Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

Call the FCC on C-SPAN for the obscenity that is the U.S. Senate.

Sadly, Linux support for one of the data acquisition devices in use is only for one particularly ancient version of RedHat and another device has no official Linux support (but it does have technically incorrect protocol documentation) and I'd rather not rip out well tuned data acquisition hardware just to get rid of Windows.

Windows 10: Hey, I know you're trying to roast coffee right now, which I think makes this the perfect time to make you stop working so I can install my updates.
Me: Remind me tomorrow.
*20 minutes later*
Windows 10: So, about that update...
Me: Tomorrow was your idea. What part of that don't you understand?
*20 minutes later*
Windows 10: But, my update.
Me: My work is more important than your update.

Since the device generating those readings is already doing a conversion to L*a*b* and I have the ability to modify its source code, I'm tempted to add another label to the display to see if the a* reading reliably tracks the transition from green to yellow on coffees that haven't been decaffeinated (or if I can do something to make it track).

One of the limitations of the new device I've been using is that it constrains its output to a range ~25-95 Agtron gourmet scale, but one of the first significant events in coffee roasting involves that measurement going off the scale (my benchtop analyzer would put it around 130). Decaf coffees, however, often start out brown so they reach their brightest at a reading that's still in range. That inflection from coffee getting brighter to coffee getting darker is where tasteable chemistry starts

This game has the worst text based overworld map I've ever seen. #tootctl

Since @ryanprior and @yomimono were the only ones who answered, I've tried installing @elementary on Dad's old laptop. The installer left a system that showed logo, briefly flashed a login on tty1, and then black screened, but I could go back to tty1 and fix things so I can do a graphical login now. Not a great first impression, but I'll let it have its updates, install the stuff my sister wants to use, and see how things go.

Removing locally cached copies of media attachments from other servers has resulted in a terminal window completely filled with ............................................................... and it's taking a long time, but disk usage has dropped from 100% to 41% so far, so I should probably run that more often.

#admin social.typica.us was briefly down because the server ran out of disk space. I'm finally getting around to learning what I can do with tootctl to free up disk instead of just buying the server more storage.

It always feels a little strange fixing a bug in a program written in a language where I rate my proficiency as "I know of this language", but having a REPL helps. Anyway, this is how my current graphs looked today. Much better. I'm still not doing anything on the receiving end to clean up that signal.

One of my employees could show me where in settings to wipe my father's old phone now that we've backed up all his personal stuff. That's all reset now and acting as a secondary credit card terminal for the phone order pickup area and I can take my iPad back.

Sent my fix back to the original author, he suggested some further constant tweaks. I haven't checked with a live batch yet, but I can hold a sheet of paper in front of the camera to confirm that the signal no longer drops out when the coffee gets too bright, so I'll see how that goes. I still haven't done any proper calibration on the receiving end.

Took a look at the code generating the new current signal I'm reading and it's got some constants that look suspicious. It looks like I can remove 7 lines of code and replace them with a one liner that should exhibit the expected behavior. I'll try it out when I get into the shop.

Dad's old laptop is only giving me the option to Update and shut down instead of just shutting down, but the next thing that's happening to this is wiping the drive and installing a Linux so I'm tempted to just long press the power button instead.

Nearly everything had been backed up onto the laptop already, but he took a few selfies in the hospital that otherwise would have been lost.

This is with Pop!_OS on a System76 laptop, but using KDE.

Last night I failed to get the photos off my late father's old iPhone while it was plugged into his old Windows laptop. Nothing was showing up in a file manager, iTunes was unhelpful, couldn't figure it out. Today I tried plugging it into my laptop running Linux and despite a "might be unsupported" message on the phone, everything just worked and I could use Dolphin to copy the photos off no problem.

Today I've been informed that my shop has, as usual, gotten into the top 3 for whatever the coffee category is in the local paper's Best of Racine thing. We always just ignore that and I think anybody who wanted to win that wouldn't have to try very hard to get enough votes, but we've also gotten first on that more than any other coffee shop in town. Just in time for the city to wipe out the business district I'm in with bad road construction planning.

It looks like I'm out of 6 cans of tea boxes for the 2 pound online coffee orders so I'm moving on to the 5 pounds of caramels boxes for that order size.

With default data acquisition hardware settings, no calibration (just going from the specs), and no attempt at doing anything to smooth things out, this is my first attempt at capturing degree of roast data in Typica. Apparently when the measured values are out of range on the high end the signal drops out on the bottom (I need to verify that and make sure it's not a bug in my software). It's a noisier signal than I'd like, but I've got some tricks that might help with that. Still promising tech