Software History

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.

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

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 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.

Charlie Gerard presented a terrific talk on machine learning in the browser at Beyond Tellerrand Berlin two weeks ago. Both during and after the talk, I felt inspired. The talk introduced me to the variety of different machine learning model types one can work with in the browser. Audio classification. Pose detection. Facial landmarks.

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.

I like surfing the web in the traditional sense of the word, going from site to site in search of interesting websites. I enjoy doing this because there are so many unique websites to explore in terms of design and content. While social media sites may have set a precedent with regard to similar user experiences, personal websites mostly have their own identities. Website owners—irrespective of whether they coded their site or used a tool to generate their site—can use their website as a method of expression. The owner can choose a design. The owner can write content that they want to share with the world.

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.

My favourite category of television show is 90s sitcoms. I greatly enjoy Frasier and Seinfeld. I have watched both series many times, although on many occasions I have had the show on in the background before I go to sleep. I enjoy going to sleep after watching something funny. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic at the beginning of the pandemic that spoke about the comfort of watching shows you have already seen before. This idea just came to mind again.

The templates used to generate prompts for my GPT 3.5-powered chatbot are versioned in a custom-made system. This was a requirement for the project that came to mind after I made the initial logic to query sources and return a result that makes reference to the sources. I decided that all prompts should be saved separately from my application code to ensure that I didn't overwrite them in testing and lose the history of the prompts with which I have been working.

As I write, Taylor Swift music is flowing through my ears, a mesmerising acoustic rendition of Epiphany. The weather has been warm of late. I saw an ensemble of small birds flying in the same area yesterday evening. The birds were so swift that I was unable to ascertain the colours on some of them. And now I find myself thinking about all of the words I have noted down in the last few days, realising it is time for another edition of Fun with Words.

I asked Jacob for how long he is staying in San Francisco. He responds

The postie arrived about an hour ago and delivered my new coffee beans from Artisan Roast. I've already brewed up a cup. They are honey-processed which is what made me choose them over all the other beans on the market.

Based in Glasgow's Southside, It All Started Here serves coffee from a rotating selection of roasters as well as cakes and other treats baked in-house. In this interview, I chat with the owner of It All Started Here, William, about his inspiration behind starting the cafe, the Glasgow speciality coffee scene, and more. I hope you enjoy the interview.

I have enjoyed every coffee I have tried from Steampunk Coffee, a roastery based in North Berwick, Scotland. Their positive reputation with me was the reason I decided to order my first ever decaf coffee from their roastery. I wanted to get the best impression of decaf coffee as I could. I did not want a bad decaf bean to cause me to develop ill-informed opinions on decaf coffee.

Artisan Roast has been on my radar for a number of months. They have a quirky website that features a GIF of someone slurping coffee directly from a glass jug. Their packaging looks aesthetically pleasing. They have a reputation for offering high-quality coffees.

I was told that I was arguably having my first

I have asked a few people lately when they drink coffee. I am interested in this because I understand that we all drink coffee at different times, in different quantities, and in different contexts. I want to learn more about how others consume coffee. To keep the discussion going, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my personal coffee routine. This routine has stayed roughly the same over the last few months as I work from home. The major changes have been the equipment I use to brew, from brewer changes to, more recently, the purchase of a new grinder.

Just over a month ago, I posted a blog post about my first brew with the Aromaboy coffee brewer, a delightfully retro coffee brewer made by Melitta. The retro appeal was a large factor in my decision to purchase the brewer but I was also fascinated by making coffee with a machine. I only brewed coffee by hand at home before purchasing the Aromaboy so I was curious about what the process of brewing coffee with a machine was like. I wanted to take some time to reflect on my use of this brewer and why I have enjoyed using the Aromaboy so much.

Argyll Coffee Roasters is a one-person operation based in Tighnabruaich, Argyll, Scotland. Argyll Coffee offers a range of seasonally-rotating single origin coffees and two blends to their customers, who live all across Scotland. I wanted to learn more about Argyll Coffee so I reached out to the founder Eve. We spoke briefly over email about Argyll Coffee, how Eve decides the way in which a coffee is roasted, and more. Read the interview below.

I see websites in two categories: dynamic and static. I had a dynamic website earlier this year. Maintaining it took a lot of work. The one factor that made me hesitant to move to a static website was that I had a few features that relied on my site being dynamic. I had a grid which showed the days on which I had and had not written a blog post. I did not make that grid on this site because, at the time, I did not think it was possible.

The Manchester Coffee Archive caught my attention as soon as I found out about the project. The Archive freezes samples of roasted coffee to preserve them for later use. Before the pandemic, the Archive hosted tastings of coffee from different years. In this interview, Tom, an archivist, notes that he is drinking a coffee from December 2019.

Credit: Lance Aikman Green