There's a British game show called countdown where one of the rounds involves getting a series of numbers and trying to put them into a mathematical formula to give a randomly selected number. It's an interesting brain puzzle and I find myself doing it often when I see a series of numbers. Like I saw the numbers 2 9 and 3 in order for some reason recently, so I bounced them around until I was able to get "The Square(2nd) Root of 9 equals 3" So if you ask me what I'm thinking about there's a nonzero chance that the answer will be putting numbers into math.
Stuff In my possession: A bunch of DVDs* "Kevin, we already know you have so many DVDs I hear you shouting at your screen. Yes, I know, but I want to talk about something interesting regarding them. ANd I can't remember if I've written about it before. I recently came into a pile of used DVDs and have been in the process of ripping the video files off to add to my plex server. I'm pretty good at the process by now, having been doing it since, I dunno, 2017? But every time I put a new DVD into my drive, I get a little thrill of excitement wondering what the DVD is going to be called. Sure I know the name of the movie or TV show on the DVD but that's not the same thing as what the computer recognizes as the name of the disc.
DVDs store data. That data needs to be organized in some way. If you’ve touched an actual computer in theist 10 years you’ve probably seen a filesystem. This is typically organized with a Hard drive, then a bunch of folders and subfolders with all the individual files floating around somewhere in there. Typically we’re not too interested in the majority of the files, but there are certain ones we really like. For example, the Film I’m currently writing this text in is in a folder called Newsletter drafts which is in a documents folder which is in a user folder which is in a another folder inside another one until you get to the top level, which is the hard drive. Knowing where it is is important, although not as important as it once was, because my word processor has an “open recent files” option, so I can just pull this back up without going through the entire heirchy. But the program I’m using is also a bunch of files inside a series of nested subfolders. I don’t need to know anything about that organization because the software handles itself on my behalf. So effectively the entire structure is invisible to me the end user. I could go learn it, but why bother. I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but you get the idea. I hope.
So the computer needs to know what to call the top level of the DVD and someone somewhere originally had to decide what to call it. But it's not exactly a piece of information that was ever meant to be public facing. They needed a name to use when authoring the DVD and they picked whatever worked best in the moment and their workflow. Usually this is something simple like "jackass2" or "taxiS1D2" to refer to Jackass Number Two or The second disc of the first season of Taxi. but sometimes they get weird. There's a disc in my drive right now with the name 1000029739. I have no idea what that number refers to, or how it relates to the content of the disc, but I really like the mystery. And the mystery will be even deeper for you because I'm not even going to tell you what's on the disc. JJ Abrams would love this.
*Note: I use DVD to mean any disc based physical media used primarily for watching video. This includes DVD classic, Bluray, 4k Blu ray (Bad branding if you ask me) and even Laserdisc. All of these (except laserdisc) store video digitally on a disc. Laserdisc stores its video signal in an analogue format, but we don’t have time for that right now. Besides, I only own one laserdisc.
Poorly Organized Thoughts On: How to make coffee I like coffee, but I also and independently like all the different ways there are to make coffee. I have half a dozen devices for making coffee myself, an there are always more. And as many ways as there are to make coffee, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to tweak any given process when you factor in things like grind size, water temperature, bean, roast level and water to coffee ratio.
I want to talk about that last one for a moment. There's not universal truths when it comes to coffee making, but one of the most standardized things is the goffee to water ratio. Without over complicating things, a very commonly agreed upon "good" ratio is 60 grams of coffee for a liter of water. This comes out to roughly a 1:16 ratio of coffee to water. This is a good ratio because you get a maximum of the good coffee flavors without over extracting. Over extracting a coffee brew pulls all of the worst, bitterest tasting, solubles into your coffee. If you've had an over extracted cup it probably didn't taste very good. And probably nothing like it smelled.
Some people just think this is how coffee tastes, because the majority of coffees they've had are over-extracted. But they don't know that . They just think it's too strong, so they want to make a "weaker" cup of coffee and then doctor it up with cream and sugar and sprinkles. There's nothing wrong with cream and sugar or any other additives to coffee. Drink it how you want, but also I think it's a good idea to start with a great base if you going to have coffee at all.
But instead people end up in a cycle of putting less coffee into their brewer and more water and making a worse and worse cup in hopes of making it better. I still remember the most significant example of this I experienced in my life. I was probably middle school aged, and I was offered the opportunity to help make the coffee for Sunday morning at church. My church had a fancy commercial coffee maker that brewed right into the large pump action carafes. This meant making the coffee was a pretty full proof process. You opened the basket, put in a filter, added the coffee, and then closed everything up and hit the start button.
But when the very nice woman was explaining these steps to me, she made it clear that I should only use half of the pre-filled coffee packets that came with the machine, because otherwise the coffee would be too strong. I thought it was weird that pre-portioned packets of coffee wouldn't come in the right size, but what do I know? Well now I do know. I've done some research on the tools and packets involved and what I know is that those carafes held about 3 liters of coffee. and the prepared packets had about 2 ounces of ground coffee. 2 ounces, is roughly 60 grams, which means that we were already starting on the back foot, where we had less coffee that we should have for that volume of water. But by cutting the coffee packet in half, we ended up with roughly 30 grams of coffee for 3 liters of water. Meaning our final ratio was much closer to 1:100 coffee to water instead of 1:16.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I'm sorry to all the people who drank my terrible coffee at church. I hope you;ve had better coffee since.
Stuff I'm Reading: I'm still in a bit of a reading slump, as I ave been most of the year. But a youtuber I liked recommended a few short books that felt like twilight zone episodes, and that was a good enough reason to try one (or all of them) out. The first one I could get my hands on was The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. It's a relatively short novella, at roughly 120 pages long in the copy I have. It takes place in a giant factory of indeterminate process, and follows 3 employees who aren't even sure how their jobs serve the unstated purpose of the factory. It's sort of a meditation on meaningless jobs and I'm enjoying it. I hope to finish it this week.
