Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

My main paying side job right now is going well. So far the client hasn't gotten spooked at any of the "here's stuff I don't know", "here are areas where you probably want to bring in someone else to work with me because I lack these skills", or "here's how much money I want". They're providing useful feedback but not micromanaging and we seem to be on the same page regarding what the deliverables should be for something that's interesting for me to work on.

Prior to this status, this instance originated 2^(local accounts count) statuses.

The cat didn't bother to move when I stopped by for today's visit.

Haven't shut down the accounts yet, but I've removed birdsite, the faces book, and that thing where people take pictures of food from my phone. I don't seem to be using them. Kept the app I've been using to post cat pics here.

Today's cat pic is blowing up my notifications.

Cat has moved on to my other wrist.

Cat is licking my wrist.

daily cat

I've pretty much decided to start up my own #peertube instance. Now I just need to decide when I want to start paying for the server. I think I'll start by putting together some new videos, so when those are ready might be a good time.

My cat is stroking my beard. She does this often.

I want to eat dinner but the cat wants cuddles.

daily cat visit

If you're interested in more on how I figure out how to roast different coffees, I have a little series of case studies on this video playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPTTFznZ65M-lSNokmiP2uByEoTZAg4oI

After a production test batch, that's brewed as a customer might enjoy it as a final check. This final check almost always passes, but if it doesn't it's important to figure out why and try again.

If I don't find what I want, I'll at least have a good idea of the approximate roast level that I want and enough information to decide how I want to approach a 2nd batch roasted with different time to milestone parameters (that is, taking some portion of the roast and going through that faster or slower), pulling samples from that batch in a narrower range, repeating as needed until I'm satisfied with the results.

After cooling, those samples are labeled. Typica recorded where I pulled each of these samples so if I find what I want I can look up exactly how I roasted that and attempt to replicate that with a larger batch on the production roaster.

In this case I expect that I'll want something that is on the lighter side of what I'd consider a medium roast or lighter, so most of these samples are pre-2nd crack, but taken above the temperature where coffee is invariably grassy. That consideration is going to be different for every coffee based on how pre-purchase samples performed, the intended use of that coffee, and how I envision fitting this into a product line.

The thing that's going to make the single largest flavor difference is roasting lighter or darker, so on this first batch I pull samples at various roast levels. Ideally this covers a range such that on tasting it's obvious that it runs from too light to too dark.

One of these days I'll upgrade the data logging on the lab roaster. The hardware is only a 10 bit ADC with suboptimal full scale range getting fed from a signal conditioner with too broad a range. Channel isolation is bad and signals are noisy. I needed to bust out the math to get this working acceptably, but it would be better to just swap in better data acquisition hardware.

As usual, I start with 2 pounds at the lab roaster.