Irish Cream

Description

My grandmother made her own Irish cream for the holidays and I've been trying to perfect my own recipe now for years. My recipe started from a combination of several others, as is my usual MO and I've been experimenting with some different flavours. One year I tried it with both dark chocolate (melted) instead of the espresso powder, then I tried it with white chocolate... I liked them all.

Note: It goes extremely well with buttery Christmas cookies, but I can't recommend it due to health concerns.

Ingredients

0.5 L. Whipping/Heavy Cream
300 mL. Condensed milk (sweetened)
1.5 Tbsp. Powdered Espresso
1 Tsp. Almond Extract
0.5 L. Irish Whiskey

Directions

Dissolve espresso in 75 mL. of hot water, then add the sweetened condensed milk and almond extract and mix thoroughly, this will help thin the condensed milk, and then mix in the heavy cream. Gradually stir in the Irish whiskey and it's done (well you'll want to bottle it).

Try to keep the Irish cream in the refrigerator for one week before drinking for the best flavour.

Stores at room temperature for approximately 2 weeks, and in the refrigerator for two months; or so I'm told. The Irish cream has never lasted long enough for me to verify this statement.

Make Raspberry Pi More Secure

A couple of simple steps to make Linux (sshd) secure shell more secure, as a follow up to my previous post about setting up ssh access with a secure key:

a) Change the default port

In order to change the default port we need to edit our ssh configuration file and change the default port from 22 to something else:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Port 22

b) Disable the password

The password is still a vulnerability, so it's best to either change it to something very secure (long and highly randomized) or to disable it completely and limit access to the ssh key itself. To do this we edit the following line in the sshd_config:

# Change to no to disable tunnelled clear text passwords

PasswordAuthentication no

Telemetry Chart

I created a very simple line plot for displaying my data using the JavaScript library Chart.js, it has less bells and whistles than a library like D3.js but it has proven to be very easy to use. Even so, I ended up taking a course to introduce myself to JavaScript; with CodeSchool and their JavaScript Road Trip. I liked the course format with video tutorials and code quizzes; I always learn better through doing (and breaking things) and their browser hosted code editor was well done.

I did have one notable issue with previous charts being cached and showing through when I would mouse over certain data points. Luckily this was a fairly well known issue and there was a simple solution, using the destroy() method.

chart.destroy();

I am still working on a few more controls, I've provided controls for entering specific start times and selecting the number of samples to display:

var start = document.getElementById("tbTime").value;

As you can see this is still a work in progress. Next thing I want to work on is a listview to select multiple data streams from the given table, connecting to (ftp) online data sources and updating my database automatically (differential updates) so I can collect data from different sources online. This may take me a while to complete (what with coding full time at work) but that's the plan.

You can see the completed code below:

And here is a screenshot of the completed single line plot, if the controls are empty it defaults to all data:

Simple time-based plot

Next on the agenda is to collect data from local and online resources (ftp); and then make the source user configurable as well as allowing them to select the stream.

So far I have the ftp request method running: