DIY Portafilter Pressure Gauge for Rancilio Silvia

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Admin

After having the Rancilio Silvia for 2 years and experienced with so many different beans from all over the world, it’s time to backflush and pressure test the machine. Blackflusing involves a 58mm Blind filter ($9.99 CAD) and Urnex Full Circle Tablets ($22.95 CAD) at Green Beanery.

The details on how to backflush is so simple and there are tons of information on the Internet. Yet, the pressure gauge is another story. The pressure gauge portafilter kits selling on Internet are about $45 US, but most of them don’t come with a valve (i.e. maximum pressure testing only) but I want to control the valve (i.e. test brewing pressure when slightly opened). Unless you buy the kit ($60 US) that is designed to install directly connected to the pump, then you can see the pressure change everytime when the brew button is pressed. For me, portafilter gauge is good enough and inspired by this article: Rancilio Silvia Pressure Gauge Test, I decided to DIY one.

Parts: I picked up a fire sprinkler pressure gauge from Active Surplus in Toronto ($15 CAD), I think it was used but who cares. Notice that it said “Air/Water” and its Made in USA. Unfortunately it was not oil filled, it’s okay since it is not connected to the pump. The rest of the parts were from local hardware store Home Depot – because of the size of the fittings, I had to get parts from both plumbing (Watts) and air compressor (porter cable) departments. It was easy to assemble, simply put them together and sealed with teflon tape.




Notes: To perform the test on Rancilio Silvia, DO NOT use any basket otherwise it will leak on the grouphead. In the photo/video, you can see the position of the portafiler was way pass the normal position because no basket was used. This is the only way to seal it properly without leaking, as you can see in the video there was not even a single drop of water leaking from any joint or grouphead.

Test 1: Maximum pressure with valve closed: 150-152 psi (10.3 – 10.5 bar)
Test 2: Brewing pressure with valve slightly opened: 140-147 psi (9.6-10.1 bar)

Repeatedly running both test 1 and 2 for multiple times (see both pictures and video), passed with flying colors. As you see in video, it wasn’t easy to control the valve. The point is to test the pump is working fine and the machine has enough pressure to brew an espresso properly.

For most semi-automatic prosumer/professional espresso machines, having 8-10 bar (116-145 psi) is optimal. Read “The umpteen BAR Myth” section in Espresso Machine Buying Guide and How Many Bars Should an Espresso Machine Have? As you can tell, company like Nespresso have their machines built at 15-19 bar, definitely it’s a marketing gimmick. Very smart, the higher the number the better especially for consumers who don’t have advanced knowledge about espresso.

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Mythos and Rini vacation at Boreal

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Admin

Thanks to Guy and Natalie for taking care of Mythos and Rini for 12 nights, their vacation has come to an end. I guess they miss playing with other cats, they are licking each other for 1 min non-stop after they got home. LOL

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Mythos Playing in Backyard

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Admin

Spring is here, Mythos is on the green as well as playing with the melting snow!!!







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Meowy Christmas e-Card 2012

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Admin

Mythos and Rini Christmas e-Card 2012,  taken using Canon 24-70 f/2.8 v1.  Lighting equipment is DIY home made (See link below for DIY Softbox project) and the color temperature is at around 3000K which produces a yellowish warm tone, so post editing is absolutely necessary.  If you compared to previous years (see links below), the lighting has improved quite a lot.

Edited using  Adobe Lightroom 4.2 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 without any 3rd party plug-in. Note that taking photos of cats is extremely challenging because they do not listen to you and they move so fast.



Related Links:

Posted in Arts/Graphics, Our Cats | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Rogers Enhanced Wi-Fi Modem (Hitron CGN2-ROG) on Bridge mode

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Admin

A lot of people said that in the Forums that they Rogers does not sell the modem at store, they only rent. I guess that’s not true, I just bought one from official Rogers store today at Eaton Center for $149.99 CAD. I asked the guy not to enter the serial number on my account, since I don’t want to lose the Internet when I got home, so had to call 1-888-ROGERS1 by myself.

Call Customer Service and Tech support

  1. Tell them your new modem serial number (S/N) and update your account
  2. Tell them to update to the new profile on the plan (no extra charge). If you had the old modem before, you are probably on the old profile. The new modem has to work with the new one to get the faster speed. For example, old Extreme plan has 95 GB monthly limit with 1 Mbps upload. New Extreme plan has 120 GB monthly limit with 3 Mbps upload. You can easily tell from SpeedCheck.net and login to your Rogers account to check both. After Rogers updated your profile, it takes 10-15 min
  3. Reboot the modem (must do)
  4. DHCP release/renew IP on laptop or reboot (must do)
  5. After that, I had 35 Mbps download and 2.84 upload on my Extreme plan

P2P Download Test  - 1.55 GB in 7 min AMAZING Speed!

Since Rogers stopped P2P throttling this year officially, I no longer need binary Usenet! P2P is back to the old days of glory! Look at the uTorrent photo, 1.55 GB was completed in less than 7 min with 3.75 MB/sec = 30 Mbps!! Pushed the speed almost to the max.

Side tips: Always use PeerBlocker or P2P VPN to avoid legal issue. Especially for software download, must use a VM to quarantine possible malware/virus and only run the keygen on your VM, never on your real laptop/desktop!

Installation Notes on Hitron CGN2-ROG for Advanced users + Bridge Mode

  1. No need to use that stupid USB key comes with the box, just login to the router using 192.168.0.1 (username=cusadmin, password=password)
  2. Disable Wi-Fi : Wireless > Disable Wi-Fi
  3. Run the modem as Bridge mode using your own router: Status > Capability > Uncheck “Residential Gateway function” and “UPnP”
  4. In Status > CM Status, write down  “Cable Modem IP”.  It is used for accessing the modem later, in my case, it is 7.27.xxx.xxx
  5. Change the password
  6. Reboot (After reboot, you will be on Bridge mode)
  7. DHCP release/renew IP on laptop or connect your own router now
  8. If you are serious about security, use a good router of your own and run the modem as Bridge mode, do not use the modem build-in NAT/Wireless




How to access the model after switching to Bridge mode

  1. Normally you don’t need this when your modem is working fine, but you may want to access it one day without doing a hard factory reset since 192.168.0.1 is no longer accessable.  From the previous step, you have the the IP 7.27.xxx.xxx
  2. Connect your laptop directly to the cable modem, change the NIC IP to 7.27.xxx.yyy  (yyy = anything from 2 to 254, in my screenshot I used 45)
  3. On your browser, go to http://7.27.xxx.xxx
  4. In fact, 7.27.xxx.xxx belongs to public range IP but it is not accessible from outside, it can only be accessed from LAN and you have to be on the same subnet. Perhaps, Rogers technical support may able to access your router remotely on this 7.27.xxx.xxx IP with the admin password.  If you look it up on Internet, this IP block actually belongs to “Dod Network Information Center”, United States Department of Defense.

Mystery of Dod IP address

Well, according to DSLReport forum, Quote from sbrook “Because Rogers runs an integrated network across its entire geography, they managed to run out of internal IP address space in the 10.* non-routable IP addresses. So they went to IANA and said “Help” and IANA offered them a series of 7.*.*.* IP addresses that are actually assigned to the US Dept of Defence providing Rogers makes them non-routable at their internet “on-ramp” gateway routers. They can do this in part because US DoD do the same thing … they are not routable outside of the DoD internet on-ramp gateway routers. You’ll never actually see a US DoD system with a 7.*.*.* IP from the public part of the internet.

It’s the same as your having a router with IPs 192.168.0.1 and your neighbours all having routers IP 192.168.0.1 … they don’t see them because those addresses are not passed to the WAN side of the routers and blocked through most cable modems … the result is everybody can use 192.168.*.* without interfering or seeing everybody elses computers etc using that IP address space.” end quote

Posted in Network/Hardware | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

WordPress 3.5 pictures display order problem (with Gallery Plus)

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Admin

I have been using Gallery Plus 1.4.1 and Lightbox Plus 2.4.6 on WordPress, recently after upgrading to WordPress 3.5,  my newly uploaded photos were totally screwed up with the wrong order. There is no effect on the new “ids” tag because of Gallery Plus, the only way is to disable the plug-in  to use the new features in 3.5. Of course, I don’t want to because Gallery Plus adds the “ref” tag to Lightbox automatically.

Usually, I order the photos by file names when exported from Adobe Lightroom.  If not, use FastStone Image Viewer to do a batch rename.

  1. Use FastStone Image Viewer (Free, open source. Google it)
  2. Tools > Batch Convert Selected Images
  3. Check “Rename” >  Type the Prefix, in my example I type “HardWoodFloor_#####”
  4. Now, upload all the photos to your WordPress post but it does not give you the right order because of the HTML5 or Flash uploader
  5. Edit the post,  write down the ID of your post, in my example it is 7042
  6. Run PhpMyAdmin or other SQL manager and run the following script (change the post_parent ID to your ID) 
    1
2
3

    UPDATE  wp_posts SET menu_order = RIGHT(post_name, 4) 
WHERE post_mime_type='image/jpeg' AND 
post_parent=7042 AND post_type='attachment'
  7. All the photos are in the same order of the file name. Fixed!


Assumption:

  1. All your photos are JPG
  2. Your file names are in format  [name]_#####.jpg    (##### is integer)
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DIY Engineered Oak Hardwood Floor Installation

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Admin

Since we have 2 cats Mythos and Rini, the 7 years old carpet on 2nd floor from the builder was getting a bit out of shape and not as easy to maintain. So Deb and I decided to replace it with either hardwood or laminate flooring.  After shopping for a while, we decided to go with Bruce hardwood because it is Made in U.S.A and not in China, this is very important because we don’t want our cats to get in touch with some unknown toxic chemical.

Engineered hardwood vs Solid hardwood vs Laminate

Finally, we chose Engineered Oak hardwood over laminate because we wanted to have a smooth transition from the main floor hardwood where the color and texture matched perfectly.  The type of engineered hardwood  we chose was using “click-locking”  or “click-n-fold” (similar to laminate),  so I did not have to rent or buy the expensive nailer. The reason was that I couldn’t finish the project in 2-3 days like the professional with a team. I got full time job and I was the only person to do it. At rental $50/day, the nailer was too expensive to rent and wasn’t worth to buy either ($600 for a decent one that won’t jam the nail – I did all the research). With 15% off at Lowes, we loaded our cars with the boxes. We had 4 bedrooms and a hall way to cover and the project took around 4 months.  I  added some description on the photos to help the other DIY people. Remember, make it right!

Note that on one of the rooms, the coaxial cable, Cat-5e cable and external box were there many years ago, I had no plan to re-wire it properly and install the jack on the wall.



















Don’t trust videos on YouTube

There are a lot of videos on YouTube that gives you incorrect information on installation. Many of those so-called professional (although they look like one)  really lack of skills and have no common sense. Use your own judgement and read articles and watch videos from sites with reputation. Do proper research before starting.

  • Overall Difficulty:  4/5
  • Most challenge: Fitting the planks under the door jambs because it required precise calculation. Also, moving heavy IKEA PAX by myself without any help was pretty challenging
  • Most annoying: Prepare, level and clean the subfloor
  • Time taken: 4 months – I have a full time job,  I worked weekend only + 1 week off. Our house is 1800 sq.feet, but the area we did the installation was around 650 sq. feet

Total material is around $3000 CAD (roughly only because we lost the receipt). Here is the rough break down:

  • $2000 CAD  E2100Y Bruce lock and fold hardwood
  • $600 CAD underlayment
  • $60 CAD for 2 x T-mould
  • $400 CAD Quarter round, tapping block, hammer, spacer, finishing nails, saw blade and related tools

Conclusion and Verdict

Bruce makes very good flooring product and we are very happy with the result, we are so glad that we got rid of the carpet. Since the engineered lock and fold floor is considered as floating floor (no nail or glue), you have to expect when you walk on it, the sound is not as solid as solid hardwood. No matter how level the subfloor is and the plank itself may not be always perfectly flat, so there are some area would move up and down when walking on it (Google it or read the forums). NEVER and DO NOT attempt to apply nail or glue to fix that, because it needs to expand and move sideways, that’s why it called “floating floor”. With this experience, next time I would try to conquer the solid hardwood.

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My new PC under $1000 CAD with Windows 8 and Deb’s Dell Studio SSD Upgrade

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Admin

Since my last PC was broken, I did not have a computer for almost 6 months and I survived using the tablet and mobile phones. But there are certain things that cannot be done, for example photos editing and games. So I decided to build one from scratch, with  a bit of patience (I had 8 rebates forms to fill out), I was able to get a good deal.

Under $1K CAD, I was able to get outstanding 296 fps on CounterStrike and  ultra/extreme graphics settings on Starcraft 2 without overclocking.  Most amazingly, cold start of Windows 8 took 10 seconds!!! Thanks to Patriot 32GB Ram and Kingston SSD.





Why did I go for i5 instead of i7?

I intentionally did not spend money on the best CPU (Intel i7) because you have to understand where the bottleneck is.  Instead, I put the money on 32 GB Ram, SSD and GPU (GTX 660 ti).  This makes my system out perform any i7 with limited Ram, 7200 RPM  HDD and a crappy video card.   Originally I debated if I should get a laptop or not, but for $1K, there is no way you can get this performance.

This is my new PC hardware configuration (total $989.91 CAD)

  • CPU: Intel Core i5-3550 Quad-Core Socket 1155, 3.3 Ghz (up to 3.7Ghz Turbo) , 6MB L3 Cache, 22nm (Retail Boxed) Gen3 ($194.99 CAD)
  • Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LK Socket 1155 Intel Z77 Chipset ($119.99 CAD)
  • Ram: Patriot Intel Extreme Masters LE 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 DIMMs x 2 = totally 32 GB filled up all slots ($54.99 x 2 = $109.98 CAD)
  • SSD: Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD), Read: 555Mb/s Write: 510MB/s ($109.99 CAD)
  • GPU: MSI Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 ti 2GB ($279.99 CAD)
  • Optical: ASUS BW-12B1ST 12x Blu-Ray Writer ($59.99 CAD)
  • Case: Antec Three Hundred Cast ATX ($44.99 CAD)
  • PSU: Antec HCG-620M 80Plus Modular Power Supply ($69.99 CAD)
  • HDD: 7200 RPM Western Digital 700GB HDD from old computer ($0.00 CAD)

Deb’s laptop SSD upgrade

For Deb’s 3.5 years old Dell Studio laptop,  a 256 GB ADATA SX900 SSD ($149.99 CAD) made her computer feel like a new born laptop. The reason is that in 2009, the laptop came with 4 GB of RAM with 32-bit Windows Vista where 1 GB of Ram was totally wasted. Now with 64-bit Windows 8, it unleashed the full power. Also, 5400 RPM HDD was so damn slow compare to ADATA SSD. The SSD is feels like 10x faster making the difference as night and day.

Research.. research and research

I built PC in the past, but since I don’t keep track of the hardware changes all the time,  I had to do A LOT of reading and research before buying the right combination with the limited budget. I spent combined of totally 8 hours just to read and pick the items that are (1) OnSale AND (2) with Rebates  AND (3) Have stock.   All items were bought from local computer stores at Canada Computers 90% and NCIX 10%.

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Hourly Contract vs Full Time Proper Calculation

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Admin

Some of my friends at work quitted the full time job and went for contract (paid by hour without benefits)  for more money and flexibility.  When I asked them the equivalent annual salary, they showed me a pretty good number. Is that the actual money going into their pocket?   Wait…

There are so many on-line “contractor calculator” and “rate formulas” on the Internet, however many of them are wrong because many items have not been taken into account.   Therefore, I came up with this spreadsheet and it can be fully customized. Hope this helps other people.

contract_vs_fulltime_screenshot

Download the Excel file

In Canada, I.T.  industry for experienced contractors has the average hourly rate from $60 to $150/hr.  Let’s take the lower boundary $60/hr job as an example. With other formulas/online calculcators, they show you more than $100K/yr.  But when you put that on my spreadsheet, you are only getting around $89K/yr. Play with it, don’t let the job agent fool you. Compare this with your full time salary, negotiate for better rate and decide if it is a risk to quit. Good luck.

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DIY Cat Safe Cup/Mug Holder

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Admin

Mythos and Rini love to drink from the ceramic mug for some odd reasons,  and it became a bad habit.  But in order for them to drink more water,  we didn’t want to remove that. In the past, one of our cats knocked down the mug/cup and made a mess. To prevent this from happening again, this is a very simple project.  That took 2-3 hours.





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