Month: April 2014

Woodworking is a highly visual craft. There’s just something photogenic about lumber getting cut to size, dry-fit, glued or tacked together, and finally sanded down and finished into a beautiful piece of furniture. Even if you’re not a woodworker yourself, watching high-quality woodworking videos is a great way to learn about how stuff gets made, and who knows, you might even realize you want to make something yourself. Over a year ago, I wrote up a round-up of three woodworking resources which included talented YouTube woodworkers Matthias Wandel, Steve Ramsey, and Marc Spagnuolo, AKA The Wood Whisperer. All three still…

Read the full article: 5 Woodworking YouTube Channels You Should Subscribe To Today

via MakeUseOf
5 Woodworking YouTube Channels You Should Subscribe To Today

Bacon is delicious, and keeping it from shrinking when cooking is a popular topic. However, Instructables user craftclarity wanted a more scientific, rigorous approach to keeping bacon from shrinking while cooking, so he put a number of popular tricks—including the one we mentioned—to the test.

Craftclarity tested the rinsing method before baking and frying, complete with some control bacon that wasn’t rinsed at all. He also tested whether or not you’d get maximum flavor from your bacon by only baking it for 10 minutes at 365 degrees F (185 degrees C), as all of the tips suggest. It turns out that the water rinse isn’t quite as effective as everyone who published it would have you believe—it certainly helped, but claims that it’ll keep shrinkage down by up to 50% are more than exaggerated.

For one thing, the experiment (rather predictably) discovered that the 10 minute/365 degree cooking time was way too short, and resulted in practically raw bacon. That makes sense, regardless of what the tips say. From there, they bumped up the cooking time to a more reasonable 30 minutes in the oven, versus the package instructions of 8-10 minutes in a skillet (where shorter cooking times make more sense. The control bacon for each experiment went in, followed by the bacon that had been rinsed and then patted dry.

The result? No significant change in bacon shrinkage regardless of cooking method. In fact, if the experiment proved anything, it’s that to minimize bacon shrinkage, you should cook your bacon in the oven. There was little difference between the rinsed oven bacon and the unrinsed oven bacon. Flavor-wise though, some of the testers noted the rinsed bacon tasted "drier," which makes sense since you wash some of the delicious, flavor-transferring fat off of the bacon before cooking, which makes it crunchier, but not necessarily better. Hit the link below to see the entire experiment; it’s worth a look.

Preventing Bacon Shrinkage: An Experiment | Instructables

via Lifehacker
A Scientific Approach to Minimizing Bacon Shrinkage

For the past few days, I’ve been posting up some optical illusions that are generally cool for everyone to look at. I did this, so I could give your brains a bit of a break, because I was posting a lot of brain teaser optical illusion. Well, I hope your brain got a good bit […]

The post Count the Balls Optical Illusion appeared first on Mighty Optical Illusions.

via Mighty Optical Illusions
Count the Balls Optical Illusion

This is a quick overview of top-level app features available with VividCortex.
Installation that Literally Takes a Few Minutes
Our install process requires only a few steps, running a CURL install command and entering some credentials and you are done. The agents automically configure, discover MySQL and start reporting data faster than you could have read this. Installation instructions are available once you signup. Instant Visual Checks on Thousands of Servers
We provide a real-time dashboard of server load, or any other metric. Imagine a real-time view of critical MySQL errors, or replication problems. It’s really hard to quickly evaluate hundreds or even thousands of servers, but with this view, we’ve built that flexibility into our app. You can start from this page and quickly drill into other parts of the app. Imagine how a maps app allows you to quickly zoom in and out of a point of interest. We’ve built that functionality into our app.
All the MySQL and OS Graphs, in 1-Second Detail
We provide the most detailed granularity of any MySQL metrics and monitoring company. Everything is 1-second. Problems that last under a minute are still problems and it’s blasphemy to ignore data that isn’t at least 1-second. We also allow you to click on a graph, zoom into something interesting, and we update the entire app to match that view state. Cool?
Profiling Queries in Real Time
Most importantly, we look at workload on a system. It’s important to understand what queries are running the longest, how they changed over time, and how expensive they are to key resources. We allow you to tag queries, and rank by those tags. We let you look at those queries across databases. We sample those queries. There is a lot more to our profiler than you see, so we suggest you give it a spin and see what you discover.
This allows you to see, in real time, how developers and users are changing load on your systems. Real Time Replication Tracking
We automatically discover replication relationships, errors, and lag on your system. You can visualize this relationship so you can catch problems before they grow. Events Feed, Without Configuration
This is a newsfeed of system events. We record errors like query pileups, configuration changes, MySQL errors, full disk, and lots more so you don’t have to configure your MySQL or OS events. These events can be integrated with alerting services, to tell your team when critical stuff is happening. Interest in Learning More or Getting Started
Of course, VividCortex has a lot more functionality than we can demonstrate in a quick tour. We automatically discover server stalls. Everything is API driven. Those APIs will soon be available for you to use. And more. You’ll have to install and discover stuff for yourself. What are you waiting for? 🙂 Signup for a live production webinar with Baron Schwartz. Or, get started immediately, and signup for a free 30-day fully-featured trial.
via Planet MySQL
A Quick Tour of VividCortex

32GB of sweet USB flash drive storage space just sits in your office drawer, ironically taking up space. Why? Because you can’t put anything else on it. It’s write protected and you can’t format the stupid thing! Or can you? We get a lot of people asking about formatting write protected USB flash drives. First, make sure this is what you need to do. Are you sure you don’t just have a dead USB port? Maybe it’s just that your flash drive is corrupted? We’re going to get to the bottom of this problem and either you’ll be stashing all…

Read the full article: How To Format A Write Protected USB Flash Drive

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How To Format A Write Protected USB Flash Drive