Bob Castleberry's blog blog

Parker 22R safety razor

2009-11-21T22:07:29Z

In a previous post I wrote about my wife getting me several old fashioned razors to play around with due to my frustration with the state of modern disposable razors well now that I’ve had some time to work with them I thought I would give a little review on each. I’ll start with the parker 22R safety razor as it’s been the easiest to adapt to and has drawn the least amount of blood.

To start off with this razor just looks really nice. It has a very dark tone with good dimensions and a nice shine to it. The shine actually made it difficult to photograph well. One of the most interesting aspects of this razor is it’s weight. At a hefty 3 oz it is twice the weight of my Gillette fusion (at 1.4 oz). The handle is around 4″ long which gives you more to hold on to for maneuvering. It feels like your holding a solid well made tool as opposed to a cheap piece of plastic (not that the fusion razors are remotely cheap).

The razor is a twist butterfly type. This means that as you twist the handle the top opens up to give you access to the blade, then you just twist it again to close the compartment. The twisting mechanism on the 22R feels very well designed. It has a clean turn and a catch on either side of the opening and closing. The compartment is spacious so when installing and removing blades it doesn’t feel cramped. All in all easy to understand and easy to get started with.

As for additional investment in the form of blades this razor again is very affordable. My wife picked up the Shark super stainless blades in a 100 pack for an incredibly reasonable cost. You can find them on amazon here. I’ve shaved I believe 15 times on the first blade and it is just now starting to drag. These blades are wicked sharp and do not seem to dull with the ease of modern shave cartridges. If I changed the blade now with 15 shaves in I would get 1500 shaves for under $20. With my previous 4 blade cartridge I would start noticing the difference at about 5 shaves and switch before I hit 10. At around $30 for an 8 pack that was making my shave habit rather expensive.

The last and most important aspect is of course the shave. This is the part where individual preference really plays a strong role. For me the razor give a wonderful shave. This is mostly because I like an aggressive shave and am careful when using it. One pass with this razor produces a shave far superior than any three or four blade razors I’ve used. Although it’s not close enough for me to ignore a second pass if I want to be “baby butt” smooth. The thing is I haven’t quite got the second pass down to not drawing blood. If I’m in a big hurry I’ll run a cartridge razor for the second pass. This is likely due to a technique issue in me learning how to use the razor when going against the grain but I wanted to warn others that there is some learning curve with this razor.

All in all I’ve been super happy with this razor and would purchase it again without any hesitation. I do plan on becoming proficient with the other blades in my collection but so far this one gets two thumbs up.

Razors

2009-11-08T22:07:29Z

For the last few years I’ve become more green conscious thanks to my wife Kim. We’ve started recycling, buying local food (farmers markets for the win) and being more aware of our power usage. One of the things that has begun to bug me has been the throw away nature of our culture. When I look at my grandfather and great grandfathers generations I see products that were built to last. Specifically with shaving products I was annoyed. Three generations ago you owned a boar brissel brush, mug for your soap, strop, sandstone and a straight razor. The only item you had to routinely purchase to shave was soap and that came in a puck that would last you at least a month or two. While you had to save up to pay for these items they would all last you at least five years. None of them had any land filling packaging (even the soap often didn’t have a box surrounding it) and all of them were made with quality. In fact I’ve heard of people who inherited their grandparents shaving kit and continue to use the razor to this day (putting it at well over 40 years worth of usage). I just like the idea that when I buy something I’m investing in quality that could last me a lifetime.

When I started looking into classic shaving gear I was rather surprised by the shear price of investing in a new razor. I did realize that this was going to be an investment and I wanted something that would really last so the cost didn’t scare me off. One of my chief sources of pricing came from browsing Classic Shaving. I am still really impressed by their selection and how well their site is laid out but with the outlay of funds I knew it wasn’t going to be any time soon that I would be shaving with a straight razor.

Recently I decided that as long as I held onto it I was never going to get anything off of my wish list (due to my wife managing the finances). So I made up my list and handed it over to her to budget in where she could find room. Not more than a month later I was met with a surprise that was like Christmas. Not only had she got me a straight razor, she managed to get four old style razors and under $100. What can I say she is awesome and tracking things down.

Here is a picture of the razors and blades she found me:

The razor on the far left is a Parker Safety razor which takes double sided blades. While it’s not totally sustainable like a solid straight razor (due to it needing blades) the blades are very cheap and there is little packaging involved. It is also far closer to the shave I am accustomed to so it’s a good transition piece and nice for quick shaves. The next razor is a Geneva cutlery 11/16 straight razor which has a good feel and heft to it. The next is a Morris 400 prosperity wedge which feels a bit light but has a nice sharp blade. The final blade is a Parker safety razor that takes half blades and is in the form factor of a straight razor.

What I’ve found in working with these razors is that my face had been totally pampered by the Gillette 3 and 4 blade razors I had been using. I have made myself bleed a lot trying to shave with these. The positive is that I haven’t given up and the more I work with them the less I’m cutting myself. This is very interesting and I would suggest to anyone to invest in yourself and your shave by getting an old fashioned razor.

Wedding Vows

2009-09-07T22:07:29Z

Here is a copy for posterity of the wedding vows I came up with for my marriage to Kim. I used several different sources and wove together the ceremony text. I got most of my insperation from the my wedding vows site. The top paragraph started as a word for word from Paul Newman’s wedding vows and I reworded it to fit our needs (Thanks Mr. Newman). The second to last sentence is a quote from Robert Heinlein that I snuck in. Tara performed our wedding ceremony and did a wonderful job. It was easily one of the happiest days of my life.

Tara

Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. In marriage the little things are the big things. It is never being too old to hold hands. It is remembering to say ‘I love you’ at least once a day. It is never going to sleep angry. It is at no time taking the other for granted; the courtship should not end with the honeymoon, it should continue through all the years. It is having a mutual sense of values and common objectives. It is doing things for each other, not in the attitude of duty or sacrifice, but in the spirit of joy. It is speaking words of appreciation and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways. It is looking for parts of each other that make you happy. It is further cultivating flexibility, patience, understanding and a sense of humor. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow. It is a common search for the happy and the beautiful in all that life brings. It is establishing a relationship in which the independence is equal, dependence is mutual and the obligation is reciprocal. It is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner. If you are ready, Bobby, pronounce your vows to Kimberly.

Bobby

Kimberly, our miracle lies in the path we have chosen together. I enter this marriage with you knowing that the true magic of love is not to avoid changes but to navigate them successfully. Let us commit to the miracle of making each day work . . . together. With this ring I offer all of myself to you for all our life. (places ring)

Tara

If you are ready, Kimberly, pronounce your vows to Bobby.

Kim

Bobby, our miracle lies in the path we have chosen together. I enter this marriage with you knowing that the true magic of love is not to avoid changes but to navigate them successfully. Let us commit to the miracle of making each day work . . . together. With this ring I offer all of myself to you for all our life. (places ring)

Tara (does handfasting ceremony, then)

Bobby do you take Kimberly to be your lawfully wedded wife, till death do you part.

Bobby

I do

Tara

Kimberly do you take Bobby to be your lawfully wedded husband, till death do you part.

Kim

I do

Tara

I now pronounce you bonded together throughout this life

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you. May beauty surround you both in the journey ahead and through all the years, May happiness be your companion and your days together be good and long upon the earth. May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live. You may now unite this union with a kiss

Making Salsa

2009-09-07T22:07:29Z

One of the joys of fall for me is making fresh home made salsa. It’s a lot of work but well worth it. My wife picked up a bunch of canning supplies two years ago and last year we actually produced some real food. Now I look forward to it every year. This year we made 33 pint jars of salsa and is it yummy.

Recipe:

* 7 cups of tomato (4 cups diced, 3 cups blended)
* 3 cups sweet onion (2 diced, 1 blended)
* 2 cups bell peppers (diced)
* 4 Tbs chopped garlic (blended)
* 1/4 Apple Cider Vinegar
* 2 Tbs Lemon or Lime Juice
* 2 Tbs Dark Brown Sugar
* 1/4 Cup Cilantro
* 1 Tbs chopped Jalepeno
* 1 Tsp Cheyenne Pepper
* 2 Tbs Blackstrap Molasses
* Herbs: Taragon, Sage, Cumin, Celery Salt
* Salt and Sugar to taste
* wheat flour

Start out by prepping your main ingredients. For the tomatoes it’s best to use the paste variety such Roma. I tend to hand dice the tomatoes. While I’ve tried using a Oxo Chopper (slap chop knock off), Le Presse and food processor the result just always seems to not be chunky enough for the consistency that we like. I use a blender to turn a little less than half of the tomatoes to liquid. If you do turn fresh tomatoes into liquid you’ll notice the result is a nice pink and not the dark red your used to with canned tomato products. I don’t know why but this seems to be important. This last time around I used the chopper to chop up the onion and found it did a really nice job. The blended onion is just fresh onion put in the blender and liquidated. The peppers I run through a small food processor to make minced bell peppers. A good variety of colors makes for better presentation and taste. With the Garlic I’ve done both fresh heads and prepackaged. What I’ve found is that the spice world chopped jar garlic is both easy and has a great taste (http://www.spiceworldinc.com/body_product_jar.htm). When chopping the Jalapeno’s you should use kitchen gloves to protect yourself. Be very careful of what you touch while working with the Jalapeno’s as getting them on your skin can be rather painful. I don’t use the seeds at all as they add a heat both my wife and I don’t enjoy.

Now that you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and blended put the correct proportions into the sauce pan and bring to a boil. With the herbs I tend to shake them in instead of measuring. Because the herbs and the aroma and smell you should smell each and get a feeling for how they are going to affect the body of the finished salsa. If you need clear instructions and this notion of smell/feeling doesn’t make sense use five strong shakes of each from the shaker and you should be good. Once the mixture hits a boil for about two minutes lower the temp about half, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Now here is the tricky part, add a teaspoon of salt and sugar to the mixture, stir and let sit for two minutes. Give it a good stir and ladle some out into a little cup to taste. You just have to gauge if it needs more salt or more sugar. Your goal here is just to get it reasonably close because the final product once it’s canned and chilled will taste somewhat different than the boiling liquid so let go of your perfectionist and be happy with “hey that’s pretty good”. Now break out your bag of fine ground wheat flower and add it a very little bit at a time. My wife has asked me several times to measure out how much flower I use but I just can’t bring myself to do it. If I had to guess I probably add about a 4 tablespoons on the first go. The trick is to stir it in little by little while you try to avoid clumps. Then simmer the mixture stirring every couple of minutes for ten minutes. At this point I put a little in a little cup and put it in the freezer until it cools (so another 10 minutes) while that on the stove continues to simmer at very low heat. Once it cools down to the warm state it’s obvious if it’s to thin or needs something, generally though it’s just right and we are ready for the canning stage.

In canning we prefer the wide mouth pint mason jars but you can really use any jars you want. One batch makes about 5 pint jars. Just pour the hot liquid in the jar up to the bottom lip (1/4″ from the top) and put the lid on snug but not tight. Using a funnel is important as you don’t want to get salsa on the lip at all. Once you’ve got all of your jars poured and lidded start your pressure caner and load it up. The reason to use a pressure canning method instead of boiling water method is that this recipe is both low acid and uses a thickener which in both instances mandate pressure canning. I’m not going to explain pressure canning on this but to say that it is needed. Once pressure canned your jars of salsa will last up to a couple of years (some say longer). I’m not sure as we almost always go through all of our salsa in a year with giving them to friends and eating it.

Thin Stream player

2009-08-23T22:07:29Z

A few years ago I was working with little via eden boards as thin clients with the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). This worked great and I quickly became excited about using these little mini-ITX boards for other projects. At one point (about three or four years ago) I bought one of these boards on ebay for a hundred bucks to play with. Due to priorities it had sat collecting dust since. Well recently my wife started talking about wanting to play the same audio content from multiple devices synchronously. This led to some discussion about streaming from one location and finally to the idea that I might have a use for that little board.

After some playing with different streaming technologies such as icecast and squeeze server I finally landed on shoutcast. There are pro’s and con’s to each of the different servers and tech but for her purposes shoutcast just seemed to be obvious choice. The streaming server is on a winxp system with winamp on the same system to direct the stream. Of course if you’ve ever messed with shoutcast you know you can pretty much stream from any system using winamp so it’s kind of flexible.

Once I had all of the services set up I broke out the eden board. It’s one of those spiffy ones with the pcmcia slot on board. I set it up with an old linksys wpc11 card and a 2Gb CF IDE drive for a hard disk that cost me $40. I used an external usb cdrom to install debian from netinstall. Now would be a good time to point out that this could probably be done ALOT cheaper other means but since I had a bunch of this junk laying around I thought why not just use it. After getting deb setup and all updated I started to tackle the problem of making it do what I initially intended for it.

I configured the wireless tools to automatically join my wifi network. I then setup dns and dhcp to give this box a static address that is resolvable from inside the house network. This box would be named thinplayer.castleberry-farms.com. Once the box was setup and accessible from the network I had to figure out how I was going to play a shoutcast stream headless without any user intervention. Well it turns out that you can play shoutcast streams using a cli utility call mpg123. The problem lies in getting the command to act like a daemon. In comes DJB Daemontools to the rescue. If you’ve never used daemontools before let me give you a brief rundown.

Daemontools allows you to automatically monitor a command and treat it like a daemon. Where I work we use it for running j2ee web containers such as tomcat and it works beautifully. If the process exits the supervise process kicks off a new one. It has a built in logger that handles rotation and removal and can be setup with all kinds of environmental variables that are used solely within it’s process management.

In order to stream a shoutcast stream using mpg123 you would use a command such as: mpg123 -C -b 4096 -@ http://stream/listen.pls. If the stream somehow dies or the connection is broken then mpg123 exits. So here is how I setup daemontools to take that command and run it like a daemon. First I needed to setup a directory structure. In opt I created a thinplayer/service directory. Then I set up an env and log directory under service. Under log you need an env and main directory. Then I went into /opt/thinplayer/service/env and created some environmental variables. I created the variables: ARGS, COMMAND, URL and USER. I populated them with simple echo statements such as: echo “/usr/bin/mpg123″ > COMMAND. The variables represent the arguments passed to mpg123, where the command itself is located, the url of the stream and the user to run as. Initially I have this all running as root which is a bad idea. I was having some difficulty allowing my player user to access the sound card and just didn’t want to mess with it yet. Once I get that lined out I will change this to be running as a protected user. After the arguments are set up I went back to /opt/thinplayer/service and created a file called “run” (vi run). It looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1 \
envdir ./env \
sh -c ‘
exec setuidgid ${USER+”$USER”} ${COMMAND+”$COMMAND”} ${ARGS} -@ ${URL}
‘

I then went into the log/env directory and created the environmental variables MAXFILESIZE, MAXLOGFILES, and USER just like I did previously. I then went to /opt/thinplayer/service/log and created a run file (vi run) which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec \
envdir ./env \
sh -c ‘
exec \
setuidgid ${USER+”$USER”} \
multilog \
t \
${MAXFILESIZE+”s$MAXFILESIZE”} \
${MAXLOGFILES+”n$MAXLOGFILES”} \
./main
‘

I then touched the file status (touch status). Now that everything is set up I linked in the service (ln -s /opt/thinplayer/service /etc/service/thinplayer). I ran an svstat /etc/service/thinplayer and tailed the logs to make sure everything looked good (tail -f /etc/service/thinplayer/log/main/current). In the log I see something a bit like this:

@400000004a90b29726bc0dc4 High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layers 1, 2 and 3
@400000004a90b29726bdd2e4       version 1.4.3; written and copyright by Michael Hipp and others
@400000004a90b29726be4fe4       free software (LGPL/GPL) without any warranty but with best wishes
@400000004a90b2972c378ea4 Can’t get terminal attributes
@400000004a90b2972f67f2bc
@400000004a90b29730735fac Directory: http://stream:80/
@400000004a90b29730744624 Playing MPEG stream 1 of 1:  …
@400000004a90b2973074af9c ICY-NAME: diskbox-stream
@400000004a90b29730751914 ICY-URL: http://stream
@400000004a90b29730fac3d4 MPEG 1.0 layer III, 128 kbit/s, 44100 Hz stereo

Which of course is the terminal output from mpg123.

After getting my streamer to work I needed some way for my wife to be able to interface with this without having to ssh to the box. It was all fine and good that I ssh and run svc -d /etc/service/thinplayer when I wanted to shut it down but not so fine for her. After thinking it over and because I’m rather partial to python I ended up going with python server pages on apache as the interface. I set up basic apache authentication with users for both her and I. Then I coded up a little python server pages application to control it. Here is a picture of the app I came up with:

So all in all an interesting weekend to set this up and get it going.

Rum Chocolate Chip Cookies

2011-02-02T22:07:29Z

This recipe is based on the standard toll house cookie recipe with just a couple of modifications. The original recipe is here.

* 2 1/4 cups flour
* 2 tsp baking powder
* 2 tsp salt
* 2 sticks real butter (softened)
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 3/4 cup brown sugar
* 2 tsp vanilla
* 3 Tablespoon Rum (I use a sipping rum that has been well aged)
* 2 Tablespoon unsweetened baking cocoa (I like Ghirardelli)
* 1/4 cup water
* 2 eggs
* 1 package chocolate chips (I use half a package as these are really rich even without the chips)

What you’ll need:

* cookie sheet
* mixer
* 2 bowls
* rubber spatula
* oven

Instructions:

The butter needs to be soft so be sure you’ve done this ahead of time. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Beat butter, sugar (both kinds), vanilla and rum until creamy in your other bowl. Heat water until very hot (2 minutes in the microwave using a microwave safe container works for me) then add cocoa stirring until fully dissolved in the water. Mix in the cocoa water solution into the butter mixture until fully integrated. Add in the eggs one at a time beating on high. Add in the flour mixture mixing in a bit at a time until fully folded in. Use the spatula to ensure that all flour is folded in and that there are no unmixed spots in the bottom of the mixing bowl. Mix in the chocolate chips. If there is any other ingredients you would like to add such as nuts or dried fruit this would be a good time to add them. Because of the amount of liquid the dough is slightly runny so place the dough mixture in the refrigerator and preheat the oven. Once the oven is heated to 375 degrees scoop out the dough mixture onto your cookie sheet. I use an ice cream scoop and make six cookies to a full size sheet so these cookies are rather large (at this size it makes 18 cookies). I bake them for 15 minutes, let them cool for 5 on the pan and then move them to a sheet of aluminum foil to cool the rest of the way.