Software History

I recently gave a talk for Codementor on Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention. A recording for the talk is available on archive.org, in case you are curious! In the 45 minute discussion, I walked through what Webmention is, how it works, and did a live demo of how to get started using Webmentions on your site.

During lockdown, I had my heart set on the days I could go back to Edinburgh and do coffee crawls. Before lockdown, I was not interested in speciality coffee to the degree I am today, and so after lockdown eased I was able to go on my first coffee crawls. I have been visiting various shops around Edinburgh and realise that I am liable to lose track of the shops I have visited because there are so many I want to go to.

The Milkman is a well-known Edinburgh speciality coffee shop, presently serving coffee from Origin Coffee Roasters and filter and retail coffee from other roasteries based in Scotland and around the world. The Milkman recently opened a second cafe at 52 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh.

I was informed that SpaceX was about to launch their latest rocket earlier today, their second attempt. When I saw the message, I went onto the livestream, curious to see the rocket take off.

Wait... The clouds are amazing. I'll take a picture, I said to a friend in a discussion about pianos. Previously immersed in the discussion, my mind was occupied with experiencing the world outside. The clouds. I proclaimed. In my head, I tried to articulate how the clouds appeared. Lattice-esque. A blanket that had been loosely stitched.

I have tuned in to two IANA Root KSK signing ceremonies this year. The last one was held last Wednesday. The Root KSK ceremony is where representatives come together to sign the new keys for the root DNS servers. These are the servers at the heart of the DNS protocol. The root servers let you find TLD-level servers. Cloudflare has a great blog post on what the root servers are and how the ceremony works. The ceremonies are often quite long but if I know one is on I will tune in.

How to Make Coffee, written by Lani Kingston, was one of the first books I read about speciality coffee. The book gave me a good understanding of various aspects of coffee and covered some basic coffee science in a way that was approachable to me as a beginner.

I am working on a new programming language called VisionScript. VisionScript gives you the power to build computer vision applications in a few lines of code, or through a drag and drop interface. Count objects in an image in three lines of code. Remove all the faces in an image with four lines of code. Read a QR code in three lines of code. Classify an image in three lines of code. VisionScript is designed to be as concise as possible.

The beginning of a new week is upon us. The City is bustling. I am sitting in a wooden seat, not the most comfortable, but certainly charming. The cushion on which I am issiting is worn. These chairs have been well used. Who sat here before me? Who shall sit here after? I gaze at the traffic passing by, and look out as people walk on the street. The weather is warm, many people are in t-shirts.

Sara has started a blogging carnival, an open challenge to blog about a topic chosen by a participant. Sara chose the topic of cooking, and suggested many lenses through which the topic could be considered. The carnival rotates every month: next month, I shall be choosing a topic about which we can write. We have an open page on the IndieWeb wiki in which you can list your interest in selecting a topic for a future month. Below, my entry into the carnival.

A key requirement for my social reader is for it to be usable on mobile. To accomplish this goal, I have added some progressive web application features to my reader, enabling its use as an app I can save to my home screen. I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how the social reader should look on mobile.

I don't recommend many products, but I do recommend Firefox for web browsing. It is fast, reliable, and its code helps us fight against a monopoly in browser engines, an expensive-to-develop piece of technology that powers a web browser.

Join me for the fourth episode of my podcast wherein I talk about, among other things, children’s television, static websites, grammar, and all things coffee. Unlike in the last episode, I am not drinking a cup of tea during recording, although in hindsight perhaps I should have prepared a cup (or even a cup of coffee, given I recorded this episode in the morning).

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.

I started to think about how one should dispose of coffee packaging after it has been used. Should you recycle your coffee packaging? Should you compost it? Should you compost the packaging by taking it to a supermarket, who then takes it to a professional facility? There is no one answer: the world of coffee packaging is complicated, and disposal instructions vary by packaging.

Continuing my interest in Japanese fiction books, I stumbled upon The Guest Cat written by Takashi Hiraide. I have two cats at home and I have not yet read any books or longer materials about cats. I started to think about the relationships between humans and cats, leaving me to think that The Guest Cat would be an excellent book to read next. The quoted reviews certainly set a high bar for this book, a New York Times Bestseller.

At Homebrew Website Club this week, we discussed book indexes (with the Chicago Manual of Style nearby as a reference, of course!). This got me thinking about what a web index may look like for a blog: a page formatted like a book index where you can see articles that mention unique concepts on your blog. Book indexes are useful tools for navigating information. Given a concept, the index tells you where to find out more. I was curious about what this may look like for a blog.

I spent last Sunday morning in Chicago, after a series of flight delays that caused me to miss a connecting flight to my final destination. I enjoyed exploring the city. Gazing in awe at the tall buildings, the subway system across the city, the underground roads, the landmarks. I had only one morning, so I spent most of my time on foot walking around.

As I await to get to Chicago — the city that is likely to become an unexpected overnight stopover in my journey toward Des Moines — I realized I don’t quite know how to feel.

We spoke about the world changing. The cab driver and I. He said he felt the world is not the same as it was when he grew up. Progress. We spoke about rural and urban; city and countryside. Then, he started talking about change in the context of philosophy.

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.

I write this blog to help me learn about specialty coffee. In many of my posts, I share advice, recipes, and techniques from my own learning. This got me thinking about how professionals teach people coffee skills. I decided to reach out to Millie (@thatgirlfromthecafe on Instagram) to ask a few questions about what it is like to train people in basic coffee skills.

(Not in any way affiliated with the renowned Fun with Flags, hosted by Dr. Sheldon Cooper.)

I've been a fan of '90s sitcoms for years and whenever I am looking for something to watch one of three names comes up: Seinfeld, Cheers, and Frasier. My personal favorite is Frasier but I am presently taking a year-or-so break from watching the show so that, one day, I can go back and watch it and feel like I don't know everything that has already happened. That is my hope.

I have been attracted to coffee shops for a long time. When I was young, I enjoyed going out for a cup of tea with members of my family. I still think back to the days when I was too young to drink tea. I'd drink a carton of apple juice or something similar. I'd think about when I would be able to drink tea. I cannot remember at what age I could finally drink tea. I do know that tea stuck with me for years. I'd drink a few cups a day on most days.

I recently watched the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, as part of my pseudo-marathon of watching high school teen romance movies. I am toward the end of the top recommendations now, contemplating what movie I should watch next. The song I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick, and whose version for the movie was sung by Letters for Cleo, was played in the movie. Moments after the song came on, I thought to myself

I was preparing to make a cup of coffee and I suddenly got the urge to listen to Gloria by The Lumineers. I obliged, opening Spotify to play the track. Gloria was one of those songs that I listened to on repeat. The music, the rhythm, the accompanying Ballad of Cleopatra video together made for engaging musical and dramatic experience.

My LLM chatbot is instructed to only reference sources that are provided in the prompt I send to OpenAI. This is essential because I want answers to reflect what I have written rather than more general facts available to ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. One of my primary considerations when developing my LLM chatbot was to ensure that, where possible, the sources of claims were cited. I devised two methods that, combined, provide both myself and users with information about sources associated with a question:

Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI's new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats are, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I'd share the result I got for the prompt

Editor's note: I am starting a new series on this blog. Every so often, I'm going to feature an interview with a coffee blogger. In these interviews, I want to learn about how other coffee bloggers approach their work, and how they go from an idea to a final post.