Archive of posts from 2021/07 📝

If you walk around the City of Edinburgh, there's a chance that you run into at least one police box, a large metal box formerly owned by the police that were used for communication by police officers. Portable radio communication and modern technology rendered these police boxes much less useful than they were before, leading them to be sold off. Now, a few passionate entrepreneurs are running cafes in these former police boxes.

The goal of my blog search engine is to make content as easy to find on my website as possible. Before the latest update, you could use my search engine to find a page based on a term that appeared either in the URL, meta description, or title of a page. However, I kept thinking about how I could enhance the search engine to make content even easier to find. Since I started thinking about this, I have looked at my search engine and made a number of improvements. Most improvements are related to either code efficiency or content discovery. In this article, I'll share a bit about how I implemented TextRank on my site.

I recently launched a search engine for my blog, allowing visitors to find pages on my website. The search engine lets you search through page "h1"s (a new change, previously the engine supported "title" tags instead), meta descriptions, and URLs to find the resources that you need. For instance, you could search "Aeropress" and get a list of all of my Aeropress-related posts.

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

A few weeks ago I came across the Keybow, a small mechanical keyboard developed by Pimoroni that is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero. After doing some digging, I realised that the Keybow was designed to be coded, meaning I could create my own custom keyboard functions using this device. I let the keyboard sit in the back of my mind for a few weeks until earlier this week when I decided that I was going to take the leap and give the Keybow a try.

When was the last time you wrote a physical letter, with handwriting? I cannot accurately answer this question for myself. Part of me wants to believe that I have written a letter by hand and sent it to someone. However, I cannot think of a single occasion where this is true. Perhaps when I used to enter into magazine competitions when I was a kid, although that was not a full letter so much as filling out a form to enter a competition.

About a week ago, I posted a question on Instagram: what is your favourite coffee and food pairing? I asked this question as a result of a discussion I was having with a friend and my ongoing thoughts on coffee as a culinary experience. Three respondents indicated they liked something sweet and/or a pastry with their coffee. One person said that their favourite coffee and food pairing was an espresso affogato, a surprising response because I did not consider that espresso affogatos are in fact already a pairing of coffee and food.

I am in the process of producing two zines. Each zine features photos centred around a particular theme. I will not spoil too much since I would like to make a full announcement after I have print copies ready to distribute. For now, all you need to know is I am working on two zines and both of them contain photos.

I have asked a few people lately when they drink coffee. I am interested in this because I understand that we all drink coffee at different times, in different quantities, and in different contexts. I want to learn more about how others consume coffee. To keep the discussion going, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my personal coffee routine. This routine has stayed roughly the same over the last few months as I work from home. The major changes have been the equipment I use to brew, from brewer changes to, more recently, the purchase of a new grinder.

Photo credit: Carolyn West.