Yesterday I made pulled pork in our crock pot. Since it was pouring outside, I wasn’t willing to walk to the big grocery store. As such, any ingredients I needed had to be available at our local corner store (minus the pork itself, which had been hanging out in our freezer for months).

It was delicious, and while I don’t have an exact recipe, I’ll describe the process so you can throw whatever’s in your house in and have something equally delicious. I didn’t take photos because it just looked like shredded meat.

You will need:

• 4 – 6 pound pork butt. Which actually comes from the shoulder. It’s cheap. You should be able to get it for around $1.25 per pound. Less if it’s approaching the sell-by date.
• Crock pot. It needs to be big enough to fit the pork butt.
• An onion
• A clove of garlic or two
• A bottle of BBQ sauce
• Various spices. Whatever you have around is probably fine.

Step 1:

Thaw the pork butt in the microwave, or overnight in the fridge if you’re better at planning than I am.

Step 1.5:

While the pork is thawing, coarsely chop up the onion and garlic. Throw them in the crock pot haphazardly.

In a medium sized bowl, mix together equal parts of the following various spices, making substitutions for anything you have / don’t have / like / don’t like.

• Salt
• Ground black pepper
• Sugar
• Brown sugar
• Cumin
• Tumeric
• Chili Powder
• Garlic Powder
• Paprika

I used 2 tablespoons of each for an 8.5 lb chunk of meat, though I added some extra paprika because it smelled so nice. I also used curry powder instead of chilli powder/tumeric because I didn’t have either of those.

Alternately, you can used a pre-made BBQ rub, but they didn’t sell that at my corner store.

Step 2:

Take your thawed pork butt and rub the spice mix all over it. Place the pork butt in the crock pot on top of the onions/garlic, and go ahead and dump the rest of the rub in there.

Step 3:

Fill the crock pot about 2/3 with water, or stock if that’s how you roll.

Step 4:

Cook 6+ hours on high or 10+ hours on low. If you have a temperature probe, make sure the interior of the meat gets up to at least 145 degrees F. The longer it cooks, the easier the next step will be.

Step 5:

Once you’re tired of waiting, turn off the crock pot. If you’re lucky, the meat will be so tender it will slide off the bone and you can pull the bone out easily, and then use tongs to move the chunks of meat into a bowl. If you’re like me, the meat will hang onto the bone for dear life and you’ll have to figure out how the hell to lift an 8.5 pound roast out of a vat of boiling water and fat.

I ended up using a measuring cup to scoop off some of the liquid, cut some of the bigger chunks off the bone, and then move the whole thing into another bowl where I could hack at it for a little while.

Step 6: After liberating the bone and meat, get rid of all the inedible bits like the skin, bone, and fat. Discard them along with the onions and garlic, who valiantly gave up their lives for your pork. Pour off most of the water/fat broth, leaving about half an inch in the bottom of the crock pot.

Step 7: Return the meat to the crock pot and shred it using two forks. By the time you’re done, it should suck up the remaining broth and be deliciously juicy.

Step 8: Dump the bottle of BBQ sauce in there. Mix it up.

Tada! You now have pulled pork! Eat on a sandwich, or just straight up.

Chris spent the past day or so penning the ultimate weddingspam blog post. There was Rock Band, Legos, Super Mario Brothers, and ice cream. Since there is no earthly way I can top it, I'm just going to link to it here:

Read all about our insanely geeky wedding here

It's finally nice weather out, so I decided to make use of my cell phone's wifi tethering feature and take my office outside. Being a member of a coworking space is great, but sometimes you just want to get away from everyone and hammer out some code.

I recently picked up a Eagles Nest Outfitters DoubleNest Hammock for camping, and this seemed like a good time to test it out and practice hanging it.

The hardest part was finding two trees close enough together and an appropriate diameter for my straps. The trees in nearby Liberty State Park are all pretty far apart, and tend to be either too small or absolutely huge. But at last, I found two trees about 10' apart and each about 8 inches in diameter. As a bonus, my spot has a nice view of both Ellis Island and the Statue of LIberty.

I did make one critical error: I forgot to bring snacks and now I'm starving. So soon I'll have to abandon my hammock to go search for food, but until then it's a pretty great place to write code.

At long last, I’ve completed the Rainbow Road on my Minecraft server.

If you’re not familiar with Minecraft, this episode of Zero Punctuation sums it up pretty thoroughly.

We're holed up in Brigantine, NJ for the week, cranking out code at a breakneck pace. Things are starting to come together, including the framework for quests!

Our first quest is a 9 week program to prepare even the laziest of couch potatoes for the zombie apocalypse. In the event of a zombie apocalypse, all the shotguns and peels in the world aren't going to help you one bit if you can't make it to the safe house without stopping to catch your breath.

The UI is slowly starting to come together. It's been challenging balancing our mountain of to-dos for the project. There are just two of us to cover all the storyline, illustration, game mechanics, user interface, frontend code, and backend code. But now that we have our first fully playable scenario up and running, the othe parts are starting to fall into place. Hooray!

In an effort to better explain what City of Epic is, we've put together this informative commercial. You could even call it an infomercial!

Development continues behind the scenes. It's been quiet on the blog because we've been hard at work! There's not a ton to see on the site yet, but here's a sneak peek at some of the artwork to tide you over.

That's right, our game will have zombies.

This week I makerbotted for the first time! I know, I know… I should have done this much much sooner. Everything Tiny and Makerbot were actually founded in the same room, the old NYC Resistor location, and it's been really exciting to see things take off for them. But until recently, partly due to the success of Everything Tiny, I never really had time to sit down and get personally aquanited with the wide world of 3D printing.

Part of my probelm was that I always had ideas which were large and complicated, and I never finished the designs. So in an effort to actually produce something, I set myself to a very simple first project: a plastic organizer insert for a mint tin.

I'm using it to organize my miniature pompom collection. Because I have one of those.

Overall the printing process was pretty easy. Adam, Matt, and Pax were nice enough to help me get over the few problems I ran into. Matt, who is the developer in charge of ReplicatorG (Makerbot's printing software), gave helpful instructions like "now click the picture of the potato with an arrow coming out of it." He then asked if I knew any UI designers looking for work.

Here are the issues I ran into on my maiden print:

The model didn't adhere to the bed.  Because my design is pretty thin, it didn't stick very well to the bed of the makerbot, even with the heated build platform. This was easy enough to fix, we turned on the raft (a layer of plastic which goes down evenly before you start the real print, and is removable later).

The plastic was coming out goopy. The main issue with my first two attempts was that the plastic was coming out much too thick, and kind of lumpy/grainy. This caused two problems: first, it looked terrible, with little lumpy bits everywhere. But more importantly, the lumpy goopy bits would build up and then harden. Then when the extruder head came by again, it would hit these plastic lumps and move the model, throwing off the registration.

There were two suggested fixes here: first was to increase the speed, so that the build platform would move faster (allowing for less material to build up). This was met with a certain degree of success, but Adam suggested that the plastic we were using, which had been sitting out at Resistor for quite some time, had absorbed too much water from the air to really be useful. The moral of the story here is to store your plastics in airtight containers with some desiccant. In the end, we switched plastics.

My machine wouldn't talk to the Makerbot. This ended up being an issue with my machine, a somewhat unhappy eeePC. When I switched to my mac, all was happy again. Also, the eee is way too underpowered to really be generating gcode for prints. I was able to cold-boot my mac, install RepG, install the drivers, and generate the print's gcode from scratch in the time it took my eee to get halfway done generating the same gcode.

The build platform wouldn't heat. This one took us the longest to debug. One of the connectors was visibly damaged (names were named but I won't reprint them here), but it worked just often enough to make us think something else was the problem. After some thorough testing with the  multimeter, and some careful coaxing of the connections, power was restored to the build platform.

Here's the source model, which I've uploaded to Thingiverse. Note that this is meant to fit mint tins that I purchase wholesale, and as such may not fit the Altoids tins. I created the object in Google SketchUp and then exported it to STL for use with RepG. GoogleSketchUp is OK for doing things quickly, but there are a lot of things I wanted to do with the design that I couldn't convince SketchUp to let me do. Particularly, I wanted nice rounded edges on the top of my model.

I'm happy with the final print, and really stoked about Makerbotting more models in the future!

This past week, I picked up a Livescribe pen. I think it's the most impressive gadget I've seen in a long while, though every now and then I have to stop to consider the fact that I carry around a 1 gigahertz computer complete with keyboard and touch interface in my pocket. I remember long ago seeing an ad for a machine for a 400 hz machine and thinking it was a typo – nothing could possibly be that fast.

Anyway, so, pen. The nickel tour is that it records whatever you write* and can also record voice. I had a microcassette recorder in college. I used it to tape a handful of lectures, and never listened to the tapes ever again. So the voice recording capabilities weren't really a huge selling point.

What's cool about the Livescribe is that it indexes the audio to your writing. So I can tap on a bulleted list, and hear the full conversation from thath point. Which is much more useful than having to search an entire conversation for the 10 second clip I care about.

It syncs with Evertnote, though not particularly elegantly. With a paid evernote account, you can search your notes (using OCR), and since I didn't feel like paying for the Livescribe OCR add-on, that's a win. Evernote's OCR does an OK job of translating my half-cursive-half-print writing.

But, let's get to the most important thing about this pen: it plays Zork.

Zork is a free application for the pen. It's a direct port of the Zork we all know and love, and it uses the pen's LCD window to scroll text (e.g. "You are west of a house"). You write your actions on the page, it reads them in, and then spits out the appropriate snarky Zork response.

The handwriting recognition is generally very good, but I had some odd trouble getting it to read the phrase "open mailbox." If you look at the command list, you can see where I forgot to save and had to start over after turning off the pen. Modern autosave has spoiled me.

Saving/restoring is pretty cool, you draw a little picture (the circled 1 and 2) and tap it twice. Then you tap the one you want to restore when you go to load a game. Neat trick.

Overall the pen is a neat bit of technology. Maybe not a critical one, but definitely neat.

*provided you write it on special paper. You can print your own special paper if you have a nice enough printer, and even design your own special paper if you really want to hack around with their SDK.

Things have been very, very busy around here. Here's some of how I'm spending my time:

Wedding

I am getting married in early April. We went a very DIY route, hand making everything from the invitations to the centerpieces (which are made from approximately 25,000 individual lego bricks). I've been dutifully documenting the processes, but haven't had time to write up blog posts about everything we're doing.

A New Startup!

Technically, it's my old startup. But we're doing it for real this time. For those of you who are following along at home, you'll remember that about this time last year I was starting a startup. And then a few things happened and my personal finances looked a little scary, and long story short: I bailed. 

But I'm back at it! The company is called BitBot Media, and is the new home for all my professional startup projects. The project under the most active development is a health game, which I'll get to in just a second.

I'm working out of General Assembly, a new coworking space in midtown Manhattan. It's a beautiful space with a great collection of people. The space opened in mid December, so there are still a few kinks to work out (I frequently complain about people taking phone calls in the library) but overall it's pretty great.

So about that game…

The working title of the game is ExeRPG, and it's a browser-based RPG meant to encourage consistent workout habits. It might not be the next Grand Theft Auto, but finding the drive to exercise seems to be a comon problem among our friends.

We're in a private email-based alpha right now while we work out some of the major gameplay mechanics. It's a slow process, but has already provided us a lot of valuable feedback. We expect to have a full beta up by May. We're also planning on running a Kickstarter campaign to fund our initial development. If you're interested in the project you can sign up for our mailing list at http://www.exerpg.com

Developing a long-form game has been a huge learning process. I hope to blog as much of it as I can over on the game development blog.

Overall it's a busy time for me, hopefully post-wedding I can sit down and finish up some of the draft blog posts I've got lying around.

This weekend was spent at RevolvingDork's parents' house, which they kindly let us turn into a Lego sculpture factory.

We had a total of 12 people over on Saturday attempting to make 15 Lego spheres. Each sphere is about 25cm (10ish inches) in diameter. They follow a pattern I created using Blender and the techniques/scripts described here and here.

We used a lot of Legos. Approximately 22,000. Most of them were sourced from BrickLink, though we did buy a few sets new from Toys R Us. When build day came we realized we didn't have enough, so RD made a last-minute trip to the Lego store. He was able to talk the staff into letting him buy a few boxes in bulk.

In order to make the build process easier, we laser-cut jigs out of foam core for each of the 27 layers. The jigs served as templates for each layer, avoiding the frustrating and time consuming counting I had been doing when building them earlier. We didn't use a script to output the vector cut paths, RD just traced them by hand in Illustrator.

To put it plainly: assembling these is hard. There are lots of overhangs and ragged edges where you really need a 1×1, but of course those aren't very structurally stable. The first few layers are definitely the hardest, and there are a number of tips and tricks we figured out along the way to make things easier. And by easier I mean possible.

The spheres were built mostly hollow, though thicker at the top and bottom for structural support. A few folks incorporated a center column to make placing the top easier. Personally I found it easier to start thickening the walls around the top 1/3rd and using long 2×8 pieces to mesh in the top.

John decided to get fancy with his; rather than a simple mottled pattern he made an artistic swirl.

;

After 12 hours of work on Saturday we had 6 complete spheres and a number of half-finished ones. On Sunday RD, myself, and my soon-to-be mother-in-law finished up the leftovers, for a total of 13 spheres completed this weekend. I'm pretty impressed, and honored to have the sort of friends who would give up their Saturday to assemble these ridiculous sculptures.

What are they all for? The answer to that is coming shortly…