Good coffee storage needs to be airtight in one direction — for the first day or two after roasting, the beans emit small amounts of carbon dioxide, so air should be able to escape whatever the beans are in. But to prevent early staleness, outside air shouldn’t be able to enter.

Proper storage will prevent the beans from going stale early, but they’ll still lose most of their flavor and settle into a dull, flat flavor profile by about two weeks after roasting. Refrigerating or freezing the beans doesn’t seem to extend this timeline and can introduce moisture in practice, so don’t do it — just put them in something airtight and leave them somewhere dark and dry, like a kitchen cabinet.

Directed by David Gallardo

Features music from the album “Mansions 2”.

Bonsai builds dynamic web sites that run anywhere. Perfect for portfolios, catalogues and other image-heavy sites.

There’s no database or admin interface - just templates for the HTML, YML files for the content, and the file system defines the hierarchy. Upload the results and you’re away.

Nicely done.

via One Thing Well

Complexity is bloated, slow, burdensome. Worse yet, our data is often tied up in proprietary formats, in databases that can get corrupt, in formats that don’t speak to other programs.

Simplicity is fast, lean, light. Data in simple formats — such as text — is mobile, can be ported to any program, is not locked into a proprietary program or database.

Making a safe place on streets for cyclists (and pedestrians) boosts sales for the small businesses in the area.

This according to a recent report from the New York Department of Transportation. The study found that on commercial blocks where new bike lanes were built, the businesses saw a nearly 50 percent increase in sales.

via Internazionale

Growing your own food is like printing your own money.

via Signal vs. Noise

Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There’s almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world.

Granted, occasionally one sees naive people try to make things better. These people almost always fail. We can and do improve performance for specific scenarios that people with the ability to allocate resources believe impact business goals, but this work is Sisyphean. There’s no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business.

Great lecture.

Simpler methods may perform better when model assumptions are violated. And model assumptions are always violated, at least to some extent.