Karl Austin Burkhardt
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Husk Beer Mustard

1/5/2020

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Pecan Bitters

1/5/2020

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While reading through Heritage by Sean Brock, I got inspired to make my own bitters. The book is about how to make good Southern Cuisine, and few things remind me of the Southern parts of my childhood more than picking up and eating pecans from my grandparents front yard. After some research, I couldn't find any pecan bitters or even recipes out there, although there are recipes for black walnut bitters. This recipe is loosely based around a number of black walnut bitter recipes I found.

Starting Ingredients:
1/2 pint Mason jar
75 g pecan bits (break pecan halves into 2-3 pieces each)
100 g Everclear (slightly more than is required to top the pecans)
2 g allspice
2 g ground clove
1 g finely ground black pepper
1/3 cinnamon stick

Later Ingredients:
1 pint Mason jar
5 oz. Woozy bottle
100 g water
25-50 g honey to taste

Lightly crush the pecan halves or break into 2-3 pieces, we will try to preserve these as garnishes for drinks that the bitters are used in. Take out a scale and tare a 1/2 pint Mason jar; fill with 75 g of the pecans. Add the spices and top with Everclear or a similar grain alcohol. Shake and store in the dark for 1 month; try to remember to shake daily.

After 1 month, strain the liquid into a 1 pint Mason jar and put the pecans in a small saucepan. Add 100 g of water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat ti below a simmer and allow the mixture to steep for 10 minutes. Once cooled, pout into the original 1/2 pint Mason jar, shake, and store in the dark next to the Everclear for two weeks, shaking daily.

After two more weeks, strain the pecans and combine the liquids. Add 25 g honey to the liquids and stir until dissolved, adding more to taste. Pour the liquids into a 5 oz. Woozy bottle, reserving any leftovers in the 1/2 pint Mason jar stored in the dark. Cover the Woozy bottle with paper (think Angostura bitters) to keep light out. Store the pecans in a Mason jar, adding a small amount of Everclear to preserve; garnish drinks made with the pecan bitters with a pecan.
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Turning a Kindle Fire into a Digital Photo Frame

7/26/2019

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The need for a custom solution

Wireless digital photo frames are outrageously overpriced, all having issues with picture upload, screen quality, price, or some combination of the above. The most commonly recommended 10" photo frames are the Nixplay Seed ($170, 1280x800), the Skylight Frame ($160, 1280x800), and the Pix-Star ($155, 1024x768). Comparing these specs to the Kindle Fire HD 10 is comical; taking the standard pricing of an HD 10, its resolution of 1920x1200 and price of $150 beats all of the competition. Take the recent Prime Day price of $100 and it's no contest.

It should be noted that you should not pay for a Fire without ads as these will be disabled in the "Locking down the tablet" section. Viable and cheaper alternatives to a brand new HD 10 would be a refurbished HD 10 for $120, a new HD 8 for $80, or a refurbished HD 8 for $70. I got the HD 10's used in this project for $95 each during the 2019 Prime Day sale.

Install the Play Store on your Kindle Fire

You should do this to all Fire tablets regardless of their use as a photo frame.

Following this tutorial, change your security settings to allow apps from unknown sources and download and install Google Account Manager, Google Services Framework, Google Play Services, and Google Play Store. At this point, the vastly superior Google Play Store should be installed as an app at the bottom of the Home screen.

​Using the Play Store, download Settings Database Editor, and Fotoo. Using a browser, download and install the Fully Kiosk Browser for Fire OS APK.

Easy upload/display: Google Drive and Fotoo

For easy picture upload, we want to avoid email due to email size limits; Google Drive is the perfect solution.

Create a throwaway Google account that you will use on the tablet if you intend to give the photo frame away to friends or family. Using this account, go to Google Drive and create a new folder, call it "Shared Pictures" and share it with your own Google account and any other accounts you may want to have "display" privileges on your distributed photo frames (in the folder, click on the folder title and select "Share+"). You will now have a "Shared Pictures" folder in your own Google Drive under "Shared with me." To upload pictures to this folder, simply drag and drop images from your computer. Go ahead and load a few test pictures here. If multiple displays are being distributed to multiple people with different interests, go ahead and create sub-folders that will be user-specific or shared.

For displaying pictures there are a myriad of viable options; I used Fotoo.

​Open Fotoo and connect it to your Google Drive, selecting the "Shared Pictures" folders (alternatively, the sub-folders of interest). You now have a workable photo frame! But we aren't done yet, tap your tablet to pause the photo stream and select settings. Change Display Time to your preferred time, change Display Effect to Scale to Fit Center if you'd like "normal" picture display, change Transition Effect to Fade, change Photo Order to Modified First. Under Others, select Keep Screen On to prevent the tablet from going to sleep while showing images, and change Screen Rotation to Landscape. Finally, increase the Disk Cache Limit to 12,000 MB (12 GB) to save more of the pictures locally and make your photo frame less dependent on WiFi uptime.

Back the main landing page, hit "Go Premium," otherwise the slideshow will stop about once an hour for five minutes. If you are distributing the display to multiple users, make sure you are using the same Google account on the Play Store as purchasing Fotoo Premium on one device will work for all linked devices.

Locking down the tablet

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools"
​ - Douglas Adams​

I want to make this photo frame as easy to use as possible, and by that I mean I want to lock this tablet down. Create a folder by clicking and holding one app and hovering it over another and releasing. Pile all apps other than Settings, Fotoo, SetEdit, and Fully Kiosk Browser into this folder.

Open Settings and navigate to Display -> Screen Sleep and change to 30 min which will allow people to pass around the tablet while unplugged without going to sleep. Go back to the first settings page and navigate to Apps & Notifications -> and turn Notifications Off.
​
To remove the lock screen entirely (which is why you should not pay to remove ads, this step removes them automatically) we follow the guide by computerhilfren.

Go to Settings on the Home screen and connect the tablet to your PC. To enable developer options select Device Options -> About and tap the Serial Number seven times (seriously). Select Developer Options and change Stay Awake to On so the tablet does not sleep while charging, and turn USB Debugging (might appear as Enable ADB) On  so you can communicate with the tablet from your PC.

On your PC, download the Android SDK Platform Tools and unzip. Place the platform-tools folder in C:\ and open the command prompt. Type "cd C:\platform-tools", enter. Type "adb devices", enter. On the Fire, select to allow communication on the pop up. Repeat "adb devices" to confirm the existence of a connected device. Type "adb shell pm grant by4a.setedit22 android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS", enter. You can now unplug the Fire.

Going back to the tablet, open Settings Database Editor which will appear as SetEdit. Select "Secure Table" in the top right and change "lockscreen.disabled" to 1. Select "Global Table" in the top right and change "device_provisioned" to 0. This second step does some funky things to your tablet settings menu and seems to disable app downloads from the Play Store, so if you find you are missing options in your settings that you would like to access or other apps you would like to install, change "device_provisioned" back to 1 temporarily.

Restart your tablet to confirm that the Fire will boot with no lock screen. Open Fully Kiosk and go to Settings, Kiosk Mode (PLUS). Enable Kiosk Mode and select Single App Mode, choosing Fotoo from the app list. This allows Fully Kiosk to keep Fotoo running at the front of the device.When exiting Fully Kiosk, select Yes to turn Kiosk Mode on. Fotoo should boot immediately to the main landing page. Ideally, the slideshow should be set using the lock button at the bottom of the landing page, which just requires one extra step to get back to the main menu.

To break out of Kiosk Mode, tap the screen seven times very quickly and enter the PIN (unless you have a good reason, I would recommend simply keeping the PIN as default 1234). Back in Fully Kiosk, select Exit Kiosk from the left.
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Performance Enhancing Effects of Nike's AeroSwift tape

10/8/2016

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I originally posted this article to the /r/AdvancedRunning subreddit, but I thought I would also post it here. For context, this article was originally posted immediately following the 2016 US Olympic Trials.

In addition to making runners look kind of goofy and making viewers think athletes are injured and wearing kinesio tape, Nike's AeroSwift tape makes a competitive difference. Just not much of one.

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Pork Buns

3/26/2016

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This is an (almost) exact duplicate of the following recipe:

http://thewoksoflife.com/2014/02/chinese-bbq-pork-buns-cha-siu-bao/

However, as you can see, the formatting sucks. Because my wife very much enjoys this recipe, I tend to make it a lot. Because I use this site a lot for this recipe, I get frustrated with the layout often. Therefore, I am transcribing the recipe.

There are three parts to this recipe, the bread, the pork, and the combined buns. The bread should be made first. It will take 10 min to prepare the dough, 10 min to knead the dough, and 1 hour for the dough to proof. After the dough has proofed for 40 min, the pork should be prepared. After combining the pork and bread, the buns will proof for yet another hour and bake for 25 min.

All in all, from start to dinner, this recipe takes 3 hours.

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Cupid's Chase 5k

2/6/2016

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Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/487255261

Result: 17:37, 1st place overall

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3M Half Marathon

1/25/2016

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Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/477504878

Result: 1:21:37, 43rd overall, 3rd in age 20-24.

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Rogue Distance Fesitval 10k

1/12/2016

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Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/467458246

Result: 37:13, 5th overall, 1st in age 20-24.

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2015 Decker Challenge Half Marathon

12/7/2015

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Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/445544312

Result: 1:25:37, 16th overall, 2nd in age 20-24.

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Daily Programmer #235 [easy]

12/2/2015

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Ruth-Aaron Pairs

A Ruth–Aaron pair consists of two consecutive integers (e.g. 714 and 715) for which the sums of the distinct prime factors of each integer are equal. These types of pairs were named by Carl Pomerance, uga math professor, after a student noted that 714 and 715 had this characteristic. 714 was the number of career homeruns hit by the Yankee legend Babe Ruth, while 715 was the number of career homeruns hit by Brave legend Hank Aaron in 1974, thus surpassing Ruth's all time home run record which had stood for almost 40 years.

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    Runner, scientist, data enthusiast.

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