Software History

A few days ago, I came across an article titled

A young man with blonde hair looks down at his iPad. With artful movements of his hand and wrist, he is drawing a picture. I only caught a glimpse. I consider what the whole picture could be.

When I hear or read words I have not encountered, I often make a mental note.

I am fascinated by how words can evoke memories. Earlier this week, a friend used the word spelunking in a conversation. When I first heard the word, I thought

Maybe I have been underestimating cats all along. I have a feeling that cats can communicate with each other; the two cats in my house can share their thoughts and feelings. I am unsure how, but I wish it were true. Cats feel more perceptive, like they understand more about the human world than we give them credit for. These thoughts have been swaying around in my mind as I have been reading—and now that I have finished—The Travelling Cat Chronicles.

Do you ever get the feeling that where you are right now is just where you are meant to be, even if your plans for the day have been derailed? A feeling of contentment, made all the more blissful by the recognition that what you are doing now wouldn’t have been possible if the day had gone the way you had planned.

At last night's Homebrew Website Club meetup, I noted that I struggled to find the utility of a digital gardens for myself. Ender ^1 said that digital gardens are a different

For the last few days, I have been keeping a journal of my espresso brews. Here is a journal entry from earlier today:

I gazed up at the Empire State Building from a few blocks away. The building was illuminated with red, white, and blue, in celebration of Veterans Day. Tall buildings fill me with wonder, and this one arguably more so than others. The Empire State Building was constructed in approximately 400 days; wonderful, in the traditional sense of the word.

As I walked along the Embarcadero in San Francisco a few months ago, enjoying the morning light, I saw an incline on the pavement (or, to use lingo appropriate for the region, the sidewalk); an edge on which I felt tempted to walk. I was reminded of childhood: the impulse to walk on the edge of a pavement, placing foot after foot, trying to balance.

This post was written on Saturday, April 15th and published today, April 17th.

Earlier today, I moved all of the bookmarks, likes, and replies from my website to my bookmarks website that uses the Known platform^1. I am thinking about re-building my blog with Eleventy (11ty), a popular JavaScript static site generator, too. I made a comment in the IndieWeb chat about my experience after encountering a few challenges (read: learning!), to which a few people responded. I am far into the the project, but I realised I don't have the mental headspace to take on the full migration right now.

As a child, there were always a lot of mugs in the house. My dad collected them and would seldom part with a mug. For years, I did not understand why: (i) we had so many mugs; (ii) mugs were so highly valued. Over the last few weeks, I have realised that collecting mugs is not unusual, especially for coffee enthusiasts. If anything, it's hard to avoid picking up at least a few mugs that you absolutely do not need but will still find joy in having at home.

A few weeks ago, I saw the gates to the University of Edinburgh New College were open. This has, in my experience, been rare, as every time I walk by the gates have been closed. When I saw the gates open, I took the opportunity and went in to take a few pictures of the courtyard. The view was beautiful. Visible behind the college building was a church on the Royal Mile, standing high. I took a few photos but the one above was my favourite.M

I love reading cafe reviews. A few weeks ago, I came across SOLO Coffee, a blog written by Eline Ferket, that features detailed reviews of cafes around the world. I started reading her reviews on Scottish cafes, given I live in Scotland, and I grew more intrigued with her writing style. I had the pleasure of talking with Eline over email to chat about her blog. The interview is below, edited lightly for clarity.

I was recently chatting with a friend about ordering espresso in cafes. I said that I used to never order espresso from cafes. Even as I learned about speciality coffee, I preferred to order milky drinks when I was out. I reasoned that if I was in a cafe I would prefer to have a drink that I could sip on. Also, I love milky coffee drinks so I would seize the opportunity to order one. Now, however, I am ordering more espresso at cafes.

I was walking around Edinburgh today. On my way down a street with a narrow pavement, I was in a position where it was unclear to me in what direction I should walk. The person in front of me shuffled one way and I did, too.

A few months ago, I reached out to Sprudge to see if they would be interested in an article on Edinburgh's coffee roasting scene. There are a plethora of high-quality roasters in the city and I wanted to spread the word about the great work they do. My article was published in Sprudge last week. In my piece, I talk about six coffee roasters located throughout the city and their place in the Edinburgh coffee scene.

This post was written on Saturday, April 15th, prior to Loneliness and published today, April 17th.

Based in Edinburgh, Obadiah Coffee has been on my mental list of roasters to try for a while. Their packaging is minimal, using simple pale colour palettes, and the company recently announced a rum aged coffee which caught my attention. I recently opted to purchase their Bombe, Ethiopia coffee. The tasting notes featured blueberry and caramel, two flavours I thought I'd enjoy.

One morning, I was making my way to a Starbucks in Edinburgh. It was early in the morning. I was looking forward to enjoying a coffee in peace before bustle enveloped the city. I headed to the Quartermile, where there is a Starbucks (and also a speciality coffee shop from which I have had a great cup of tea in the past). As I was walking, it started to rain. Heavier and heavier. As I got close to the Starbucks, water was starting to soak through my trainers. My trousers were drenched. I stopped in the rain.

When I consumed more speciality coffee, I had an idea for an application that would let you take a photo (or photos) of a label on a bag of coffee and create a personal library of coffees you had consumed. The only input would be a photo, providing a relatively low friction method through which one could catalog the coffees they had consumed. Back when I first had this idea, I was limited by my knowledge of high-quality open source OCR models out there.

TL;DR: I now have a search engine on my blog at search.jamesg.blog. Check it out!

The Drip is one of a few police box cafes in Edinburgh, an idea which has intrigued me since I first found out about police box cafes. The Drip has locations in Morningside and Tollcross and serves espresso-based drinks to-go. I wanted to learn a bit more about the business so I reached out to The Drip on Instagram, who kindly responded to a few of my questions. Our chat is below. I hope you enjoy!

Written by Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean Paste is a book I struggled to put down, filled with twists and moments that made me ponder isolation, being a member of society, and pursuing an interest despite the challenges ahead. The book starts by setting the scene, where Sentaro, a man who makes dorayaki, a sweet pancake made with sweet bean paste, sees an old woman staring at the shop where he works, Doraharu. Over time, Sentaro engages with this woman, finding out that she was a confectioner capable of making sweet bean paste.

I have installed Plan 9 on my Raspberry Pi. I am excited to start using it. I can't use Plan 9 yet because I need a new keyboard and mouse to use with my Pi. So, this evening I decided to peruse the online Plan 9 manual pages. I am excited and have been eagerly trying a few commands on my Mac to see what commands are also on my Mac.

I sometimes get an impulse to jump and see if I can reach a branch high up on a tree. I start lower down, then set myself a goal I could never achieve, then turn back to a lower branch. Yesterday, on a walk, I saw a branch I wanted to touch and jumped as high as I could to reach the leaves. The purpose? To fulfill the sense of excitement I had at the prospect of touching the leaves. I touched it, then failed to reach the next one. There is something joyful about trying to touch branches, paricularly when one's ability to estimate height is poor: you never know what is just high enough up that you cannot touch. At least, until you try!

I looked up from my desk to see the outline of a castle.

I often make use of Slack's

My website has been hosted on many platforms in the past, from Vercel, back when I had a website running Next.js, to DigitalOcean and Netlify. I stuck with DigitalOcean for a long while back when I decided that I wanted to have a static website. While DigitalOcean did cost money to use, I needed a server for some of the experiments I was running. Back when I got started with the IndieWeb, there were some Python scripts I wanted to run that required a server.