PE Cold Brew Coffee Process

A quick video tour of our Cold Brew process for making coffee. Enjoy!

Coffee Technician - Jason Hogue
Music - Sweet Love (sweetlove.bandcamp.com)
Editing - James Re

• 4 cups of water in the Toddy Cold Brew brewer.
• 3 cups of grinds sprinkled on top of that.
• Do Not Stir.
• 5 more cups of water poured slowly into the grinds. Wet them thoroughly.

This recipe makes a brew that does not need to be thinned out with additional water. The original Toddy recipe produces a coffee concentrate which we used to drink straight, one which made us way too caffeinated and made us go through coffee beans like whoa. This mixture is the right amount of flavor and caffeination, using the least amount of grinds. Pour into a glass with some ice, and add simple syrup and/or cream to taste.

Repeating background image rendering issue for iPad and iOS

Every now and again, you run across a rendering issue or bug and think "There is no way I can fix that, I'll need to submit this as a bug to the browser people". Designers and developers hate those issues — they are almost like admitting defeat. But when there is nothing we can do, there is nothing we can do.

Yesterday I ran against an issue that I thought was a lost cause. We had a funny rendering issue on non-Retina iOS devices with a simple repeating background image on the body. The png in question was only 41kb, and was large enough at 256x256px, so it couldn't have been a memory issue. We were stumped.

A few Google searches later, trying different words and combinations of "iOS", "iPad", "rendering issue", "background image", and others, we found someone with a similar issue. Thank god for StackOverflow.com.

As it turned out, turning on hardware acceleration for webkit devices did the trick. The code we ended up implementing is as follows (in SASS format):

body {
    background: url('../img/rough_diagonal.png') 0 0 repeat transparent;
    color: #333; 
    font: normal 100%/1.75 $alt-font; 
   
   .touch & {
       -webkit-transform: translateZ(0); 
   }
}

We use Modernizr for feature detection, which is where the .touch class will come from. We do not apply this fix to desktop browser without touch, as the rule will effect the way position: fixed elements are "stuck" to the top of the browser window. We don't want to "stick" anything to the top of the viewport for touch devices, anyway.

So there you go. Sometimes, when a bug seems like the fix is out of your control, you get lucky. Thanks to a strong developer community on sites like StackOverflow and CSS-Tricks, we can benefit from the frustration and Eureka moments of others.

Discrete Modules of Functionality Need a Discrete Module of Content

Had a great conversation today... I love good conversations with people who may not speak your language, but are in the same country. The people I was conversing with had a particular set of problems, but none of them were that unique. They are the same problems that a lot of large companies face. And the conversation keep coming back to content. Content is king, but damn if great content is not a pain in the butt.

And that got me thinking... one of Project Evolution's businesses is creating web-based CMSs for companies. That's a good niche to be in, but what happens when a company has content assets far beyond what they need for the web? How do they manage content? How can they manage "chunks" of content — short form, long form, multiple languages — all in the same system? Can we craft a solution for that? Of course we can...

Karen McCrane states the problem well:

And that's just it. Even we have to remember — the makers of Content Management Systems — that while some companies are only getting into the web CMS game now, others are far ahead of the curve and need more abstract systems that can manage chunks of content, and most importantly, help make the process of creating new content more fluid for the author.

Let's make tools that help authors author and publishers publish. It's a challenge that I would like to think more about, because the need is out there. The first wave was Content Management and Publishing, and the next wave needs to take it all even further.