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:

Growing English Lavender From Seeds

I'm attempting to grow English Lavender from seed, because I would like to plant a lot of them around our house - approximately 170 - and the seedlings are relatively expensive.  Also, as my friend Jason R. pointed out, I'm Mark Watney'ing - I'm inspired by the book The Martian that I read over the summer.

The main instructions came from the "growing information" section on the Burpee catalog page for Lavender, English:  http://www.burpee.com/herbs/lavender/lavender-english-prod000476.html but I also read through several other web pages, see references below.

Ezekiel 25:17 for software engineers

The path of the righteous engineer is beset on all sides by the iniquities of scope creep and the tyranny of product owners.  Blessed is he who in the name of Agile and Scrum shepherds their project through the valley of deadlines, for he is truly his team's keeper and the finder of lost core functionality.  And I will strike down upon thee with great practicality and furious patience those who attempt to delay our release.  And you will know my name is Victory when I lay my practicality on thee.

With apologies to Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson.

And a wall paper version provided by Phil M.