Kombucha Recipe

Ingredients and Items

• Tea (I use tetley black green, 8 bags)
• Filtered water
• Scoby
• A bottle of kombucha (yes you need kombucha to make kombucha)
• 1 gal jar
• 1 cup of white sugar
• 8 500mL recappable bottles
• Funnel
• Fruit juice

Kombucha is made in two stages

Stage One: Creating plain kombucha

1. Bring a few liters of water to a boil enough to put in the 1 cup of sugar and 8 bags of tea.
2. With the heated water in the 1gal jar, dissolve the sugar, let the tea steep and wait for the mixture to cool.
3. Add in the bottle of kombucha.
4. Add in the rest of the water
5. Add in the scoby
6. Close the top of the jar with some papertowels and a rubber band (coffee filters also works well).
7. Let the mixture sit for 1-2 weeks in a dark area that is away from direct heat or cold. I usually go for 1 week.

Stage Two: Adding flavor

1. Remove the scoby from the mixture into a bowl.
2. Stir the mixture so that the sediment is evenly distributed. You should already see some carbonation.
3. Use the funnel and pour contents into bottles, fill them to the start of the neck taper. I can usually get about 8 bottles from the 1 gal jar.
4. The remainder of the mixture is used along with the original scoby for the next batch.
5. Use the funnel and fill the rest of the bottle with juice.
6. Cap the bottles and let them sit for 3-6 days.
7. Burp the bottles periodically to release the c02 buildup. If you don't do this steps some bottles may explode.
8. Once carbonation is at your acceptable level you can put them into the fridge which will stop the fermentation process.
9. Carbonation helps hide the vinegar taste of the kombucha. If you notice that your kombucha does not have enough carbonation, you can remove the bottle from the fridge and let it sit in stage two until more carbonation is produced.

Owen River Gorge Take One

It was a late start on Friday as we accidentally drove north of the Owen River Gorge entrance. Driving on the 395 from Bishop towards Mammoth Lakes, you should take the Paradise Swall Meadows exit and not the more appropriately named Owens River Gorge exit which will actually spit you out atht the north side of the gorge. After finally finding the correct exit from the 395, we arrived at the 2nd parking area with a steep downward approach. The temperature was cold, probably the 40s and we only had time to do one climb. I lead Clip Jr 5.6. It was so cold my fingers became numb halfway up. I realized this as I was able to torque my fingers into holds without much pain at all. The return ascent back up to the car was killer on the quads. I'll need to return to this place when the sun is out and the temps are warmer.

Mouse feels "funny" on Mac OSX

At my new job I was given a Mac to develop on. It took a little bit of getting use to to, but after a few days I had almost everything dialed in. The only thing that was super annoying was the feel of the mouse, particularly wireless mice. It was so annoying that I just ended up using a wired mouse.

My trusted wireless Logitech and Microsoft mice felt "funny" when using it on OSX and no matter what I did with the settings I could not get it to feel normal. I finally took a bit of time to look into this and appears that Apple deploys a different curve of scaling the acceleration curve. There have been several attempts to correct this with various apps such as ControllerMate, SmoothMouse, MouseCurves, but I found that the terminal fix to be quite adequate for what I need. Its no Starcraft 2 max APM precision, but enough for what I need on a dev machine.

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1




This terminal command will make mouse movement much smoother and more familiar. To reset it, just replace the -1 with a 1.