D life blog

Making Beef Jerky is easy and quick and not too expensive on the Traeger.   Get these ingredients: 1 12 oz beer dark.  I used Negra Modelo 1 cup soy sauce 1/4 cup worcestershire sauce 3 TBSP Brown Sugar 1 TBSP Morton Tender quick Curing Salt (this is optional) 1/2 TSP Garlic Salt 3-4 TBSP Ground pepper 1 TBSP of Tony's (Tony Chachere's Original Creole ) 2 LBS Top round beef  (pre cut if possible ~1/4 inch thick) Step 1 .  Mix the non meat (& only 1 TBSP of pepper) ingredients together well, into a marinade.   Note that the ingredients call for 1 - 12 oz beer, but you could drink another while doing step 1 & 2. Step 2 . Put the mix in a zip lock with the meat for 24 hours in the fridge.  Step 3 . Start the Traeger on Smoke. (takes a couple of minutes for smoke).  I used Hickory wood. Step 4 . While waiting for smoke, lay the meat out on paper towels and pour out the marinade. Apply pepper to the meat generously on both sides. S...

I'm a huge fan of lots of different foods.  One of my favorites is smoked Salmon.  I have an electric smoker (aka a lazy guy smoker) and I recently perfected smoked salmon.  Here are the basic steps. For salmon, you need to brine it for the smoking technique to work properly.  Salmon can take a dry brine, meaning that you just apply to brine with no added liquid. Note: these steps are what I used on 1 big filet of salmon. If you have more/less than that you can adjust your measurements.  Some people prefer  one giant smoked filet, but I prefer smaller cuts.   Salmon dry brine ingredients: 2 cups brown sugar 1/2 cup kosher salt 1 tablespoon cracked pepper Steps  Get the salmon - doesn't have to be the most expensive salmon.  I usually wait for the sale on Atlantic salmon, or something similar.  Put the salmon in the dry brine overnight (see brine recipe above).  This will pull out some liquid and apparently chan...

If you ever wanted to grab the audio from any kind of video file, ffmpeg seems to be easiest way.   If you aren't familiar with ffmpeg,  it is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data - on just about every operating system you can think of.  Amazingly powerful Swiss Army knife - this is just one of many things it can do. Below are some examples of extracting audio out of a video file.  (ffmpeg runs from the command line) In this example  i indicates the input ab indicates the bit rate (in this example 160kb/sec) vn means no video ouput ac 2 means 2 channels ar 44100 indicates the sampling frequency.  "video.m4v" is the full path to the video file  audio.mp3 is the audio file that gets created as an output ffmpeg -i "video.m4v" -ab 160k -ac 2 -ar 44100 -vn audio.mp3 In this example the -vn switch extracts the audio portion from a video and we are using the -ab switch to save the audio...

I had to take a promotional video for work and make it available for a targeted marketing campaign.  The requirement was pretty simple, make it available to any HTML browser.  The challenge was the the original file was only made available as an MP4.  And we have no tools/budget to convert this to the other video formats HTML5 browsers may expect. What is the right way to convert video to encoding that works well in all HTML5 formats?  That depends, but I'll show you one way that worked for me in this case. After a little digging, seems it is really easy to get HTML5 video converted from an MP4 source video using FFMpeg from a command prompt in Windows.  I was successful using the examples below on Windows 8.1 For Webm I use the following. ffmpeg -i SourceVideo.mp4 -c:v libvpx -crf 10 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis output.webm for ogv I use this. ffmpeg -i SourceVideo.mp4 -codec:v libtheora -qscale:v 7 -codec:a libvorbis -qscale:a 5 output.ogv In this examp...

Blogging always seemed like a cool idea for other people.  Lately I've been thinking about blogging for myself.  Nothing concrete in mind, but hoping to post the things I like and find interesting, whenever I have time or feel like it. We will see how it goes, but right now I'm hoping to blog about technology, health, food, faith and family and general other things good in life.  I'm not overly wordy, so these will probably be short easy to read posts.  In any case, this may be more of a diary as I don't necessarily expect other people will read it! :)