Exasperated Calculator

On February 11, 2012.

It’s been a while since one of my more popular posts on how to build a small media PC, and even longer since I built my last ‘main’ PC (2008).

But due to age, and a growing addiction to FlightSim, I decided to build a whole new PC.

Here are all the bits (well, minus the motherboard that hadn’t arrived when I took this photo):

I’ll talk about the various bits as I put things together. Everything except for the motherboard was purchased at MSY, who have great prices and a Canberra store front. The motherboard came from Aus PC Market, another fantastic supplier of bits, especially stuff that’s a bit more bleeding edge.

First up, here’s the case fully disassembled, with all the cables running everywhere:

The case is an Antec Nine Hundred Two V3, which is probably a bit more garish than I’d like, but was a good price and a good size. I would have preferred a P182 or P183, but no one had those in stock at reasonable prices. Here’s the case cleaned up and ready to start building:

First up is installing the motherboard I/O plate. The motherboard here is an ASRock Z68 Extreme 4. This is probably the most ‘bleeding edge’ component I’ve ever bought – Z68 motherboards have only been available since May! We can see on the I/O port a few of the important features – HDMI out on the onboard video card, USB 3.0 ports, FireWire, 5.1 sound and so on.

Next, the power supply. This time around I have a Thermaltake 875W power supply – slight overkill for what will be in it at first, but I wanted to be able to add another video card later on, if needed.

Another first for me, this is a modular power supply, meaning that you plug in only those cables that you need. This is a huge help in keeping the inside of the case reasonably neat.

Here’s the motherboard, ready for component install. Another first for me, I’m using an aftermarket cooler, in this case the Coolermaster Hyper 212+, which is rated as one of the best of the low end coolers. It’s about 5 times the size of the stock Intel one, so it at least made installing a lot harder!

The processor is an Intel i7 2600K, about the best balance between cost and performance available at the medium to high end at the moment. This is the ‘K’ variant, so it’ll be easier to over clock later.

Here we see everything installed on the motherboard ready to go. The memory is G.Skill Ripjaws, and is 8gb of DDR3-2133. Probably the place in the computer where I went furthest up-market, but RAM speed helps a lot, especially in flight sim.

So now proceeds an hour or so of swearing at drive bays, coaxing drives into place and so forth, to arrive at this:

There are three drives installed here. There’s an LG Blu-Ray drive, purchased only because Blu-Ray adds very little to the cost these days. The main boot drive is a 64gb Kingston SSD, to speed up boot and operating system performance. The main storage drive is a Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm 1tb drive.

A bit of cable dressing, and putting the covers back on and we have this:

All ready for the next stage, putting on the software. This is a PC for flight sim, so the only choice is really Windows. In this case, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

Finally, here’s everything in place in my home office/cockpit:

The other components for the build are a Microsoft wireless mouse and keyboard set, and an LG 27″ monitor. The flight sim controls are all from my old PC, relegated to the far right of the desk now.

It’s working very well so far, giving me 45.0 frames per second on FSXMark11, a pretty respectable performance for a sub $2,000 PC.

So, to start with I want to quickly go over my Sous Vide setup.

The bits I’ve bought are a Maxkon Vacuum Sealer. It’s a no-name brand, but it works well and the bags to use with it are reasonably cheap.

The main special part is the temperature controller. This bit turns the rice cooker on and off according to the temperature in the water bath.

And finally, the rice cooker. This one was from Big-W for $40, and had a few useful accessories like racks/et. I’d really like a bigger one, but haven’t found one yet.

Using it is very simple. You plug the rice cooker into the back of the temperature controller, and put the temperature sensor into the water bath.

Then you just have to set the temperature, and the little box does the rest of the work.

So now, onto the cooking reports. This week I’ve tried:

• Sous Vide Brownies – a bit of a failure, but I think because I didn’t cream the butter properly.

• Sous Vide Steak – very nice, but I took too long browning it and it was a little cold by the time it hit the plate (this seems to be a bit of a structural problem to me: by only cooking to the exactly right temperature, the meat will hold the heat for less time).

• Sous Vide Pork Fillet – this worked much better, and produced one of the nicest pieces of pork I’ve had in a while. It could’ve done with a little seasoning before being vacuum sealed, I think, but it worked pretty well.

• Sous Vide Kebabs. This was the most experimental I’ve been. I just took some of the kebabs we normally buy from the Griffith Butcher, and cut the pointy end off the kebab, sealed it, and cooked for two hours at 60 degrees, followed by a very quick run on a very hot skillet. Definitely juicier and more tender than usual, but probably needed a bit more browning.

Next up is a Sous Vide Eye Fillet. Yum!

As many have noticed, I’m a bit of a gadget hound.

Today’s new entry – a Sous Vide setup. I’d been wanting to try Sous Vide (french for ‘Under Vacuum’) for a while, but the multi-thousand dollar costs of the setups put me off.

Then I found Sous Vide at Home. It’s a simple box that you plug in to a rice cooker, and it uses a combination of a temperature sensor and turning the rice cooker on and off to maintain a constant temperature in the water bath. Together with a vacuum sealer to seal the meat in the total cost was less than $300.

Today’s first experiment was a simple one – a soft boiled egg.

Let’s take a brief excursion into the science of cooking first.

Cooking is not mainly about heating things up. It’s about chemical reactions. The two biggies in this case are protein denaturation and the malliard reaction.

The malliard reaction is what happens when food browns as you grill or bake it. It’s really important for a lot of flavours. And it happens at around 154 degrees C, which is why grills and ovens need to be at least this temperature when cooking meat. But we can add this later (e.g., with a blowtorch). We’ll be coming back to this one tomorrow.

Protein denaturation, on the other hand, happens at much lower temperatures. Denaturation is when proteins lose some of their structure due to external stress, in this case heat.

The clever bit comes in the fact that different proteins in food denature at different temperatures, and so by careful temperature control we can create tastes that are otherwise practically impossible.

So let’s come back to eggs.

Eggs are composed of lots of different proteins. So for every temperature form around 57 degrees C (which is effectively uncooked) through to 90 degrees C (Egg yolk becomes crumbly) we get a slightly different result. The most interesting results are in the range from 62 to 70 degrees.

So to start: one egg, in shell, cooked at 65 degrees for one hour. Another point to note about Sous Vide is that it’s kinda slow: but the good news is that you don’t need to hang around while it cooks. For many things, such as meat, it doesn’t matter if you leave it in for several extra hours. Eggs are a bit twitchier though.

The result: A runny, slightly set egg white, and a firm but gel-like yolk. A cross between a hard boiled and soft boiled egg really. And with a really interesting taste.

Anyway, day two will see some pictures of the whole setup, plus my first attempt at cooking some meat.

When you book a balloon ride you may (like me) think that you don’t need to think too much about taking pictures: “f/8 and be there” would be all you need.

What you haven’t realised (or perhaps you did, and that’s why you’re here) is that the lighting conditions are going to be really difficult. Balloon flights nearly always occur at dawn, due to the weather conditions (particularly wind). But dawn is a really tricky time to take photographs.

Here’s what I did on a recent flight, it seemed to work pretty well.

Before the flight: choose your equipment. I cut back to two lenses – an 18-55 for wide-angle shots, and a 70-300 for telephoto. A polarising filter would have been a good addition, but I don’t have one of those.

Next, before the flight setup: I knew that I’d need pretty fine control, so I set my camera for full manual mode. I also checked the other settings, such as for the cursed ‘bracket’ mode – I have taken so many almost good photos ruined by forgetting to turn bracketing off.

Getting there: my flight started 30 minutes or so before dawn with the setup for the balloon. It was effectively dark at this point – I was shooting 18mm f/4.5 1/60″ ISO 6400 and getting photos that only had material in the far end of the histogram. That’s pretty much the extreme of my camera in terms of low-light.

Once dawn twilight started I began cranking my camera down. As I was on an 18mm I wasn’t getting too much depth-of-field problems from shooting at f/4.5, and with vibration reduction 1/60″ is fine for hand shake. So I took the improving light on the ISO to start with, cranking the ISO down whenever the picture started going past halfway on the histogram. This is purely a personal taste question, about the tradeoff between underexposure and noise, but I really dislike noise. Another reason to keep the picture a bit underexposed is to get better pictures of the flame from the burners heating the air

The balloon inflating is a good subject, and you can need to move quickly as it inflates quite rapidly once it gets going. I stayed on the wide angle throughout – the details weren’t that interesting, and the best shots I could see were including the most of the balloon.

After a quick scramble in for take-off we were away. I was still on f/4.5 and 1/60″, but now on ISO 200. The light is still improving, and as I was at my camera’s best ISO (it can do ISO 100, but you lose dynamic range) I was now slowly increasing the f/stop. While the depth of field on my 18-55mm lens is unlikely to cause any depth-of-field problems, the 70-300 is likely to have some problems unless it’s past f/11 or so, although it also needs a 1/125″ minimum handheld exposure.

Once moving it’s a slower experience. Try a range of different options as the balloon moves, and you’ll find you have plenty of time to try several variations on one subject.

Not too far into the balloon ride I found that the light had gotten better enough for me to start to worry less about it, so I switched over to aperture priority, and also started to play with my long lens for close ups of some of the things in the lake. I probably started a bit early, as the f-stop was still giving me depth of field problems with that lens.

Don’t forget to keep your eye out down as well as around – there were some rowers on the lake who made a very good subject on the day of our balloon ride.

Soon enough it was time for landing. To get one more interesting shot in, I set my camera to high speed, and took a sequence of photos as the balloon landed. Which, of course, I then turned into a time lapse video:

And that’s that.

The first, and most important thing to know about 2011 is that it’s a prime number.

Why is this important? Because it suggests that it will be a year unique in it’s own right, not just derivative of other years.

I hope so at least. In a lot of ways 2010 did not go very well at all. I don’t want to dwell on the past, just want to make the most of a new year.

I have only one resolution for the year: control. Be in control, don’t cede control to circumstances, or even the desire to sleep .

Hopefully that’ll mean more blogging here as well, starting with the return of the Trekathon, and probably some nerdy stuff about writing iPhone apps.