Archive of posts from 2021/06 📝

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.

This interview series actually started with me chatting with coffee bloggers, who represented the intersection of three of my interests: websites, writing, and coffee. Earlier this year, I saw that there was a new speciality coffee blog on the scene, Mandy's Daily Grind, and I had to reach out to learn more about the project.

The title of this post must be in the running for the longest title for a blog post on this blog thus far. That aside, I just wanted to take a quick moment to say that the thermal printer project was mentioned on the Adafruit blog. For those who are not familiar with Adafruit, they are in the business of manufacturing and selling hardware. They sell a lot of hardware that works with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, including the thermal printer that I am programming at the moment.

A key part of my "daily update" on the thermal printer is the daily calendar. This calendar shows all of the events I have in a day, as well as any tasks that I have added to Google Calendar as an all-day event. I also display all the birthdays and holidays in my daily update using some of the same code I use to retrieve my daily update. Birthdays and holidays are only printed on Mondays.

Based in Glasgow's Southside, It All Started Here serves coffee from a rotating selection of roasters as well as cakes and other treats baked in-house. In this interview, I chat with the owner of It All Started Here, William, about his inspiration behind starting the cafe, the Glasgow speciality coffee scene, and more. I hope you enjoy the interview.

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

A few weeks ago I visited South Queensferry, the home of Brew Culture Coffee and Tea. I had wanted to walk over the Forth Road Bridge and also visit Brew Culture, which opened earlier this year as the only speciality coffee shop in the area. I had previously interviewed the owner, Robert, about his blog a few months prior, but I wanted to ask him a few questions about starting his coffee shop. I sent Robert some questions over email which he kindly responded to. I hope you enjoy the interview.

I have been a fan of Coffee People, a digital and print zine about the world of speciality coffee, for months. I first read one of their magazines last year and the content intrigued me. A mix between poetry, photographs, drawings, writing, and other creative media, Coffee People explores a theme through the lens of coffee in each edition. The work I have seen in the editions I have read has been creative and engaging, which is what led me to submit an entry myself.

Ruben Schade, a technical writer who blogs about the internet, technology, and many other topics, featured a quick post on me on his blog. In only a few hundred words, Ruben was able to summarise accurately exactly what I like to do on this blog. The first sentence in particular stood out to me, which was:

How would you like to send me a message that gets printed so that I can read it on paper? You can do this by sending me a webmention, which is a way of sending comments from your own website that I will then receive. Using webmentions, you can retain ownership over the comments you send other people. I know that webmentions are not widely used, and do require a bit of technical knowledge to use, but for now I can say I support printing webmentions.