Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

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.

The cat is offended that I didn't give her any ice cream.

I think the cat has forgotten about my dinner. She's in lap cat mode now.

The cat is sulking because I discouraged her from hunting my dinner.

linter: "you can't do that"
me: "okay, let me try typing that again without trying to figure out what I screwed up"
linter: "looks good to me"

Approved the latest arrival sample. Once the coffee is delivered I'll sort out how I want to roast that and try to get it out for sale promptly.

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to use computers without programming them at least a little. Everything is awful in its own way (different people will have different ideas about what awful is) and a little scripting can go a long way toward making things nicer.

Solving minor annoyances with shell scripts.

The voting van is out in front of my shop today and seems to be good for business. I will, as usual, be waiting for election day and voting at my usual place, but I'm glad stuff like this exists for people who have trouble with that.