Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

@gnomon I'm still annoyed that Acaia couldn't be troubled to hook up data pins on the USB port and put a lame obfuscation layer on the Bluetooth communications instead of just using an openly and correctly documented communications protocol (I have their protocol docs, they're wrong).

@gnomon Brewista Smart Scale II, though I have a couple of pre-Lunar Acaia scales from the kickstarter.

My personal view on this sort of technology in coffee brewing is that it can be interesting for experiments and some kinds of training, but if you feel the need to weigh all your shots of espresso something has gone very wrong and it would be worth investigating better solutions to whatever problem is leading to that decision. (Unless your using it as a theatrical prop, which is a valid artistic choice even if it's not one I would make myself.)

This is not something that I would have purchased for myself as it has far more features than a cupping scale needs (it has a bunch of modes geared toward timing and weighing espresso and manual pour over), but I also didn't have to pay for it since it was a sponsor gift connected to some teaching work.

Charging up what's going to be my new cupping scale. My old cupping scale sort of works except for the power button.

That said, if I owned one, the stock software would have to be banished. It's not good and frankly I'm confused as to why they'd even spend the time building this, though not surprised as they've done several of these NIH software projects over the time that Typica has existed that have always come out later than planned with feature sets that completely miss the point of what people want.

On the plus side, it would be a relatively trivial hardware modification to make the hardware work with Typica and more to the point it would be a relatively trivial modification to Typica (and one that I've had on my wish list for a while) to get the system working without needing that hardware modification. The major pain point would be the initial configuration. Kind of wish I had more regular access to one as this would be a fun thing to hack on and build new features with.

A while back I had the opportunity to use a relatively new program one of the roaster manufacturers has as an option and was unimpressed by basically every aspect of it. I did, however, pop open the electrical box and took some pictures of the item numbers of the hardware side of that so I could look up the manuals. Now that I've done so I'm especially confused because as near as I can tell it should be possible for this to operate with much better performance than I observed.

I've just informally polled some younger computer users about their mouse pad usage and apparently people like mouse pads again and I'm just getting old. I'm still not going to order a few gross of promotional mouse pads, though.

Today's spam included not one, but two attempts to sell me on mouse pads with my branding on them. Are mouse pads making a comeback or something? Somehow, I have doubts.

Disassembled a bed for a long time customer who is getting out of the hospital next week and needed something lower.

If you're emailing me to ask for help, maybe check your spam folder to notice the reply asking for more details.

Owl collecting isn't as good as cat collecting, or naming every dog in the world, but it's still pretty good as far as entire game long side quests go.

Getting the hang of combat in Tales of Arise. I like how I can find owls just often enough to give each party member a different set of animal ears.

Got a pretty good phishing scam today. I am, of course, ignoring it, but I can easily see how people would fall for some of these. Related, I don't want your passwords. Please stop telling them to me. Also if you've given me access to your systems to do a thing, I don't need that access anymore and you should remove my account/change credentials. I'm not going to abuse access, but it's better if I outright can't.

If anybody out there is working on that and needs an internationally recognized expert on coffee roasting who has extensive experience developing software for coffee roasting operations, feel free to reach out.

Some day I would love to have a chance to work on a line of coffee roasters where all of the details are optimized for joy. No cutting corners to shave the BOM, all the modern amenities, fast tactile controls for everything, integration with surrounding workflows, everything tuned to make it easy to get the coffee to do whatever it was you intended to do with it and repeat that reliably. There's only so much I can do strictly in software with no budget.

The other class of common issues would be that someone had a clear vision of what they wanted and came up with something sort of sensible for that, but then more features got bolted on around that and nobody ever went back to reconsider a more general approach so if you're not doing things exactly like you could have back in 1.0 things get very strange very quickly.

A lot of software in the space has fundamental issues here. In most cases, tuning the signal path just isn't a thing. Someone picked your settings and that's what you get. It's simple, but the person who picked your settings has never actually roasted a batch of coffee and what they picked is extremely suboptimal.

Reconsidering Typica's configuration system in light of some new capabilities that I've been experimenting with. I already like what I ended up with by the end of 1.x better than what I've seen elsewhere, but I think there's a lot of room to improve on feature discoverability, expressiveness, and making it harder to mess things up.