Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Tasting my first series of roasts from the new Ethiopian coffee that arrived yesterday. For this one I've skewed my sampling toward the lighter side as that's what I expect I'll want, but I have 12 cups each at a different roast level across a broad range. Aroma is quite nice throughout the range, though the lightest 5 are closest to what I expect I'll want out of this particular coffee.

Game: When creating your character you can give them cat ears.
Me:
Game: All the head armor conceals the cat ears.
Me:

The cat is insisting on sitting on me.

Accidentally dropped a glass on my toe. The toe was protected by a sock and a shoe and there won't be any lasting damage, but it's still painful.

New bags of coffee arrived with the claim of "Extra Hand Picked". It seems to me that coffee is either hand picked (which is basically all of it except in Brazil) or it isn't. I'm assuming they're just using a weird term for some extra manual sorting, but that's not what the words they've chosen to use mean.

Game: You should really team up with another 4 players and take on this dungeon in co-op.
Me: Nah, I'm just going to solo that.

Post more cats, please.

I voted. Am wearing my I voted sticker.

Started on a new game a few days ago. On the one hand the controls are terrible. On the other hand, I just got a cute dog-like pet to follow me around.

Spotted Carmen Sandiego at the grocery store. I suspect she's in town to steal the Golden Rondelle theater.

I'm thinking the shop might need to have an email list. I've avoided doing that because I hate most of those.

It looks like in the near future I'll be sorting out roasting plans for 6 new coffees, one or two of which I might do a couple different roast levels on, then I'll be working on 2 or 3 new or updated blend recipes. There are a few things coming where I still need to use up what I already have so I don't need to worry about doing the full product development work on those right away. I think I need one more coffee order before the end of the year still.

My new Ethiopian coffee is scheduled for delivery today and I've just placed an order for another few thousand pounds of assorted things including some coffees I haven't had in a while so I'll be pretty busy once that shipment arrives.

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.