Grapefruit Mead*

* technically it's called a melamel when you add fruit to a mead

Following up on previous mead brewing attempts, I decided to attempt a mead flavored with grapefruit.  Basically I followed Charlie Papazian's recipe from The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, p. 344 "Antipodal Mead".  What I used:

Time lapse of cutting limbs off a mostly dead tree using a bucket lift

Here's how I put together a time lapse video of cutting limbs off a mostly dead tree.

Raspberry pi RAID array 3: health check & building a level 0 array to use for additional backup

I wanted to build a level-0 array out of two 1 TB drives (total size should be 2 TB) to act as a backup for my existing level-1 array (size: 2 TB), but I first discovered a problem with the level-1 array - it was only listing one of the constituent drives as actually being present, and it's state was "degraded".  Here's how I fixed that problem and built the level-0 array, and started my backup.

Small attempt at paving driveway with pavers

I've always wanted to do some sort of stone or brick project, so I decided to pave a small section of the driveway with pavers.  Here's a time-lapse video of the project:

Cutting down a dead tree in South Orange NJ 2017-03-18

I cut down a tree in my mother in-law's back yard!  It was about 12 feet tall and 24 inches in diameter at the base.  I mainly used a chainsaw (16" bar).  I did a hinge cut on the "downhill" side, and a thin back cut on the opposite side.  I then used a mallet to drive a wedge into the back cut to try to tip the tree over (towards the hinge), without any luck.  So I started cutting more away.  After cutting some away I would try to use the wedge again, without any success.  Eventually, it fell over spontaneously.  It was interesting that it didn't fall until it was cut down to about 3 inch diameter section in the center.  In the picture below you can see the small section in the middle that was left uncut right before it fell: