This vanilla and draught flavored ice cream has a delicious, layered taste. Even if you are not a beer fan(like myself), this can be a fun new flavor to try.
Adapted from this recipe, mostly by not doing the suggested amount of beer.

Guinness Ice Cream

Ingredients

While many times I like to play fast and loose with the measurements, this recipe is very sensitive to measurements, try to keep them close. I pushed it on the amount of beer, using the whole can, try to keep it close to 12oz.

• 2 cups whipping(heavy) cream
• 1 cup whole milk(1%)
• 1 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 beer(can use any, I used a 440ml Draught Guinness)

Directions

Start by mixing your cream, milk and sugar in a saucepan on medium heat. Slice the vanilla bean down the middle and use the knife to scrape out the insides, put all this into the pot(bean pod and seeds). Place your thermometer into the mixture and stir constantly until you hit 170 degrees F. Do not over cook this, take it off the heat immediately upon reaching this temperature.

Remove the bean and toss it in the compost, put the pot aside(covered to ensure you keep the cats out) and let it cool to room temperature. Once it hits room temperature, pop the top on your beer, let it foam up and pour it into the pot. Place this all in the fridge for about an hour or until cooled.

Once it’s cooled down, churn it in your mixer according to instructions. It will have a hard time freezing due to the alcohol, so you might have to run it a bit longer, watch out for it going too long too, it can stop getting thicker. Quickly put it in the freezer and let it set overnight. This is not a recipe that can be consumed as soon as it churns.

Serving

The source site suggests peanut brittle as a companion serving item, and any salty/sweet item will work great on this. It’s ice cream, but it should not really need you to do anything interesting, just put it in a bowl and enjoy the novelty.

Jared

Amusing writing aside, my 25/7Meg DSL is working great. I’m glad to have good, fast, internet on one connection. I cancelled the cable internet to allow me to save some money and sell my cable modem. Since the beginning of high speed internet in this city, I have always had DSL(The only interruption being when I didn’t live in town). The first 1Meg connections with Bell, the move to alternate ISPs(ie IGS) when Bell started to cap connections. The migration to TekSavvy and my dogged sticking with them as they grew. Even when I had cable, I still had DSL.

You might ask why I’ve been attracted to this technology so much. Initially it was speed/price. I could get a fast connection for a low cost. Later it became the static IP address. With my move to TekSavvy there was an option to have a static IP. With an always on internet connection, this made sense to me, so I paid the extra few dollars to keep my address the same. Over the years it’s been useful to access my hardware at home when needed. Sometimes to test if network issues were local, sometimes to get around mistakes in the firewall rules I just edited, sometimes to access content from my home systems. Mostly it has been as a toy.

Not that long ago, I added a routed subnet to my monthly order. I have a small, 6 address, subnet routed to my DSL connection and this allows me to run some test hardware with public addresses. As my home data centre has expanded, this has been useful(if electrically expensive) in my playing with new technologies.

Unfortunately, 6Meg DSL in our area does not live up to it’s name. Bell will not directly sell DSL around here because they know the signal is bad enough that it cannot be sure to get even 2Meg on a good day. Most of the stuff I have seen indicates that the loop length to the central office was over 5KM, which is generally assumed to be the reasonable limit for DSL of that type. I could use the internet, but streaming was bad off sites like YouTube and unusable on Netflix. I wanted to keep a static IP for testing a keeping my routed subnet would be nice, but I had to get faster internet.

Around this time TekSavvy started offering cable internet in the Ottawa area. I signed up rather quickly to try it out. I did not cancel my DSL. With the infrastructure that Rogers has in place for cable internet, you cannot do a static IP address easily. This limitation extends to resellers of their services. I could get fast internet, but no static IP. I kept the DSL and the Cable, one for playing, one for speed. It cost a bit, but I wanted it.

Now, that has changed. Bell rolled out FttN(Fiber to the Node) hardware in our area. The loop length from my house to the DSLAM(other end of the wires) is now about 850m, well within the reasonable values and easily able to achieve some very good speeds. My DSL was upgraded, but I got to keep my existing IP and subnet, and my speeds are great. Cable no longer had it’s advantage of speed, and was actually eclipsed by the upload capabilities of this new connection. Cable has been cancelled. I am back where I know I should be, with DSL.

As a side note, I have my Cisco 1811 setup and NATing(Network Address Translation) for my home network, routing the subnet, connecting to my Proxmox install on one of my servers. The Proxmox server is slowly taking on the roles that are on my hosted server right now, mostly sites and a few minor services. Once I have this all migrated, I will be retiring my hosted server. It has been a long time coming, I have had servers around the internet in various places for nearly a decade. Now, they will live in my house, and use my one connection to serve my needs.

While the faster DSL costs more compared to standard DSL, it saves me a lot of money in the long run, and that I can deal with.

Jared

Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Surfer on Nowness.com.

From here. I want to try doing this some day, would be fun.

The subtitles are in english if you want to understand what is going on.

The current results of a speed test vary wildly depending on what I use to connect and what medium I connect over. The best results I am getting currently are from my media center system: Testing on my tablet I get 15-25Meg download and about 2-4Meg upload.

My next move will be to setup my Cisco 1811 as the primary router on this, managing my routed subnet, and my home network internet connection. I will probably run my test network through another router(likely the Cisco 1760) on the routed subnet I have. Once setup I will have to decide on the layout of my OpenVZ(or Proxmox) server(s) and get them online quickly so that I can remove my dependency on 1&1 for a hosted server. Currently at 1&1 I have a 10Meg download and 10Meg upload, but since upload is not a huge priority, I don’t see 7Meg as being an issue.