• 1 Post
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • I wouldn’t consider these huge issues, but there’s 3 areas where I think the miir design suffers relative to the chemex. The pourover part looks like just a single wall. Obviously the chemex is, too, but according to a quick look on wikipedia, stainless has ~10x the thermal conductivity of borosilicate glass, so your brew chamber is going to cool more quickly. No clue if it would be enough to make a difference in brew temp, though.

    The stainless carafe part sounds good, too, but stainless travel mugs almost always get lots of coffee residue buildup, and it’s a bit of a process to get them properly clean to the point where you don’t smell it. I always end up washing with baking soda and/or citric acid a few times. Glass stays cleaner, and it’s also easier to see how clean it is.

    Lastly, it might just be me, but every once in a while, my scale times out if I’m doing other stuff while making coffee, or I’ll make coffee without a scale. It’s really nice to be able to see visually how much coffee there is in the carafe.




  • No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there’s nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.

    For most jobs, the “filter” is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn’t mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that’s cause it’s really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the “filter”.

    You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.

    You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can’t just go to class, get all A’s and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.


  • The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It’s probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.





  • I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

    I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.



  • That lance Hedrick video had a lot of good relevant info.

    I’ll add that the definition of “light” changes as much as the definition of women’s pants sizes do. Its essentially “vanity sizing”, but for flavor. Most consumers, at the end of the day, want their coffee to taste exactly how they are used to, but they paradoxically also want to be having something “different” or “unique”. It’s why Hawaii is full of roasters selling $70 bags of coffee that taste the same as $8 grocery store bags.

    Roasters have to weigh whether to give accurate info that will appeal to us nerds, or whether to aim for the general populace. There are probably many roasters who legitimately don’t know better, but I’d reckon many roasters are just making the economical choice.


  • I am not familiar with the bags you are talking about (our bread bags aren’t stretchy), but this has a fairly straightforward explanation. Things that are elastic usually get stiffer when cold. This is part of why winter tires exist. There’s literally less molecular movement.

    You did say they stay crinkly/brittle even after warming up, though. This is likely due to another mechanism. When a solid is created from a liquid, there is typically some type of crystal structure (with notable exceptions like glass). A material can have multiple crystal structures due to how the molecules line up. Often, the crystals are tiny, so you don’t see them, but you can have large crystals if something is cooled slowly. That’s how you get gems.

    When crystals start to form, they start to incorporate as much of the surrounding material as possible. When they run into a neighboring crystal, they run out of material. Unless they just so happen to line up perfectly, they will remain separate. The space between them, called a grain boundary, can be a weak spot in something like a diamond. In metals, more grain boundaries actually make things stronger, usually. This is because metal crystals can slide along the plane of the crystal. This is why blacksmiths will quench stuff; the rapid cooling leads to smaller crystals, which leads to more grain boundaries.

    A metal won’t completely form crystals from every available molecule. Every process happens over time, and cooling a metal down extra cold causes it to shrink, which can cause any straggler molecules to join up with the crystals, which makes the metal stronger. That’s why some metal objects are “cryohardened”.

    The last factor is that changing temperatures can change the most energetically favorable crystal structure. Tin pest is a famous example where in really cold weather, tin can change from its useful form to a brittle crumbly useless form, and it can only be fixed by remelting it.

    It’s all a bit weirder with plastics cause they can be crystalline, non crystalline, or a mix, but my guess is you’ve changed the structure of it.


  • The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, so your process has to be dialed in per bean, which is why most people end up just sticking with 1 type of beans.

    Different roast levels are going to have different densities. Different bean varieties (and localities) are going to have different density and size. The age of the bean comes into play as well.

    Some variables affect the actual brewing, others affect how the beans grind. Every once in a while, i’ll have a bean that just seems to make more fines for whatever reason. I guess it’s just down to the stiffness of the bean and the size.

    If you want to be able to switch beans at will, you’ll need to keep notes for each variety, and adjust back and forth as needed.

    I don’t think you’ll be able to get a new bean right on your first shot no matter how you try to adjust. If you adjust for one variable, there’s still all the others.




  • I think there’s a lot of fluff for sure. I do think there is some real technique to it, though.

    Pouring so that you keep a higher volume of water in the pourover will help to keep the temperature stable, which should help keep extraction up. The two extremes here would be if you dripped water through in like 20 additions, letting the bed settle each time vs. doing it all in one addition. The average temperature throughout would be higher in the latter case.

    Bloom should also have an effect for freshly roasted coffee. If you dump a bunch of hot water on really fresh coffee, a decent amount of the grounds will just float on top of bubbles, insulated away from the actual water. It matters less and less as coffee ages/off gasses.

    Agitation should also have an effect. Things dissolve better when agitated; that much is obvious. The only additional thing to consider is that no coffee grinder creates perfectly uniform grounds. One thing that any beer brewer can tell you is that the “filter” is not what actually filters a wort from the spent grains; the spent grains themselves form a filter to get rid of any fine particles. Similarly in coffee, a lot of the fines will actually get caught up on the larger particles, provided the larger particles are allowed to settle. If you keep the grounds agitated the whole time, the fines will get sucked into the filter paper itself. Some will probably make it through into the cup, which could affect taste and texture, while much will clog up the filter, slowing the whole brew down.

    It ends up depending on how good your grinder is (and if your beans are especially prone to making fines), and what type of filter you use. If you theoretically had a perfect grinder and beans, maybe you’d want to keep the grounds agitated the whole time, but if you have a crappy grinder, maybe you want to have no agitation at all.

    Personally, I have an okay grinder, and i always use fresh beans, so I try to bloom my grounds with maybe 20% of the water, and agitate as much as possible. Then I add basically as much water as my pourover will hold at once, and I’ll top it off gently as soon as room opens up.




  • There’s basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you’ve done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.

    I’m still super new to freecad, and I haven’t done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.

    There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn’t been implemented yet in the main fork cause it’s pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there’s a lot of things that can break