Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Is Nessie getting more popular? I'm seeing more Loch Ness Monster merch around lately.

Today was fill out the insurance premium audit day. That always puts me to sleep. Going to make another batch of chai concentrate next.

New tutorial video is up. Here I'm taking roasting data from two batches of coffee where the data initially looks very different and I'm showing another way of looking at the data which explains how these ended up matching on the sensory spec.

It's an analysis technique that I've been successfully using for over two decades that never really caught on, I think in large part because there wasn't any software to make it easy. The latest CRUCS update changes that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PHdDMZtEog

Decided it would be less work to just re-record the tutorial and instead of trying to figure out what sort of graphical screen recorder was going to work for me, I just used ffmpeg. Should probably stick the command into a 1 line shell script with a nice name so I don't have to look up the options I need next time.

Recorded a new tutorial video, but the screen recorder only grabbed the upper left quarter of the screen instead of the whole thing (HiDPI issue I guess? What are people using for screen recording on Linux/X.org these days?). I can probably still make it work instead of re-recording the whole thing, but I'll want to eat a lunch before I attempt that.

Cat had her shocked face on when I left for work early. Now that I'm back she's getting in her sit on me time.

Just discovered that a replacement battery for my lawn mower costs more than a whole new lawn mower (with battery included). WTF?

This is based on an analysis technique I was using way back when I was tracking roasts with pen and paper. I've written about that elsewhere, but it never really caught on, I think mainly because it's historically been too time consuming to slice and dice the data like this. Building the feature into CRUCS makes that a lot more accessible so hopefully people will start using that to better contextualize their roasting and tasting data.

CRUCS version 1.2.0 is now live. The main addition is the Analysis menu and report. There are some other uses, but the main idea here is you can import data from multiple batches and get a view into how these compare within various defined ranges. There's some room for improvement to the feature, but it's useful enough that I didn't want to further delay getting it out. Should do a tutorial video on that soon.

https://crucs.net/

The next thing that I'd like to try adding once the currently pending release is out will let me talk about roasting plan design in very sci-fi sounding terms like applying a localized time dilation (which is very useful if you're designing training exercises). I've also had a thought on further enhancements to the time entry fields.

Continuing to work on the next release of CRUCS. I'm pretty sure that's almost ready and I just need to spend the time running down my final checks. I've been putting off working on another set of features for the release after that because the analysis feature for 1.2.0 is too useful to hold back while I work on other mostly unrelated stuff.

My tech support super power: reading the whole error message before doing something (usually following instructions in the message that match the desired resolution). I'm told this is seriously deep wizardry that mere mortals are totally incapable of doing for themselves.

Updated the shop's web site to tell everybody about the new coffees now available and let people order those through the web site. I only bought 66 pounds of the Bolivian coffee and since I'm roasting that two different ways I expect to sell out of that very fast.

https://wilsonscoffee.com/

bird

New coffees will probably hit the shelves tomorrow. May or may not hit the web site later today.

Finally, the decaf French Roast also needed an update. This used to be made with the old decaf Colombia but I decided that I'd likely get better results with a decaf Brazil I already had in the shop than the new decaf Colombia. It tastes like a French Roast.

For the decaf Colombian coffee, the intent was to try to get something that's a good match for the previous lot of decaf Colombian coffee. That happened. This is the motivation for having the Mexican coffee as I was going to run out of the decaf Colombian and needed some other stuff to put on the order to not get killed on the freight charges.

I tried doing a darker roast with the Mexican coffee and this came out I think a little too sweet compared with what I had in mind for that. I was hoping to bring out a classic Vienna Roast flavor profile and while this is good, it's not that.

This one is a brighter, more vibrant coffee compared with the roasts I did for the Bolivian coffee. Lighter (more medium) body, good sweetness.

Next up is the new coffee from Mexico. We used to work with a supplier who specialized in finding nice Mexican coffees as opposed to the more common cheap flavor base sort of thing that has long dominated the expectation of Mexican coffees, but I guess that was a bit too narrow a niche. Still, it's nice when the timing works out that I find something a little more interesting and have space to bring it into the product line.