Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Sanding is done. Time for a cheesecake break.

Taking a break from sanding to eat some pizza.

Tasting production test batches of new decaf coffees today. So far they're all turning out as expected.

Obtained sanding equipment. The shop is closing early today and staying closed an extra day so I can work on refinishing half of the floor.

alternating between eating dinner and petting the cat

This is going to be their 97th year of doing free concerts.

Renewed my ad in the Racine Concert Band program. I don't know if it brings in any business but they reliably do a good concert series at the zoo.

The funny thing about this one is that it's not even a good video. It's just something that I threw together when testing out a then new camera, but I guess it shows up pretty highly on certain searches because those sorts of shenanigans have made it the 7th most watched thing on my channel and the only thing in my top 10 without any real educational component.

There's one particular video on my YouTube channel where every so often another company gets the idea to embed that without sound, attribution, or ads as if it's their own video. When I notice that happening I disable embedding and break that element of their site. If random coffee company wants to license my video for commercial use they can have that conversation with me, but you don't just hotlink someone else's work like that and pretend it's yours.

Yes, my house has collected lots of strange things in it. Video games that are older than I am, industrial process control hardware, full scale model catgirl, assorted commercial coffee equipment in various states of disrepair, green screen, miscellaneous lab equipment...

I own a Computer Space cabinet, but it's the later 2 player version where the buttons were replaced with a joystick and I think there's a good reason that arcade games ended up going in that direction.

Good dental checkup today. I helped a kid figure out how to play the Asteroids machine. There aren't any instructions on the machine but it's very similar to the first generation Computer Space machines (a button for clockwise rotation, a button for anticlockwise rotation, a button to shoot, a button to thrust, and (not present on Computer Space) a button to warp to a random location. The cabinet also has a rotary dial and a trackball that serve only to confuse players.

motion blur cat is rotating

Oh look, it's a cat.

So this is a thing I had to deal with today. https://video.typica.us/videos/watch/472e432d-9a67-4130-a29f-d1709404254c

I don't do outside product design work very often but sometimes when I do I get unexpected feedback. A while back I did a mock up for a client and the feedback was that they wanted people using their product to feel like they were on the Death Star. And, I mean, okay, you want Death Star, you get Death Star, but really?

The cat has concerns.

I would love to design a roasting control system built around an obnoxiously large 4K or 8K touch screen. If you look at some of the most heavily instrumented roasters on the market their interfaces could be done so much better with more screen space. Then again, I've also been told that incomprehensibility is a feature, so

Going to move some things around to help Typica better fit on smaller screens, though frankly, roasters should go for the biggest highest res screens they can afford. Giant data screens make you seem more impressive.