24h acid hydrolysis

Needing to hydrolyse some protein foods down to amino acids by boiling for 24h in 6M HCl, I came up with a new "invention".

Place four 100ml conical flasks full of water into a 2l Japanese water boiler, about half-full, so as not to cause the flasks to float. Having four of them means they can't tip over anyway.

Then place your hydrolysis solution in a boiling tube into one of the flasks (or do up to four at once). I stoppered it with a one-hole stopper, to prevent too much water dripping into the tube and diluting the HCl or causing it to overflow.

I set the boiler to 90^oC, not 98, to reduce the amount of bumping.

It works really well, and is so much safer than using a normal water bath.

Thiosulphate - Acid in a reasonable time

Struggling to get a simple thiosulphate - hydrochloric rate of reaction practical to work in a handful of minutes, trial and error brings me to this conculsion

0.1M sodium thiosulphate  + 1.0M hydrochloric acid + water in equal volumes gives about 6 minutes to obscure a cross at 20^oC, or about 2 minutes to max out a turbidity sensor at the same temp.

Test Web Server

Using a Raspberry Pi with Minibian Jessie Install:

mysql-client mysql-server postgresql apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysqlnd php5-curl php5-gd php5-intl php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-pgsql php5-apcu phpmyadmin phppgadmin