Cheesemaking in My Home

Sun 27 September 2015 11:08 AM / 1 Comment /

I’ve been making cheese for about a year, and I’m starting to feel confident in my technique and equipment. I decided to write up this post to help others who are starting out. It’s a collection of equipment that I built or bought and how I use them to make my own cheeses at home. Using this equipment, I’ve successfully made cheeses like Colby, Gouda, and Camembert, and I think I could make many more cheeses without any further investment.

When I started cheesemaking, I wanted to avoid feeling “gouged” by buying specialty equipment. I didn’t want to spend $300 on a pre-fab cheese press, or $20 on a single shaping form when I could make those at home for cheap or free, respectively. Sure, my cheeses might not be precisely the traditional diameter or height or exact shape of the cheeses made in France, but whatever, I’m eating it, not staring at it. Below is a list of equipment and techniques that work for me. Give it a read, use what you like, and decide for yourself what you don’t like.

Five week Colby

Five week Colby

Research and recipes

First I want to throw out a huge shout-out to the folks at Cheesemaking.com. They have a huge collection of educational articles about cheesemaking, right from the start through to advanced cheeses and techniques. If you want to do home cheesemaking, just go to their website and read absolutely everything you can find. You should understand what the bacteria is doing, what rennet does, what cooking the curd does, why you press cheese, how waxing works, what an aging environment should be like, the role of bacteria as the cheese ages, and more. Cheesemaking doesn’t have many hard techniques, but it requires precision, attention, and time. Do your research and you’ll be rewarded with a successful batch, every time.

Cheesemaking.com also has a huge collection of recipes written by Jim, one of their staff members. Most of the recipes, especially the more recent ones, are incredibly detailed with pictures and temperatures, times and quantities down to the last detail. While I’ve begun adapting my own techniques for cheeses I’ve made more than once, Jim’s recipes are a fantastic starting point for your first try at a cheese. Pick out a recipe and read the instructions for it ten times before you start the process. If you don’t know what you want to make, the first recipes I followed were Colby, Gouda, and Sage Derby.

Ingredients

While I’m recommending Cheesemaking.com, I also buy most of my ingredients from them. I find their website so helpful, I want to support their business by giving them my patronage. I use their liquid animal rennet, though when I run out I’ll probably try the liquid vegetable rennet and see how well that works. I’ve been warned against tablet rennet from someplace online. I also buy my bacteria cultures and molds from them. For example, I’ve bought their mesophilic culture, geotrichum, and penicillum. All have worked great, no complaints. They seem to source at least some of their cultures from Danisco/Choozit, but I want to support Cheesemaking.com and I feel more confident that I’m ordering the right thing in appropriate quantities, so I just order from them.

Cheesemaking ingredients

Cheesemaking ingredients

I also buy my wax from them. I shopped around trying to find a good source for cheese wax, but again, the best I could find that gave me confidence was Cheesemaking.com’s offerings. I opted for the red wax, because I think it looks the most striking, but my understanding is they’re all interchangeable. I ordered five pounds, and that seems to be a good quantity for occasional home cheesemaking. It fills my wax pot about halfway (more on this later), which gives plenty for dipping wheels into. I’ll probably have to order more in another year or so, so I think ten pounds would have been overkill for my setup.

One thing you’ll figure out quickly while researching is the importance of quality milk. I’m really lucky to have a farm just a couple hours south of the Twin Cities that sells high quality milk in my local grocery store. I buy their non-homogenized (“cream line”), pasteurized milk. They sell in half-gallon, glass bottles, pictured below. I usually buy four bottles and do two-gallon batches. I have bought the non-local milk in plastic bottles, and it works, but since finding this brand I haven’t tried anything else. You should go out of your way to find the highest quality milk you can. Even though the milk I buy is high quality, I still buff it up with calcium chloride.

High quality milk

High quality milk

Pots, utensils, and other equipment

On a cheesemaking day, I’ll start by sanitizing my equipment. Equipment I use includes a whisk; a long spoon; a large ladle for soft curd cheeses; a long, serrated bread knife for curd cutting; and a few measuring spoons and cups. Nothing you don’t already have. A more specialist piece of equipment is a (very) large colander for draining curds. For sanitizing, I use 1-Step No Rinse sanitizer. I just dunk every tool in some lukewarm water with 1-Step in it, then cover them lightly with a towel so they dry while I’m bringing the milk up to temp.

Cheesemaking equipment

Cheesemaking equipment

One critically important piece of cheesemaking equipment, that you really should spend the money on, is a quality thermometer. I use a Thermoworks Thermapen. Yes, it’s expensive. It’s recommended by lots of home cooks, including the incorruptible Alton Brown, and it obviously has lots of other uses around the kitchen than cheesemaking. Just get the Thermapen, you won’t regret it.

Some day I might buy a pH meter to take some guesswork out, but I haven’t needed it yet.

There are different techniques for bringing the milk up to inoculation temp. I don’t have the room to do a water bath, so I just heat it directly on the stove. I use a medium heat, stirring every five or so minutes. The important things are to avoid scalding, and avoid overshooting your target temperature. It took a few batches to find the ideal stove setting on my stovetop to avoid scalding without taking hours to heat up. At the setting I use, it takes 15-30 minutes to bring the milk up to temp.

Cheesemaking equipment

Cheesemaking equipment

I bought some cheesecloth off of Amazon back when I started, and I still have more than half of the roll left. You do want to make sure you get a fine grade cloth. Some stuff sold as “cheesecloth” has holes around 1/8″! This will pass much of your curd straight through and down the drain. The cloth I use is grade 60, called “very fine.” When I run out and buy again, I’ll probably try to find some “butter muslin,” which I think is even finer. Shop around and see what you can find. I do hand-wash and re-use my cheesecloths for several batches. Eventually it gets kinda chunky or discolored, and then I toss it and cut a new length.

For waxing, I found a pot at Goodwill to sacrifice to the wax. After using, I just let the wax cool in the pot (pictured) and put it away for storage. I tried to find tall, narrow pot as I wanted the wax to be deep so I could dip the wheel in without hitting the bottom of the pot.

Shaping forms (molds)

I call these “forms” because the word “mold” is overloaded in a cheesemaking context. You can buy expensive, perfect, thick plastic forms online for $$$. But I’m cheap, so I just use old plastic takeout containers. One thing that is important to me, is that everything that touches the cheese must be food-safe. Plastic containers that sold food are food-safe. Perfect.

DIY Cheesemaking Forms

DIY Cheesemaking Forms

What I do is find a plastic container about 4 inches in diameter and 4-6 inches tall. One was a container from Chinese takeout. Another held shredded meat from my local butcher shop. After eating the takeout/shredded meat, I give it a very good wash and grab my scissors and cut off the bottom just above where it curves. This is now my “follower,” which is used in the press on the top of the cheese. Because of the curve of the follower, I sometimes trim off the rim that forms after pressing to keep the top edge square.

Next I grab a long nail, about 1/8″ in diameter, and a blow torch (I use my girlfriend’s culinary torch, don’t tell her), and a pair of pliers. Heat up the nail with the torch and press it through the plastic to make drainage holes. I found it works best to push from the inside out, as this will leave the rough edge on the outside where the cheesecloth won’t get caught as much. Make a hole every 3/4″ or so, all around the form.

Now you have a perfectly good cheese form, for free! Compare that to the prices online…

Making Camembert

Making Camembert. The right sheetpan is ready to receive the flip.

Cheese press

You can buy a pre-fab cheese press online for $$$$$$. Or you can build your own out of a cutting board and some stuff from the hardware store for under $50. Again, every surface that touches the cheese should be food-safe. In this case, that just means the cutting board. I followed this guide by spike3579 on Instructables, but it’s pretty trivial. Cut a couple holes in your cutting board, use a long, threaded rod and some nuts. Grab some springs, cut some wall studs to length, and put it all together.

Sage Derby in the press

Sage Derby in the press

Some tricky parts to find were the springs and circular followers, which the hardware store didn’t have. I got lucky here. There’s a wacky local chain called Ax-Man Surplus that sells all sorts of crazy crap like misspelled pint glasses, random electrical items, mannequins, whatever. They happened to have some stiff-ish springs and some wooden circles for a few cents apiece. Bingo.

Cheese press parts diagram

Cheese press parts diagram

I use a half sheetpan to catch the whey drainage. The cheese press has rubber feet in the four corners to keep it out of the drained whey. Occasionally I’ll have to drain the whey into the sink.

Speaking of drainage, when I started making Camembert, which drains under its own weight, I needed some draining mats to allow the whey to flow off. I could have bought some mats online for five bucks apiece, but instead I went to a home goods store and bought a roll of flexible shelf liner, which I cut squares out of. Works a treat, and I got many yards for the price of a single drainage mat.

Fresh Camembert

Fresh Camembert

Cheese aging fridge

Once you’ve made your cheese, you’ll need someplace to age it. I got an unused wine fridge from my girlfriend’s parents. People are selling these for a dime-a-dozen on Craigslist. They work great because they’re cheap, small (cheap to cool), and have a thermostat built in. Mine only goes down to 50 degrees, which is a little warm for some cheeses, but it’s good enough.

To keep the humidity up, I use a sponge in a plastic container that I keep a little water in. This keeps it around 70-80%RH. For cheeses like Camembert that need 90+%RH, I use a tupperware with a loose lid and stick a wet paper towel in there. I bought a Thermoworks hygrometer/thermometer and leave it in the “aging cave” to monitor actual temp and humidity. I open the door as infrequently as possible to avoid fluctuations.

Conclusion

I hope you find this helpful in getting started and saving some money. If you’ve got some feedback or even your own ideas, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Posted in: Cheese

Fez Mysteries

Wed 25 March 2015 8:45 PM / 2 Comments /

Fez is, I think, my favorite video game. I’ve beaten it to completion a small handful of times, and I’m always mournful when the whole map is gold, because that means I’m out of content. But there are a couple nagging, unsolved mysteries in Fez. This post is a summary of what we know, and what we know we don’t know, about the endgame and post-endgame of Fez.

It goes without saying that this post is full of spoilers. In fact, it contains nothing but spoilers. If you haven’t beaten Fez, there’s nothing for you here. But it’s a three-year-old game, so I think the statute of limitations has passed. Below you’ll find a discussion of some of the larger mysteries of Fez, both solved and unsolved.

If there’s something you think I missed or got wrong, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

The Heart Cube Conspiracy

The Language

Fez has English dialog coded with a simple cypher. It is clearly intended, but optional, for most users to be able to decode this language. There is even a stone block reading (in code) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in front of a languorous canine being leapfrogged by Vulpes vulpes.

It turns out that the language is completely superfluous except for one puzzle. You can complete every puzzle in the game, save one, without decoding the language. In fact, I never decoded any of the dialog in any of my playthroughs. Transliterating just isn’t my idea of fun. The puzzle that requires language skills is known as the “security room” puzzle.

fez_security_sm

In the security room, there’s a floating rectangular prism which has two messages. The first reads

PLEASE ANSWER THIS SECURITY QUESTION WHATS MY NAME

The second reads

SECURITY QUESTION HINT MY FIRST HALF IS WHAT IT IS MY SECOND HALF IS HALF OF WHAT MADE IT

Then, there’s a jumble of random letters on blocks below.

The answer is given as a concatenation of “meta” and “tron.” Meta is data about data, or “is what it is.” “Tron” is the second half of the name of the company which made Fez: Polytron. And indeed, that’s almost certainly the correct way to come to this conclusion.

There’s a handful of Christian and Judaic hints in this solution and in the tome’s translation, but they don’t mean much to me. I shy away from numerological answers, since they can lead anywhere you want to, so I feel those fit more into the “flavor” category than into the “puzzle hint” category.

The Monolith

The monolith was probably the first major Fez mystery. There is a treasure map in the game which is burnt in half. The half you find has a button combo code on it, and an indication of where to stand in an otherwise empty room. After you enter that code while standing in the center of one of two circles, a black rectangular prism floats up out of the ground and spins while hanging in mid-air. There is no indication of what to do next.

fez_monolith_sm

Some intuition leads one to conclude that you should stand in the other circle and enter some other code. But what code? That’s our first still-unsolved mystery: how do we find this code? People have brute forced it. In fact, it was kind of a fun community effort back when the game first came out.

But brute forcing the solution feels wrong. One could brute force all of the codes in the game, but there are always solutions derived from game logic. Is brute forcing really the correct method for this one? Far more satisfying would be a concrete and obviously correct solution derived from clues found within the game, or from its real world paraphernalia.

There’s lots of guesses for how we were intended to discover this code. The popular one is some crazy derivation of the release date, though that’s got a few holes in it. Maybe some “black box” transformation function? No one knows.

The trouble is all these “solutions” seem like they’re working backwards. There’s no way to know which solution, if any, is the intended solution to this puzzle. In fact, maybe brute forcing was the correct solution after all! Poke the black box with enough inputs until something pops out. All these proposed solutions might be backwards justifications for a puzzle that never existed. There’s no way to know without finding another hint, or some feedback from Polytron. For the time being, it remains unsolved, three years after the game’s initial release.

The Observatory

This is a fun one, and it has the benefit of being solved. There’s an observatory with a telescope in the late game of Fez. You can view the stars at nighttime through this telescope. There’s the usual tetromino-based puzzle, but solving it won’t turn the room gold on the map. There’s something more.

Through the telescope, you can find two blinking, red dots, one to the bottom-left and one to the upper-right. If you record them, these actually spell out a 96-bit piece of data. Split that into bytes and decode into 8-bit ASCII and you end up with a sequence of L and R characters that spell out a code. Brilliant and incredibly hard to solve… except there’s a mistake. If you just tap left and right in time with the red lights as they blink, you’ll end up solving it anyway due to a substring of the bits matching the same L and R sequence. Whoops.

The Heart Room

So, what prize do these three difficult puzzles result in? For each, a Red Heart Cube. Your companion, Dot, acknowledges the first heart cube you receive with a bewildered reaction. What on Earth is this thing for?

After solving all of the other puzzles in the game and receiving 64 cubes, you finally open a door accessible fairly early on in the game. This leads to the Heart Room, where your three Heart Cubes assemble to form a pretty heart.

fez_heart_sm

This heart is actually the logo of an indie gaming collective that Fez’s designer, Phil Fish, was a part of. Just a little Easter egg for diehard fans? Yes, but…

The Heart Disintegration Codes

This is where the mysteries kick into high gear. After a while, Fez was eventually released for the PC, which opens up all sorts of hacking avenues. People have long since reverse-engineered the game’s data formats and begun data-mining the game for anything that hasn’t yet been discovered.

There are two artifacts in the game that are designed to give you hints towards the language and number systems in the game. These are referred to as the letters cube and the numbers cube, as they show you how to draw each letter and each number. You can look at and rotate these items in your inventory. Through reverse engineering, one player found codes for each artifact that can be entered only while standing in the Heart Room. You look at each artifact, enter a certain sequence of L and R button presses, and then…

the heart dissolves into space.

What does this mean? How were we supposed to find these codes? Significantly, they’re the only codes in the entire game that are entered in the menu screens.

One theory, my favorite, is that discovering these codes is only possible through reverse engineering. By entering these codes, that means that you must have broken apart the game to examine its insides, and you have effectively “broken the developer’s heart” by tearing into the game’s internals. You’re cheating. Your reward is an empty room after the heart breaks to pieces and disappears. Jerk.

There is one small piece of supporting evidence for this theory. Entering the code on the original, Xbox 360 release will break your save game. This looks to me like an unfinished piece of the game. The functionality is still present, but there is no way to discover the code except by reverse engineering. Perhaps they forgot to playtest this non-feature while trying to fix some of the notorious save-game bugs, leading to the corruption observed by players who enter this “unofficial” code.

There are other theories. Crazy numerology? Something to do with stereoscopic mode? Just like the monolith code, no one knows, and it’s impossible to know without further data. Another unsolvable mystery.

The Classroom Numbers

There’s a significant room in the game where the number system is spelled out. The mystery here is a long set of digits present in that very classroom, which have no use in or out of the game, to anyone’s knowledge.

fez_numbers_sm

The numbers are transcribed as:

2 4
2 5
3
  6
4 1
5 4
4 4
3 3 
3 6
5

Most text in Fez is read top-to-bottom-right-to-left, so something like “45 614436” and “223 454335”.

Numbers in Fez work strangely. There are multiple representations for the same digit. The number four can be represented with both a single line to the left (“four”) or with two lines, one up (“one”) and one down (“plus three”). This is straightforward enough. After a little practice it’s easy to read any number the game gives you, and you never need to write your own. Perhaps significantly, the number four is written in both manners in this snippet. Maybe it’s just gibberish for you to practice reading numbers? Maybe it’s a secret hint at the monolith code? Perhaps you can somehow derive the heart disintegration codes from these sigils? Letter coordinates to some unknown corpus? A café in Montreal?

Lesser Mysteries?

The above is, in my opinion, a complete list of mysteries remaining in Fez. I think these are all questions to which an answer exists that we don’t have.

Below are some more gray area, open ended questions. In my opinion, they’re dead ends. Leftover artifacts from unused puzzles, or just design elements that people are reading too much into.

The Soundtrack Images

Fez’s outstanding music was written by Disasterpeace. Downloading the soundtrack and running it through a spectrogram analysis (a visual representation of audio frequencies across time) yields images. As far as I can tell, no one has gotten anywhere with these. You can find some descriptions of what is represented in the image, but there’s no real hook back into the game. Neil Armstrong? Harry Truman? Huh?

I think there might be something here, but I think it’s just too esoteric. It’s just too open-ended to come up with any interesting conclusions. Any guess is just that: a guess. There’s nowhere to go, here. It’s a dead end without any more info.

The Tome

One of the artifacts you acquire in the game, along side the letter and number cubes, is a book. It’s a long book, written in Fez’s cypher language, and worse, it’s scrambled. It can be unscrambled (see the Ars Technica article linked above for the process), but doesn’t really yield anything interesting. The “release date theory” of the monolith code depends on the unscrambling order, but as I described, I don’t really buy that theory.

Is the tome just a bit of incredibly hard to find flavor text? That’s my guess.

One larger problem is the letters written on the back (verso) of each page. From the front of the book to the back, these spell out PAEAEBUB. Huh? Repeated letters mean they’re not “page numbers” of any sort. So… what are they?

The Skull

The final artifact you get is an ancient skull from a precursor to the current civilization. This skull has no use in the game whatsoever. The skull shape is referenced a couple times, in the ancient civilization areas, and, oddly, in the boiler room in the first village. But… then what? Reverse engineering has turned up nothing to do with the skull. Is it just flavor? I guess so…

fez_skull_sm

Concentric Rings

Scattered throughout the game are flat textures depicting concentric, white rings. There’s one image containing one ring, one containing two rings, and so on up to eight rings. All of these rings are written on the floor and can only be seen in first-person mode. One cannot be seen inside the game, ever. This one is on the Fractal stage in the forest, the only room where the rotation mechanism is locked by the rotating totem in the center of the stage. First-person mode doesn’t work here, so you can’t see the rings on the floor.

fez_rings_sm

Is there something here? Maybe, but I can’t imagine what. The fact that one of them isn’t even viewable makes me think it’s just a design pattern, or possibly a leftover from a half-baked puzzle. Nothing significant, in my opinion.

So Now What?

To the best of my knowledge, these are all of the significant loose ends in Fez. In my opinion, we won’t find any obviously correct solutions to any of the mysteries presented above. At best we can rank our guesses in order of plausibility. It’s a bit unsatisfying, in my opinion. So much thought was put into the puzzles in this game, that it tears at me that we have puzzles whose solutions we’ll never know. I feel like there’s more we can discover here, but it just hasn’t been laid out in a way that is intelligible. I think the only way we’ll be able to definitively put these to rest is if someone in a position of authority gives us nudges in the right direction, or tells us if we’re barking up the wrong trees.

Posted in: Gaming

First Camembert results

Thu 26 February 2015 6:24 PM / Leave a Comment /

Here’s the results from my first Camembert. I cracked open one of the two wheels tonight. Aged just under three weeks.

2015_camembert_done_2

It turned out looking gorgeous. Dense, fine white fuzz that packed down to a smooth surface. A nice gentle grid pattern from the racks they aged on.

The cheese is very runny. Basically no solid center, just runny the whole way through. I think that’s because the wheels are so thin at about 1.5 cm in height. The mold was able to break down the milk solids all the way through in no time. I suspected from the start that I’d run into this problem. The inside of the cheese is basically pure white, it didn’t develop a yellow or cream color.

2015_camembert_done_1

The overriding flavor of the cheese is salt. I ate it on some bread, as shown, and it tasted mostly like salt on bread. But when I ate the cheese plain, the flavor really did come through. Still salty, but it had a bit of the creamy mushroom you expect from Camembert. A good, clean flavor, but very mild. The rind attached firmly to the innards and is moderately toothy.

I’m going to let my other wheel age at least another week, maybe two or three, before breaking into it. It’ll probably be super runny, but maybe it will develop some more flavor with the longer aging.

Lessons learned? With forms this size, maybe just do one wheel of Camembert from a one-gallon batch instead of two. I think this will give me the correct height, though the wheel will be pretty huge. Maybe tone down the salt, although I wonder if the extra saltiness comes from the small wheel size, too. I used the full amount of salt recommended by the recipe I used, and the small wheels may have thrown the ratio off.

Not a failure, but not as good as I was hoping. I’m interested to see what another couple weeks does for the flavor.

Posted in: Cheese

First forays into cheesemaking

Tue 10 February 2015 4:44 PM / Leave a Comment /

Like most sane people, I’m a big fan of cheese. I also like to cook. I bake bread and brew beer, clearly I have an affinity for bacteria-based foodstuffs. Let’s try making cheese!

It’s actually turned out really good. I started last Fall. I built a simple cheese press, fasioned some forms out of old takeout containers, and ordered some rennet and bacteria online from cheesemaking.com. They’ve also been my primary source for recipes. I acquired a small wine fridge with a thermostat from a family member and bought a hygrometer from Thermoworks to put in it.

Below I’ve cataloged what cheeses I’ve made so far, and some thoughts I wrote about them at the time.

Five week Colby

Five week Colby

This was my second aged cheese, after a 2-month simple “farmers cheese.” I don’t have any photographs of that one, so we’ll start here. This Colby turned out really fantastic. It had a bit of tang to it, but mostly it was creamy. The recipe has you washing the curds in cold water, which should retain some of the moisture after cooking.

Sage Derby in the press

Sage Derby in the press

Next came the Sage Derby. This was the first batch that was cheddared. You can see it in the cheese press here.

Four week Derby Sage

Four week Derby Sage

Four weeks later, it turned out pretty good. Very sage-y! It worked best on sandwiches or crackers, because it was very overwhelming by itself. A little dry because I overcooked the curds.

I still need to work on my waxing technique. You can see in the photo that the wax is quite thin. Some whey leaked out of the cheese while it was aging in the fridge.

Five week Cheshire

Five week Cheshire

Finally is the Cheshire, opened just a few days ago. This is my favorite so far. It’s dry, salty, crumbly, and creamy. It’s got a good pungent kick to it that my other cheeses haven’t had. I feel it’s the first one that’s had its own flavor instead of mostly tasting like “cheese.” The recipe has the curds sitting at a high temperature overnight before pressing. That lets the bacteria work full-bore on the curds for 8 hours, so that’s probably where the flavor comes from. This is the first cheese that’s so good, I want to make the same recipe again instead of trying something new.

Again, I had wax problems with some mold developing on the surface in the pockets. I washed it in brine and cut off the wax to avoid the mold, but luckily none of it penetrated into the cheese.

I’ve also got two cheeses aging. One is a plain Gouda, which will be opened in mid-March at just over three months of aging, by far my longest aged cheese. The other is two wheels of Camembert, my first aged soft cheese. I’m real nervous about this one. I’m currently on day three, letting the wheels dry out in a quiet, spare room. So far no mold, good or bad, but the surface is still quite wet. I’m eager for it to dry out so I can move it to the aging fridge. The house is pretty cold, though, so I’m not too worried about it ripening too early.

Fresh Camembert

Fresh Camembert

Posted in: Cheese

Replacing the door mirror on a BMW Z4

Thu 7 November 2013 7:58 PM / 5 Comments /

Are you a big fucking moron idiot who gets their car into fights with the garage door? Of course you are! Don’t worry, I know the feeling.

Anyway, let’s get you back up and running with mirrors on both sides.

My car specifically is a 2007 BMW Z4 3.0si coupe. But I’m pretty sure these instructions will be the same for any first-gen Z4 or Z4M. 2009 and later models, I’m afraid you’re on your own!

If you’re lucky, you just twisted the mirror around and you can twist it back into shape. If the mirror assembly is still firmly attached to the body, you can try twisting it back the right way around and seeing if it locks back into place. There’s a stiff spring intended to resist this motion, so give it a good pull and twist. If it’s all flopping around, like mine was, you’re out of luck and will need to order a new part.

You can see the various options at RealOEM.com. My car does not have auto-dimming mirrors, nor do the mirrors fold, and I wanted the passenger side assembly, so my part number was 51167189708. Shopping around led me to GetBMWParts.com where I found the best price. Expect to pay a bit north of $200 for the part. After pulling out your credit card, spend a few minutes reminding yourself to be more fucking careful getting out of the garage next time, yeah?

The part that ships will be the whole assembly, including the painted shell. Except the shell you get won’t be painted, it’s just solid black. If your old shell is recoverable (mine was), you can take apart the old assembly and swap the shell onto the new one and avoid having to pay to have the new shell painted. The other possibly recoverable part is the mirror glass itself. Instructions for disassembling the old mirror follow after the door disassembly.

To get started, you’ll need a torx T10 and either a T15 or a T20 driver (I’ve forgotten); an approximately 6mm hex driver (again, I’ve forgotten the exact size); and some trim pry tool. A few other tools can come in handy, and I’ll mention them through the guide.

First, take off the mirror glass. If you can, tilt the mirror with the in-car controls to face downward. Along the top of the plastic behind the mirror is a notch, visible at the top of the following picture. When facing the mirror, you need to turn that notch to the left (counter-clockwise), for both the passenger and driver mirrors. This rotates the plastic circle on the back of the mirror from the locked position into the unlocked position. There’s some foam between the mirror and the servo that you may need to compress by pushing on the mirror to get the plastic circle to turn.

Z4 Mirror Locked

The above is an image of the mirror with the circle in the locked position, covering the tabs on the servo. Below is the unlocked position. It only turns a small amount. Notice the servo tabs are free in the below picture, which lets the mirror/plastic circle assembly come off of the servo.

Z4 Mirror Unlocked

Now let’s start taking the door apart so we can swap mirror assemblies.

Pop off the cap behind the door handle. I used a box cutter to pry the little bit of plastic off. BMW’s TIS says to use a piece of sticky weather trim tape to pull it out. Whatever. Take out the torx screw behind there.

Z4 Door Handle

Pry off the trim from the door grip with a trim removal tool (ten bucks at AutoZone, and way better than a screwdriver). Photo shows you where the clips are. Start from the bottom.

door_handle_trim

There are four screws back here, two small torx and large two hex-head screws. The lower screw had a bunch of noise proofing material stuck on it in my car. Pull the grip straight out from the door.

door_handle_back

Pop out the airbag label with your trim tool. There are three notches on each side. Under there should be another screw to remove. Try not to drop the screw into the door panel.

airbag_label

Next is the hard part, removing the door panel. The image below shows the clips that hold it onto the lower part of the door. I used the trim tool as a lever to get my fingers under, and then pried them out. I found it was easiest to start with a bottom corner and pop them out one by one. The top of the panel will still be attached to the door.

lower_door_clips

The upper clips were the hardest part of the whole process. The picture just below shows how they work. There’s a series of metal tabs which you can try to push down to release from the slots in the second picture below. You can also just use brute strength to pull them out. Good luck!

upper_clips_metal

upper_door_clips

I unplugged the speaker wire and the other wire over there, then rested the panel on the stacked blanket. Be sure to note where the speaker wire is plugged in before you unplug it! There are two identical slots, I’m not sure why.

Next take off the speaker next to the window. This is pretty easy, push in the top of the triangle and it will pop out, then pull the whole bit up and out. Unplug the speaker wire (screwdriver may help) and set it aside.

window_speaker

Unplug the wire that comes from the mirror assembly, and pull out the plastic clip from the door. Your new part should have this clip already on the wire, so don’t worry about recovering it. There are three silver torx screws back here which hold the mirror assembly onto the body. As you undo them, be sure to hold the mirror assembly so you don’t drop it down your door and onto the floor like a moron. After you get it off, you’ll have to squeeze the rubber plug through the hole to pull the wire out.

Next, it’s time to take the old assembly apart. If you’re not recovering any of the old parts, skip this.

There’s a handful of screws, thankfully all the same small torx screws. The first screw is on the bottom of the mirror, in a strip of black plastic. After the screw is out, pop off the little plastic bit that the screw went through.

Next, there are the three servo screws. With those out, you can unplug the servo and remove it. Finally, there are four screws through the plastic support into the shell. The shell is then held on with two clips on the outside of the mirror. Use a trim removal tool or something to pop out these clips. The shell should now be free.

Assembly is the reverse of disassembly. Thanks for reading!

No seriously, it’s pretty easy. Make sure to get the servo aligned correctly. On the passenger side, the two rectangular slots should face up and left. I’m not sure about the driver side.

servo

Unless you’re an idiot (hi!), put the whole mirror assembly back together before you put it on the car. Shove the cable through the hole and squeeze the rubber bit into its place. The slots for the silver screws on the new part aren’t threaded, so they’ll take some muscle to get in. Hook all the wires back up and make sure to slot the door handle cable into its holder on the door panel.

Attach the door panel to the door, starting with the top. I ended up basically holding the door and punching the door panel to get it onto the clips. Pop the bottom clips into place, and reassemble the trim.

Test out the speakers, window controls, lock controls, and mirror controls. If they’re all working, you’re done!

Did you find this helpful? Have any questions about the process? Want to share your own ran-the-car-into-the-house story? Leave a comment below!

Posted in: Cars

Programmer looking for a hobby? Try cars!

Wed 27 March 2013 4:36 PM / Leave a Comment /

I grew up with computers. Computers and video games were my hobbies from as early as I can remember straight through my college years and today. I would get out of middle or high school and either go hang out with my friends to play video games or, more often, work on one of my many side projects, ranging from websites for myself or friends (I’ve forgotten how many garage band websites I built) to, of course, video games.

Early in my college career, I got a part-time job doing quality assurance programming. Two years later, I found what would turn into my current programming job. I began working part-time on the Wine project, the open source Windows reimplementation, for CodeWeavers. A year after that, I graduated college and began working for CodeWeavers full time.

Shortly after my switch to full-time programming work, I noticed that my personal projects were waning. I’d stopped working on projects, I’d stopped learning new programming languages for fun, I’d lost my urge to experiment with new operating systems. It took me about a year to figure out what had happened: I had turned my hobby into a job, which meant I no longer had a hobby. The last thing I wanted to do after 8 hours of programming was more programming. I love my job dearly, but it was providing plenty of opportunities for tough problem solving and education. I needed something else to fill that gap.

Porsche Cayman S
Porsche Cayman S via Autoblog.nl

Enter Forza Motorsport 3 for the Xbox 360, which I picked up on a whim in early summer, 2011. Growing up, I’d always enjoyed racing games (I was embarrassingly good at Beetle Adventure Racing and 1080 Avalanche), so I immediately felt at home turning dozens of laps a night. Trying to improve my lap times led to real-world racing websites like TurnFast!, which naturally led to HowStuffWorks’s Auto section, and by now I was hooked. I was reading introductory guides on the bus to work and back, reading car forums at home, and playing Forza in my remaining time. In Forza, I fell in love with a little, dark green BMW Z4 M coupe, which I thought was the coolest looking car on the disc. Finally, on the last day of 2011, I ended up going home from the dealership with a 2007 BMW Z4 3.0si coupe. Previously cars had just been a way to get from one place to another; now I owned a sports car and was spending most of my time learning how to drive it and how it worked.

2007 BMW Z4 3.0si coupe (US)

I was up to Brainerd International Raceway twice in 2012. Over the winter, I read “Auto Fundamentals” by Stockel, Stockel, and Johanson to help understand theory, terms, and practice. I even used my newfound knowledge to fix my girlfriend’s cold start issue this winter. This year, I’m going to volunteer at two or three ChumpCar series races in Minnesota and Wisconsin. ChumpCar is a racing series where each car is valued at no more than $500, not including safety equipment. I’m starting to query friends who might be interested in forming a race team for next year. Who knows what will come next?

Spec Racer Ford
Spec Racer Ford via Wikimedia

So, what does the automotive industry have to offer to bored programmers? More than you might expect. Here’s some thoughts on why it grabbed me so quickly.

One big, generalized draw is its emphasis on min-maxing, that quintessentially nerdish obsession of optimizing the properties of a system for a given challenge. Every lap provides another opportunity to change a single variable—say, how much throttle you give during corner entry—and see how it affects your time. The car itself is an obvious opportunity for min-maxing, but that’s a level I haven’t gotten to yet.

Another draw is the sheer volume of information available to learn and understand. Just like I used to read programming language docs for fun, I’m now finding myself poring over Wikipedia pages about the history of Audi (whose name is a foreign-language pun on its founder’s name), the ongoing 2013 Formula 1 season (last year, the Mercedes team used a controversial “F-duct” to cancel downforce on the rear wing to achieve higher top speeds), and the rather crazy history of now-defunct Group B rally racing.

Aside from its past, cars have a really exciting future. The all-electric Tesla Model S was just released, to considerable critical acclaim. Tesla are finally building an electric car that’s actually cool instead of re-warmed, heavy, and ugly variations existing models. BMW is launching their i line of electric cars, the concepts of which look really striking (unfortunately, the reality doesn’t seem to be lining up to be so good-looking). Audi introduced the first hybrid gas-electric drivetrain at 24 Hours of Le Mans last year, and won.

Audi R18 e-tron quattro at 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans
via Wikimedia

So far, I’ve found the motorsport community to be very welcoming. I went to a ChumpCar gathering here in Minneapolis, where I found a team to sit and have dinner with. The instructors and other students up at Brainerd are lots of fun to talk to. Most of the instructors have professional experience in motorsport. I also play a racing simulator, iRacing.com, which has a helpful member community that gives tips on your car control technique.

So, if you’re bored and looking for a hobby outside of technology, I hope I’ve gone some way towards convincing you to take a look at some automotive hobby. I’ve found it to be wildly fascinating and educational, and a great way to meet people outside your normal circles.

Plus, let’s face, it, cars look really cool and are really fun to drive!

Lancia Stratos Zero concept
Lancia Stratos Zero concept via Bruno_me

Posted in: Cars

My Game of the Year 2012: Fez (and Journey)

Wed 26 December 2012 9:04 PM / Leave a Comment /

My definition of “Game of the Year” is “if you can only play one game from the year, make it this one.” That’s not the same as highest production values, or most replay value, or best multiplayer. Instead it’s about more interesting assets such as expanding the medium, trying new things, and providing unique experiences that you’ve never seen before in games. Once you’ve played one Halo game, you’ve more-or-less played them all. You won’t really be missing anything if you skip it this year. But you will be massively missing out if you choose not to experience 2012’s Game of the Year: Fez.

I think Fez invokes the same mystery and fascination in discovery that made the Myst series so popular and powerful. You’ll notice things as you make your initial exploration through Gomez’s world, and they’ll seem decorative or meaningless. Only after you’ve gone through enough of the world will you start to understand why they’re there and what they mean. Just like in Myst–that’s not decoration, that’s a clue!

Fez screenshot
via Microsoft

My roommate and I played through the game over the course of a month, sitting on a couch with a notepad between us and trading the controller every now and then. The game is a little heavy on retracing your footsteps, which is both a good and bad thing. Like I mentioned, you’ll notice new things as you traverse through old areas. Warps might contribute to your missing vital clues. But it does get old jumping through the same platforms over and over as you switch between two areas comparing notes. But the puzzles are wide, varied, and ingenious enough to make up for the moderately repetitive gameplay. The game is hard, but completely accessible. Between the two of us working together, we only had to look up the solutions to two puzzles, one of which actually remains unsolved to this day.

The art is astounding. It takes SNES-era pixel art to the extreme, and then stacks a whole other physical dimension on top. Take the time to take in the art as you go through the levels. Notice the trees with hundreds of leaves; the blades of grass perfectly reproduced from any angle; the unique indentations in each of the game’s blocks; the little wildlife creatures that bring activity into each area of the world.

It is a massive shame that Fez will probably never see a release outside of XBox Live Arcade. I would love to be able to come back and re-experience this game ten years from now, dragging hints of puzzle solutions from deep in my memory and re-discovering the hundreds of nooks and crannies this game has tucked away. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Fez is unplayable as soon as five years from now, as Microsoft migrates their servers to whatever platform is current in the late 2010s. Your XBox sitting in storage won’t last ten years, you will have no way to re-download the game onto a replacement XBox, and it will be lost to the annals of DRM and cheap technology. A PC release would at least allow the game to exist in the shady corners of the Internet where we currently find SNES ROMs.

Perhaps there will be a DRM-free and cross-platform release through Humble Bundle to save the game from the passage of time. The game’s developer has said that the exclusivity period with Microsoft has expired. Nothing’s impossible, and this game deserved to be played years and years from now.

If you only play one game from 2012, make it Fez.

Extremely Honorable Mention: Journey

Journey only missed out on being my Game of the Year because it was released in the same year as Fez. I actually hadn’t heard about Journey until the soundtrack was in the news because it was up for a Grammy award, so I played it months late. I read a review or two and instantly knew I had to play it.

Journey screenshot
via thatgamecompany

It’s short, designed to be consumed in one sitting, like a movie. I played it at night with the Grammy-nominated sound track turned up loud and a glass of wine to accompany me during the cutscenes between levels. I won’t delve into the details of the multiplayer aspect, as that would kind of be a spoiler in itself, but I will say that probably my favorite gaming moment of the year was watching a complete stranger deftly draw a heart into the sand before spiriting off into the end credits and out of my console forever.

Journey is a masterpiece.

Posted in: Gaming

Running the iRacing.com client on Linux

Mon 22 October 2012 9:15 PM / 14 Comments /

iRacing now has official Mac and Linux clients. Please use those.

Introduction and basics

iRacing.com is an auto racing simulation video game with a strong online community. The game is unique in that it tries to simulate real-world racing, including leagues, licenses, and safety ratings. It’s an impressive piece of software and community building, and a great opportunity to both have fun and practice real-world racing.

The trouble? It’s Windows-only. That leaves out us Linux users.

The solution? The Wine Windows compatibility layer. Wine is a reimplementation of the Windows operating system on top of the Unix operating system. Wine is built to run Windows programs on Linux and other Unixes, and it runs the iRacing client very well.

Architecture

Here’s how iRacing works and how Wine fits in.

iRacing installs a system service called iRacingService.exe. This is launched when Windows starts. iRacingService.exe is actually a small HTTP server running on port 32034 and the iRacing website communicates with the HTTP server through AJAX. The iRacing website gets version data and the like from the service, and sends commands to the service to launch the simulation, or download and install updates, and so on.

Wine supports almost everything the iRacing service and client need right out of the box. iRacing uses some relatively obscure Windows APIs (largely the Windows Terminal Services APIs) to determine user account information. These aren’t well supported in Wine, as most applications don’t depend heavily on them. We will have to patch Wine to support these APIs before we can run iRacing. This is the only modification required to run iRacing, although further modifications can improve the experience.

The following steps require some knowledge of how Unix works and the Linux command line. You can probably cobble together a working system even if you have no idea what you’re doing, but you would be well served to learn about Unix/Linux so that you actually understand what you are doing. The Internet is a vast and great resource.

Preparing Wine

Before you build Wine, you will need to patch the source code to support these APIs. First, get the latest Wine source from Wine’s Git repository. Then, download the patch and apply it to Wine’s source tree. The patch was created against version 1.5.26 of Wine, but will probably apply to many later versions as well.

~$ wget http://smokingonabike.com/iracing/iracing_patch_1.5.26.patch
~$ cd wine-git
wine-git$ git apply ~/iracing_patch_1.5.26.patch

If you’re git-savvy, go ahead and make that a commit so you can rebase on future Wine releases. Next, build and install Wine. I will not go into detail about how to build Wine. There are plenty of guides on the Internet about how to compile and install Wine. It’s not hard. It’s your choice where to install Wine, or you can even just run it straight out of the build tree.

Installing iRacing

I suggest using a special Wine prefix specifically for iRacing. A Wine prefix is like a self-contained Windows filesystem. Installing iRacing into its own prefix will prevent conflicts with other Windows programs that you might want to install with Wine in the future. To specify a Wine prefix, use the environment variable WINEPREFIX.

wine-git$ export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/iracing

Remember that exported environment variables only apply to the session in which they were exported. Next, run the iRacingInstaller program. This will eventually launch a DirectX SDK installer, which you should also install.

Running iRacing

As I said earlier, iRacing runs as a Windows service. Windows services are automatically started on operating system boot, or in this case, when Wine is started. So you don’t actually need to run the iRacingService program. In fact, it will fail if you do, as it has already been started as a service. Instead, just run the `winecfg’ program and let that sit while the service runs in the background. This is sufficient to run the iRacing browser client and run the simulation.

Before we do a live test of the software with the iRacing browser client, let’s give it a quick test. Make sure the iRacingService program is running in the background (see the previous paragraph). Open a terminal and try to connect to the HTTP server:

~$ telnet -4 localhost 32034
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /get_versions2 http/1.1

http/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/javascript
Content-Length: 1564
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: close

var systemversions={
is_admin:1
,is_winxp:1
...

You will need to copy-paste the highlighted GET line into the prompt, including a full blank line, and you will need to be quick about it as iRacing kills the connection after just a couple of seconds. You should see some JavaScript spam printed back at you, starting with ‘var systemversions’. If you get that response back, you are golden!

Now that iRacing is installed and running, load up the iRacing member site and see if it works. I was able to get it to work in both Firefox 15 and Chrome 23. You should see a widget on the right side of the site saying something like, “Your software needs an update.” If you instead see a warning about the software not being running or installed, then something has gone wrong. Check your Internet browser plugins (NoScript’s ABE blocks localhost requests). Maybe dig into wireshark logs. Good luck!

Important: While you are testing your setup, you will probably be stopping and starting the iRacing service repeatedly. Unix network sockets have a timeout value which can cause new network connections to fail if too short a time has passed since that connection was closed. This will cause the browser client to fail to connect to your service, even though nothing is actually wrong. You can diagnose this problem by running winecfg with the environment variable WINEDEBUG set to “warn+winsock” and looking for the message “address already in use.” The fix is to simply wait a few minutes after exiting the Wine session before starting the service again.

Go ahead and install the updates through the browser client. You should see a simple dialog window pop up with download and installation progress bars. If you’ve reached this point, you are good to go! Keep reading if you want some tips for improving your experience.

Configuring Wine and iRacing

Graphics

One handy tip is to use a virtual desktop. This is a fake desktop environment created by Wine inside of which all of your Windows programs will be displayed. This gives you more control over how iRacing is displayed, and tends to play nicer with multiple monitors. You can set the virtual desktop settings inside of the winecfg program. My personal configuration is set up so the Wine desktop size matches one of my monitors’ sizes. This appears to be fullscreen, even though it actually isn’t, which allows me to continue using my other monitor without issue. You may need to also tweak iRacing’s resolution to match that of your virtual desktop.

By the way, the iRacing community suggests targeting 80 FPS in your simulation.

Input

I don’t have a racing wheel, and I race with an old XBox Controller S converted to USB. Really, any joystick or wheel supported by Linux should interface correctly with the game through Wine. I had to set a deadzone on the joystick input so it wouldn’t steer the car simply by my tilting the gamepad. To do this, launch regedit and create a new registry key:

[HKCU\Software\Wine\DirectInput]
DefaultDeadZone="3000"

The units are in hundredths of a percent, so the example is a 30% deadzone. Just keep tweaking the number until it feels right.

Do you have a racing wheel or pedals?

I’d love to hear about it! What manufacturer and model(s) do you have? Did you have any difficulty setting it up? Does force feedback work? Leave a comment below!

Posted in: iRacing / Tagged: , ,