My first Woot Bag of Crap revealed!!!

My Random Crap from Woot arrive a few days early!  After following what people were getting on their discussion boards I was pretty sure what I'd be getting, and I wasn't too far off.  My loot was...

4 Woot wine bags (green in color)
1 Disney Princess Scratch and Design pack
1 Active Air Aroma Remedies unit
1 Apple iPod Nano lanyard earbuds
1 Golds Gym tote

Not bad, no letter but worth more than the $8 I paid.  I'll edit in some photos and possibly the video I took of the opening if it doesn't suck!

Woot! Bag of Crap!

A website I visit on a daily basis is Woot.com.  The website, with its tag line of "One Day, One Deal", offers one product a day at a usually great price.  These items are sometime new, sometimes refurbished and are often tech related but could be anything.  Once a month, they change things up a little and have a Woot-off.  During a Woot-off you will see flashing yellow lights on the page and they will put up one item after another, changing when an item sells out or they pull the plug.  This is also where you might just encounter the coveted "Woot Bag of Crap!".  When the bag of random crap ($8 including shipping) comes up they usually sells out within a few seconds, they are highly sought after.  So what is it?  Well, it could be anything.  Those lucky enough to get their order in will receive a box of random items from Woot about a week or two later.  The items sent can be working or broken, cool or crap.  You never know.  An item that everyone hopes for is "the letter".  The letter simply states that one item of random crap was too big to fit in the box and was shipped separately.  These can turn out to be TVs or in one case, a pallet of car wax.

The latest Woot-off started just ater midnight on August 18th and lasted through August 20th.  A72 hour Woot-off is a long one!  I was running a cool little tool in my browser at woot.kishk.org which can calculate how many of an item are left and estimate the time to sell out.  You can also set it to give audible alerts when an item gets to 20%, 10% or 5% left as well as when the item sells out or a new Woot is put up.  This works OK, but I found that Kishk didn't update very quickly when an item sold out, so when it alerted me that only 5% of an item was left I would start reloading the Woot page until the next item was up in hopes that it would be the Bag of Crap.  This went on for three days!  While at work I would take a short break whenever the audible alert went off (just a minute or so, I wasn't ignoring my job!) and at home I'd stop what I was doing when I would hear the birds chirping from Kishk.  I also have an app on my iPhone so I can keep track of what was going on while in my car, but only when stopped at lights.  So on Friday, Kishk showed about 9 minutes left on an item so I decided I had time for a bathroom break.  I took my iPhone with me so I could play a game while indisposed, but the first thing I did was run the Woot app.  Of course as soon as the app loaded it showed the Bag of Crap was being offered.  Jumping to my feet I shuffled to the computer (which was still showing the previous item), refreshed the Woot page and there it was!  The "I Want One" button was frantically pushed and within a minute or so the order confirmation page popped up.  My credit card security number was quickly entered and the order confirmed.  I'd been this far several times before, only to have my dreams crushed when the order finally finished processing and tell me that the item had sold out before my order could be completed.  This time the processing screen stayed up for what seemed like a LONG time, and when it finished my order was CONFIRMED!  I successfully ordered my FIRST BAG OF CRAP!  Will it contain a new computer?  The Lost Ark of the Covenant?  Spock dolls with their ears missing?  I don't know!  But it'll be fun waiting to find out!

HIS 5830 graphics card arrives, and still doesn't work!

So the HIS 5830 graphics card was delivered on Tuesday.  The card is a bit longer than the malfunctioning XFX 4870 card it is replacing, but I was able to get it in place by moving cables out of the way as much as possible and wiggling it in to place.  No issues on power-up, but when I went to install the drivers they did the same thing as the 4870 was doing.  Each time I tried, the driver installation would fail.  Obviously there was nothing wrong with the old card, so I went about trying to track down the true issue.  The possibilities I came up with (besides the video card which seems NOT to be the problem) were the PCIe slot, the power supply and the hard drive.  The hard drive would be the easiest thing to check out, so I ran the disk check included with Windows 7.  The process is simple, click on Start then select Computer and right click on the drive in question.  Select properties and then go in to the tools tab and click the check disk button.  I checked the boxes to automatically fix detected errors and hit OK.  The disk can't be checked while it's in use, so the system set up the scan for the next time the computer is started.  This turned out to be the problem (which is good because I didn't ant to have to replace the power supply or mainboard).  The scan took about 7 hours to complete, and there were a LOT of files with bad clusters which were fixed.  After all was said and done (at about 2am), I was able to boot up and install the latest graphics drivers from the ATI website.  SUCCESS!  Still, there are a few issues.  I don't know why the files got corrupted, so I don't trust the HDD that much anymore.  I've backed up all my data and will be purchasing a new hard drive this weekend.  I'm thinking of just using Synctoy from Microsoft to sync all of my personal folders to another computer on the network which is backed up with Carbonite.  Then I'll just keep running my computer as it is until the drive fails or I build another box, which I'm planning on doing early next year anyway.  When I do, I'll probably get another 5830 card to run in crossfire mode.

The video card I purchased came with a free download of Modern Warfare 2 from Steam.  It took about 12 hours for the download to complete, but the game is working great with the 5830 card!  With all video setting as high as they can go I'm getting around 75 fps frame rates.  It could probably go higher if my monitor had a faster refresh rate.

Trouble in video land

On Wednesday, ATI released this months update to their Catalyst suite and video driver so I decided to install them when I got home from work last night on my XFX 4870 card.  When 10.5 was released last month I noticed that the installation took a long time and when it finally finished the log indicated that the driver installation had failed.  I tried a few more times with the same result.  My assumption was that this was a software problem, and since everything was working I decided to wait for 10.6 and try again.  When it didn't install either, I tried several steps to get around whatever the problem was.  First, I tried to install just the driver without the Catalyst suite.  No go.  Next I uninstalled the old driver and tried to install the new one.  Big mistake.  The new driver would not install, and when I tried to reinstall an older version that had worked in the past it also would not install.  This tells me that there is a problem with the card itself.  This is the second XFX 4870 card I've had, the first one lasted about a month before it had to be sent back to XFX for replacement.  They were pretty quick, but I wasn't to happy about having to pay to ship back their defective card.  I ended up pulling my old Geforce 8800GT off the shelf and was able to get back up and running in no time.  After reading an article on Tom's Hardware, I decided to purchase an ATI 5830.  I just ordered an HIS iCooler V H583FN1GD HD 5830 video card from Newegg.com due to it's high rating and the free Modern Warfare 2 doesn't hurt too much either.  I'll write about the card once it arrives.

Making pizza with a 2Stone Pizza Grill

A few years ago, a thread was started on PizzaMaking.com entitled "Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven".  The OP had created a pizza oven to fit on his Weber charcoal grill which mimicked the conditions and high temperatures found in a traditional coal fired brick oven.  The thread can be found here...
Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven 


I was really (and I mean REALLY) in to pizza at the time, so the oven intrigued me.  Before long I had placed my order and shortly thereafter received my 2Stone Pizza Grill.  The weather has been improving here in Chicago, so I decided to make some pizza for dinner last night.

To make a really great pizza you need to start at the bottom, the crust.  To stand up to the high temperatures a dough with a higher than usual hydration (water content) works best.  The dough formula I use for pizzas baked in my home oven (expressed in bakers percentages, I'll explain that later) is...

100% bread flour
60% to 62% cold water
2% salt
0.25% Instant Dry Yeast (IDY)

This is mixed in the Kitchenaid stand mixer, balled, rubbed down with oil and left to ferment in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours before use.  The dough I use for the 2Stone oven is this...

100% Caputo "00" pizzaria flour
70%-72% cold water
2% salt
0.25% -0.5% IDY
2% Extra Virgin Olive Oil

 The "00" flour I use is imported from Italy and is milled finer than American flours.  When I tried using American brands of flour such as King Arthur I had issues with the crusts sticking to the stone and burning, those problems have disappeared since I started using the Italian "00" flour.  It can be difficult to find a local supplier for this type of flour, but you can order it from Amazon 00 Pizza Flour Attimo Caputo or PennMac.com.  The method I use to make this dough it to make a sponge with the water, yeast and ~ 70% of the flour, which I cover and let ferment all day while I'm at work.  If I want to use it that night I use a higher percentage of yeast, but if I'm going to let the finished dough sit in the fridge until the next day (which does seem to improve flavor and texture) I will use the lower percentage of yeast.  When I get home from work I add the remaining flour and mix for ~ 2 minutes, then add the oil and continue mixing until the dough is smooth.  At that point the dough is dumped out on to a floured surface, rolled in to a ball (which can be tricky with a dough this loose!) and placed in a covered, oiled bowl to rise until needed.

The formulas posted above are in baker's percentages.  The weights of all ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour, which will always be 100%.  If more than one type of flour is used then the weights of the flours combined will equal 100%.  The reason that this method is preferred in commercial bakeries is that it makes it very easy to scale recipes up and down according to need.  The way to do this is simple.  First, you need to add all the percentages in a particular formula together.  For the dough formula above you add all the percentages (100% + 70% + 2% + 0.25% + 2% = 174.25%).  Convert that in to an integer and you get a conversion factor of 1.7425.  Now that you have that number, you can use to to find out the weight of flour required for any given weight of final dough.  Say you need 850 grams of pizza dough, just divide 850 by 1.7425 and you see that you'll need 487.8 grams of flour.  70% of 487.8 = 341.46 grams of water and so on.

Now that the dough was done and rising, it was time to set up the 2Stone.  I lit a chimney of charcoal and let it go until the coals on top started to turn white.  The chimney was dumped and I arranged the coals in even layer in the center of the grill, roughly 2" high and 13" square.  The 2Stone was then placed on the cooking grate over the coals and allowed to heat up with the grill cover placed on top.

I can usually get the oven up to 900-950 degrees, but I was hungry, I was impatient and I only had enough charcoal to fill the chimney 3/4 of the way.  Now it was time to stretch the dough, dress the pizza, cook and enjoy!

I was lazy on the sauce, it was just a store bought brand (Boboli) that I dressed up with oregano, basil, vinegar, sugar and oil.  There were some left over vegetables that I had grilled the night before (mushrooms, onions and peppers) that I diced up and added after saucing the dough, then topped with slices of whole milk mozzarella and finished with slices of Ezzo pepperoni I bought from Pennmac.com.  After baking I picked a few leaves of Basil off my AeroGrow and tore them over the top and drizzled the pie with some really good olive oil from Old Town Oil.  I have enough leftover dough in the fridge to do it again tonight if the weather cooperates!

The creator of this product has been making improvements and new models of this oven.  He sells them via his website, www.2Stonepg.com.

HDMI to DVI adapter for Sony BDP-BX57

I received the HDMI to DVI adapter I had ordered on Friday and changed the video connection for my new BDP-BX57 to HDMI from the component video outputs I used when first setting up the player.  The adapter I bought was the most inexpensive one I found on Amazon, Eforcity HDMI-F to DVI-M Video Adaptor with Gold Contacts.  There seems to be a misconception that expensive cables are necessary for digital signals.  This may be the case for analog signals, but a digital signal is either there or it isn't.  If the signal is too weak you won't get a picture.  Except for long cable runs you will find little difference in picture quality when using the most expensive cables versus the cheapest.  It didn't take long to hook up the player via the HDMI output, but there is a very noticeable improvement in picture quality.  The blacks were fairly gray before, now they are much deeper.  Contrast has improved as well.  While I had the TV out I took the opportunity to clean up the cables back there, bundling them makes everything look cleaner and more professional.  If your TV has a DVI input but no HDMI, the adapter from Amazon will do the trick.  The cheapest on I could find at Best Buy was $20, so this adapter is a bargain.  If your TV only has analog inputs you will need to get your Blu-Ray player before December 31st, 2013.  After that day "Analog Sunset" goes in to effect.  Read here for more details AACS Final License - Analog Sunset. 

Sony BDP-BX57 Blu-Ray player with Wi-Fi. $229 at Costco.

I had been looking for a Blu-Ray player for a few weeks to replace my Samsung upconverting DVD player which had developed some issues with the audio.  The Sony BDP-S570 appeared to have all the features I wanted, but I everyone was listing them for $250 (MSRP) and I was waiting for someone would put them on sale before buying.  While browsing through Costco last weekend we found the Sony BDP-BX57.  It appears to be exactly the same thing as the BDP-S570 for only $229.  I decided to pull the trigger and bought one.

The specs for the BDP-BX57 can be found here...

Sony BDP-BX57 marketing specs



There is no product page for the BDP-BX57 on the Sony website, but comparing the marketing specs from the service site the player appears to be exactly the same thing as the BDP-S570.  The thing I was most interested is the ability to stream movies via the internet from Netflix, but running an ethernet cable across the room to hook a device up would be, shall we say, frowned upon.  I also didn't want to throw a wireless access point on top of the entertainment center.  The BDP-BX57's built-in Wi-Fi allows this player to connect to "the internets" without the clutter of exposed cables or extraneous hardware.

Upon opening the box at home, I found the player, remote, batteries manuals and an HDMI cable.  Video outputs are HDMI, component and composite.  Our TV does not have and HDMI input so I dug up some component cables for the video.  There are the standard RCA analog audio outputs along with optical and coax digital outputs.  I used the RCA outputs to the TV and the digital optical output to our home theater receiver for Dolby Digital and DTS audio.  Our TV is also a Sony, albeit and older one, but the remote worked for both it and the player right out of the box.  Once the connections were made and the unit powered on for the first time, a setup screen appeared which allowed me to set certain features such as language, output format (720p) and other options.  Connecting to our Wi-Fi was fairly painless, it scanned for available networks and asked for the encryption key once one was selected.  I then ran the "Network Update" from the menu to get the latest software installed from the Sony server.  The next thing was to activate the player to stream content from a Netflix account I had just set up.  This was a little more involved, probably would have gone quicker if I had bothered to read the instructions but that just isn't how I roll.  The process involved getting a code generated by the player, entering it at a website which generated another code which had to be entered in to the player via the remote.  We finally got everything set up after about 15 minutes and selected the first movie from Netflix, it showed up in the player's queue within a few minutes and we were watching!  The Netflix account I set up allows for one disc out at a time, so I picked a blu-ray disc (X-Men Origins:  Wolverine) which was delivered and watched yesterday.  The picture looks good, but I think it will be better with a digital video signal.  Our TV only has a DVI connector, so I've ordered a HDMI to DVI connector to see how it works out.  I'll post an update when it is done.

So far I'm really enjoying this player!  When we switched from cable to satellite last year we decided the premium movie channels weren't worth the money, now for $11 a month we can watch all the movies we want streaming plus have one DVD or Blu-Ray at a time.  If you're looking for a good Blu-Ray player with built in Wi-Fi, the BDP-BX57 is a good one to consider!