Software History

I used to think dictionaries were just a list of words. In school, I rarely referred to a physical dictionary. Online dictionaries were much easier to access. Reading The Great Passage, a work of fiction by Shion Miura, made me realise how much work goes into maintaining physical dictionaries and, to a greater extent, the responsibilities involved in writing definitions for a word.

Coffee is a fruit. Most of the coffee in production today—around 70 percent or more—is cultivated from the coffea arabica species of plant. This plant is commonly known as Arabica. Grown between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the coffee plant grows cherries that contain seeds.

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on Instagram: where can I get a speciality Robusta coffee? I received no direction as to where I could get some speciality Robusta coffee, perhaps with good reason because speciality Robusta is not nearly as easy to get as speciality Arabica coffee. Things changed when I had a conversation last week which led to me getting my hands on a small sample of speciality Robusta coffee, graded by a professional.

I sat down studiously reading the newspaper, engaged in the news of the day (and, on a side note pondering on how a large, notable news story announced yesterday must have happened after the presses started printing). With a keen eye for words, I proactively took notes, as I often do, of exciting words. That, combined with my other readings over the last week, is the origin of this week's edition of Fun with Words.

Matthias Ott's recent article on writing caught my attention:

Perhaps only I could be listening to a podcast introduction and think, as the sun is rising,

When I am traveling places, I don’t like to take my computer unless necessary. If I take my computer, it would be too easy to jump back into a programming project on which I am working or dive into a rabbit hole from which I emerge hours later.

I write a lot of technical documentation, which involves using long(er) words like

In parts one and two of this series, we built a program to monitor the moisture level in a plant and a program to convert our readings into a chart. The final step is to create a web page that lets us see our chart and download our logging file. That's what we are going to cover in this tutorial. If you have not already read parts one and two, I'd recommend doing that before continuing. You can find links to these tutorials at the end of this post. Without any further ado, let's get started.

As you might know, Google weighs various factors when ranking a web page to certain extents. Factors like whether a keyword is in a title are a strong indicator that the article is likely to be relevant to a target keyword. Thus, that article will be considered more relevant than, say, an article that only mentions the keyword once or twice. I will leave the exact logic behind Google to people who know more about this topic than I.

I attended my first Beyond Tellerrand conference in Berlin last week. I'll not bury the lede and go right out and say that I definitely want to attend another Beyond Tellerrand. The event was such an excellent experience, featuring inspiring and thought-provoking talks as well as an excellent community with whom I chatted about everything from technology to data to anything else that came to mind.

A couple of months ago, I started to work on my own webmention receiver. Instead of relying on webmention.io, a service commonly used to receive webmentions, I wanted to challenge myself to create a receiver from scratch. To do so, I realised I would have to read, understand, and interpret a W3C specification, something I had not done up until the point of deciding to work on a webmention receiver. While I knew there would be challenges, I wanted to take control over how I received webmentions and build my own service.

When was the last time you wrote a physical letter, with handwriting? I cannot accurately answer this question for myself. Part of me wants to believe that I have written a letter by hand and sent it to someone. However, I cannot think of a single occasion where this is true. Perhaps when I used to enter into magazine competitions when I was a kid, although that was not a full letter so much as filling out a form to enter a competition.

For the last few days, the server on which this website (and many others I run!) started acting strangely. Every so often, nginx would stop working and I'd have to restart the service manually. I had restarted nginx two or three times over the last few days so I knew something wasn't right. I spent some time this afternoon figuring out what was wrong. I found an issue with certbot renewals and nginx that, when resolved, fixed the errors I found in nginx and the /var/log/syslog file on my computer.

I was in Edinburgh last weekend for the first time in many months. It was nice to break out of my usual routine and do something different. I visited many coffee shops and two museums. If you are ever in Edinburgh, I would recommend visiting both the National Museums of Scotland and the National Gallery. If you happen to be reading this shortly before travelling, check out the Typewriter Exhibit at the National Museum. I saw not only a Lego typewriter in person (yes, Lego, and it works!) but many other interesting typewriters from history. Anyway, I digress.

I was recently thinking about what attributes are common among the coffees I enjoy the most. I have written about this subject before although the last time I covered it was last November. Since then, I have tried many more coffees. Not only have I tried more coffees, I have tried more unique coffees. I have sought out more distinct coffees—from those with unusual flavour notes to those from origins I have not yet tried—because I enjoy trying something new. In doing so, I have found some flavour attributes that I really like in coffee.

Sara started the IndieWeb Carnival last month, a fun challenge that invites you to post a blog post on a topic selected by a rotating set of participants each month. Sara started us off with the topic

Over the holiday season, when I had some time off, I got back into watching films. Before then, I usually preferred putting on a sitcom like Seinfeld or watching Coronation Street if it was on the television. I decided to start watching movies because I had long spaces of time to use up. I started by watching the Christmas Chronicles movies. Those movies are now among my top recommendations for Christmas movies. Perhaps I shall issue a reminder later in the year about those movies. It's a bit too early to talk about Christmas movies, I think. Pardon my faux pas.

I mentioned casually in passing that I have houseplants. My peace lily has been troublesome; my other plants have grown and thrived. A friend mentioned in passing that peace lilies can be difficult plants to grow and thrive. The wisdom shared by my friend -- the sort of serendipitious remark that stands out in your mind -- provided me with a semblance of relief. It was not I who was the problem (Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero is now singing softly in my mind), with my forgetfulness interfering with watering schedules.

My TODO list is an interesting place. Candidates for this series are interspersed with the rest of my TODOs. I am eager to document new words and my TODO list is often the lowest friction way to do so; the file is always open, ready for me to add notes. That's why

On Saturday, while I was in Edinburgh, I spent some time in coffee shops (as usual). [1] I am slowly making my way through the list of cafes I would like to visit, which I keep both in my head and in a designated list on the Google Maps app on my phone.

I have already explored a number of Edinburgh coffee shops. I have visited Stockbridge, New Town, Old Town, and further afield for a cup of coffee. Now that I'm getting toward the end of my list of Edinburgh coffee shops, I have started to think about where to go next. I am not done visiting Edinburgh coffee shops, rather that I want to explore other places which also have good coffee shops to visit.

I was in Edinburgh on Saturday doing a coffee crawl (which has become a regular event since lockdown restrictions eased). I shared a photo on Instagram of one cafe, asking people to guess where I was. Later in the day, I ended up in a conversation on Instagram with someone who guessed one of the cafes correctly. I shared a few more photos and that person guessed the cafe featured in three of four photos I sent.

Today I had the pleasure of drinking coffee from three separate coffee shops in Edinburgh. When I was in the second shop, I thought to myself that I should take a picture so that I can run another quiz. I took pictures in the other two shops I visited so that I would have enough for a quiz.

There are times in the day when I say

When I start these posts, I am tempted to open with an introductory sentence such as

Last night, I was exploring personal websites and left numerous tabs open to which I wanted to come back and explore further. During my exploration, I found Anhvn ^1 published a blog post called

Over the weekend, I worked on adding a new feature to my personal website: videoconfencing. I was motivated to explore this space by Angelo ^1, who used Twilio to run a video conference on his personal website. Twilio is reliable but is not free, so we explored alternatives. Angelo told me about a piece of software called MediaSoup ^2, an open-source project that enables you to run video calls through self-hosted infrastructure.

mf2py, the official Python microformats parser, is now under active development. After a hiatus without a lead maintainer, a few community members and I have coordinated to help drive the package through a series of updates.

I am excited to announce that IndieWeb Utils is now in v0.3.1. This update is the culmination of months of work from project contributors. Before I get any further, I want to note a special thank you to James, Tantek and Angelo for their collaboration in this project. Their contributions, code reviews, and suggestions have greatly enhanced this library.