Spaghetti Dogs

Had some freaky food fun today… cut hot dogs into segments, pushed pieces of dry spaghetti through, boiled. Despite the faces in these shots, Miles loved them, said they looked like Cerise Tinh from Star Wars… without a face.

After clicking Play button, click icon at lower right of slideshow to view full-screen.

Flickr set

Gas vs. Charcoal

In some circles, the gas vs. charcoal grill debate is like red state/blue state, saints vs. atheist heathens. Charcoal purists swear there’s a noticeable taste difference, while gas users claim there is none, or that if there is, it’s minuscule compared to taste factors that come from the dry rub or marinade, cooking technique, and quality of meat. Some even cite studies “showing that there is no effective taste difference between food cooked with gas vs. charcoal.” Charcoal users claim that if you can’t taste the difference, you’re not paying attention. There’s also a big romance factor associated with charcoal – piling up, lighting, tending the coals is part of the ritual, and rituals are important. I can dig that, but happily trade it for the convenience of being able to come home from work late and start grilling immediately. And I’m just not sure I buy the taste difference thing, unless you’re wanting to make a real smoker.

I’ve found that some charcoal enthusiasts think gas grills don’t produce smoke at all… which is absolutely not true. A gas grill is not an oven! The smoke from gas grills can be voluminous (even scary), and comes from the burning off of fats and drippings from meat, as well as the carbonized residue of previous grilling sessions. Yep, it’s a different kind of smoke from charcoal smoke, but it’s definitely smoke.

Our family are gas peeps – we sort of skipped the charcoal phase and went straight for convenience. For us, the gas decision was partly environmental, wanting to sidestep or reduce particulate emissions that come from burning wood, for the same reason newer houses don’t even come with fireplaces.

Charcoal grills emit more carbon monoxide, particulate matter and soot into the atmosphere, contributing to increased pollution and higher concentrations of ground-level ozone.

In fact, in Canada, charcoal is now a restricted product under the Hazardous Products Act. But the carbon footprint question is more complicated than it appears on the surface – charcoal may come from renewable forests, which in turn consume the same amount of CO2 as the grills they fuel produce. Then again, a lot of charcoal products are infused with chemicals to make it easier to light, burn longer, etc. Slate has a great piece on the environmental factors in the gas vs. charcoal question.

Then there’s the cost factor – gas grills cost more, but reqire far less expenditure on fuel – a round of charcoal cooking can cost up to $5.00 in briquettes, while gas might clock in at around $0.50 per session.

OK, poll time – do you do gas or charcoal? Let me know in the comments whether you can taste the difference.

What kind of grilling do you do?

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Here’s a pretty good side-by-side comparison chart, though it conveniently skips the environmental factors.

I’m a Hacker

The unfortunate but sometimes hilarious side-effect of having the last name “Hacker” — occasional emails like this one.

Email: queen5050pil@ymail.com
Message:
pls are you a hacker, if yes pls can you get for me cc with the balance and ATM pin visa and master cards or can you hack into any bank system mostly nigerian banks, pls reply asap thanks.

Srsly.

Headbanging with QuickTime

At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Knight Digital Media Center, we’ve used Quicktime Streaming Server successfully for years. We mostly love it, but recently I’ve been banging my head against something that’s driving me nuts.

First, understand that .mov files on QTSS need to have a “hint” track added in order to enable genuine streaming. We run live webcasts with something called Wirecast Pro which lets us interleave titles, images, and output from a presenter’s desktop directly into live streams. It also records .mov files of those streams to disk for our webcast archives. After a conference ends, all I had to do was use QuickTime to add hint tracks to the recorded files and put them on our streaming server.

Recently we found that .mov files created with Wirecast would completely crash (hard!) QuickTime player when served from the streaming server into the browser. After much discussion on the QTSS mailing list, I was able to positively identify the problem as a bug in Apple’s hinting routine. Until the bug gets fixed, a developer at Apple recommended that I use the Penguin MP4 Encoder to add the hint tracks, rather than Apple tools.

That worked perfectly, but raised a separate problem – while the files will stream, they can no longer be played directly from the desktop (we offer a separate Download link). Attempting to play them results in an unhelpful “This movie file is apparently corrupt” message.

Thought I would go back to the drawing board and try to remove the hint tracks added by Penguin, so I could try a different approach. Can’t remove them in QuickTime since I can’t open them in QuickTime. Can’t remove them with the qtmedia command line binary that comes with OS X Server. Fortunately Penguin’s command-line tool does provide an “-unhint” option… but attempting to use that crashes Penguin.

So I’m stuck with a set of .mov files that play fine from QTSS but not locally, due to  weirdo hint tracks. And I can’t find a tool to remove  the hint tracks without crashing.

That’s my day so far. How’s yours?