Be Smarter, Calibrate your Thermometers
I’ve been firing up the Big Green Egg throughout winter and as the weather has started to get a little nicer I’ve been grilling even more. I’ve been really frustrated lately though with my grill not coming up to temperature as fast as I thought it should. I also have been getting some odd results. I recently put a couple of racks of ribs on and they came out really dry and overcooked. I had the temperature right the whole time, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
Then things got confusing. I took out my Thermapen and a couple of other thermometers and started getting really odd temps all over the grill. Today I fired up a pot of water to calibrate the thermometer that sits in the dome of the Big Green Egg. This is the one I use constantly to know the internal temperature of the grill.
Whoa! That’s not just off, it’s horribly off. I was shocked that the thermometer was reading -60 °F lower than it should be. A quick turn of the nut on the back and it was calibrated!
Why am I posting about this? It’s a really simple thing, but I bet a lot of people don’t do a calibration. Your out there grilling away and you need to know your temps. I’m not sure if being outside all winter causes the calibration to get all screwed up. Either way it was off so much that I was grilling at temperatures that were just way too hot.
I had the newly calibrated thermometer in tonight for some grilling and things were so much better. Lesson learned. Get a pot of water boiling and make sure all your thermometers and probes read 212 °F on the nose.
Nice evening of grilling on the Big Green Egg.
In the room at the U of M where I first met the Internet. I feel like I should have brought a gift or something.
I kind of like Safari 4’s tab placement. Don’t hate me for it.
Last night of clay class tonight.
PSA: All you WordPress folks remember to change your timezone offset. Took me until now to remember. Someday this will be automated.
P2: The New Prologue
I was a fan of the original Prologue, and this new iteration of it looks even better.
I’m struck by how easy it would be to setup a private Twitter-like service for just the people you want to hang with. That could be fun, particularly as Twitter becomes less and less interesting and more and more overcrowded.
Mother of All Funk Chords
I rarely send out YouTube video links, but this remix is pretty darn cool. Nice.
iTunes Needs iTunes Syncing
Apple just released iTunes 8.1 with a bevy of new features, but there is a critical need for iTunes that I think would be a huge help for anyone that regularly uses more than one computer. In addition to being able to sync to dozens of iPods, the iPhones and Apple TV we need the ability to sync to iTunes itself. All of the pieces are in place to do this, it seems like it would be relatively easy to implement. Here is what I would imagine the iTunes sidebar looking like.
You’ve got an iPod, three Apple TV’s and then your laptop. The idea is that I should be able to setup iTunes on a laptop or any other computer that is just a sync partner with another computers iTunes library. iTunes can already sync over the network to an AppleTV, so the hooks are all in place and should be easily extended to another iTunes installation.
Right now the only option that iTunes users have to put music on more than one computer is to copy the files over. This is horrible in so many ways. First, you have to do the work of managing the files which is a huge pain. Additionally, the iTunes Library is not sync’d at all. Play counts, ratings and other metadata is completely separate which really messes up some more sophisticated work you can do with Smart Playlists.
If we were just able to sync to additional iTunes installs I could have all of my Mac’s with the same music library, and syncing metadata back and forth. It would make things so much simpler.
Would it help if I said please?
Pretty please?