Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Work also had power disruptions, but that wasn't too bad. Coffee roaster was mostly cooled off with nothing in the roasting chamber. I was trying to use a scale that really doesn't like unexpected power outages and power kept going out briefly before the scale recovered from the previous outage.

There's weather happening. Power company says my house doesn't have power so I'll have to decide if I want to try to find some take out or if I'm going to risk dinner being saltines and cheesecake. Maybe they'll let me know that power is on before I'm done with work and I can just cook a proper dinner.

Today someone at the company that sells my shop various kinds of insurance learned that it's normal for mail servers to limit message sizes and that there's significant overhead in encoding for attachments. One of the files was probably just barely over the limit and I'm not changing my email server configuration, but I could give her a link to upload to our Nextcloud server and she was fine with doing that instead of spending several dollars on printing and postage.

Scrapped most of the code I wrote yesterday and replaced it with something a lot simpler.

I'm reminded of an exchange I had with a company that was doing the whole your data lives in our cloud and that lets you share it and I'm over here like most of the time I don't want to share that, but when I do it's called a file and I can attach it to an email or stick it on shared storage or put it on a thumb stick and hand it to someone or make it available on my own web site or... Plus I can use it when your company fails or my Internet is down or there's a DDOS. Files are great. Use them.

Had a small detour for technical support. A growing category of issues that I'm seeing people get frustrated by fundamentally boils down to people not knowing where their files are (because the apps they're using make it too hard to know that). As soon as the file is found outside of the app that hid it, the thing they need to do becomes trivial.

Didn't have time to finish up the next bit of coding but I left myself some notes on where I left off and what's left to do. Maybe I'll pick it up again after dinner.

Removed a few coffees from the web site. I still have it to sell from the shelves locally but I can't roast any more until new coffees get into the country.

Spent more on groceries today than planned, but that's just because I stocked up on stuff with good sale prices. I'll have to remember to eat more yogurt to get through all of that while it's still good.

I have acquired bread.

Updated the shop's web site to include the latest arrivals. https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Not sure what changed but I've been noticing more problems with unintended duplicated key presses lately while typing. Pretty sure it's a hardware problem but I've jacked up the repeat delay setting and that seems to have mostly fixed it. Still, it's probably getting closer to time to replace the laptop.

New coffee from Honduras smells amazing.

Slower or faster and operator anxiety shoots way up and with that comes a reduction in control accuracy and an increase in mistakes resulting in failure to hit product spec. Faster incoming data rates can still be useful because you can apply well known statistical methods and get cleaner data at human friendly rates ($1 microcontrollers have enough compute these days to do that) but most of what's out there just doesn't really bother.

Based on actual user/usability testing, software for monitoring what's going on in a coffee roaster should be presenting updated data somewhere in the range of 2 to 10 times per second, with 4-5 updates per second being an especially good sweet spot for maximizing operator joy. This is something that computers from 3 decades ago would not have struggled with.

The third is a competing free option that was just never really designed for larger scale use and is missing a ton of features that home roasters don't need but anybody trying to operate with batch to batch consistency should have.

Another is a commercial sponsor of the event that I get to have a little chuckle about every few years when their marking brags about a feature they could have mined from my software more than a decade prior.

One is software from the roaster manufacturer which prompted me to contact them about certain design decisions that can cause safety problems but that also was so slow that I pulled open the electrical box to write down part numbers and look up spec sheets to find that they could be driving their whole UI a lot faster for better user experience.

First text from the employee I sent to an educational trade event says she's having fun but also that the software they've got set up on their roasters is bad. Based on what I saw the last time I taught at the venue there are 3 things that she might be experiencing.