Well, it’s no GameGun, but we hear this “PlayStation motion controller” thing from Sony is going to be “kind of a big deal.” The SCEA R&D team was kind enough to put together some behind the scenes footage detailing a bit of the genesis of the controller and some of its technical prowess, and according to Sony this should be just enough of a calculated tease to get us excited for TGS in late September. We feel so manipulated. Video is after the break.
I love coffee. Probably more than you do. But I’m not as obsessed as the people who devote their lives to coffee, forever searching for the perfect cup through practices that mingle science and voodoo. I want to be.
When I (or anyone) order a macchiato at either of Ninth St. Espresso‘s Alphabet City outposts, it’s always made by a dude in his 20s wearing a baseball hat and facial hair who appears to move with a level of enthusiasm rivaling that of an arthritic retiree working as a night-shift security guard at a library. It looks like he simply doesn’t care. At least, if you don’t watch closely.
After he presses the tamper into a mound of brown, almost velvet-like powder to compress it into a perfectly even puck of coffee for proper extraction, he gives the portafilter a fast twirl, proving the coffee is packed in tightly enough that gravity can’t wrestle it out. The steel pitcher holding the steamed milk is slammed into the counter once then swirled, twice and another swirl, three times—then half of its contents are dumped into a drain before they’re poured into a tiny cup with hand movements that slink back and forth so subtly they’re almost imperceptible, smoothly layering the milk into a triple shot of thick and rusty brown espresso, the drink topped with an arabesque mark of white in a small sea of tan foam. I wasn’t witnessing malaise, but the skillful, measured movements of a pro.
That’s merely what I can see—what I didn’t know before talking to Ninth St.’s owner, Ken Nye, is everything leading up to that. The $15,000 hand-built La Marzocco machine my drink was crafted with is the only one of its kind in the U.S., an “almost prototypish” model that stuffs the state-of-the-art in espresso-making technology into a retro body style that evokes fine Italian machinery as much as it does coffeeshop centerpiece (photos above). The heart of the machine is an electronic PID-controlled triple boiler system. Typical commercial machines have two boilers—one for the coffee, one for the steamer—but Ken’s machine has separate boilers for each group head (where the coffee comes out), each of which can adjusted to within a tenth of a degree.
Ken says that kind of temperature control really matters. He and others avow that taste begins to change within half a degree—as coffee gets hotter, it tends to be more bitter, while cooler coffee can be more sour. (How important is temperature to coffee? Ken keeps his shops at exactly 73 degrees year round—for the beans, not the customers.)
Older machines just couldn’t get that kind of precision. They had a typical variation of a few degrees either way—which is why Ken retired his 1970s machine, which it sits, gorgeous as a classic car, in the back of the shop. The new machine is a glimpse of what other top-of-the-line espresso machines will perform like a year from now, says Jacob Ellul-Blake from La Marzocco R&D—though they’ll have even more sophisticated, programmable controls for pressure, too, giving a barista exacting digital power over nearly every parameter of the coffee.
How those parameters are changed is where engineering meets art—it’s entirely based on taste. Artisan coffee-making may be at last trodding toward digital control en masse, making the production of a cup of coffee approximate voodoo-inflected mad science. Ninth St.’s relatively new $3000 Mazzer burr grinder is also electronically controlled, its older grinder relegated to pulverizing beans for decaf, while water filters run amok throughout the shop to ensure a mineral level of 100-150 PPM/TDS, lest the water be “lifeless” or too hard, and damaging to the equipment—but the very analog rituals of tasting, like cupping, prevail. After all, there’s only two elements in coffee: Coffee and water.
And despite all of the gear, what this bleeding edge of the coffee industry is attempting to imitate is the old-school wine industry. To see that, I had to step back a level, from coffeehouse to roaster, so Ken directed me to the current supplier of his beans, Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee.
Intelligentsia’s New York training lab, run by David Latourell (formerly of the Clover’s progenitor, the Coffee Equipment Company), is a large white space divided into two rooms. Two-thirds of the space is the lab, with two long steel tables pressed back against the wall, cluttered by nearly $50,000 worth of gear for making coffee: Chemex to vacuum pot, caffe solo to Clover. The other third of the space is a dedicated cupping room with a hydraulic table cut into a stage. Intelligentsia is one of the three big roasters, along with Portland-based Stumptown (who just opened a NY roastery) and North Carolina-based Counter Culture, currently spearheading the so-called third wave of coffee, the second wave being, in a nutshell, Starbucks.
The two big messages of the third wave, if you buy into it as a movement, are sustainability and coffee as a “culinary experience.”
By sustainability, that means environmentally accountable and fiscally beneficial to the farmers who grow the beans, long screwed over by Big Coffee. But the sourcing goes beyond just quality and fairness: These people are bringing wine’s notion of terroir into coffee—tasting precisely where coffee is from, not just down to the single-origin farm level, but down to blocks of a farm’s land. (By the way, David says that Starbucks’ sourcing practices are exceptionally solid, so no ill should be spoken of them in that regard.)
The incredibly nerdy and exacting methods developed lately for brewing coffee aren’t about convenience, like the drip pot. They’re designed to express and articulate the particular qualities and complexities inherent to a coffee, to make it possible to not simply taste coffee like wine, but to talk about it in a similar manner—”gilded by an orange and lime citrus acidity, the center of Itzamna radiates flavors of fruit punch and caramel”—and ascribing those qualities to a particular origin.
The feedback loop of the relationships with farmers that these roasters have been building for years now, David says, doesn’t just mean that coffee is more responsibly harvested, but that coffee is actually better now, and there are coffees that were never possible before, since farmers have been refining their practice to grow coffee that suits the tastes of roasters who will pay more for particular beans.
David is actually un-elitist as they come, despite being at the center of a movement that smacks of cultural and culinary elistism. For him, all the gear, all of the mechanical extravagance and precision, is all about taste and getting the flavor profile you want out of coffee. He refuses to judge even those who drink Folgers and like it (he just wishes they’d buy coffee from somewhere that practiced more ethical bean sourcing). But I mean, how much can you really taste the difference between various coffees, or hell, one coffee prepared different ways? To find out, David made us several cups of coffee, prepared using the Clover, Chemex and CafeSolo.
Clover is particular suited to experimentation, since nearly variable can be manipulated digitally and the process is easily repeatable, potentially turning every cup into a science project. The Chemex delivers the cleanest profile of any brew method, plainly exposing the bean’s flavor profile—there’s no muddling to hide it, like with a French press—and the Cafe Solo is kind of like a reverse French press, offering something a bit heavier and richer. (We explained most of the major ways to make coffee earlier with Ken and David’s help, if you’re curious.) We tried Intelligentsia’s La Soledad, from Guatemala, Flor Azul from Nicaragua, and La Maravilla, also from Guatemala.
Here’s where I’m coming from, going into this: I can tell the difference good coffee and shitty coffee. The latter, well, tastes like shit. The former, I can drink black and like, tasting something more simply coffee, but that I can’t define. In other words, the flowery descriptions adorning bags of coffee from most specialty houses haven’t actually played out like that on my tongue. It’s a rudimentary sophistication.
After an introductory cup of the Flor Azul, we try the La Soledad in the Clover with a 30 second brew time. It’s pleasant and fairly light. There’s a defining acidity to it, but it’s not bitter in any way. David adjusts the steep time to 60 seconds. The resulting cup is mellower, and loses a lot of its punch. He makes a third cup, this time upping the dose: Perfection. A happy medium of the first two, what people mean when they say a coffee is “juicy” suddenly makes sense to me. I can’t tell you if it was “pear” or “apple,” but the subtle bite of a tart fruit is there, then it dissolves into something smoother, almost “herbacious,” as David called it. Well, he also said it tasted very “green,” since for him, coffee has strong color connotations. This would prove to be our favorite cup.
Next, we go to the Chemex. The coffee is thinner than what came out of the Clover, and the taste has a lot more acidity to it. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I picked up a weird cinammon note that became a lot more pronounced than it was with the Clover. What. The. Fuck. Am I really starting to taste like the obsessives I’ve been talking to? The cup that came out of the Cafe Solo is initially a disappointment that seemed overextracted, though letting it cool longer made it better, rounding it out to something more balanced, though ultimately kind of forgettable (I know, because I forgot what it tasted like and apparently didn’t deem it worthy of taking notes on).
Beyond David’s advice to junk my albeit fancy drip coffeemaker for a French press or Chemex pot, I kind of wondered how much I learned would stick with me: I mean, I actually did taste a real difference between all of the coffees we drank, but I got to compare them one after another. I got a machiatto from Ninth St. on my way home the next day, and there it was: Juiciness. I remembered it. I understood it. It was still there. Not merely “this doesn’t taste thin and burnt and shitty” like a machiatto does from all but a handful of coffeehouses in New York, but layered on top the subtle sweetness of the milk and velvet mouthfeel is a tartness I can actually identify as “juicy.” Fuck, it might just be peach.
I guess there is no going back.
Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
After years of shunning that most common of headphone styles, the earbud, Grado has at last taken a break from its over-the-ear, vented diaphragm purism (if you don’t count the China-built iGrado) and created an in-ear pair for the kiddies. The GR8 doesn’t really look like anything special, but the couple of reviews that have trickled in sound promising. The headphones are being built in Japan, but have some proprietary Grado magic in there to at least make them interesting — and it certainly should, at $300 a pop.
Read – Grado GR8 unboxing Read – Grado GR8 product page
This article was written on January 11, 2007 by CyberNet.
VeriSign’s iDefense is offering big bucks, up to $12,000 for vulnerabilities found in Vista or IE7. VeriSign of course has an interest in this as their job is to provide secure Internet transactions. In fact, according to their website, they process as many as 18 billion Internet interactions each day. It is no wonder why they’re willing to pay big bucks for Microsoft’s flaws. iDefense, part of VeriSign does these Vulnerability Challenges quarterly, and the latest is just getting started.
According to an article over at eWeek.com, this comes about 1 month after some researchers at Trend Micro found that underground sites were offering $50,000 for each Vista flaw. The people getting $50,000 under the table probably won’t trade their even bigger bucks for the $8,000 that iDefense is offering. iDefense is willing to pay for a maximum of six vulnerabilities, each at $8,000. Then they will also pay $2,000-$4,000 for working exploit code that exploits the vulnerability that was submitted. The additional amounts will be based upon
Reliability of the exploit
Quality of the exploit code
Readability of the exploit code
Documentation of the exploit code
If you’re interested in being a bug hunter, there’s a list of rules you’ll want to take a look at. Among them are: the vulnerability can’t be caused by or require third party software installed, or it can’t require additional social engineering beyond browsing a malicious site. The deadline is March 31st.
iDefense isn’t the only company offering money for vulnerabilities. TippingPoint, a division of 3Com has a program called Zero Day Initiative, or ZDI. Their program is similar, if a research discovers a vulnerability, they log into ZDI to submit it. 3com tests the vulnerability, and after they verify it, they offer the researcher money. They take it a bit further though, and offer reward points for each submission. Those reward points lead to bonuses and other cool benefits.
What does Microsoft have to say about all of this? “We do not believe that offering compensation for vulnerability information is the best way [researchers] can help protect customers.” Hmm.. with money being offered, I don’t think researchers are going to willingly call Microsoft and tip them for free when they could potentially make a good chunk of money. Sometimes it takes a little motivation$$$. I guess Microsoft still benefits because companies like VeriSign and 3Com contact them with the confirmed vulnerabilities so that they’re able to get a patch available. There’s no need for Microsoft to pay when others are willing to fork out money and do the work on their behalf!
With all of this said, the whole underlying factor of companies paying to find vulnerabilities is important. With all of the new code that is being released with these new programs, (which undoubtedly have a huge chunk of the market), it is really important that these vulnerabilities are found and patched as soon as possible. There are plenty of people that will be diligently searching for the bugs and vulnerabilities for their own financial gain at the expense of unsuspecting users.
We hate concept cars. Year after year we see new concept cars more fantastical and amazing than the last, and year after year we see cars hit the market that have had all the magic ripped out of them by safety regulations and market realities. The newly unveiled Vision EfficientDynamics car from BMW is mainly here to show us BMW’s new diesel-based plug-in hybrid drive system. But it’s also here to annoy us. Video is after the break.
Remember that RedneckTechie and his insanely great GameGun idea? Well, he’s back with another “slick” demo video, along with some news for us: he’s putting together a retail version that will be ready by Christmas. The gun will also be compatible with Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and Windows and a plug-and-play device. We’re incredibly short on details, and the pre-order page isn’t live just yet, but if Mr. Redneck can pull this off, we’re gonna fall all over ourselves to nab one no matter what the price is. New vid is after the break.
We saw the top, we saw the poster, and now it looks like we’ve got more or less the whole deal: Canon’s EOS 7D has been leaked in (most of) its gory detail. At the heart there’s an 18 megapixel sensor and dual DIGIC 4 processors, which shoots stills at 8 FPS with ISO from 100 to 6400 and a special 12800 ISO mode. The 3-inch LCD has a 920,000 dot resolution, while the viewfinder offers 100% coverage and a built-in digital level. Naturally the camera picks up the HD movie capabilities of the 5D, but no word on how it might expand upon them just yet. All this info has been gleaned from a Chinese forum, so we’re still obviously awaiting on official word from Canon — but if the rapid leakage rate is any indication, it can’t be too far off.
Medion has never really been our go-to manufacturer for new hotness, but we’re really digging this new X9613 all-in-one model it’s showing off. Even better than the sexy, the computer is fronting a 24-inch multitouch display, a miniature SideShow screen, a gloriously large physical volume knob, and a bunch of convenient media controls along the bottom. Internals aren’t bad either, with a Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor and GeForce GT240M graphics. The price range, unfortunately, is rather steep at 1,499 to 1,900 Euro (about $2,142 to $2,714 US). Lucky for us, US prices are usually quite a bit lower than straight-up conversion, though there’s no promised roll-out just yet to bank on. Video hands-on is after the break.
This article was written on December 19, 2007 by CyberNet.
Dell has announced that they are now shipping Ubuntu computers running the latest 7.10 release. On the Dell blog they said that it took so long because they wanted to do extensive testing first, but I would say that it was a rather fast turnaround considering that it was such a big upgrade.
Dell also managed to solve one of the most vocal complaints that I’ve heard with Ubuntu, and it’s that there is no way to play commercial DVD’s out-of-the-box. Dell wanted it to be as simple as putting the DVD in and hitting the play button, and so that’s what they did. Also on the computer you’ll find that Flash is pre-installed…that’s one less thing you have to fuss with when trying to go online!
There was also a 13-minute interview between Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Ubuntu, and the manager of the Linux team at Dell (it’s embedded below). In the interview Shuttleworth was asked where he thought Linux market adoption was heading, and I think he made a valid point when he said “I think what we’ll see is that Linux is in everyone’s pockets before it’s on everyone’s desktops.” Because of the Linux’s compact size I do believe that it will be the backbone of many portable devices, and we’re already starting to see that happen. As time goes on the popularity may also start to work its way over to the desktop market, which is exactly what Shuttleworth is predicting.
I give Dell a lot of credit for releasing an Ubuntu lineup, especially when a bulk of the community never really expected Dell to fulfill their promise in the first place. There are only a handful of computer manufacturers that sell Ubuntu-powered laptops, and only one that is brave enough to offer them in Flamingo Pink!
If you’ve got about 13 minutes to kill this is a rather good interview with Mark Shuttleworth:
Induction stoves may be making their way into restaurant kitchens, but for home cooks they’re still a mystery. Fortunately, Wired product editor (and food geek) Mark McClusky volunteered to enlighten us:
It took me nearly an entire evening in the the kitchen at Alinea before I realized what was weird about it. Sure, there’s the stunning intensity of the chefs as they prepare Grant Achatz‘ intricate dishes, and the nearly-operating room level of cleanliness. But that’s not what struck me one night at the end of service. What struck me is that I didn’t know where the stove was.
You see, in most restaurant kitchens—like most home kitchens—the stove is the focal point of the room, the place that all the action revolves around. If you’re running the sauté station in most big restaurants, you’re the man, the line cook who’s banging out the most food in the hottest, most extreme environment. You’re the alpha cook.
Not so at Alinea. Of course there’s a stove, but it’s much smaller than you’d expect for a kitchen that puts out a couple of thousand plates a night, just four burners and a flat top. Instead, the chefs at Alinea do the vast majority of their cooking using induction burners, portable ones from CookTek.
Induction is just plain cool. Instead of using a flame like gas, or radiant heat like standard electric burners, induction burners use a magnetic field. The field creates heat through the property outlined in Joule’s first law—you do remember your thermodynamics, right?—in which current passing through conductive material generates heat.
So what? Well, a couple of things. First, induction is super-efficient. Induction burners convert about 85% of the energy you pour into them into heat, compared to about 70% for electric burners and 40% for gas. That means you’ll spend less to cook on induction.
And since the burner itself doesn’t create heat, it stays cool to the touch—take the pan off, and you can put your palm on it. That also means that they don’t throw off ambient heat like gas or electric, so the kitchen stays much cooler.
Then, there’s the responsiveness of induction. Like gas, when you turn it off, there’s no residual heat from the burner, just the pan. Plus, there’s the flexibility of portable burners like Alinea uses. Frying something smelly? Got an outdoor power outlet? Set up a portable burner, and you can keep the stink out of your house. Want to keep soup warm at a party? Throw a burner on the buffet, and you’re good to go.
The one thing to keep in mind is that your pans do have to be magnetic. That might be a pain in the ass, especially if you’re hip deep in anodized aluminum pots. But the good news is that some of the cheapest (and most fun to use) cookware around—cast iron—works amazingly on induction burners, as will all your fancy pots as long as they’ve got some stainless steel kicking around in them. If in doubt, grab a magnet from your fridge door to check.
As far as specific models to check out, Circulon makes a nice burner, and Spanish appliance giant Fagor has one. For the best combo of power and price, check out the Max Burton 6000, which puts out 1800 watts for just $125 retail.
That’s how to cook like they do at the best restaurant in America. Or, really, it’s how to cook with the same methods. The talent is up to you.
Mark McClusky is products editor at Wired magazine, and one of the authors of the Alinea book. You can follow him on Twitter @markmcc. Also check out his special section, The Future of Food.
Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
VeriSign’s iDefense is offering big bucks
Dell has announced that they are now 
So what? Well, a couple of things. First, induction is super-efficient. Induction burners convert about 85% of the energy you pour into them into heat, compared to about 70% for electric burners and 40% for gas. That means you’ll spend less to cook on induction.
