Category: General

General

Strawberry Rhubarb Compote

I have 3 large rhubarb bushes in my garden and inevitably end up with too much rhubarb on my hands. After passing some off to family/friends I use the rest up either in pie or in a delicious compote. I don’t use any particular recipe just usually eyeball half half rhubarb to strawberry and adjust based on taste afterwards.

This taste great out of the pot while its still warm as a great comfort drink (Grandma makes the best “Kompot”), but lately I have been enjoying this chilled on hot days. For this I usually bottle the compote while warm and then refrigerate. It is fairly acidic so it keeps well in the fridge for at least a week though in my experience this delicious drink is finished well before that time.

Sous Vide Temperature Accuracy & Reliability

I have purchased a new sous vide machine and as always it has to be broken in and tested. I have found digital temperature sensors to be repeatable but sometimes inaccurate and so offset have to calculated for each of these machines.

I have a master chef unit and the test was controlling water at 132F (55.56 C). I dropped in a logging probe to confirm this. The chart below shows a very tight temperature grouping but the average is at 55C and not the 55.56 the sous vide was controlling to. So in the end I have a very repeatable and controllable unit but it is 0.5C off which I can alwaysaccount for.

Cell Phone Tracking & PiHole

Many people underestimate how much data their phones upload. I use PiHole as a DNS filter and cache so I can track outbound requests. I noticed that during the same time of day a significant portion of my blocked requests disappeared. Turns out this is exactly when I leave and come back from work. The culprit was my cell phone trying to send usage data that pihole was blocking successfully. I will post the blocked queries later.

Sun Room Temperature & Humidity

I monitor temperature and humidity in my sunroom. An interesting trend can be seen when overlapping humidity and temperature. As the sunroom is an uncontrolled environment when temperature increases during the day humidity drops down but at night when temperature comes back down humidity comes back up.

Aquarium TDS

Analyzing my aquarium total dissolved solids (TDS) a neat trend can be noticed. A water change was completed on the 9th which resulted in a dramatic drop in TDS but over time the TDS had risen back to its previous levels. As this the aquarium has an open top, water will evaporate and lead to an increased solids concentration. A water top up was completed on the 8th and there was a drop in TDS related to that as well.

Easter Rum Baba

An Easter classic, the rum baba makes a delicious treat. It is a bit intensive and messy but well worth the effort. One key factor is the raisins themselves have to be soaked for at least 4 hours as when trailed at shorter intervals they weren’t retaining any of the flavor. Additionally the soaking liquid has to be applied hot and can quite literally be squeezed into the cakes.

Understanding Fridge Temperature Cont

A follow up for some of the takeaways of the previous post (https://adam-s.ca/understanding-fridge-temperature/). Repeating the experiment in a different part of the fridge showed some cleaner results. In-fact there were oscillations present at a much more realistic interval (30min). This was very surprising as this is a mechanical fridge with a thermostat and the oscillating period was dead on 30min almost as if it was computerized.

The temperature logger was able to go for 4.5 days on the external battery bank.

Power BI Top 1%

One of my Power BI reports has reached the top 1% of all Power BI reports for the whole international company. A few keys to getting my report to this point.

  • Value to users: I tailored many aspects of the report to be more suitable to users in different departments giving them a reason to use it and widening the amount of people interested.
  • Automated Reports: Many daily and weekly status and trends were automated through power automate where users could quickly see top issues and then links were added to go to the Power BI report for further trends.
  • TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING: Many users are still new to Power BI and are unaware of what data is available. Training sessions and more commonly training videos were a key in getting users more engaged and involved.