[SGVHAK] 09/05 (Thu) meeting recap

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

This was a pretty quiet HAK meeting, which started with just a few of us around 6:40pm, and a few more trickling in later.  I think we had a maximum of 8 people.  

Much thanks to Dave for hosting the meetings and showing off all his cool stuff.  Michael worked on his SGVLUG presentation.  James was working on a website, though he had brought his radio to show off.  (I know nothing about these things, so that's the most I can say.)  Dave showed part of the gun for his tank project, which winds up the string that pulls back the piston in the Nerf dart magazine.  He also showed off his industrial servo motor, which requires 3-phase A/C to turn continuously. 

Adam came with a stack of hard drives that he was evaluating to see which were dead and which were worth salvaging.

Homan and I and Adam were taking apart hard drives for the heck of it.  Adam's hard drive was a dead Western Digital 2TB drive.  The cover was secured with 11(!) screws, most of which were covered by stickers.  I guess WD really didn't want people taking apart their hard drives.

Scoops came with Ginko.  Ginko worked on her illustrations while Scoops showed us what we could salvage from a CD-ROM drive.  It has more interesting moving parts than a hard drive.  Between the shiny rings from the hard drives and the gears and motor in the CD-ROM drive, I was irresistibly reminded of the old wind-up toy race cars 

Dessert was peach and strawberry galette, passionfruit sorbet.  I'd also brought a can of whipped cream, which went well with both.  Recipe links at the end of the e-mail.   

About the most hackerish thing I can say about the food is that I used a hacked together refrigeration unit to bring the sorbet, to provide a thermal buffer against melting.   I went with the Starch unpatented ice cream containment vessel with a couple of modifications suggested by Mic.  I nested a quart-sized lidded plastic deli container into a larger 4lb plastic tub that used to hold yogurt.  I made an ice brine in the tub before adding the deli container, which I'd weighted down with a drinking glass.  The whole unit is put into the freezer.  It takes a while for the ice brine to become solid ice, due to the salt lowering the freezing point of the solution.   Mic had suggested enclosing the inner container with a plastic bag, which makes it easier to slide out the inner container from its ice bed, and in general, makes things less messy.   Excellent suggestion.   Made my life easier when I needed to slide out the inner container to add ice
 cream or serve ice cream.


You can get the recipe for the peach and strawberry galette here.  Lots of pictures, too, if you were wondering what a galette is.  
http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2013/08/14/rustic-strawberry-peach-tart/


The recipe for passion fruit sorbet is extremely easy.  It's just a lot of work if you are juicing fresh passion fruit instead of using a frozen puree from the supermarket.
http://www.savorysimple.net/passion-fruit-sorbet/



Lan
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