General

My Starbucks Via Review

photo-4Instant coffee is typically freeze dried crystals of a prepared coffee that can be added to hot water to make a quick coffee drink. I guess the ultimate goal is making a coffee drink that’s not fresh brewed coffee that still tastes like fresh brewed coffee. Via is Starbucks answer to your father’s Sanka instant crystals. Via has a new form of instant mixed with some very finely ground coffee (they call it micro-grounded).

My bottom line: Via tastes like correctly brewed stale coffee with a bitter finish.

When I first opened the package I noticed a strong bitter smell.  I got some of the Via on my fingers and smelled it for a while.  The smell reminded me of the bitter coffee oils from a dirty espresso machine.  I dumped the Via into my cup of hot filtered water and noticed the Via didn’t want to easily come out of the packet.  Maybe steam had condensed inside the packet or it was static – I don’t know. I tried the two varieties of Via I found and drank 3 cups of Via for my test (not all at once!)

My first thought was, “WOW”.  Instant coffee is disgusting.  Via isn’t disgusting.  Right off the bat I give Starbucks my award for best instant (I haven’t tried many).  As I drank I noticed a pretty obvious bitter finish that bordered on “bad aftertaste”.  I drank the cup and thought, “this almost tastes like brewed coffee”.  After the second cup I decided it did taste like brewed coffee, just stale coffee.  I’ll confess I’ve had WORSE coffee in many local coffee shops.  I would attribute that to the fact many shops leave coffee sit too long or brew it improperly.

Via is expensive. It comes in small single serve packets that cost about $1 per prepared up. That’s about 10-12 times the cost of most instant coffee.  Unless you are nowhere near a kitchen to use a pourover, and there are no coffee shops nearby, I can’t see Via being a great option.

Try it, you may like it.  It’s expensive and not as good as properly brewed coffee.

Disposable Electronics?

In the town I grew up in there was a small TV repair shop named “Ron’s TV”.  The folks at Ron’s TV repaired televisions and many other electronics. From what I heard, the owner’s name wasn’t Ron, that was just a ruse for sales guys and bill collectors. Apparently they did something right, because many years later they are still in business – amazing given the change in this industry.  The great thing about this repair shop is if it was electronic and had a screen or speaker they could repair it.

Today everything is disposable.  Most electronics are built in China at factories that would never pass our safety standards.  They are made by people making wages we would consider unthinkable. Unfortunately, I think we exported our morals along with our electronic manufacturing.  The upside is costs have gone way down.  A growing problem is many electronics cannot be serviced.  I’ve heard many low-end 40+ inch LCD televisions can’t be repaired anywhere (well except maybe the famous Ron’s TV).

I’ve found the growing trend to combat the lack of repair is a good old American “do it yourself” spirit.  Recently I’ve had some Nintendo DS game devices in our house break.  The pictured device is a perfectly good machine, but the bottom screen stopped functioning as a “touch screen”.  Many people would just buy a new device, but I wondered if there were any tricks to fix it.  I went to my friend Google and found several tricks to fix the problem.  None of them worked!  I knew replacing the component was an option so I dug deeper.  Turns out you can not only get the part on eBay for $8 delivered, but find YouTube videos to show you how to put it in!  I ordered the touchscreen on eBay and it arrived a week later (it even came with the right screwdriver for this machine).  I immediately took it apart and started the repair.  My son watched and a few times asked me if I knew what I was doing.  I didn’t read any online instructions but it seemed simple enough to me.  Find the old part, figure out where it is connected, and replace it with the new one.  About 20 minutes later he was up and running.

So if your stuck with a dead device, head onto the internet and find your $8 solution!

Does your Corporate Culture Clash with your Social Side?

You’ve seen the Mac and PC commercials right? Apple products are hip, fun, and counter-cultural. iPods, iMacs, and iPhones generally exude a fun, simple, elegant design. Working at Apple must be a really progressive place just like the commercials right? Everybody blogs, lots of wikis and ad-hoc collaboration? Nope. Apple employees aren’t supposed to have personal blogs (something about speaking with “one voice”).

The United States Government typically brings to mind thoughts of red tape and process for anything and everything. Think up-tight, uniforms, and nobody shares information. Wikis and blogs would be squashed by regulators or the CIA Right? Nope. The government, particularly the Intelligence and Military, is all over social media tools and is a role model in many respects (one example).

We’ve come a long way. Wikis and other trendy collaboration tools popped up many years ago under the desks of IT folks who got tired of boring document management systems and static Intranet portals. Today every corporate leader is being yelled at, “Get a 2.0 Collaboration Strategy!”

Most companies go through an evolution of tools and platforms to get to a consolidated, supported, “everywhere” platform. As the tools evolve so do new policies to deal with this new media. Often younger segments of the workforce expect these tools, more seasoned employees question them.

How about your workplace? Do you have tools to find other employees based on their user profile? Is there a corporate “Encyclopedia” anyone can contribute to? Can you quickly create ad-hoc communities to share information without email lists? Do you have these tools but your corporate culture is holding back their adoption?

Airpot Brewing with the Technivorm

Don’t try this at home.  Wait, TRY this at home!

Often I get assigned “coffee duty“. This often happens when we have people coming over, we host a party, or bring coffee to an event. I often find myself getting out my two glass airpots and brewing coffee into the carafes. Then I carefully pour into the airpots.  While this solution works, I was interested in brewing a larger quantity directly into an airpot.  This would be less work and temperature loss (a lot).  Even my great home equipment isn’t made to do this, but I developed some workarounds to the problems I ran into.

1) Cone filter.  These are great for brewing smaller batches of coffee. With larger quantities you wind up over-extracting the grounds at the point of the filter (the bottom). This can give you a nasty bitter taste even if you use the correct amount of coffee. Workaround? Stir the basket grounds when brewing is 2/3 complete.

2) Water reservoir is too small.  In my Technivorm I can do 10+ cups (close to 1 liter) of filtered water.  Unfortunately, an airpot is typically 1.6-1.8 liters. Workaround? Before the 10 cups were gone I’d add 6 more cups of water.  Your application will vary, I did a “dry run” with just water.

3) Basket too small  for extra coffee.  Typically to brew an airpot of coffee you want about 3.25 ounces of beans, which is roughly a cup of dark roasted whole bean coffee. This may be too much coffee for the basket and cause an overflow. Workaround? I did a scant cup of coffee (7/8) as to not overload the basket.

4) Airpot is taller than the brewer!  Workaround? As you can see, I was able to put the brewer on a small box to accommodate the airpot perfectly under the brewer.

If your coffee maker doesn’t brew at the right temperature, or takes longer than six minutes to brew a normal pot don’t try this.  You need a quality brewer that will brew for the right amount of time at the right temp. The Technivorm MoccaMaster is a high-quality coffee maker that will last for many years and make coffee as good as your best local coffee shop.

Bible Software for the Mac

picture-1If you are looking for Bible study software for the Mac you aren’t alone. On Windows there are quite a few options – even great free ones like Online Bible and e-Sword. I did a lot of “poking around” for low cost and free solutions. The only real solution I found, that was native to the Mac, was MacSword.  MacSword is a port of the open source “SWORD Project”. It didn’t do much for me, though it had great integration with the large Sword project library.

On Windows I used e-Sword, and I had bought a couple of modules for it (like NASB translation). I decided to look at running e-Sword on Mac using virtualization or emulation. Since I only have 1G of RAM on my MacBook I immediately tossed the idea of a tool like VMWare Fusion (which would have been easy and effective). I looked at using the Windows emulation software called “wine”. I already own a copy of Crossover, a paid supported version of the “wine” project.

I was able to use e-Sword on the Mac, and it works pretty well. The verse navigator box causes it to crash, but everything else works so far. Here are two options I found for installing it.

1) Get Mac e-Sword Package. This package bundles the free version of Wine with an e-sword distribution. You can click, install, and run. I found the tool worked fine but was a bit slow.  This was totally free and simple!

2) CrossOver with e-Sword. Since I own CrossOver which has the latest Wine code, etc. I decided to try it out. First I installed IE6 with CrossOver to create a Windows 98 “bottle” as my default. I then ran the installer for e-Sword using the CrossOver control panel. This worked fine and product started normally and works much faster than the one using the Darwine wine package (above).  CrossOver costs $30 but it’s a great product.  You can easily install Quicken, IE, Office, and many other windows programs easily onto the Mac.

Regardless of how you install it, I would recommend following these instructions for turning on font smoothing. Enjoy!

Time to Clean the Equipment! Really.

About 3 weeks ago my wife and I started noticing an odd rubbery metallic taste/smell to my espresso drinks. We had some immediate suspicions. The first was the cup itself. We had just picked up some new fun mugs at IKEA in Chicago and figured the nasty smell came from the cup. We swapped out cups and thankfully it wasn’t our new mugs. My next guess was the espresso blend itself.

I thought the beans smelled a little different when grinding. I know sometimes too much Robusta in a espresso blend can give the cup that flavor so I emailed my local roaster to see if there was anything new or maybe a bad roast batch had been reported (anything!). Nope, dead end. Time to clean the Ranchilio Rocky grinder.

I unscrewed the plate that holds the hopper and unthreaded the top burr. Yup, a 1/4 inch of yucky oils and residue. I got it all clean and cleaned the small cavities around the bottom burr. Fixed right? Nope, another dead end. Time to clean the machine.

I started with descaler, soaked all the components (wow – the portafilter!). The first shot I pulled revealed no change. I start wondering about that gasket in the brewhead that’s been there for 5+ years and the scary process of backflushing that I’ve not done (because of the vendor recommendations). I stumble across a great website (there are many for this machine) that finally gives me the courage to do these two things. I ordered a rubber insert for the portafilter that turns it into a blind (which forces pressure back into the machine for backflushing). In addition I picked up a $5 gasket. $10 in parts, $10 in shipping (boooo…!)

After emptying the machine and turning it on the side I wrestle out the gasket. Prying it out from the innermost part seemed to be the trick. To say there was a lot of oil and burnt reside in this area would have been an understatement. After removing it I used a standard espresso cleaning brush to get every corner of that brass brew head clean. Putting the new gasket in was simply, insert smooth side down and push. Next I backflush. I first put the knobby part of this rubber stopper down into the spout (made sense to me) but it didn’t seal, upside down did the trick. I flushed it several times and let it sit for a bit, then cleaned it out and backflushed again with water. After putting it all back together I pulled a couple shots with old beans.

The moment of truth. Will I be cursed forever with rubbery metal flavored coffee? I was happy to only smell coffee flavors when I dumped the 2 shots into the hot water to make an Americano! Gasket, backflush, who knows – one or both of them did the trick.

I found a lot of people complaining about this same issue on the net (but not a lot of answers). If you have a similar issue read the above links and order from Chris Coffee (I got parts in a few days). Gotta run, time for another Americano.

Getting a Netbook?

newmacFor a while I’ve wanted something a little more useful than my iPhone when I’m not at a computer.  I had a Toshiba laptop, but wanted something smaller with a longer battery life.  I started looking at the netbook models, and these caught my eye:

Dell Mini 9
MSI Wind U100
Lenovo S10

The one issue I kept getting hung up on with these devices was the screen resolution.  Most of them are only 500-600 pixels high.  That means a lot of scrolling on an already small trackpad.  Unfortunately right now in laptops (and netbooks) we mostly have 15.4 inch screens and 9-10 inch screens.  I started to look at my options for something closer to a 12″ screen.  This brought options like the IBM x40, ultramobiles, macbooks, and the new Dell Mini 12.  My plan was to run Linux or OSX (potentially try installing on non-Apple machine).  At the end of the day I found a used white macbook for a little over the price of a loaded netbook.  After just a day I can say the smaller Mac laptop fit the bill perfectly and didn’t break the bank.

I found it interesting my employer is now offering $50 netbooks in some areas if you purchase the right data plans. Too bad no MacBook discounts 🙂

Why Google is Winning

Google is winning because it works.  People like things that “just work”. 

Let’s look at home computers.  They have become more complicated and error prone.  This has to do with Viruses, half-baked software, Microsoft engineering, and too many options on hardware.  Users get frustrated when their IT friend says, “Just buy a new PC from Best Buy”.  The answer is usually upgrade the hardware, wipe the drive, put better virus software on…. But the answer to “just make it work” is get a new PC.  Wonder why a lot of people are trying the Mac?

How about Google?  What “just works”? For an experiment I tried the Yahoo search bar in my browser first for two weeks. After a few searches I usually reverted to Google, and got what I wanted on the first page of results.  Today I’m switching my default search bar back to Google.  Remember “just works”?  Try putting “buy Mark lunch next Friday” in your Google calendar.  Yes, it will figure it out.  Google Calendar “Just works”. 

Rather than wrangling over features and functionality I’ve started just asking the question “Does it just work”?

Great to be in a crowd?

My iMac does this crazy thing where the desktop gets all kinds of “quilted” patterns on the screen. I’ve had it in the store and they can’t find anything. Of course they want to restore the OS and other mess. Isn’t this why I bought a Mac? Turns out tons of people have this problem. I’m just glad it’s a general thing and not my specific computer.

I suspect my next computer will be a small form factor PC with an unbelievable monitor running Ubuntu. The trick is to keep running open source applications or cross platform apps (like MoneyDance).

What’s Wrong with the iPhone?

Apple is what is wrong with the iPhone. Apple tightly controls several aspects of the phone. The software development interfaces don’t allow you to access some of the core data on the phone. This means you won’t find a great replacement calendar in the App Store. In addition, Apple also does not allow programs to run in the background while the phone is off. This means that 3rd party programs can’t trigger your phone to awake if a new IM message appears or you reach a specific GPS coordinate. Forget about taking “Remember the Milk” to a whole new level by alerting the user when they drive by that convenience store on the way home!

If Apple had done a better job at some of the core programs this might not have been as big of an issue. The calendar program is attractive but is very lacking. I’ve listed a few items below:

  • Calendar Entries cannot be emailed. This was a real let down for me.
  • Calendar has almost no settings that can be changed. I’d love a default 15 minute alarm. Wouldn’t you?
  • No task list integration
  • No iCal support for external calendars, this should be simple
  • No OTA calendar synchronization

If there was an open API in this area, and you could convince Apple to put the program on it’s “App Store” there would be an answer overnight.

The second big issue is programs running in the background. Apple might have some good reasons for this but certainly there is a way to provide a hook or some rules to “protect” the platform. Even Windoze Mobile programs could do this (ouch). Let’s say I download a great streaming music program and want to browse the web or read an ebook. Not on the iPhone. Only the Apple iPod program can play music in the background and they don’t support streaming audio!

Apple please don’t forget that the “open market” principles work best on your platform and App Store too!