique: unleash the stick blender on the cottage cheese to beat it into smoothness! Use this in places that call for ricotta or cream cheese, if you’re going for the healthier substitutions.), 1 cup of sugar, 3 eggs, 1 can of pumpkin puree. Add with baking spices, and a dash of vanilla extract and (I think) a tablespoon of flour, and beat it all in the KitchenAid until more or less smooth, then pour into the prepared springform. The baking time was a little weird, in the sense that this was a high-walled springform that was filled close to the top (so the volume:surface area ratio is different from using a 9″ springform), and I was using a toaster oven (this was the day before) at 325F. Total time wound up to be around 90 minutes, though the thing bears watching. I might have overcooked it slightly, to make sure the center was properly cooked. I also put the springform pan into a water bath during baking (The toaster oven comes with a solid roasting tray of sorts. Wrap the springform in aluminum foil so the bottom is water-tight, put a water in the tray, then put the springform in there. Stick the whole thing in the pre-heated oven. Replenish the water as it boils off.) to help maintain the temperature and provide a humid oven environment. Cool overnight in the fridge.

Fruit bowl. The usual mix of pineapple, honeydew melon. Plus, Asian persimmons are in season right now, as well as pomegranates.

NYT no-knead bread. Here’s a good write-up. I used a little too much water (the infamous extra 1/8 cup) which made the dough a bit formless. Also, I was using 1 cup of fresh ground whole wheat and 2 cups of white flour. The crumb was very good, but the crust a little tough, though this may have had to do with it sitting around for many hours, before dinner started.

This was, to some extent, a logistics exercise, in terms of, uh, kitchen tasking orders for the various pots and pans, as well as oven time. For example, the bread was done first, with the turkey going in the hot oven more or less immediately afterwards. The apple crisp was started once the sweet potato casserole dish was freed up. The gravy couldn’t be completed until the turkey juices were ready, but this wasn’t a big deal, since you want the turkey to rest for a while after it comes out of the oven. And so on. It was more or less non-stop from 11AM to about 3:30PM, when guests were supposed to arrive. Of course, no one showed up until around 4:30PM, so I suppose the tight scheduling could have been relaxed, say, for the gravy, for a reduction instead of the corn starch thing.

The previous weekend, we went to Mansfield Prison as part of Grace’s local college alumnae seasonal get-together. While we missed the alum group because of a late start, we did go through the annual the Haunted Prison Experience run at the old prison. It’s the first time we went through one of those Halloween “haunted house” amusements that seem to be all over Northeast Ohio.

We got there as the doors opened, but well after the ticket booth opened, so we waited on line for about an hour before we actually went in, a little after sunset. Here are some shots of the facility from the line:

Most of the crowd were younger, with a few clusters of older people here and there (was the alum group one of those?). It was Saturday, and I guess this was date night, with a few haunted thrills before or after dinner, I suppose. By the time we entered the prison, the line had more than tripled in length with the after-dinner crowd. Annoyingly, more than half the people on line smoked.

A large fraction of the Mansfield police force also appeared to be on the grounds. I don’t think they were expecting any awful goings-on; this just happened to be by far the largest congregation of people in the area and you have to provide basic crowd control and traffic direction.

Once we were through the door, the people running the experience sent us through in 10-person groups. The “plot” of the experience was straight out of video game cliche: an experiment in the old prison had gone horribly wrong, and the researchers and subjects have turned into flesh-eating zombies! Throw in interdimensional gateways and give us pump action shotguns, and you have the old Doom. Doom was scarier, though.

Basically, there are dim-lit rooms decorated with somewhat more expensive versions of the Halloween things you find at the local drug store: grotesque figures, skeletal remains, glow-in-the-dark ghouls. There might have been a strobe or two somewhere; I don’t remember exactly. In almost all the rooms, a Halloween Experience employee will jump out from a darkened corner and basically yell, “Boo!” Occasionally, he’ll have a toy chainsaw growling away.

We could see why the groups had to be somewhat separated: the employees needed a moment or two to reset themselves in their dark corners. We were at the back of our group, so all these shocks fired off about 10 feet in front of us, leaving us with only mild giggles. Grace said, “hello there!” to any number of the purported ghouls with their masks.

I spent a lot of time peering up at the remains of the prison. You can glimpse the peeling paint in the dark, and see the outlines of the small cells. Last century’s architecture of incarceration was more interesting than the 20-minute “Experience”, even though we couldn’t see most of it in the dark. Next summer, when the weather is warmer, we need to go back to Mansfield for the guided tours of the facility.

The Big Picture has a pointer to this Google Spreadsheet of a buying versus renting cost comparison: .

It’s neat, but you have to save a copy to your own Google account before you can modify the values. There are a couple issues, having to do with dependent variables that aren’t well linked to other cells, e.g., the estimated tax deduction probably can be a formula that takes an expected tax rate and does a calculation against the holding period and the mortgage interest payments. But these are relatively minor.

One big hole, which is alluded to in the document’s notes, is that there’s no provision to calculate the returns on “alternative investments of downpayment.” One can make simplifying assumptions to figure out what this opportunity cost of buying would be: assume you put the whole thing into a CD with a maturity equivalent to your holding period, and ignore the pre-tax/post-tax issues. Depending on the size of the downpayment, this could be many thousands of dollars.

One difficult-to-quantify issue is also the amount of effort and heartache it would take to sell the property, which is something to consider when we hear anecdotes about other people at CCF who take a year to sell a house after they’ve finished their residency and moved out of state. I suppose one could ask text to the spreadsheet that merely asks whether the benefit of buying is worth the effort you expect to put into selling (including, say, double mortgate payments for a few months, etc.). That’s something people have to figure out on their own.

An associate of mine was challenged to crack WEP by one of his collegues recently. Somehow, this collegue was unaware that WEP is flawed and subject to very fast cryptanalysis, and believed that 128-bit WEP keys were unbreakable.

We picked up two Netgear WG511T PCMCIA cards, got the Auditor’s Security Collection as of around June 2006 (I had tried doing this on my own around then, before realizing that my DWL-630 PCMCIA card is on the non-functioning hardware list) and went to work. The first thing we found was that a lot of the documentation on how to do this tends to be specific to software versions, hardware, etc. For example, to perform the deauthentication attack, the guide from Tom’s Hardware uses the void11 tool, which is specific to Prism cards, but the Netgear has a Atheros chipset. Other sites, such as this wiki seemed to use versions of the software tools that had different options from the ones that came from that particular version of the Auditor’s disk, even though it was a useful discussion of the principles involved. There’s also an entertaining video of a fast WEP crack, but they either skip over some steps or were very lucky in an ARP packet capture.

These are my notes on what I did, with the hardware we had on hand, and that particular version of the Security Collection’s tools. As usual, cracking other people’s WEP without permission is illegal; these are notes in a lab/challenge setting.

1. The first thing is to run kismet to survey the area. The items to record on the kismet scan are the target WLAN’s AP’s BSSID/MAC, the channel, and the MAC of an associated client. “h” will give kismet’s help screen, but the relevant keys to push once the target WLAN is selected is “i” for detailed information on the WLAN and “shift-C” for the associated clients.

2. The Atheros cards have to be put in monitor mode:

# iwconfig ath0 mode monitor channel CHANNEL

where CHANNEL is the channel of the target WLAN.

3. We now sniff for IVs:

# airodump ath0 FILENAME MAC_OF_AP

where FILENAME is the destination of the dump, and MAC_OF_AP is the MAC of the access point.

Note that running kismet first will do something with the config of the card. I couldn’t get the airodump command to run without first running kismet, and running the above iwpriv and iwconfig commands.

There may be more than one WLAN displayed. The column to pay attention to is the one counting the IVs that have been captured. We want this number to be at least 100,000 if we’re targetting a 64-bit key, and at least 200,000 for a 128-bit key. This will be incrementing relatively slowly, depending on how busy the WLAN is.

4. Force the generation of IVs. We will attempt to capture ARP packets, as these are associated with IV packets. When we get an ARP packet, we will replay it, which forces extra traffic at the access point, thereby making Step 3 much faster.

# aireplay -n 68 -m 68 -b MAC_OF_AP -d ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff ath0

The “-n” and “-m” options specify the packet min and max size, both set at 68 for ARP packets. “-b” is the source, and “-d” is the (null) destination for the ARP request.

This will tick by, with aireplay reporting on how many packets it’s seen. If it sees a packet fitting the specified criteria, it’ll ask you if you want to use this for replay. I got lucky, and an ARP request came by relatively soon. Using that ARP packet allowed me to spin up the IV counter in airodump, so that I had about 200,000 packets in 5 minutes or so.

Of course, it may take a while before an ARP packet comes by. We can force extra ARP traffic by using a second machine to launch a deauthentication attack against an associated client:

# airforge MAC_OF_AP MAC_OF_DEST FILENAME
# aireplay -m 26 -u 0 -v 12 -w 0 -x 10 -r FILENAME ath0

So, the airforge command creates a deauth packet from MAC_OF_AP to the MAC_OF_DEST (the MAC of associated client we saw on the kismet survey) and saves it as FILENAME. The aireplay command then just sends the packet from FILENAME out on the wireless. Note the “-x” option is set to send out 10 packets/second, which is good enough to cause a lot of packet loss on a standard ping to the client machine.

The first machine should see the ARP traffic in its aireplay, and we should be good to go from there.

5. Once enough IVs have accumulated, it’s time to run the cryptanalysis program:

# aircrack -m MAC_OF_AP FILENAME

where FILENAME is the filename of the airodump file. You can run this while airodump is still working and writing to the file. On a 128-bit key with around 250K – 300K IVs, I got a crack in a couple tens of seconds. The key will be in hex form. You can go verify this against the access point’s configuration, seeing as how you’re doing this in a lab and have full control over all the hardware.