The Picture So Far I’ve used a number of VCS flavors and platforms over the years. I started with CVS, moved on to SVN for a good long while, and was finally converted over to Git long after it had achieved its critical mass. I had a sourceforge account (which I loved) long before it became the …

WordPress to Octopress and Back Again This site is once again running on WordPress. It’s been through many changes since its earliest incarnation as handwritten static HTML. There have been versions based on custom PHP frameworks, a pyblosxom-based variant, and most recently, the Octopress …

Part 1 and part 2 covered getting the Raspberry Pi booted up and configured with a basic software stack for developing on top of. With that out of the way, we can focus on wiring up the remaining hardware components. There will be two types of IO devices wired to the Pi – temperature sensors and …

In part 1 I walked through getting the Raspberry Pi initially up and running. Once you’re logged in, you can immediately start hooking up sensors and start polling them directly from the command line. However, you’re likely going to want some more software installed for additional tasks. For my …

The Raspberry Pi is a cheap single-board computer with generic IO features which make it ideal for brewery automation projects. The BrewPi project is just one example. I decided to assemble a similar project with the goal of being able to monitor, log, and control the fermentation temperature of two …

While recently assembling the brew log page, I realized that I haven’t written about anything other than brewing beer in quite a while. When I initially started writing I had four primary concepts in mind – a blend of food, beer, travel, and photography. Over time it seems some of these have fallen …

My last vacation back to Missouri was for Thanksgiving last year. Here is a short video composed of snippets of footage I shot while spending time with the family. Everything was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II outfitted with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Lens and then edited together with Final Cut …

These are hands down, the best wings I’ve ever made. Never mind that the recipe was hastily hacked together from multiple online recipe sources and only used as a rough guideline once in the kitchen. And don’t even think of bringing up the fact that I’m basing this on a sample size of one and have …

I spent a year with a pro Smugmug subscription. When it came time for renewal, I decided to make the switch over to Flickr. In my year with Smugmug I had uploaded somewhere around 1500 photos. It would be no easy task to migrate this number of images between services while maintaining their …

The end of June marks the end of the first half of a year in pictures. It also signifies the end of a month-long experiment in black & white photography for my 365 project. I’ve never really appreciated working in the B&W format. If anything, I prefer to treat my images with a dialed down …

At the end of April, I took a bit of vacation time and spent five days driving from San Francisco, CA to my hometown of Springfield, MO. While large portions of the journey were spent mindlessly blazing down the interstate on autopilot, some sections were devoted to sightseeing along the historic …

The greatest shows are often put on by those bands that most of your friends have never heard of playing in small dives. Jason Webley started busking on the streets of Seattle with his distinctive brand of accordion music. He now tours venues around the world on his own and as part of his Monsters …

As I’m preparing to embark on a new road trip to the Midwest, I’m reflecting on other past trips. This post has been sitting as a draft for a few months now. It’s about time it finally got polished up and published. I kept a short journal of the first few days of my vacation in Mexico near the small …

Less than a mile’s walk from my front door are the Buena Vista and Corona Heights parks. Albeit, a mile of steep hill climbing, the views of the city from the top are well worth it. I’ve recently created a few panoramas from photos taken at these locations. Hopefully they give a sense of the …

Another month into the year means that many more days of 365 pictures. February was filled with rainy days. It’s a fact that can be evidenced by the large number of shots of (mostly) inanimate household objects. The limited opportunities for shooting excursions often challenged me to find …

Almost everyone has hated Valentine’s Day at one time or another in their life. It’s most likely out of these deep feelings of love scorned masked by a disdain for corporate holidays that the great Pillow Fight was borne. This year marked the fourth anniversary of the San Francisco Pillow Fight. The …

The Chinese New Year Parade was started sometime in the 1860’s and remains one of the few night illuminated parades in the country. By now it carries strong corporate sponsorship, falling under the direction of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce – currently sponsored by Southwest Airlines. The …

2009 marks the beginning of my first full year of serious dSLR photography. I picked up my first dSLR camera kit – the Canon Digital Rebel XTi – in April of 2008. Since then I’ve already acquired various new lenses and other essential photo gear. Most recently I upgraded to the Canon 5D Mark II …

Vermillion Lies with Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band The Great American Music Hall Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 Established in 1907, The Great American Music Hall is San Francisco’s oldest nightclub. It is located on O’Farrell Street in the Tenderloin district. Getting to the venue is a simple …

Continuing the field testing of my new Mark II, I decided to check off another item on my list of must visit locations and headed to the San Francisco Zoo. Getting there is a fairly trivial task – a simple matter of hopping on an outbound Muni L Taraval LRV and taking it all the way to the end. The …

I recently read about a place known as the “secret sidewalk” located somewhere in the Niles Canyon area of the East Bay. Also in the area adjacent to this sidewalk were said to be the ruins of an old brick factory. Having recently acquired my upgraded camera body, this seemed a perfect location to …