With that out of the way, lets get down to it, rarely do I write about anything other than food and in a strange far out way this will be related to food.  For quite sometime now my passion for technology and food have collided and I have been working on building out my Digital Cook book and working on and iPad app to accommodate it.  Recently while I was out of town the server on which the majority of this application resided bit the dust or at least the drive with the data one did.  As a person who should know better I have no excuse, but, none the less the data was not backed up.  There was one copy of the database and the data in it.  Fail.  With options running out and not wanting to pay to have the data professionally recovered I took a last ditch effort to recover the data myself.  Much to my surprise it worked.

Thankfully when I built the machine I used identical drives I had laying around.  Because of this I could swap the platters from one drive to the other and that is what I did.  I took the platter (the CD looking thing that lives inside a hard drive and holds all the data) and installed it in the working drive, after removing its platter.  I then tore into my network attached storage chassis, removed the drive in there and plugged in my Fraken-drive.  Bam, disk spun up and Windows recognized it.  Pulled my data off and let out a squeal of delight.  All of my hard work has been saved.  As a by product I have some pictures and videos of the process someone is bound to appreciate.

Moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR DATA.  I will be doing that first and foremost on my new server configuration to avoid the sense of panic upon realizing you have to start over.

The iPad looks great, in fact, I want one and will be buying one as soon as it is feasible.  In the mean time I am left to wonder, as a foodie-geek or geek-foodie or food nerd or whatever I am, how will this work as a cookbook?  Will the screen stand up to some abuse?  Can I wipe it off with a rag when I get oil, grease and juices on it?

Starting at $499 it is a rather expensive toy and an even more expensive cookbook but it holds promise if it will stand up to the abuse of living in a kitchen.  In the mean time I have downloaded the SDK and hope to begin plugging away shortly to hook the iPad into my existing recipe database.

Time will tell whether or not the iPad will catch on but with Apple’s cult following surely they will sell millions of these devices in its first year of availability, however, with a  built in stand by battery time of a month it seems that Apple has already counted on these devices not being used daily.  Perhaps CraigsList will end up flooded the used iPads for cheap.

I love meat, juicy, tender fall off the bone type of meat and a while back I decided I would like to be able to smoke meat without using my Weber Kettle grill as a make shift smoker. So in a possibly less than ideal state of mind I decided that I would like an electric smoker, really I just wanted a smoker but found and electric one on Craigslist and bought it without thinking about it enough.  I ended up with a Brinkmann Gourmet Electric Smoker. Once I got it home, I cooked up some mighty fine grub, but noticed Brinkmann really gives you no method to tame this beast.  It can cook up some wicked fish or BBQ with the risk of the fluctuating temperatures murdering a otherwise perfectly acceptable piece of meat, so I stuff it back in the corner of the garage and bought a charcoal version of the same from a friend, then a propane conversion kit for that to make impulse smokes a little more possible.

Well that was all well and good until I decided that there will come a time when I will need more than 1 smoker, or I will want to smoke something (cheese) below the conceivable temperature range of the other smoker or something delicate (fish, and I like smoked fish) and I decided I needed to tame this bright red machine from Brinkmann.  That is when I consulted the Google and was offered up a couple of options.  The first was well so painfully obvious I about smacked myself upside the head, add a thermostat!  An example of this can be found here.  The idea of the thermostat, was well simple and seemed like a good idea, you dial in the temperature and then just leave it set until your food is done or you need to add chips.  Great!

My problem was I wanted intelligent temperature control, I wanted something to control temperature and predict ahead how the element would heat the smoker and shut off the burner before we reached and blew by our target temperature.  So I was on the cyber prowl again and found an excellent tutorial of how to use a PID controller to intelligently control the temperature in a smoker.  That article can be found here.  It was to be the perfect solution at around a $100 it was far more than I had paid for my smoker initially, but it had blinky lights and a couple of temperature readouts and looked like overkill.

Well I had my options and I decided to go the PID route and ended up using the following parts:

• Auber Instruments 1/16 DIN PID Temperature Controller – $44.50
• Auber Instruments 25A Solid State Relay – $15.00
• K Type Thermocouple with 4″ probe – $11.95
• K Type Thermocouple panel mount – $4.90
• A terminal strip from Radio Shack
• A project box from Radio Shack
• A power tool replacement cord from Home Depot
• An extension cord end from Home Depot
• Hole Grommets for cord pass through
• A scavenged CPU cooler for SSR heat sink
• Some misc. bolts to hold cooler on SSR
• Thermal compound for SSR to heat sink contact

All of that came to around $80 when all said and done, and then came assembly which was not hard but after taping up the project box with masking tape and marking out my cutouts.  I grabbed the Dremel, cutout all the holes to mount the required components, drilled some holes in the lid for the cooler to mount to over the SSR and wired the beast up.  In the end I was glad for the panel mount connector for the thermocouple, it will allow the thermocouple to be mounted to the smoker and the controller to be stored elsewhere.  I followed the directions found in this article to assemble the controller, after all I am a programmer not an electrician.  It was really quite easy and when I gave it the trial run and auto tune recommended by the manufacturer I couldn’t have been more happy.

Once the controller was dialed in it had no trouble holding the temperature +/-1°F inside of my garage, external factors may force more deviation from this such as wind or sunshine but I could easily hold temperatures as low as 140°F in my trial and right up at 225°F the temperature remained steady.  My Maverick thermometer (although a little slower than the thermocouple) confirmed the accuracy of the unit.

The only thing that remains to be done is mounting the thermocouple permanently in the smoker body, while this is an easy task, choosing a location that will not interfere with the contents of the smoker remains quite a challenge.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get the chance to smoke something with this new found control over the previously untamed Brinkmann Gourmet Electric Smoker.

Like most things this involved money, a bit more than I had imagined but it also took some elbow grease.  But the first step was to build a screen.  Easy enough, while building the screen was pretty simple painting it along proved to be a bit more challenging.  Once the screen was built it was onto finializing somethings in the theater itself, adding a shelf instead of the mini fridge as a place to house the equiptment, hanging the speakers on the wall and hiding the wires (this is not quite done).  So after all of that here is where it is today.

The picture is actually crystal clear, but I am too shaky to get a good picture with my camera, need a tripod.  I am very happy with the way it turned out, its awesome playing Halo that big or watching a movie.  Also it is in the basement so it contains the rumbles pretty well and keeps the neighbors at bay.

So what did it take, here is the rundown:

1 – 4′x8′ Sheet of 5/8″ Drywall
3 – 1″x4″x8′ Popular Boards
3 – 1″x2″x8′ Popular Boards
3 – 8′ sections of trim
1 Tube Liquid Nails
Tite Bond Wood Glue
4 steel corner brackets
4 steel T brackets
2 Heavy Duty Mirror Hangers (Lowes)
1-16 oz Bottle Auto Air Aluminum Fine (Black Widow Screen Covering)
1 Gallon Valspar Ultra Premium Flat Bermuda Beige (base for screen covering, note it looks PINK before mixed)
1 Gallon Kilz 2 White Pigmented Primer
1 Quart Valspar Tintable Primer (did not like this stuff get something else)
1 Quart Valspar Ultra Premium Flat Black (for trim)
6 Chenille 9″ Paint Rollers
4 Foam 3″ Paint Rollers
And about 2 hours to build and a day to paint the screen.  And it looks AWESOME!

That is when I went to the drawing board and designed what I thought would be the perfect desk.  I did not have any idea how much work it would be.  Cutting, welding, grinding and painting the frame.  Plaining, joining, sanding, sanding, sanding and tung oiling the top.  Then putting it all together.  Now this desk is no push over assembled I dare say it weighs just shy of 300 pounds, its a beast, would probably be safe to hunker under it in the event of a tornado.

Now here is what it took:

90′ – 1″ x 1″ 1/8″ wall square tube steel
4 – 2″ x 12″ x 11′ Black Ash (rough sawn, thank Lonn)
A ton of biscuits for the joint
1 bottle Titebond wood glue
1 can Tung oil varnish
12 – 1″ right angle brackets
24 – self tapping sheet metal screws
24 – wood screws
Alot of elbow grease

It was alot of work, alot more than I had expected but it was worth it.