Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Visiting Mom's cat. She doesn't want me to do anything. She just wants to lick my pants and roll around on my legs.

Night cat

Anyway, that update won't be released until after I've finished with the book launch and I'll need to assess if there are other bug fixes or new features that I want to make sure get into that as long as I'm doing the work to put out a new release. I was kind of hoping that I could have retired the 1.x code base by now.

That works fine if your control panel was designed with that use case in mind and if you have good gas service to your facility, but a lot of coffee roasters operate with neither of those being quite true, so getting a real measurement off the gauge would be an improvement for them and should be an easier feature to retrofit for most.

While I'm adding current input support for something entirely different (which I still can't talk about because I don't want to wreck another company's product launch), that's probably the easiest way for a lot of roasters to add fuel logging by replacing the manometer with something that operates a current loop. The way I'm logging this on one of my machines now without that is with a dual pot driving both an electric valve on one circuit and a 0-10V logging device on a separate circuit.

https://typica.us is showing $9 donated in support of ongoing development so far this month. That isn't true, it's just that the form there is the easiest way for some people to send money to me. In actual Typica news, I'm hoping to get a new minor release out late this month or early next to add some additional hardware support. That'll make it easier for people to use 4-20mA instruments and I'm also expanding options for reading voltage signals.

Is it nap time?

Morning cat

Cat hunting pizza.

Today I got a particularly good piece of Chinese factory junk email. I liked the subject: "Make the best labels the strongest guardians of your product." but what really made this pop is down in the example photos mixed in with the boring holographic anti-counterfeiting labels was a little cartoon dinosaur making finger guns and a biu~ sound effect while shooting hearts.

Working through the feedback from my technical reviewers, lots of the feedback is stuff that's easy to fix and obviously correct to do so, some of the feedback is obviously correct and more difficult (but still worthwhile) to fix. Then there are the things where I think the reviewer is missing the point and I need to remind myself that everybody I asked to look at this is both really smart and a subject matter expert so if they're missing the point, maybe I didn't make that point well.

Editing the book. It looks like a lot of the edits are actually expanding on the content so the book is getting longer.

https://roastingbook.coffee/rcpd/

*hug*

Cats are still good.

If you eat enough appetizers that counts as a meal, right?

Did the coffee roasting demo/lecture for the new employee.

There's been so much scam email going around lately claiming to be invoices or late payments or similar where the distinguishing characteristic is that the attached file is an Excel spreadsheet. I haven't investigated to see if that's malware in addition to fraud, but I'm pretty sure I've never gotten a legit bill in the form of an Excel document (not without that at least getting converted to a PDF or something first). I've just been promptly deleting those.

Stayed late at the shop tonight to help my sister paint. The brown wall is now a green wall.

Finished off another roll of paper at the coffee roaster today. I have a cheap receipt printer hooked up there which produces tags to follow each batch of coffee I roast so I don't have to hand write those and can unambiguously look up data associated with each batch.

I have two low volume mailing lists that get used to update people on different projects (one to notify of new releases of some software I wrote, another for updates on the book I'm working on). Today I was curious about what kind of overlap there is between those lists and it turns out, not much. 5 email addresses are subscribed to both lists.