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.

Now that I have access to a Mac that can run a version of Safari new enough for CRUCS, I'm able to notice that they've got a minor rendering bug that I didn't see on iOS. The next version update will include a little more CSS that as near as I can see has no visible effect in Firefox and presumably other browsers that were already doing the right thing but gets Safari to also do the right thing.

In other news, I have secured access to a machine that will let me put out a build of Typica for current Macs once the next release is ready. It was looking like I was going to need to skip Mac builds for 2.0 so this is welcome news.

Another usability win for Linux. My laptop noticed the new printer on the network immediately and let me print without any setup at all. Windows required that I go into settings, look for the printer, and add it manually. In both cases there's no way I'm installing anything off the disc the printer came with.

New printer for the shop arrived with an extra piece that doesn't appear to go anywhere and isn't mentioned in any of the documentation.

The cat is demanding hugs.

First we're taking the California Zephyr out to California to spend some time with my sister in that part of the country, then overnight on the Coast Starlight to get over by my nephew, and then Empire Builder back home.

Some time back I was planning to do a train trip instead of flying for a trade show but then COVID hit, the trade show got cancelled, and the trip no longer made any sense. So when my mother said she wanted to do a road trip with me and we started talking about it I tossed out the idea that if I were doing the trip on my own I'd probably take the train. I guess she liked that idea because now we have train tickets.

Buying train tickets with Mom.

I had put a different compatible screw in place of the one that had dropped, but this one was a nicer and visually distinct screw so I've put it back where it was supposed to go.

Found a screw I dropped last week.

Needed to pull into the driveway very slowly to avoid hitting a bird that really wanted to be there.

The cat is not a fan of the storm outside.

Helped a customer pick a way to do what he wanted for about a quarter of what he had in mind for a budget.

Working through the Guatemalan coffee helped me decide on what I'll do with the El Salvador. New Guatemalan was lovely at a pretty light roast while going into the medium and dark roast ranges I could find acceptable but unimpressive representations that frankly aren't worth what I'd need to charge. Assuming production test batches come out as expected based on the cupping, I'll just do the Guatemalan coffee as a light roast and do medium and dark roasts on the El Salvador.

The new coffee from El Salvador turned out very nice across the whole roast spectrum with some interesting shifts in flavor profile as it progresses from light to dark roasts. The medium to dark roast transition is particularly distinct and at a higher temperature than many coffees make that switch. This, of course, makes it harder to decide which I want to try replicating for production, but I can at least confidently recommend it for home roasters as it'll be hard to screw up too badly.

Lots of coffee tasting to do today.

More coffee has arrived. Time to figure out how I want to roast it.

The cat has managed to pull the F9 key off her keyboard. Easy fix.

USPS tracking still claims they'll deliver a box here today, but it's 11:42PM so I don't think that's likely.

The cat is shoving her head into my shoes.