Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

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.

My class has top billing on the Saturday workshops for the event in April. https://www.crgretreat.coffee/education

On the off chance that anybody here is both a Typica and an IKAWA user and wants to help me pay for this so that I can improve the integration there, my project accepts financial contributions and in a given year those contributions have never exceeded my out of pocket spend on the project.

https://typica.us/

I didn't specifically ask for one but I'm hoping that they have a free software dev or famous roasting instructor discount available because I'm pretty much guaranteeing that the project continues to not turn a profit (it never does and I don't intend it to) by buying one this year.

Sent an inquiry about getting one of these for the purpose of improving Typica integration in the next release. https://www.ikawacoffee.com/for-professionals/

Typica currently has an import feature that satisfies what people have asked me for, but it's one of those features that feels kind of pointless. If I had one of the machines I think I'd be able to do a more robust and more meaningful integration and now feels like a good time to work on that.

It looks like this time around what I'm getting is an outer case with lots of scary warning stickers that aren't needed with the inside of the box lined with some thick bubble wrap with a trash bag inside of that tied closed over 6 manufacturer case packs. It's still more packaging than these have ever arrived in from either other distributors or from the manufacturer directly, but for this company it's a welcome improvement over past ridiculousness.

One of the companies that's been sending out shipments with completely insane packaging has finally realized that they can just use the manufacturer's original case packs for me. This order almost looks sane, but I still have to open the inner cartons and make sure the boxes say what they contain. There's also two more outer boxes to open which could be packed in some other less sane manner.

I took some time to break down what it would look like if I made a bunch of Typica tutorials for the next release and if I limited myself to 1 video upload per day I'd have over 2 months of daily videos. On the one hand, that's a lot more than I want to do. On the other, I'd like to have the material done and stretching the work out more than that doesn't really help anybody.

Not the most flattering cat pic

If I wrote updated documentation on how Typica uses the database, would anybody bother to read it?

Didn't finish sorting out all the database changes that are needed to support some new Typica features. One of the reasons I initially had this feature set slated for 2.0 was because I knew just how disruptive this set of changes is. It's probably the largest set of database changes I've needed since Typica added database support. I might work on it more after dinner.