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I Made Peanut Butter

We normally buy peanut butter because I use it for making granola bars, smoothies, and baked goods. I rarely just spread peanut butter on something and eat it. As I’ve been trying to be more and more aware of the foods we eat and what’s in them (and where they come from) I noticed the ingredients listed sugar and palm oil.

I know palm oil is a controversial ingredient so I did some searching and found this page on SKIPPY Natural Creamy Peanut Butter Spread. They claim it’s “the good palm oil” and okay, but why? And also, there’s added sugar. I’m sure there are reasons for this but I don’t think they are needed.

So I looked up “how to make peanut butter” and damn, it’s pretty simple. Peanuts and a food processor. You can add in some honey, oil, salt, or whatever and just blitz it. The instructions I found said it takes a bit of time to come together and look smooth and creamy, and it did. I also did end up adding just a bit of honey and some oil, thinking that would help mix it all up.

The process was simple though, and I started with a 16 ounce jar of dry roasted peanuts and ended with roughly 16 ounces of peanut butter. (Maths!) The cost of a jar of peanuts was pretty similar to the cost of a jar of peanut butter, so there’s not exactly a huge cost saving. It’s more about being able to make your own, knowing what goes into it, and buying one less thing. (Sort of, I still bought peanuts. I just need to find a source of free peanuts now!) Actually if I can buy bulk peanuts for cheaper I could potentially save a little bit of money. (But not time. That’s the tradeoff, right? Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death as the old saying goes.)

The one downside to this is that you are using a food processor to make peanut butter. First you need a food processor, and second you need to clean peanut butter out of the food processor. Peanut butter is sticky and messy and difficult to clean. So there is that, again, the time element.

As I mentioned, I rarely just spread peanut butter on something, which is good, because I plan to keep this in the refrigerator. It should be fine in the cabinet but should last longer refrigerated. (Honestly this is the part I researched the least so if you have insights please share them.)

This method should work for any nut butter, so cashews or almonds might be worth trying in the future. I really just need to work out a scheme to get free nuts now and I’ll be all set!

Feel free to check out my Granola Bars v2 recipe. The page it is on has no ads, no tracking, no pop-ups, and none of the annoying shit most recipe sites tend to have.

Note: The second time I made this my daughter helped out, and she pointed out we should let the food processor run even longer, and we did, and the peanut butter was much smoother! Lesson learned.

Tags diy, food

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Game Show Buzzer System V2

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2025-01-19
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The name “Game Show Buzzer System V2” is a misnomer but I’m gonna go with it… See, I’ve built more than one “Game Show Buzzer” type of system since the original post but they were not documented here for various reasons… Anyway, this is a system I designed quite a while ago but just recently had someone actually want, so I built it.

See, typically I sell one (or more) of the Big USB Buttons or even these Survey Says Buttons, but this system doesn’t use multiple individual self-contained buttons, but a control box you can plug multiple buttons into. This specific system has just two buttons but the original design had either three or four, though doing up to six (or even eight) buttons would be trivial.

The control box plugs into a computer via USB and can send keys, keystrokes, USB MIDI data, or serial data. Each button plugs into the control box using a TRS cable. (That’s a 3.5mm Stereo Cable for you non-nerds in the crowd.) The TRS cable has three connections (Tip, Ring, and Sleeve) which is perfect for a button and LED.

The trick is in the code… meaning the programming is whatever is needed. For this specific build we did a USB MIDI noteOn for each button, followed by a five second lockout so no button could be pressed for five seconds. I’ve done systems where the “host” (using the control box) can reset the system, say for instance if the person/team who buzzes in first gets the quiz answer wrong, so that another team can try to buzz in and answer. Lots of possibilities, again, the magic is in the code.

I’ve built enough of these that I really should formalize things and come up with a system where you can choose the components and features and then place an order… It’s still sort of a custom thing (code always is anyway) but I think I have it down enough that a base system is in order.

Anyway, this was another fun project, though it was a bit rushed (got it built and programmed in a matter of days before it needed to ship) so there are a few small improvements I’ll be making next time.

Tags arduino, button, controller, games, usb

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WMSE Art & Music – Sydney Hih

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2025-01-19
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One of my pieces for the 2025 WMSE Art & Music event is my illustration of the Sydney Hih building. If you didn’t live in Milwaukee around the 1980s/1990s and dive into the counter-cultural music scene you may not be familiar. Read about it at OnMilwaukee or Urban Milwaukee.

I always struggle with the edges of the 12″x12″ boards as they are just plywood and kind of rough, so this time I sanded them, filled the holes, sanded some more (and I hate sanding!) and then applied some black paint. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. I spent way too much time on the edges.

For the frame itself I laser cut a piece of 1/4″ Baltic Birch and stained it black, which I think looks really nice. I glued it down to the board but the frame was warped so the gluing process took a long time and all the clamps I have. Once it was finally glued down I painted the edges black (again) and added one more coat of black stain to the frame. I am mostly pleased with how it turned out but because it’s my own work I can see so many areas of improvement for next time. I’m sure no one else will see what I see.

Still, this process worked well enough that I did it for another board and yet another board that my daughter Madeline did.

Here’s a version of the digital illustration that I created with Procreate. This is a part of my history, and is for many of my people, those who grew up going to shows and seeing bands play, and playing in bands.

I’m sure I’ve told the story of how I ended up running sound for the Sunday morning punk rock shows at The Unicorn (located in the basement of the Sydney Hih) but here it is again. One day we were setting up and asked Gus where the sound guy was and he said “You do the sound!” So we did… I wasn’t in a band at the time so I just started setting things up and got some help along the way, and I think from then on we just ran the sound for the local shows. Just one more step in a life of DIY.

Tags art, auction, milwaukee, wmse

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Boot Repair with Plasti Dip

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2025-01-18
1 Comment on Boot Repair with Plasti Dip

Remember back in 2007 when I got new boots? Well, they broke. 17 years ago I said “they should last at least 10 years” and they did!

But in the last few years I noticed they were cracking and sort of falling apart. For a minute considered getting a new pair because I am an adult with more than a few hundred dollars in my savings account…

But then I thought, maybe I should try to fix them? So I did. First, the damage… see the photo above and the two below.

The right boot wasn’t too bad, but the left was terrible. It came apart right below the seam where it is sewn together and in other places the boot had cracked and split open. You can see the white filling on the inside of the boot.

I’ve had this Plasti Dip since at least 2017 (I know this because I used it for a project) and honestly I think I dipped all the tools I needed to dip. I started the repair by grabbing a cheap bristle brush and “painting” on a coating of Plasti Dip. I let it dry and did a few more coats and called it a day.

I then wore the boots outside, did some walking around, and they split open again. Obviously the solutions was… more Plasti Dip!

This time I grabbed a popsicle stick and just slathered it on, filling in the cracks and gaps and I did this a bunch of times to build up a good layer of rubber to stick everything back together. (You might notice I also fixed the aglets with some heat shrink tubing.)

I’ve flexed them a bit and they feel like they’ll hold together, but if not I can always just pour the rest of the can onto them. Seriously though, I hope this does it because I’d really hate to buy a new pair, mainly because I want to cut down on buying new things if I can repair old things I already own. I probably wear these boots less than 30 days a year since we don’t really get that much snow and I don’t spend a ton of time outside if it’s extremely cold outside.

So fingers are firmly crossed that this fix works!

Update: 10 days later the boots are holding up but I lost an aglet.

Tags boots, diy, fix, repair

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Jellyfin for Music

I started using Jellyfin for my music library so I can access it anywhere I can get a connection to the Internet. I don’t support streaming services that charge subscriptions and I’ve spent over four decades building my music collection, and I add to it frequently.

I’ve been using Apple’s iTunes/Music/whatever it’s called now, and often copying some (or all) of my library locally to multiple devices but I thought I’d give Jellyfin a try. I know people who use it for video but I’m strictly here for the music.

A guy I work with uses Jellyfin running on his home NAS with a zillion videos files. I thought about where to get it running, but ended up just running it on my primary desktop computer. It’s already basically a server, and it’s always on (except when it kernel panics a few times a year) and since my music files were already there, it was simple. I just have it set to launch at boot.

One interesting thing about Jellyfin versus a lot of other open source projects is that they seem to have money!

So it’s been a few months (I started this post in July!) and I’ve been mostly pleased with Jellyfin. There are a few things that are annoying, but overall it’s pretty good. The annoying things are mainly stuff that is different from the old way I did things. Like there are no star ratings. I used the 0-5 star ratings a lot in iTunes/Music.app and I miss it. (A plugin could probably be written but no one has done it yet.) It does handle all my scrobbling so the data goes to Last.FM and Heard just fine.

Another nice thing about Jellyfin is that I could (in theory) share my server with others by making accounts that they could use to login and listen to my music library. I have not done this yet but it’s a nice feature for sure.

I’ll plan a follow-up post talking about clients for Jellyfin, because honestly servers are kinda boring by design (when they work well) because they just sit there and run and you shouldn’t even see them much.

Stay Tuned!

Tags music