Test burn in the barrel pit

Just like General Dynamics or any other fighter jet builder tests their latest incarnations of jets, I performed a test burn on part of the pit this weekend. And just like those experimental figther jets, there are a few tweaks needed.

So what happened? What did I learn? What needs to change?

The test burn was in part a necessity because I needed extra grill space for all the food I was cooking for a friend's party. 2 briskets, 12 racks of baby back ribs, 8lbs sausage and 3 pans of beans is a little more than my N.B. Smoker can handle. So once I wrapped stuff in foil it got transfered to the barrel pit for further cooking.

The pit was quick and easy to light with the log lighter assembly. No charcoal needed, just stack up some logs and light the propane.

Temp variations

Once things were going I noticed some real variations in pit temperature. The top right shelf (on the firebox side) got to 300 degrees while at the same time the bottom left shelf (farthest from the firebox) was just a little over 150. The variation was even noticeable on the same shelf. The top shelf for example was 300 on the right side and 250 on the left. I also found it interesting that the exhaust temperature was lower than the hottest part of the pit. In general the exhaust temp matched the top right shelf temp which makes sense as that's where the exhaust is.

I think tuning plates are going to be needed after all. I had hoped that I could avoid them since they make it a little difficult to clean up the grease but they are going to be needed. No problem, my plasma cutter should be back (from repair) on Wednesday so I can cut out some plates from the remaining steel plate I have.

Where's the shelf?

When moving things over to the barrel I quickly discovered what was missing, a place to set things like hot pans of beans. So I need to build a little 12 inch deep shelf for both pits. Just something wide enough to set my baking sheet pans on.

Who cut the foil?

It seems my fresh new metal grates have a sharp edge on them. I don't know if it's part of the forming process in making expanded metal or what but there's definitely a sharp edge on the grate that seems to rip aluminum foil if you drag anything across it. I'm going to try sand blasting the grates to see if that helps. If I still need to dull the edge I'll pull out the sanding wheel for the grinder.

Bottom shelf needs a handle.

It's no good to have slide out shelves if you can't slide them out. That was the problem with the bottom shelf. Since there's not a gap under the bottom shelf there's nothing to grab hold of. So the only way to pull out the bottom shelf is to stick your fingers into the metal grating and pull. Ouch!!! So the bottom shelf will get a small pull handle.

Leaky door

The curve on the door doesn't match the barrel. This seems to be a result of how the barrel was formed in a press brake instead of a roll. I thought I could bend the door into shape but 3/16 inch steel doesn't bend easily. So I think I'm going to source some stove gasket material and use it to seal up the sides and bottom. If I use 2 different size I should be able to seal up the gaps.

Grease drain

After the fact I also discovered another adjustment needed. I failed to put a drain in the bottom of the barrel pit. I thought the grease would simply drain back into the firebox. Nope! I pooled about 12 inches from the firebox. It also seems there's a slight leak on the bottom of the barrel pit where it joins with the firebox. So I need to weld that up. I think it's just a weld I forgot to run anyway.

That old generator

One of the things that I was able to keep following the sale of the ISP was my original generators that we first used when there were power outages. Well 2 of them were given away and I kept one for myself. These units only saw limited use in the ISP business because we eventually got a big diesel generator.

Basically this thing has been in the garage taking up space and collecting dust. The tires tend to leak so every 4 weeks I have to air up the tires. Lucky for me I had just aired up the tires 2 weeks ago while cleaning out the garage. Otherwise I would have had to start the generator to run the compressor to air up the tires to move the generator.

Well after 2 years of storage I turned on the fuel valve, set the choke and pulled on the starter cord. 1st pull.... nothing. 2nd pull.... put put smoke smoke vrooommm! It started right up. No stabilizer in the gas or anything. The little generator runs great.

So the power was out for about 40 minutes (it just came back on) and I was able to keep things up and going past the duration of my UPSes. So I guess keeping it in the garage was a good thing.

A weekend with the N800

I did it! I went from Thursday to Monday without actually using my laptop while I was away from home. I have to say the N800 wasn't a perfect substitute but it was pretty handy. Here's a few things that caused me problems over the long weekend:

Rebooting on Startup: For some reason it would reboot automatically after being on for about 2 minutes. I'd have a few seconds where I could open a browser or try tell it to connect to the Internet via my phone and then Boom!!! It would just freeze and reboot. On Saturday it did this 6 or 7 times before it stopped and finally settled down. After that I left the car charger plugged in and left it on.

I thought this whole reboot problem was related to not being able to get on a network but when I got home I tried booting it up with the same results, freezing after start up and then reboot. I can't seem to find any correlation. It does it with the bluetooth keyboard on or off. It does it when you have a network connection or not. The best thing to do seems to be to let it just boot up and sit there for a few minutes. Then it will work.

Opera and Ebay: So ebay is trying to make more of it's web site Web 2.0 friendly. Only problem is that many of their enhancements don't work so well with Opera. One in particular is the drop down box under the action column. It's supposed to give you a list of options that you want to both for items you are buying and selling. In fact it's the only way to end an auction early. But when you click on the drop down it just shows you a blank box. That's a problem. Luckily I also installed Minimo so I just logged in using Minimo when I needed to do things that required use of the drop down boxes.

Wrong memory card for my camera: Unfortunately my camera uses the older, very outdated Smart Media cards so I couldn't view the pictures I took. This really isn't a problem with the N800 it just means it's time to get an updated camera uses MMC cards.

Well that about sums it up. While writing this entry I've been trying to turn on my N800. It just keeps rebooting after 2 minutes. I can get into it remotely via ssh and top reports jffs2_gcd_mtd4 as the highest usage program so maybe it's time to figure out what that is and what it's doing to cause my problems.

BTW: The Stoaway BT keyboard works great on my lap!

2 days with my N800

So it´s the end of the day and I´ve surprised myself with how easy it is to leave my laptop in it´ś backpack. Sure if there was a big server crash I´d probably have to pull it out just to work quicker. But for basic email and web surfing it works fine. The most difficult thing I´ve found so far is with logging into the dashboard to publish this blog. For some reason the signin link at the top of the page doesnt work. Instead I have to go to sign up for a new blog, then click on the sign in page and enter my credentials. Then I can type in www.blogger.com as the URL and I´ĺl see my dashboard. Sort of a pain but easier now that I´ve figured out how to do it.

One annoying thing is when there isn´t a connection available. I´ve had problems with it freezing and then rebooting. Tonight there were some updates available so I applied them. I´ĺl have to see how the unit does tomorrow.

It seems it´ś harder than I expected to find open wireless networks. I guess more and more folks are figuring out how to secure their wireless networks. Thankfully using the DUN on my Treo I can get connectivity almost anywhere as long as I have cellular service. Hooray!

N800 and the Stowaway BT Keyboard

So tomorrow I´m going to try to spend the rest of the weekend without using my laptop. We are heading to Ft. Worth to watch the NASCAR races. So this just seemed like a good time to try more of my mobile options. I haven´t really used my N800 for much more than a novelty item. Mainly because I kept forgetting to carry it. In preparation for this extended weekend adventure I purchased a Think Outside Stowaway bluetooth keyboard to make things a little easier.

So today it arrived and I opened the box and ripped open the packaging. I skimmed through the book to discover how to pair it to my Treo. OMG, I have to install software on the Treo, uggg! More on that later. So I put the kb into pairing mode and tell the N800 to search for blue tooth devices. Just like that Ive got it and I type in my pair code and Presto! I have a keyboard.

Oh crap now the fun starts. This is no ordinary keyboard, and characters aren´t necessarily where you´d expect them. But as I type more and more of this post I´m finding it´ś pretty easy to get used to. I seem to be having problems with the apostrophy key. I press it as hard as the others but it doesn´t always work. This could be due to the keyboard dipping a little as I press on keys in that area. I think I´ll try propping it up with some cardboard to see if that helps. If so I´ĺl figure out a little spacer.

Overall this seems like a great purchase for my mobile adventure. Now if I can figure out how to make the screen larger :) When Im typing on the screen keyboard the unit is closer to me so it seems bigger. When I´m on the stowaway though I have the N800 farther away. Something to work out this weekend I guess.

Getting mypodder to work with FC6

I use a java client called mypodder to download podcasts I like to listen to. It's all part of the service available at PodcastReady. It's pretty simple really, you load the application on your USB drive and when you plug it in the program is supposed to autorun. Well it works on Windows but it wouldn't work on Fedora Core 6. Research time!

It seems Fedora Core 6 uses the gnome volume manager which is well... lacking in features let's say. I'm not sure who made the decision but someone decided that we should mount USB thumb drives with noexec. OK, fine I understand the security concerns but I also want mypodder to work when I plug in my USB drive. Despite the fact that I'd set my preference to "Auto-run programs on new drives and media" this won't work since the file system is marked as noexec.

So what can you do to get around this?

Well I decided to simply enable the exec option on all vfat filesystems that are mounted. Here's how to do it.

From the command line:
gconftool-2 --type list --list-type=string --set /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options "[shortname=winnt,uid=,exec]"

* make sure it's all on one line.

From a gui:

use gconf-editor
system -> storage -> default_options -> vfat -> mout_options

Add "exec" to it's string value

That's it! All you have to do is insert the thumb drive and your autorun should work. No need to reboot.

You might also want to think about adding the "sync" option to mount_options as well. It will slow down the writes but when the application tells you it's downloaded a new podcast it really has completed downloading the podcast.

It's on fire!

So this past weekend was spent like so many weekends before, with me working tirelessly on the BBQ pit. However, this weekend was special because I had promised Reagan that we'd have a fire in the pit and sure enough I delivered. Ahead of schedule even. I told her to schedule the marching bands, cheerleaders, the mayor and fireworks for a fire starting at 2pm. At 12:34 I walked inside to report that it was ready for lighting so we lit the fire early. I guess that's why the parade never started :)

So is the pit done? No! Not yet. The basic barrel pit is finished. The smoke stack is installed as are the shelves. Even the little side shelves are installed so it's basically complete. The lid needs some tuning to get a better seal and it may be necessary to add another smoke stack to allow a little more flow through the pit. But we had a fire to see if it would actually breath and it did!

New pics are up in the gallery starting with the fabrication of the rotisserie spokes.

Hopefully I'll finish the rotisserie this week and we can have a ceremonial fire in the rotisserie side on Saturday. Then it'll be time to pressure wash the outside and build real fires to actually season it for cooking.

I also need to figure out how to rig up some propane burners to start the fire instead of having to use charcoal in a chimney. This is a big boy's BBQ pit now.