More info at RobotGossip and RobotsRule. Here’s another video (via Digg):

The design is apparently based upon work by Sean Frawley and Dan Getz while in high school. Their work is said to be based on a 19th century french invention.

A comment on my last espresso machine post reminded me that I never really wrote about how the new machine worked out. So here’s that post.

The new machine is fabulous

It took a few days to start getting the hang of consistently good shots, but those first few cups made me realize what great espresso was really all about. My first thoughts were, literally, “Oh my God, what have I been drinking?” This is real espresso. Much as I loved my now deceased Barrista machine, it didn’t make espresso. It made pseudo-espresso, a dopplegänger imitation of what espresso should be. Basically it was just really strong drip coffee.

With the new Rancilio Sylvia, I immediately began tasting many more levels of flavor between beans. I now know what stale beans taste like. With the Barrista I could distinguish and enjoy the differences between high east African, Central American or Sumatran beans, but it turns out those flavors were masked and muddied. The taste difference is sort of like how our TV looked pretty good before seeing what HD could do. Since getting this machine I’ve only use darker, oily roasts, but the next trip to the coffee store I’m going to get several smaller bags of various beans and roasts.

The gateway drug dispensing gateway drug

It only took a few weeks before I bought a grinder (Baratza Solis Maestro Plus). Before, I would have the beans ground when buying coffee (from Porto Rico on St. Marks). Since I burn through a pound of coffee pretty quickly, I wasn’t too concerned about the ground coffee getting stale and as it turned out, the Barrista was masking the increasingly stale taste anyway. But the main reason for the grinder was that different beans and different roasts of different beans requiring slight adjustments to the grind.

Negatives

Much as I am loving the machine, there are a few areas where it could definitely be improved upon.

Noise. I haven’t opened it up yet to check if anything could be better dampened, but the machine is quite loud enough to make noise a concern.

Cooldown time. After steaming milk, there is a bit of a process to bring down the boiler temperature for espresso. What I do is flip the hot water switch and run the wand into the sink. At the same time I tend to run hot water through the empty portafilter. That makes sure the portafilter is at least somewhat heated, and clears leftover grinds from the inner screen. These steps are loud. Because of these steps, I’m not using the three-hole steaming tip I bought — it’s too much hassle to clear the wand into another container rather than the sink. I’m not sure about initial heatup times since my wife and kids tends to turn the machine on before letting me know it’s time to drag my butt out of bed. By the time I finally stumble into the kitchen, the machine is always ready to go.

A ball joint on the steaming wand would be welcome. I’m not the first person to bring this up, but there’s enough of a hacking community around this machine that I expect someone has already figured it out and will sell a kit eventually.

For some reason, if I don’t use enough coffee, my fancy 58mm tamper will bind the edges of the portafilter basket. I will probably buy some other portafilter baskets in the future. Unfortunately, after reading this, possibly more tampers too (those Pullman tampers are beautiful).

One more thing

While writing this, I stumbled across this super-modded Rancilio controlled by an original Nintendo gamepad. Wow.

Last year I posted Sixteen ways to spell Hanukkah, here’s an updated list showing this years counts for the various spellings:

• Hanukkah : 25,400,000 hits.
• Chanukah : 5,090,000 hits.
• Hanukah : 1,120,000 hits.
• Hannukah : 1,390,000 hits.
• Chanuka : 841,000 hits.
• Chanukkah : 439,000 hits.
• Hanuka : 954,000 hits.
• Channukah : 537,000 hits.
• Chanukka : 486,000 hits.
• Hanukka : 185,000 hits.
• Hannuka : 139,000 hits.
• Hannukkah : 82,400 hits.
• Channuka : 34,700 hits.
• Xanuka : 15,300 hits.
• Hannukka : 970 hits.
• Channukkah : 940 hits.
• Channukka : 644 hits.
• Chanuqa : 22 hits.

36,515,976 total hits. Again, Google’s index seems to have grown quite a bit, the total number of hits is more than double the total from 2005. This file contains my Hanukkah spelling counts for the past three years.

Thanks again to Jeremy Blachman for posting the 2004 numbers.

Happy Hanukkah, see you again in 2007.

Recently, I’ve spent some time working with MediaWiki for Lila’s school’s web site. A small part of what I’ve been doing has been implementing an exisiting design onto the wiki backend. In an effort not to overcomplicate anything (think longevity) I built the entire design adaptation on the default MediaWiki MonoBook theme. Everyone who’s visited Wikipedia has seen what this looks like. Monobook is a very well constructed theme with clearly defined parts that degrade nicely without its stylesheets. So far, with the exception of these two small changes, I’ve able to do everything I needed to with the default page structure.

First change: Fixing bad portlet IDs

Editing Mediawiki:Sidebar allows for nearly complete customization of the sidebar links. Custom sections automatically get custom IDs which can then be styled. There is one thing that seems like a bug however: If a section heading has a space in it, the portlet ID will have an illegal name. Classes can have spaces in their selectors, but IDs can’t. Here’s what I did:

and the new one:

'>

Simple enough, PHP’s str_replace is used to swap underscores for spaces. I’m still feeling my way around the MediaWiki codebase, so this might not be the best solution to the problem, but it does what it needs to with a very lightweight function.

Second change: Classes from page title

I needed to change the background of the globalWrapper element depending on the page, the way I accomplished this was to use the page-title. This has one initial drawback, namely that colons are not allowed in CSS class names. However the workaround above can be recast here with added benefit. Switching colons for spaces results in multiple class names, so namespaces can be styled too.

Here’s the old code:

And the new code:

This method would seem preferrable to adding a CSS import rule which would look for a custom-named file. Even though CSS load errors don’t break pages with visible 404 errors, they would slow down page loads and litter the server logs. Checking that the CSS file exists is somewhat costly, and I suspect MediaWiki’s cacheing isn’t something that can be quickly skimmed over and implemented.

There appears to be a pageCSS extension somewhere, the hooks are even specified in MonoBook’s header, but I couldn’t find a working download and CVS repository doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

Buy a Wii and cute, giggling (French|Japanese|American) girls will flail around your generic apartment.

Nintendo’s Wii promotional site is brilliant. Cute giggling girls aside, these videos are really fun to watch. And effective as marketing too, because we’re immediately curious about what unseen thing these people are looking and smiling at, they also using marketing online, by getting agencies as Melbourne SEO expert to make a good marketing campaign to reach more costumers using different websites exactly like https://factschronicle.com/ or even http://www.brandedimage.com/service-areas/.

Nintendo isn’t just marketing to non-gamers, they really did build this “with everyone in mind. My favorite videos were the kids in this family and this older couple, who go from stoic to ecstatic in about 5 milliseconds. Looks like fun, though I’d much rather being playing catch outside.

What can Sony and Microsoft possibly have to counter this? (Some aliens in a generic dark and smokey sci-fi world with big explosions and inexplicably ubiquitous crates everywhere?)

Another good thing about the Wii controllers is that they will force players to get up off the sofa or at very least hold their arms up. That means there will be fatigue and that mean it will be very difficult for kids to get as sucked in as the typical twitching thumbs console game. Which got me thinking:

In the near future, there will be a YouTube video showing how to play Wii without leaving the sofa. Players will demonstrate ways of using the controller with as little physical movement as possible.

Mark. My. Words.

Update Through a random stroke of luck I was able to play a pre-release Wii yesterday. Well, mostly Lila played but I got to work the menus. The Wii really is that good, this thing is going to own Christmas.

(continued from this previous post)

After more research, I’m switching my preference from the the Gaggia Classic to the Rancilio Silvia.

Finding Sweet Maria’s Rancilio Silvia page did a lot to sway me. They’ve got some very good close up pictures showing the parts, and as of July 2005, they have stopped selling the Gaggia Classic.

“We don’t stock the Classic model anymore, because I feel that the Rancilio Silvia is a better machine in the same price class. I am leaving the description for posterity sake.”

Even more exciting is the discovery that there is a Rancilio Sylvia modding community.

A modding community for an espresso machine.

That takes a minute to sink in. But there are people hot-rodding these machines all over the place: Precision digital thermostats. More digital thermostats, Add-on spare parts. Faster warmup tutorials. Collected tips and mods. Extreme mods from Taiwan.

And then there’s Randy Glass’ opus, Espresso! My Espresso!

The decision is mostly settled in my mind, but I’m going to give it a few more days before buying. I’d wait longer, but I’d like to be familiar with the machine before relatives arrive for Thanksgiving later this month.

Update: I bought the Sylvia, it should be here sometime Thursday.

Two-months later: Two months of great coffee

After six or seven years of hard, dedicated service, my espresso machine is finally giving up the ghost. It’s a Starbucks Barista and made gallons of fantastic coffee over the years. I’d buy this exact machine again, but I’m feeling ready to move up to a commercial portafilter instead of the pressurized one this uses.

I make coffee at home because I drink a lot of it and I’d go broke if I had to buy it all. While writing this, I finished my third double-shot espresso of the day. So far. At a conservative average that’s $10 a day in coffee, and most days would be more. Saving $300-400 a month on coffee pretty much justifies any price for an espresso machine. A $500 machine will have absolutely paid for itself in just 6 weeks.

Super Automatic machines don’t interest me much, not just because they’re a fortune, but because they have too many moving parts to maintain and postpone maintenance. Additionally, we occasionally have roaches in our building, and NYC roaches love coffee. Having a reservoir of spent grounds on the counter would be inviting an infestation. Besides, I don’t like the idea of putting off cleanup for days: I make coffee, I clean up, I’m done.

I’m leaning towards a Gaggia Classic, because the reviews are universally excellent, it uses a commercial portafilter, isn’t too big, has a powerful pump and heats up quickly. I have a few reservations and I’ve been trying to find one to look at in person, but I’ve had no luck at stores near me, and I kind of hate shopping anyway. My three main questions:

• What is the vertical clearance between the portafilter and the drip tray? (ie. will my preferred 3 inch tall cups fit underneath? My guess from pictures is about 2 5/8 inches — WLL lists the clearance as 3.25 inches, see note below)
• Can the steaming wand be replaced with a bare metal tip?
• How well sealed are the internals? (roach concern again)

I’m going to call Whole Latte Love when I get a minute and find out the answers. If you are shopping for coffee products, their site together with CoffeeGeek are incredible resources.

Update: I haven’t yet called Whole Latte Love, but I did find that they list cup height in their “Compare-o-matic” page. That lists the Gaggia as having a cup clearance fo 3.25 inches, though I’m not certain that measures the new spouted portafilter, which extends lower.