Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

Apparently I'll be on television next week. Need to set an alarm to wake up for that.

Presumably there's something within Qt causing the button to lose that visual indication which isn't getting undone, leading me to think it's a Qt bug, but for my program at least the workaround is tiny and not worth trying to figure out a patch. Problem observed on Linux/X11 in Qt 6.10.

The solution is to add a changeEvent override which calls update() on an ActivationChange event.

For that last problem, I have a set of buttons that I use to note changes in machine controls where I don't have a sensor to detect that automatically. The way I use this is I tab/backtab to the next control I intend to change in advance and then it's very easy for me to hit the spacebar with one hand while making the control change with the other so that's logged accurately enough. The problem comes if I temporarily switch to another window. This causes the button to lose visual distinction.

Spent a little more time on Typica before heading into the shop this morning. Removed 4 things from my list of desired changes. 3 were things that I knew would be easy once I had the code open in front of me. The 4th is arguably a bug in Qt and I wasn't sure what the right thing to do there was, but the easiest thing I could think of to try did resolve the issue.

Disappointing grocery run today. The good thing is I spent about a third of what I was expecting. The bad thing is that's because so much of what I planned to get was out of stock. Ended up stocking up on ramen. They had ramen.

Got some new features working today. The code is a bit of a mess so I'll want to clean that up, but it's working so that's something.

The first thing is average rate of change through the range. Very easy calculation. The other thing that I'm thinking is percent breakdowns which nobody should be doing with roasting data, but I've had some thoughts on how to make those metrics less trash so I'll implement a couple variations on that and see what users think about it.

Started adding some new features that I've been thinking about lately. I'd previously combined the batch timer display with some other secondary displays and changed the range timers to something with more information density. Now I'm thinking that multi-range display could sensibly be extended to include various other kinds of batch statistics where it's useful to show that separately for different parts of the roast. The easiest way to add that looks kind of ugly, but I'll make it work first.

Finally got the new coffees up for sale on the web site. I still need to update the wholesale list and get a sample out to a company that expressed interest in one of the new arrivals before I had it.

I kind of miss when there was a shop across the street that offered sewing lessons. We'd get people bringing their sewing machines into the shop to do their homework at the last minute before class.

Someone brought their mechanical typewriter to the shop today. It's been a while since I've heard that sound.

It would be nice if the parking cops would knock it off with the flashing lights when people could reasonably be trying to sleep. Of course, better still would be scrapping the idiotic ordinance they're currently abusing in a fundraising scam. I complained at politicians when I saw them pulling this nonsense last year.

The overpriced comment is not a knock on quality (which is very good) or value, just that customers are going to look at the price, look at the size of the thing, and decide to not buy it from me. I'm sure there are other shops with customers who would go for it.

Decided to add another chocolate bar supplier that one of the sales reps we buy other stuff from also handles. He's been trying to sell us on them for a while now and while their small things are egregiously overpriced (so I'm not ordering any of that) for my customers, their full sized bars are priced reasonably for the level of quality and I think it's a good time to bring something new in and see how it does. This will also make the dark chocolate fans happy. Several new options for them.

Oh joy, I guess I'm learning how to deal with docker now (or rather, I fixed my issue and will now promptly forget all of that)

First attempt at reworking the espresso blend with the new ingredients was one of those where I'd be happy to be served that somewhere else, but it's entirely the wrong character for what I want to do here. 2nd attempt brought it in line with what I'm trying to do with this here.

Darker roast on the new coffee from Bolivia also turned out as expected. Full body, slightly sweet despite the roast, very smooth. It's been a while since I brought in a Fair Trade Certified coffee that wasn't a decaf so that's also a nice feature. Need to put together new product labels for this one.

Evaluating production test batches of new coffees today. New French Roast tastes like French Roast. It looks like I'll also be able to lower the price on that a little bit, so that's good.

2nd coffee I'm working on today was more straightforward. I found exactly what I was looking for in one of the roasts while the other I think I'll find right in between two of the roasts I tried. No need to edit the plans for that. I can just load what I did on the little machine directly.