Super Easy Giant Chocolate Fondue

This is a bit out of the normal realm of my engineering projects.  Last week at work we had a Halloween Party at lunch, with each department kicking in some activity or fun thing for everyone to enjoy.  I volunteered to do a chocolate fondue.  My goal was to make enough for everyone there (about 100 people) to try some if they wanted, and to make it relatively quick and easy to prepare.  I found a recipe here and decided to scale it up.  The original recipe calls for four cups of chocolate chips, which is 24 ounces.  Since Costco sells a 72 ounce bag of chips, I decided to do a triple batch.  This worked out great, because the recipe also calls for 1 and 1/3 cup of half and half.  Triple that and you get 4 cups, or 1 quart!  So it really did come down to:

1 giant (72 Ounce) bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips from Costco
1 Quart of Half-and-Half

Melt together in a crock pot.  That's it.

I used a 6-quart crock pot, and I might have gotten away with a smaller one, but I was glad I had some room to stir.  I also did use the Reynold's liner bag, which made clean-up very easy, but was probably otherwise not necessary.

To get it ready quickly, I deviated from the source recipe's instructions:  I poured both ingredients into the crock pot and put the stoneware pot (but not the heater base) into a microwave on high for 5 minutes to get it started melting.  Then I put it in the stoneware back into the crock pot heater and set it on high.  I stirred it almost continuously to prevent burning, and in about 15 minutes it went from the consistency of chocolate milk with large melty lumps to a smooth, very nice dipping chocolate fondue.  At that point, I set it back to "warm," which kept is just right throughout the party.  I also stirred it occasionally to make sure it stayed smooth.

This produced about 100 ounces, which is enough for 100 people to have a reasonable taste, or 20 people to go quite nuts.

For dippers, I put out mini snickers, marshmallows, Oreos, pretzels, and strawberries.  Far and away the most popular item was the strawberries, and I ended up wishing that I had bought much more than the two quarts I did.  Lots of other things also work well with chocolate fondue, such as pineapple, apple, and poundcake.  Really, what ISN'T better dipped in chocolate?  One of my clever co-workers took one of the apples from the bobbing-for-apples area and cut it up for dipping.

It's fun, it's quick, and it's an impressive amount of molten chocolate!

I crashed my flashlight...

My dad recently bought some Techlite 200 high-intensity LED flashlights at Costco, and gave me two of them.  They are amazingly bright and well constructed, so they quickly became my favorite hand-held flashlights.  I was reading this extremely detailed review of them on Amazon, and learned that I could skip the somewhat jarring strobe mode when turning them off by just holding down the power button for a couple of seconds.  I tried it, and it works, but after doing it several times, my light would no longer turn on.  I had to remove the cap to disconnect the battery, causing a hard reset of whatever control circuitry they have in there.  I don't know exactly how they implemented the electronics, and I'm not willing to sacrifice this neat flashlight to find out, but I crashed my flashlight...

Attempts to reproduce the failure on the other Techlight 200 I have were unsuccessful, so it is apparently not an inherent design flaw, just an edge marginality.  Still, I crashed my flashlight!  There is some sort of cautionary story in here somewhere...

"Revolution" TV Show.

This entry is some thoughts about the new television series "Revolution."  This latest invention from the imagination of "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams premiered Monday, September 17th, on NBC.  The pilot episode was released early on Hulu, so I took a look at it.  I'll try to write this entry without spoilers, or at least without any more spoilers than the ads and website for the show provide.  Still, if you prefer to avoid even a hint of fore-knowledge, you may want to read this after you watch the pilot episode.

"Revolution" is set "fifteen years after the blackout."  In a video on the show's website, Abrams says, “The question the show asks is, 'What would happen if everything powered by electricity suddenly turned off?'” Because I'm interested in worst-case scenarios, disaster preparedness, and knowing what to do when the zombies come, I'm intrigued by ideas like this.  But this a problematic scenario...  People are really ingenious and given the proper motivation (say, the loss of civilization as we know it), they would come up with some pretty clever stuff.  Let's consider how...

While it's true that we use electricity for an enormous number of things, we can still do a lot without it, as we did in the past.  Energy can be harvested mechanically in the form of movement, with windmills and water wheels or water turbines. In 1890, George Westinghouse suggested that the energy of Niagara Falls would best be transmitted to Buffalo not as electricity generated on site, but as compressed air. Compressed air can also be used to store mechanical energy in high-pressure gas cylinders.

Furthermore, a lot of technologies that we think of as “electrical” don't have to be. In many cases, we use electricity to provide mechanical energy that could be provided by other sources. Refrigeration, for example, uses electricity to turn a motor to run a compressor. But there's no reason the compressor can't be turned by a water wheel or a windmill. Or a steam engine...

In the event of a “Revolution” scale blackout, the world would quickly see the return of the steam era. Boiler technology and steam engines would be the next big growth industry. Coal and wood fired steam railroads would quickly provide critical transportation links, first on a small scale as museum exhibits were pressed back into service, but then growing as fast as more equipment could be built. Central steam engines in factories could provide mechanical energy for all sorts of tasks, such as machining, cooling, cutting, building, and so on.

And if the “Revolution” world really just precludes electronics, it wouldn't be limited to steam engines. Diesel engines use the compression of the piston to ignite the fuel-air mixture, without any electrical spark plug. And they can be built to be started using only compressed air. It may take a lot of tedious pumping, but you could prime a compressed air system with a hand or foot pump. Then, once you've got the engine running, you could use it to drive a compressor to charge up the compressed air cylinder for the next time you need to start.  All without electricity. Virtually all large scale modern engines are highly dependent upon electronic engine control modules  (ECMs) to manage every aspect of their operation. But that's in order to make them as efficient as possible. You can trade away some of that efficiency for a much simpler, all mechanical control system. That's how they all used to be. And there would be enormous motivation for people to return to and advance these sorts of technologies.

Refrigeration also illustrates the case where the current state of the art is only one of many ways to achieve the desired goal, in this case of making things cold. Anyone with a propane fueled refrigerator in their camper knows that you can keep a fridge full of food or drinks cold just fine using a small flame to drive an absorption refrigeration cycle.

A permanent loss of electricity would limit the production of some materials. Aluminum, for example, is refined using an electrolytic process, without which, it is becomes a very precious metal. Fortunately, there is already a significant stock of metallic aluminum in the world that could be recycled almost endlessly. But anything that depends on an electrolytic manufacturing process could no longer be made.

Otherwise, I can think of only a few key technologies that would be impossible to at least approximate in a “Revolution” world: high-speed computing and high-speed, long-distance, and wireless communication. And even some level of both computation and communication can be done mechanically. Mechanical calculators existed for years before modern electronic logic circuits, and I'm sure the world would see new heights of sophisticated mechanical computers being built. It would be a steam-punk enthusiast's dream come true. I can also imagine a telegraph system based on mechanical modulation of something like a metal bar, in order to send messages significant distances at the speed of sound in metal, or around 13,000 miles per hour. Or perhaps we'd just see the return of other pre-electronic communication technologies.  Sure, neither of these are as good as what we have now, but they are still a major step above the pre-industrial, agrarian civilization portrayed in the show...

T-Mobile Customer Service Fail

I was in Seattle recently, helping work an event booth at the Bite of Seattle, and we needed to upload a bunch of photos.  The available free WiFi options were pretty poor, so we purchased a T-Mobile wireless hot spot. They offer high performance network connectivity, and contract-free data plans that can be purchased or re-charged easily.  As in so many situations, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once we got the hot-spot set up, we had network connectivity but it was insanely slow.  I put my phone in airplane mode and connected only it to the hotspot, then ran the SpeedTest.net app, and got 13 kbit/sec down, and 9 kbit/sec up.  That works out to 2.96 hours to upload each photo.  Obviously, that was not suitable.  At other times, I did get somewhat better performance.  When I thought to get a screen capture (Thank you, Ice Cream Sandwich!) it was up to 31kbit/sec.  Now each upload would be slightly less than an hour!

Rather than throw more time and effort down this particular rat hole, I decided to take the easiest of consumer outs and just return the product that clearly didn't meet any reasonable user expectation.  At my local T-Mobile store here in Santa Clara they gave me a prompt and courteous refund of the purchase of the hot spot, and didn't even try to ding me for the $25 restocking fee they warned of when I purchased it.  But they wouldn't refund the $35 for the useless 3GB data plan at which I had barely sipped.  For that, they said, I would have to call T-Mobile Customer Service.

What followed was a customer service experience surpassed in badness only by the U.S. Postal Service.  The Postal Service was worse only because the folks at T-Mobile pretended to care about my annoyance.  Over half an hour on the phone I was transferred from tech support, to customer care, to prepaid refill, to payments, to refunds.  Although T-Mobile runs the network, conveys the data, tracks the usage, and can recharge the account when needed, they had no mechanism to verify (and thus refund) the 3GB data plan purchase I had made.

At the end, they said that I would have to go to the T-Mobile store where I purchased the plan to get a refund.  That, I pointed out, was in Seattle.  Well, then, I'd have to go to a local T-Mobile store.  That, I pointed out, was who sent me to call them.  Ultimately, they won, in that I gave up, and decided to instead just tell them they suck, and expense the $35 rip-off.  I will yet contest the charge on my credit card, since they didn't actually provide the service I paid for.  Even then, I may or may not get my money back.  At least the Post Office eventually gave me a refund in stamps...

Not particularly...

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox.  I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually.  That way, my potential down-side is limited.  If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account.  If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken.  Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

1. Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
2. They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
3. The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you.  I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it.  Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case.  Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop.  But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Droid Razr Touch Screen Noise

Last month I got a new cell phone to replace my first generation Motorola Droid.  I decided to get the Droid Razr, another Motorola product, and I've been generally happy with it.  Some of the features just seem nuts to have in a cell phone, like HDMI output, and yet I've used it to watch a movie on a hotel TV.

One interesting sensitivity that I noticed today was that the touch screen keyboard became almost unusable while I had the Razr plugged into a wall charger.  I have been using the "Swype" mode, which allows you to enter entire words as a smooth sweeping gesture around the keyboard.  This time, though, it was detecting finger-lifts when I was still touching the screen, and the path it showed as where I was moving my finger looked like I'd had way too much caffeine.

Now admittedly, I was not using the charger that came with the phone, but it was the Motorola charger from my first Droid.  That's the charger that I usually have in my backpack, and I have actually had occasion to look at the 5V coming out of it with an oscilloscope.  It very clean and well regulated, even under load, especially compared to many other third-party chargers.  On a hunch, though, I unplugged the charger, and suddenly the keyboard worked fine again.  This may merit some further laboratory investigation, and it might provide good justification for building a controllable noise injection circuit...