I have been accused of being a nerd, and at times it can be difficult to argue the point.
On a less nerdy front, I have been experimenting with making my own breakfast sausage lately. I bought a mass of ground pork from the local butcher earlier this week, and over the course of the week I tried a different recipe variant every day until I found a formula that I liked the best. I have enjoyed all of the variants that I have tried, but the careful tuning each day paid off. The final product has (in order of quantity):
Ground Pork
Bread Crumbs
Maple Syrup
Salt
Pepper
Sage
Ground Coriander
Marjoram (I substituted Thyme for it today, but I've found that I prefer the former.)
Ground Clove
The other thing I tweaked was technique. At first I was making the sausages in the shape of a small hamburger patty, but by today I was layering the pork in waxed paper and pressing it between two flat surfaces to make very thin patties. The next time I make these, I will use the formula from yesterday with slightly less sage than I added today.
Some things that I tried and rejected:
Bacon Fat - The last time I bought ground pork from this place, it was very lean, so for my first attempt this time I shaved in some frozen bacon fat. Turns out this pork is not quite as lean, so it just made clean-up a bit worse.
Caraway - I like caraway, and it did not add an unpleasant flavour, but it didn't really play well with the other spices, and it dominated the final result.
Maple Flakes - I found that maple syrup and bread crumbs achieved the same end, but help the sausage to hold together a bit better.
On a more nerdy front, my WiFi range extender finally showed up yesterday. Our WiFi signal in the back yard has always been weak, which wasn't as big an issue before we had the garden converted into a patio. I put a Netgear extender in the spare room overlooking the patio a few years ago, and it was a middling success. Depending on the weather, and the phase of the moon, and in which house Jupiter was currently residing, it would alternate between barely providing service in the 2.4GHz range, or providing a signal with no Internet access.
It had status indicators for the strength of the signal it was receiving, and they would alternate between yellow and red (green is good). With the potential of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
atara using the WiFi out back for work, I decided it was finally time to make some changes to our local network, so I ordered another range extender from Best Buy. This time, I picked up a TP-Link one that had a very small footprint (it is a stand-alone unit that plugs into a standard outlet) and set it up in the back hall, which is pretty close to the mid-point in our house.
After an initial snag with it (I could not get it to connect with WPS), I finally remotely connected into it and configured it manually.
Once I got it set up, I went through all four of our devices, updated their firmware as required, and set them up in a way that made sense to me.
Our service starts with the modem/router provided by our ISP. When we upgraded our service a couple of years back, they replaced our ADSL modem with a combined modem/router. It only broadcasts on one frequency, and its signal was a bit weak down in the basement (where our file server resides), so I physically wired our old Asus router to the modem and set it up a an access point.
With yesterday's addition, this is how our daisy-chained network looks:
ADSL Modem/Router deep in the computer room ----->
Asus access point near computer room entrance ----->
TP-Link range extender in middle of house ----->
Netgear range extender in rear-facing guest room.
Later this morning I am going to take my Surface out to the patio to check the signal strength, but the Netgear device is reporting full bars on both frequencies, so I have a good feeling about things.
In other news, depending where you stand in the house you may find yourself with your choice of seven SSIDs to connect to our network. Each of them have variants on the network's name so that you know which device you are connecting to. Like I said earlier, the signal strength bounces around randomly (depending on humidity, location of the cat, etc), so you can ensure you are connecting to the closest one.
This is the kind of thing I do for fun. Does that make me a nerd?
On a less nerdy front, I have been experimenting with making my own breakfast sausage lately. I bought a mass of ground pork from the local butcher earlier this week, and over the course of the week I tried a different recipe variant every day until I found a formula that I liked the best. I have enjoyed all of the variants that I have tried, but the careful tuning each day paid off. The final product has (in order of quantity):
Ground Pork
Bread Crumbs
Maple Syrup
Salt
Pepper
Sage
Ground Coriander
Marjoram (I substituted Thyme for it today, but I've found that I prefer the former.)
Ground Clove
The other thing I tweaked was technique. At first I was making the sausages in the shape of a small hamburger patty, but by today I was layering the pork in waxed paper and pressing it between two flat surfaces to make very thin patties. The next time I make these, I will use the formula from yesterday with slightly less sage than I added today.
Some things that I tried and rejected:
Bacon Fat - The last time I bought ground pork from this place, it was very lean, so for my first attempt this time I shaved in some frozen bacon fat. Turns out this pork is not quite as lean, so it just made clean-up a bit worse.
Caraway - I like caraway, and it did not add an unpleasant flavour, but it didn't really play well with the other spices, and it dominated the final result.
Maple Flakes - I found that maple syrup and bread crumbs achieved the same end, but help the sausage to hold together a bit better.
On a more nerdy front, my WiFi range extender finally showed up yesterday. Our WiFi signal in the back yard has always been weak, which wasn't as big an issue before we had the garden converted into a patio. I put a Netgear extender in the spare room overlooking the patio a few years ago, and it was a middling success. Depending on the weather, and the phase of the moon, and in which house Jupiter was currently residing, it would alternate between barely providing service in the 2.4GHz range, or providing a signal with no Internet access.
It had status indicators for the strength of the signal it was receiving, and they would alternate between yellow and red (green is good). With the potential of
atara using the WiFi out back for work, I decided it was finally time to make some changes to our local network, so I ordered another range extender from Best Buy. This time, I picked up a TP-Link one that had a very small footprint (it is a stand-alone unit that plugs into a standard outlet) and set it up in the back hall, which is pretty close to the mid-point in our house.After an initial snag with it (I could not get it to connect with WPS), I finally remotely connected into it and configured it manually.
Once I got it set up, I went through all four of our devices, updated their firmware as required, and set them up in a way that made sense to me.
Our service starts with the modem/router provided by our ISP. When we upgraded our service a couple of years back, they replaced our ADSL modem with a combined modem/router. It only broadcasts on one frequency, and its signal was a bit weak down in the basement (where our file server resides), so I physically wired our old Asus router to the modem and set it up a an access point.
With yesterday's addition, this is how our daisy-chained network looks:
ADSL Modem/Router deep in the computer room ----->
Asus access point near computer room entrance ----->
TP-Link range extender in middle of house ----->
Netgear range extender in rear-facing guest room.
Later this morning I am going to take my Surface out to the patio to check the signal strength, but the Netgear device is reporting full bars on both frequencies, so I have a good feeling about things.
In other news, depending where you stand in the house you may find yourself with your choice of seven SSIDs to connect to our network. Each of them have variants on the network's name so that you know which device you are connecting to. Like I said earlier, the signal strength bounces around randomly (depending on humidity, location of the cat, etc), so you can ensure you are connecting to the closest one.
This is the kind of thing I do for fun. Does that make me a nerd?
