I b ought my first Moka Express about a year ago. It is a wonderful little machine. It is very easy to use, simple to k eep clean, and durable. It doesn't take up any counter space and it is easy to take with me when I travel. It also makes a good strong espresso-like coffee.

I should probably mention here that I am not a coffee aficionado. I can't tell the difference between coffee I ground today or last month. A lot of people would probably say I don't even really like coffee.

I do like French Vanilla creamer and caramel syrup, though. I don't make proper coffee beverages. I usually mix about 1/3 Moka Express coffee with 2/3 french vanilla creamer (50/50 if it's iced) with a bit of caramel syrup.

We have a Keurig K-Cup machine. I can only get a strong enough brew out of it to make a coffee the way I like if I use the iced-coffee (3.25 oz) setting and use it to make a hot coffee. Even on that setting it is much, much weaker than what comes out of the Moka Express. It may not be as strong, but it sure is fast and convenient.

I've learned a lot about brewing coffee with the Moka Express over the last 12 months. Some of what I learned is exactly the opposite of what "The Internet" told me.

Don't Grind the Coffee Too Fine, Watch Out For Dust

The first batches of coffee I made with my Moka Express were awesome. After a while, things got bitter. Tiny grounds of coffee were making it through the filter into my beverage.

It turned out that the pre-ground coffee we had lying around was probably processed with a blade style grinder. No matter how coarse the grind, a blade grinder will generate tiny grains of coffee dust. These pass right through the metal filter and make the brew extremely bitter.

My first attempts at grinding my own beans failed in the same way, since I was using a cheap blade type grinder. I picked up an inexpensive Nesco burr grinder. Now my brews are consistent and taste better than ever.

My good friend, "The Internet," told me to grind the beans finer than for a drip machine. I'm actually getting much better results on a slightly coarser setting (the 6.5-7.0 setting on my Nesco).

When I ground too fine the water couldn't get through the grounds. The valve would whistle, it'd take forever to brew, and it would taste terrible.

I've made plenty of tasty non-bitter coffee with pre-ground mass produced coffee. If you're buying pre-ground you will just have to find one that works. You can also probably grind the coffee in the store.

It is OK to Pack the Coffee

You sure don't want to tamp it down like you would in an espresso machine, but I do lightly pack the coffee into the pot. I probably fit an extra teaspoon or more in there this way.

You know you packed it too tight if the pressure release valve starts whistling.

How Much Heat?

I've read all sorts of ideas related to applying heat...

I crank the stove up all the way. Right before the coffee starts flowing, you'll recognize the sound, I turn it down to about half heat. It brews quite a bit slower than at full heat and it seems to taste better. I haven't really done any sort of blind taste test here, though.

Light or Dark Roast?

This is more about personal taste than anything else. I prefer to use a lighter roast. I've been buying huge, cheap bags of Sam's Club brand breakfast blend coffee. We're happy with the taste and the price.

We managed to buy a huge bag of Sam's Club French Roast coffee. We really didn't know our coffee lingo at the time. We did not know that French Roast was the darkest over-burnt coffee. I feel it is way too dark. It has been handy to have around, though. I sometimes throw a few spoonfuls in with the breakfast blend if we want a darker tasting coffee.

Is it Hard to Keep Clean?

My old friend, "The Internet," tells me that the coffee tastes better when the walls of the pot are coated with coffee oils. I don't actually know if this is true or not.

I rarely use any soap to clean it, though. As long as I use the pot every other day or so, I just take it apart and rinse it before each use. Just make sure you empty and rinse the top of the pot out after you use it. If you don't you will have scrub out the dried out, caked on day old coffee.

How Does it Compare to Proper Espresso?

I have absolutely no idea. I do know that the Moka Express produces a much stronger, more caffeinated brew than a drip machine. They are also much cheaper than a proper Espresso machine and seem easier to maintain.

I've been fairly unhappy with the battery life of my G1. With the stock 1150mAh battery I am lucky to get 12 hours out of it most of the time. I was once able to use 49% of my battery in an hour and a half by driving to a doctor's office and surfing the web in the waiting room... Bluetooth was at the top of the list of battery consumers, so be sure to turn that off if you don't need it.

I found a cheap 2300mAh battery at dealextreme.com. I've ordered lots of cheap gadgets and cables from them in the past, so I figured it'd be worth spending $11.22 at this battery to try it out. They ship their items, slowly, from Hong Kong. I think it took between about 3 weeks to get the battery.

How long does it last?

I haven't actually run it down to empty yet. The first day I had it I ran it down to 25% in a little over 19 hours. I had everything enabled except Bluetooth. I watched a little over an hour of video, listened to some SHOUTcast radio with Tunewiki, played a bunch of games, read email, and surfed the web. I tried to use the phone as often as I could. That last 25% should easily have put it over 24 hours, but I was tired and I needed a full battery for the next day.

Just how big is that thing, anyway?

I looked at a lot of batteries. Nobody seems to give dimensions. Unfortunately, I don't have anything terribly accurate like a caliper to measure this thing with. I did come up with an easy way to convey the difference in thickness between the stock battery cover and this new battery cover.

The top part of the battery cover that sits over the camera is probably identical in thickness to the stock battery cover. Just below the camera it gets thicker and it maintains that thickness all the way to the bottom of the phone. I was able to stack 3 pennies on the shallow side of the cover and it came out pretty flush with the deep side. My good friend Wikipedia tells me that a United States Penny is 1.55mm thick.

My math tells me that the thickness of my phone has increased from 17.1mm to about 21.75mm. That puts it just a smidge under the thickness of my old Treo 650. I think I can live with that.

Is it heavy? Does the cover fit well?

I may not have a caliper handy but I do have access to a shipping scale! The stock battery came out at 25g, the beefy new battery came out at 45g.

The first time I put the cover on the phone it didn't feel like it was going to fit. I may have had to press it on a little harder but it fits very snugly with no gaps anywhere.

Update 2010-01-06:

My phone has mostly been sitting idle the last few days and I forgot to put it on the charger last night. The battery use applet is showing that I've been unplugged for a few minutes shy of 39 hours with 29% capacity remaining. The three biggest battery wasters seem to be Cell Standby, Bluetooth, and Phone Idle all clocking in at 29%. Wi-Fi clocked in at 9%, Voice Calls at 6%, and Display at 2%. I was on the phone for about 45 minutes.

All the power wasting goodies were turned on, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Sync. It probably helps that I live about a quarter of a mile from a cell tower.

I recently upgraded to Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0. That got me thinking that now might be a good time to clean up my local mail folders. All of my mail from the past few years is stored on my IMAP server. I still have a few gigabytes of old mail from my old POP3 days stored in Thunderbird's Local Folders.

I decided that now might be a good time to do some spring cleaning and not carry around my old POP3 mail anymore. I figured it is also a good time to store this current copy of my old mail with my long term backups.

My Old Friend rzip

I have been using rzip for quite a few years. Its job is to find and encode large chunks of duplicated data over very large distances, up to 900 MB. Once that is completes it runs the resulting data through bzip2. For large datasets I've found it to be much faster than bzip2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2) and it usually results in an archive that is about 30% smaller than just using [bzip2`.

Unfortunately, rzip can not operate on pipes. All of my automated backup scripts run along pipelines, usually from tar to bzip2 to gpg. They never touch the disk unencrypted, which probably isn't always helpful.

My New Friend lrzip

I recently discovered Con Kolivas' lrzip. lrzip takes rzip a couple steps further. It lets you choose a compressor other than `bzip2 for the second stage of compression. It can also be used in a pipe.

Unfortunately, when used in a pipe it generates a large temp file. This can be a problem if you are trying to generate a large archive and don't have a lot of free disk space, or if you don't want unencrypted data being written to the disk.

Some Benchmarks

I compressed the tarball of my .thunderbird directory every way I could think of that made sense. The default settings for lrzip kept erroring out on me at about 30%. I had to use the -w switch to reduce the window size from 20. I chose 12, which should be about 30% higher than rzip's window.

              Size    Minutes    Ratio
              (MB)
uncompressed  5761         na    1.0:1
lrzip zpaq    1207        265    4.7:1
lrzip lzma    1262         60    4.5:1
lrzip bzip2   1401         27    4.1:1
rzip          1362         20    4.2:1
lzma          1441         97    4.0:1
bzip2         1748         38    3.3:1

Both rzip and lrzip achieved a smaller file size in less time than bzip2. lrzip with zpaq is over 13 times slower than rzip for a savings of 155 MB, or about 12%.

Why Would Anyone Wait for zpaq to Finish?

Most of the time it isn't worth the wait. I'm a huge fan of smaller backups. Backups become significantly more expensive every time a single backup has to span a second (or third, or fourth...) piece of media. It's another floppy, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, tape, hard drive, or flash drive to have to manually swap around and keep safe.

I like flash drives for my personal backups. I have too many CDs and DVDs that are unreadable. I've accidentally run an old compact flash drive through the laundry and it still worked. I'm sure all flash drives won't survive that, but they do tend to be very durable.

Unfortunately, lrzip with zpaq did not get the file size down for enough for the archive to fit on the backup flash drive that I keep around the house. Another 100 MB or so would have done the trick and would save me quite a bit of effort.

Which One Should You Use?

For most archives I would probably just choose bzip2. It does a very good job and a decompressor is always very readily available.

For almost every very large archive I will definitely be sticking with rzip. It is faster and more space efficient than bzip2. It is also easier to find than lrzip, my Ubuntu machine has an rzip package available in apt.

I will be sure to keep lrzip with zpaq in mind, though. Sometimes an extra couple hundred MB will save the time, effort, and cost of a second piece of media. The other downside to zpaq is that decompression is also very slow as well.