Last year I read about 60 books, this year I might squeeze in 40, currently on book number 38 and I got some time off coming up.
This year I did read some longer than average books for me as I reread all the Tolkien history of Middle Earth books.
Next year I really want to read 52 to maintain a book a week on average. Aiming to reread some spy stuff for a change, LeCarre and Slow Horses for a start.
I have been making the occasional coworker a cup of aeropressed coffee with good reviews thus far. Being that it is shift work, most of my coworkers are used to drinking the reduced syrup of a pot that’s been left on the burner too long (one coworker thanked me for leaving it for her!). Many don’t even know coffee doesn’t...
I cannot suggest a widely recommended brand as I don’t have experience of anything I would recommend, however have you considered a medium to dark roast? Most people drinking coffee outside the speciality scene will be expecting a traditional Italian style coffee. This might not be what you are trying to go for but you might get some mileage out of it.
While this is local to the UK and not supermarket cheap it is cheaper than a mid to high end light roast, single origin bean: ravecoffee.co.uk/products/the-italian-job-blend?v… I have had it for group holidays where I am making the coffee and it has gone down well.
Leave it to James to get the author of the paper for his video.
Bit I hadn’t picked up before is that Ionisers like on the df64 are in the wrong part of the workflow to reduce static in order to improve coffee uniformity as they are on the exit rather than before the chamber. Obviously they still reduce mess.
Yeah the DF grinders are like that without theirs or water, the messy grinder in the video looks like a DF to me. I could not put up with it without RDT.
My sculptor has the knock ring that keeps the mess constrained really well, that is a proper magnet for chaff.
They would just exempt themselves from it as they did with both reporting on people accessing porn using the HoP network and with the investigatory powers bill.
That is not what RDT is for coffee beans, lol. RDT is Ross Droplet Technique, which is very much adding water to beans. Named after David Ross who came up with it back in 2005
Edit: post I replied to has now been edited to include the correct answer. The original answer was from chatgpt and completely incorrect so extremely misleading
I wouldn’t trust that to tell me anything I didn’t already know the answer to, it is fucking useless as it still makes too many mistakes and lies about them
I am very surprised that anybody answering that question wouldn’t have been in the hobby long enough to not know what RDT is. Immediately downvoting my actual, factual link to both what RDT is and a deeper dive on the article to it says a lot.
So what happened was that someone asked a question and while I answered the question someone else answered with a completely incorrect answer. My answer was then down voted and the incorrect one (which has since been edited to add in the right answer) upvoted.
So yeah, you are a bit late to the party here.
At not fucking point did I refuse to answer a basic question.
The issue here is posting chatgpt answers as fact without knowing remotely enough about the topic to know it’s garbage. I wouldn’t dare post answers on random topics I know nothing aboutusing chatgpt as my sole guide, its a proper dick move.
It’s been a part of the speciality coffee scene since 2005, and a big part of many recommendations to improve grinding. I would be surprised if anyone who has been an active consumer of coffee content hasn’t seen it used at least once.
Any community particularly one for nerdy hobbies has jargon as part of it’s discussion and doesn’t have explanations littered in every instance jargon is mentioned. Part of joining in that community is asking or finding out what the jargon means. Asking like an entitled ass over not understanding jargon in a hobby you aren’t familiar with shows what sort of person you are.
Not sure if you have watched Lance’s video I linked elsewhere in the post but they measured particle size, RDT improved uniformity of particle size. This to me is the first empirical evidence of the actual benefit of RDT over and above less mess with grinding. For what can be a completely free and quick upgrade that seems always worth doing.
While WDT does need a tool and even a homemade one isn’t completely free it’s ability to better distribute grinds in the basket I would also say it’s an essential upgrade as it can be so low cost
Anything else like slow feeding, hot starting that are free upgrades no matter how small for cheap to midrange grinders that lack prefeeding augurs or other chokes that prevent overloading the burrs seem no brainers to me.
If it applies to both I would still post it here as the community is bigger and would still benefit from it. Even for basic stuff as there appears to be far more total beginners than the subreddits in the other place.
If you make them that wet you are doing it wrong, lol.
You only need a drop or two of water for espresso and only slightly more for a larger amount of beans for a pour over, it’s a tiny amount. People have been doing this since 2005 without problems.
My favorite part of that paper is that thanks to them actually measuring particulate size we now have empirical proof adding a small amount of water improves the consistency of your grind:
it is clear that the inclusion of even small quantities of water (as low as 5μLg−1) results in an immediate reduction in electrostatic aggregates of boulders and fines
I wouldn’t recommend that approach, its more suited to single dosing, which is based around grinding only the amount of beans you need for that single lot of coffee by only feeding the hopper with the amount of beans needed rather than using the hopper for bean storage.
So weighing out your beans first for a single espresso or pot of pour over, wetting those beans with a drop or two at most of water, giving them a shake/stir, then feeding them into the hopper and making sure everything comes out that you put in.
Single dosing makes it easier to get the exact amount of coffee by weight each time from cheaper grinders and can lower retention (how much ground coffee the grinder holds in its burr chamber and spout) when combined with RDT and flushing out the grinder with something like bellows and discarding what comes out as its mostly chaff and fines that you do not want. Coffee tends to build up even in expensive grinders without flushing it out, this goes stale over even a few hours and works its way into your normal cups of coffee.
Grinding by weight is still pretty limited availability, most with a hopper tend to offer grinding by time, which is nowhere near as accurate. Grinding by weight makes it easier to make your coffee more predictable, its especially important for espresso as you are trying to fill the basket almost but not quite the top. Espresso is better measured by volume as coffee density varies by roast type and by time since the beans were roasted, but that is much harder to do than by weight on a regular basis so most people just use weight.
There are a lot of simple things, often free or low cost that people can do to get a lot more out of their existing gear, and the more people know that the better.
Beans and water quality >>>>> technique >>> grinder >>>>> espresso or pour over gear, for coffee quality anyway. You’ll get most of the way there just getting the first two right
Personally an extra minute a day isn’t going to kill me and I like tasty coffee. Modern home grinders are trending towards single dose anyway, so it becomes closer to the norm than hoppers that are better suited to commercial grinders due to the throughput of coffee beans they need.
I am too focused on getting the exact weight of grounds out to make my recipes exactly repeatable (and pretty much essential for espresso anyway), which is so much harder to do with the majority of affordable grinders, to even entertain using a hopper. Then the retention caused by not being able to use bellows and RDT shudders
I am only going through about a kilo of espresso and a touch less than that of pour over beans a month, so its not like I am high volume.
The postman delivered a new to me DF83 Gen 1 with SSP HU burrs. Just had fun dialing it in over lunch for espresso. It is a huge step up from the Niche Zero it replaces for espresso.
I would feel the same if somebody posted a p100 or Monolith Flat MAX, but then they also way more expensive like the DF83 with SSP burrs is vs. the Zero.
Short answer is price, df83 with the SSP burrs used is about the same price as a brand new df64 with stock burrs in the UK.
I decided I wanted the profile of the SSP HU burrs and the 83mm offers slightly better results than the 64mm of the same burrs. Shrinking the cuts down isn’t just a question of making the same cuts smaller, it reduces the surface area which changes the way it grinds.
However I suspect most people including me wouldn’t be able to blind taste the difference with just one to sample from
The zero is terrible value new in Canada in that case. I actually think that the zero is a bit over priced in the UK now due to cheaper options like the Ode.
The workflow on the Zero is best in class as long as you aren’t trying to slow feed and/or hot start for better coffee. It gets painful to work around the lid closure detection if you do.
Most of the “budget/high value” grinders such as the DF83 have significant workflow problems compared to more premium rivals like the Zerno or even the Zero, but for a handful of shots per day you have to be pretty picky for workflow to be a higher priority choice than grind quality.
I do think the hype with it has sustained it so far, you even see people with Linea Minis with one as their only grinder, talk about back to front. I am expecting to sell mine for almost as much as I paid for my used DF83, which is just insane.
I don’t rate the Ode as best in class, but with the right burrs it leaves the Zero for dead despite being less than half the price in the UK.
I read and watched reviews, lurked on a few of the coffee forums to see the consensus on what sort of coffee the different options would make. From there it was a simple step for me to pick the highest clarity burrs I could get as I really love my ZP6 for pour overs and I had grown to dislike the body focused espresso my Zero made.
I wouldn’t spend the sort of money the SSP burrs are, be they 64s or 83s, unless you either want to try and then sell them, or you are very sure you know what you want.
If you don’t know what you want based on what you have now (even if its I don’t want what I have now like me) then if you really really lucky you might have coffee meet ups near by that you can try different grinders, otherwise you are at the mercy of what grinders the specialist coffee shops have near you for taste testing.
My joke of a country did not order any from the updated vaccines for COVID-19, but still insists on keeping the state monopoly on it. We have private institutions where we can get pretty much any vaccine, but not COVID vaccines....
UK it will be possible to buy the vaccine in the new year at some point but not currently. Assuming it works the same as the flu vaccine you can book and pay at Boots online ahead of time and just turn up.
Its really hard to get the vaccine for free for the more moderate at risk groups if you are under 65 now, it used to be over 50s.
A smart switch for my espresso machine so it turns on a timer each morning so it’s ready for when I get up, it takes about 25 minutes to fully warm up. Also I can turn it on or off using voice controls, great when I want another coffee later in the day.
Majority of any e61 espresso machine is like that, pretty much par for the course for anything other than budget non e61 or some of the new high end espresso machines that use some variation of electrically heated groups.
Mine will be “ready” after about 15 minutes but as an e61 group head is a heavy block it takes along time to get good thermal stability. Difference is I can steam and extract shots at the same time with 2bar steam and 9bar espresso, shot after shot.
My espresso machine has a proper on/off switch, so I just leave that set to on and control the power from the smart switch.
No, its a smart thing switch as I have the hub, so its z wave. However I have a lot of smart home switches, lights and so on so that makes sense for me. Plenty of options if you do not want a hub now.
The espresso machine has a proper on off button so I just leave it in on position and the switch turns the power on and off
They nice machines but I wanted more consistent with its pressure and water flow, better steaming, not made by breville,and made with industry standard components that can last decades.
It’s a decent machine for the money but compared to its competitors from gaggia and rancilio what they lose in fancy programming or the pid or the easy steaming (which is still way off mine) they gain in actually having an opv (depending which one you have), build quality and self service.
I’ve seen far too many people have issues with breville stuff and then problems returning it. It’s not that good ones don’t exist it’s just that more reliable does.
To put your seven years into perspective I should be getting 30 to 40 years out of mine with some regular servicing.
It’s worse than that as it’s short term tax gains now but increased public health spending later from those same taxes when they start getting cancer in a decade or two.
Using the UK numbers, around 80k people die of smoking per year, costing the NHS alone £2.6bn, their full state pension cost is around £900m, so there is a sizeable gap between just the NHS cost and the amount on their pension as the pension saving has to be significantly more than the remaining years on their state pension as there is another set of costs next year, and the year after and so on… Total cost per year is estimates at about £12bn, but direct government cost is a bit over £4bn. This doesn’t include the fact that it ties up beds for other people who do not smoke, which means worse outcomes fro them, and this has knock on costs.
While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.
Would love to know what you guys think and your reasoning for it. I’m starting to see a lot of Apple Watches/Fitbits/Galaxy Watches in my area compared to more traditional timepieces.
I had a smart watch when they first came out and the experience was miserable, poor battery and slow response times. I know that’s improved now but it didn’t offer enough over and above what I can do with a chest strap HRM for exercise, my strap doesn’t even need the phone when I go out as it has offline storage.
I have a few mechanical watches I wear as accessories when going out that I love for their function, these will last decades. This is my other problem with smart watches, the battery isn’t going to last forever and the specs are eventually going to fall too far behind. I’m not spending hundreds on a good smart watch when I can buy a mechanical watch for the same price that lasts 10 times longer.
Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.
I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.
I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don’t want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.
I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)
I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.
Kalita Wave Tsubame Copper Dripper wave if you want flat bottomed and something more robust than glass. Otherwise I like my Hario Switch bu the base is like rubber so not all glass. Otherwise if you want 100% glass then the orea comes as glass now, super flexible for filter paper types as well if you get the negotiator to go with it.
Do you guys have any book reading goals for next year?
Personally, I am trying to read 15 books this year and mix in more non-fiction books.
What's a decently fancy coffee that's still affordable and will be well received even by non-coffee snobs?
I have been making the occasional coworker a cup of aeropressed coffee with good reviews thus far. Being that it is shift work, most of my coworkers are used to drinking the reduced syrup of a pot that’s been left on the burner too long (one coworker thanked me for leaving it for her!). Many don’t even know coffee doesn’t...
The simpleton version of the recent anti-static paper (youtu.be)
For the ones who find ourselves in the second slide of this strip....
UK porn watchers could have faces scanned (www.bbc.co.uk)
Looks like UK is going the same way as a few states. Spare a thought for us. So messed up this increasing surveillance state.
Scientists claim to have discovered secret to perfect espresso (www.theguardian.com)
Spoiler, its RDT...
Which song are you currently obsessed with?
I will start. Lovely by Billie Eilish. I have already played it 34 times and can’t get enough it. I feel like i could hear it all day.
New (to me) Grinder Monday (lemmy.world)
The postman delivered a new to me DF83 Gen 1 with SSP HU burrs. Just had fun dialing it in over lunch for espresso. It is a huge step up from the Niche Zero it replaces for espresso.
Any european (not necessarily EU) country where tourists can get vaccinated?
My joke of a country did not order any from the updated vaccines for COVID-19, but still insists on keeping the state monopoly on it. We have private institutions where we can get pretty much any vaccine, but not COVID vaccines....
Police across Britain equipped with live facial recognition bodycams (inews.co.uk)
cross-posted from: lemmy.nz/post/3829409
What is a fun gadget you have purchased that has added value to your life?
New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts (www.theguardian.com)
Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
what caused you to get into Linux?
What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
Do you prefer to wear a smartwatch or a regular watch?
Would love to know what you guys think and your reasoning for it. I’m starting to see a lot of Apple Watches/Fitbits/Galaxy Watches in my area compared to more traditional timepieces.
which distro and why do you prefer it over others?
Non plastic coffee cone recommendations
Anyone have a recommendations for non plastic cones for pour over?...