Nobody in their right mind should own a professional espresso machine at home. Which is exactly why, for years, i owned a professional espresso machine at home. I sold it after getting increasingly frustrated with having to wait for the machine to warm up before i could pull my first decent shot of the day. I still own a V60 dripper, an AeroPress, a French press, a cold brew pot, but truth be told, i mainly use my trusty Moccamaster KGBT coffee machine.

That doesn’t mean i haven’t found ways to make things more complicated than they should be. I’m not talking about filtering your water, storing your beans in vacuum canisters, and grinding your coffee fresh. Those are things you should absolutely do if you see coffee as something more than a mere shot of caffeine. I’m talking about systematically benchmarking paper filters before settling on Moccamaster’s own, because they produce a clean, bright, and generally good cup.

I’m talking about lightly spraying the beans with water before grinding them to prevent static and clumps. I’m even talking about using a sieve to remove the finest particles, which lead to uneven extraction, when i hear my grinder choking on light roasts. (I’m a bit concerned that friends thought it’d make the perfect gift for me, but turns out, they were right.) Those are things you should absolutely not do if you want to keep seeing coffee as something enjoyable.

You thought i was finished? Think again. I love the Moccamaster KGBT, but i’ll never understand why its shower head is so small (i hope that Coffeehaus will eventually make a metal version of their wide shower head). At the beginning of the brew, i have to stir the grounds a few times to make sure they’re properly saturated all around. At the end of the brew, i have to stir the slurry a few more times to make sure the bed is level. In a way, i’m recreating the motion of a pour-over to even out the extraction.

As one last flourish, i shake the hell out of the carafe to mix the different stages of the brew before serving. At this point, it’s more ritual than recipe, but i’m convinced that forgetting even one of these steps leads to a worse cup of coffee. It’s not even close — my poor wife will attest i can tell when she hasn’t stirred the grounds. So please, don’t try this at home. You’ll thank me for not making your life harder.

Apps

Picnic. A nifty little app to organize your photo library, hamstrung by a frustrating pricing model. It blends the swipes from Tinder to keep/delete your photos (brilliant) with the streaks from Duolingo to earn more free swipes each day (less brilliant). The 100-to-250 free swipes cover most days, so the subscription needs to justify itself. At €69.99/year, up from €29.99 just months ago, it really doesn’t.

Links

‌“The paper computer” by James Somers. “Shouldn’t one goal of rapid technical advancement be some melding of the physical and virtual worlds such that I can sit quietly in an easy chair with pen and pad […] and yet have the same flexibility, portability, persistence, and remixability as in the digital versions of these things?” I’m still convinced that ML and LLMs are the missing piece of the “electronic notebook” puzzle — the Microsoft Courier concept, to cite one infamous example, isn’t as unfeasible as it once was. The underlying tech isn’t the problem anymore, but the GUI on top of it still is. Doing away with it entirely might be an idea worth exploring.

“Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis” by Jake Handy. “There’s a specific kind of brain rot spreading through executive suites and VC circles right now. It looks like productivity. It sounds like innovation. It burns through tokens at a rate that would make your CFO cry. And it produces almost nothing of measurable value.” As always, people see the hammer before seeing the nail, but this time around, the hammer is riding on $1.6 trillion and there are no nails. Psychosis my ass.

Videos

“The BLUETOOTH CONNECTED Voice Actors” by String & Tell and Tawny Platis. That was surreal.