Mindless Movie

Since you all are suffering my Tech Geek posts about my user interface for my planned computerized homebrew system so well, I thought I’d take it a step beyond my screenshots to a little “in action” action. The screen capture was encoded with the Microsoft MPEG-4 v2 codec, and I know it works with Windows Media Player v11 (what we have). If it turns out you guys can’t see it or play it, or really want a different codec, I can try again. Otherwise try saving it to your harddrive and opening it with WMP.

BrewzNET video #1

The video basically shows the use of design control points, resizing the various objects that are available, playing around with pipe routing and styles, and a quick demonstration of the alpha-level support, which is not 100% at this point – I make the fermenter vessel partially transparent by setting the alpha channel for one of the color properties. I used a crappy freeware video capture application, so the framerate blows… but you get what you pay for, and you guys still will get the idea on how the screen designer is gonna work.

You may not care, which is fine too.

On the homebrewing front – I haven’t really brewed much. We did a saison (10 gal) a couple weekends ago, which is ready for transfer to secondaries, and I bottled 10 gallons of Choking Sun Stout on Monday – But I haven’t really put much thought into brewing more batches, namely because I have so much beer on hand as it is. I will probably brew some Black Honey Ale and a Coffee Stout sometime soon, but no firm plans on when. To be honest, the price hikes for malt and hops have seriously got me rethinking the frequency with which I brew. I have a decent supply of base malt and hops now, so I’ll probably burn through that over the next 6 months just to reduce on-hand inventory.