Software History

NB: This post is about two months old but I did not schedule it for publishing.

I am in Berlin for the Beyond Tellerrand conference. The hotel at which I am staying offers continental breakfasts.

I like to end the day with watching comedy. Yesterday evening I was watching Seinfeld, one of my favourite television shows, and started noticing little details that call back to previous jokes in the show. I didn't know the term for this, if there was one, so I turned to Google. My query was

Sheldon Cooper, a character in The Big Bang Theory, had a recurring mini-show within the show called Fun with Flags wherein he shared facts about flags, often with props. If you have seen the television show, you can perhaps hear the words of Mr. Cooper echoing in your head at present.

Manually grinding coffee at home is a lot of work, both in terms of time and energy. I can grind 14g of beans—the amount I use to brew an Aeropress—in less time than it takes to boil the requisite water, but there are other things I could do with that time, such as prepare my equipment (which I used to do before grinding).

This article is a few months old and has been in my drafts for a while. I think there's some interesting insights in this post so I thought it would be worth publishing this article.

I've started drinking a floral coffee, Bale Mountain from Steampunk. I wrote in my review that I do not have a wide palate when it comes to floral notes. This is down to my relative inexperience with floral notes in comparison to other flavours, such as cherry, blueberry, and chocolate. I have avoided some coffees described similar to teas and plants because I do not have many points of comparison.

Up until now, I've experienced fruity, chocolatey, and nutty coffees.

As I sat to enjoy my coffee this morning, I looked out the window and saw snowy rooftops and a clearing sky. It has been snowing on and off all morning. While this moment was wonderful in itself, the coffee did add to the experience. I was drinking Jamila Abakeno, an Ethiopian coffee purchased from The Good Coffee Cartel.

When I went to purchase my coffee of

I talk a lot about Steampunk Coffee, a coffee roaster based in North Berwick, Scotland, both on this blog and in general. Their cupping session gave me an opportunity to refine my cupping skills and taste five excellent coffees. Not only that, but they've been authoring coffee-related content that has caught my attention, from insightful blog posts to their podcast.

Image sourced from the BBC website.

Happy New Year! Did you stay up last night to see the change of years? As always, I did. I stayed at home but ITV was broadcasting one of my favourite James Bond movies, Spectre, so the evening flew by. We're now in 2022.

I haven't written about coffee for a while but I can assure you that I still drink coffee regularly. I am presently drinking Bale Mountain, this year's harvest of the same coffee that blew my mind last year and expanded my perception of what was possible in coffee. I love drinking coffee, talking about coffee, and meeting people who also like coffee. Recently, however, I have reduced my consumption to two cups per day, down from my usual three.

I have been writing about little moments of joy on my website this year. From the time I heard Baby Shark playing loud on a train ^1 to the time I heard two young musicians playing music at Brandnburg Gate ^2, I have taken pleasure in documenting the little moments that made me smile, feel warm, and feel joy.

At this week's Homebrew Website Club, I asked everyone what tools they use for writing. Participants shared a range of tools, from BBEdit, a text editor for macOS, to

This week, I have been tinkering with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to build an index for my personal website. While I was creating this project, I explored various techniques to help me find words relevant enough to be featured in the index.

I recall moments during summer when I thought to myself

The phases of the sunset in San Francisco are breathtaking; captivating. Last night, I found myself near the Bay. A thought popped into my mind:

Find the most surprising words and most common n-grams on a web page.

I just finished an accessibility audit on my site. There is only one flag that is raised by Axe, the accessibility validator I use. I believe I can ignore that flag. It relates to the arrows that I use for my webrings. I do not believe the suggestion impacts the quality or accessibility of my website. I am proud to say that I've resolved many accessibility issues over the last few weeks.

I lost my sunglasses around two months ago. The day I realised I had lost them, I was perplexed.

This weekend I experimented with using word surprisals -- given a corpus of text, how

A multi-roaster cafe based on Easter Road in Edinburgh, Little Fitzroy is a slice of the Australian Fitzroy coffee culture here in Scotland. I have followed Little Fitzroy on Instagram for a while and had a few questions about their cafe. Cathryn, the owner of the cafe, kindly reached out and answered my questions. You can read our conversation below.

When I got home from my trip to London earlier this week, the child-like part of my mind expressed a thought

I look out of the window of the train and see my reflection. The morning has been rainy; cool. Autumn is indeed getting closer. Behind my reflection is a young and older woman taking a selfie. They have suitcases. They must be traveling somewhere.

I mentioned in my last post that I wrote a module that processed my RSS feeds. After further testing, this module turned out to be quite unreliable. It worked for my feed and a few others but was not robust enough to meet the varying ways in which people represent published dates on their blog RSS feeds. Because dates could be formatted in one of many ways, I would have to spend a lot of time gathering different timestamps and writing code that supported them. This was far from ideal. Also, I found some feeds were marked up using Atom and so might not have worked with my code.

I am presently writing this blog post in a train, with my large suitcase by my side encroaching on the leg room available to me (indeed, as if I hadn't spent enough time with little leg room on seats after flying). Conversations are happening in the background. I have my headphones in, listening to a song by Leah Kate that was recommended by Spotify. It's not the best song, but I'm happy. I was able to play piano for an hour or so at the train station while I waited, something about which I have been thinking for at least a week.

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

After I posted my brainstorm on how an email to RSS service could work, I received a few emails informing me that this already exists in many forms. One reader reached out to say that Feedly offers a native service that lets you subscribe to newsletters. Using the service does, however, require that one is using a paid tier of Feedly. I can't use this service because it is tied to Feedly but I love the idea of having an email-to-RSS service as part of a feed reader rather than having to set up an external service.