@decentespressomachines

Since the Decent Espresso Machine has a tablet on it, and the machine is sitting in your kitchen, I always felt that it should display nice artwork, that complements your home and tastes. When the Decent is not being used, it cools down, the tablet dims to a settable brightness, and displays Decent-themed artwork I'd commissioned. I'd always planned on revisiting the artwork that's on there, and made the process of replacing my artwork, very clear (it's a /saver/ directory on the tablet). Some people have gone further and written app extensions that make it easier. But I'd like to take this idea waaaay further. Years ago, I had a (non money making) side project called "Pixcycler.com", whose goal was to upcycle low power LED screens most of us own, into art displayers for your home. I hired a retired Dutch art publisher (she had a background in legal clearance issues) living in the UK to find and organize, a vast collection of open license art, from museums around the world. It all had to be "open license", high resolution (3000 pixels or greater). She added metadata on every file indicating the source, license, artist, photo name, and more. All images have been tidily categorized. Over several years, the archive grew to tens of thousands of images, about 1TB large. I believe it's one of the largest curated open license images in the world, verifying and aggregating as it does, all the museum collections we could find. On the Diaspora owner's group, there's a renewed interest in the screen saver, and a lot of Decent owners are programmers. So... I've announced that I'm opening up the archive to all, sharing my google drive of the archive https://tinyurl.com/decentart and encouraging people to make use of the archive, however they like. I'd love for: 1) the tablet on the Decent to display your favorite art 2) to make use of this currently-unused massive collection of Open Access art. And a big callout of thanks to Annemieke Dolfing, who did all this collection work for me, over years. I know she'd really love to see it come to something. -john

2022-01-16

COVID causes move to faster USA shipping from Decent, no extra cost While we ship our espresso machines via UPS/FEDEX, so they arrive in 2 to 4 days, we've continued to use the postal services to send our coffee accessories. Due to COVID, postal services have tripled in prices, and become much slower. This is mostly due to the lack of passenger flights, with unused baggage capacity used for most air mail packages. A few days ago, Postal Services from Hong Kong to the USA were completely suspended. And yesterday, Hong Kong ordered all flights from most of the Western World, to be stopped for (at least) the next 2 weeks. We're battling a COVID outbreak here, and trying to get back to COVID-zero, which we've enjoyed for about a year. A year ago, I had programmed support in our shipping software, for a lower cost service from UPS, called World Wide Express (WWE). It has a completely different programming API, and a need to pre-sort packages. Back then, it was much more expensive than the postal services, so we didn't use it, but now.... We've done the calculations, and while we charge customers $10 to ship accessories to the USA, the average package is actually costing us $14. That's not too much of a difference. Now, with UPS's WWE, that's going up to an $18 average, which I feel is still OK. So: we can continue to afford to offer the same shipping rates to the USA on our accessories, as well as free shipping for purchases of 3-or-more items. Delivery time to the USA will hugely speed up with this change. Previously, using the postal service, the average delivery time was 10.8 days. But via UPS in December, the average was an incredible 1.9 days. You can see 15 months of tracking stats I've been keeping, in the chart above. It's a really good service. I've been long wanting to change to UPS for accessories for another reason. Every day, after our chef Michael has finished making lunch, he walks over to the post office with a massive quantity of each days' orders. There's no package pick up with an inexpensive airmail rate, you have to take packages to them. The load has been getting to be a btt much for him. I knew we had to transition to another way.

2022-01-06

A frustrating chatbot gave me this idea Opening up a facebook chat yesterday with a company I buy from, led me down a immediately frustrating robot-conversation experience. At first, I thought it was a human, and then the robot didn't understand what I wrote, seemingly requiring me to add [Square Brackets] around my request. Even when a human (I think?) entered, I didn't know it for sure, nor their name. Instead of letting the frustration get to me, I thought: "I ABSOLUTELY never want anyone dealing with Decent Espresso to have this experience." And so, a half day of programming later with @respond.io (the fantastic CRM software we use), when you're chatting with Decent (via Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc...) we now tell you which human you're dealing with. And we never, ever, hand you to a robot. I've long had this in our web-based customer support, since I programmed it myself. There's a photo of the human you're talking to, on every message. There are some robotic emails ("Here's your Invoice"...) but they're clearly marked as such, as collapsed/hidden by default. Something I've come to really dislike about modern company iteractions is how faceless and nameless it is. When you know someone's name, you know they have responsibility. If they screw up, give you bad advice or rude service, you can complain, and there'll be repercussions. And that's if it goes badly. Since you know their name, you can also thank them personally for exceptional service. At my previous company, Lyris, we had an unusual quota for our support department. Every representative had to receive two unsolicited "thank you" letters, sent to their boss, for a job exceptionally well done. We only wanted to keep people who went beyond the ordinary, to delight. A postscript: that company with the frustrating robot? They actually provided exceptionally good "human chat" support, fixing my bug within 2 hours and releasing it the next day. And they were fun to chat to. Their name? I have no idea, and can't thank them. -john

2021-12-31

I’ve long thought that retail needs to think of themselves like a street musician would: people are busy, on their way somewhere, and you need to do something that stops them in their tracks, makes them look at you, and puts them firmly on your side. A great cafe/store name is hard to create, but self deprecating humor is one of the best ways to achieve this. I’m writing this in a cafe/florist combination @hayfeverfloralgifts in Hong Kong, that made me smile. I have an hour or so to kill while I wait for Bugs to finish at the hairdressers to repair the “highlights gone horribly wrong” so what could be more pleasant than a flat white, apple pie, among flowers ? Pleasantly surprised that the flat white is very competent. The staff were happy to chat about the funny name, and warm the pie. The reality inside lives up to expectations. It reminds of the massive trade show sign Decent Espresso uses, that says “ I’ve had worse” in massive letters. It never fails to draw a smile, start a conversation, and enable me to have them taste a shot I pull, to see if they indeed agree. Humor, humility are great ways to start a conversation. Hence “Decent Espresso”.

2021-12-26

I've been cooking all week for today's company feast, of homemade beef wellington. It's our tradition for the boss to cook the annual feast for everyone. We've got so much to be grateful for, as the Decent team has really come together this year. I have a hiring policy of letting people have a try at working for us, and not being too fussy about their resume, so they have a stab at getting the job. I do this because the college I went to, Bates College in Maine, makes SAT scores optional, and weighs the in-person interview as the most important criteria. They do this because they found that test scores and grades were a very poor predictor of future college success. As it happens, Bates was the only school that let me in, out of 14 I applied to. I was in the bottom 1/3rd of my high school class, but in fact, did succeed at Bates. So, I take that lesson, and apply it to how I run Decent. The downside is that we do hire more than we need to, and then have a high "drop out rate", just as a College would. In the end, though, I love everyone who is here now, with me at Decent. To thank them all for making this work, absolutely every employee got a significant and permanent raise today, right before desert was served. So thank you everyone who has been reading my posts this year, as you're all part of the great year we've had. We feel all the more lucky for it, knowing how hard and awful it's been for many of you. Let's hope next year goes better. ps: we are staying open through the holidays, and shipping every day. Last year, we closed from the 24th to the 2nd, and we got quite a lot of grief from people for the long delay in getting their orders, as well as not having my best staff available to answer tech support. So now, we stay open. We might be slightly sleepy from over-eating, but we'll do our best to help. -john

2021-12-24

A few months back, our wood handle maker sent us a catalog of materials he could order, to use instead of wood. He also indicated that olive wood, from old olive trees that have been uprooted as their no longer fruiting, was also possible, but very expensive. It's a beautiful wood, but because it's old, it's knotty and full of holes and defects, so there's a very high rate of discards. Our black wood handles are painted black, which isn't great for longevity, because that paint can flake off if you had the wood handle on the portafilter bar (maybe you're not quite awake). I've been searching for a black through-and-through material to make our black handles out of, so that'd stay nice looking, permanently. A number of handle samples arrived today, in solid resin. Despite not being wood, this is a quite expensive material. It's heavy, polished, and feels great in the hand. These are made on a lathe, like wood is, so there is no seam. They are not moulded. On the bottom left of the photo I opted for a conservative choice, of black resin with just a small amount of sparkle. The bottom right is a much crazier mix of dark and light greys. On the top row are two "fashion" colors. I surprised myself in really liking the top right, but I know it's a contentious choice. On the top left is the olive wood handle. I really like it: it's an ecological choice, since it's essentially reclaimed, and a hardwood to as well. It's very lightly finished so that it doesn't shine of lacquer but still feels smooth in the hand. I don't yet have pricing for that, or even if it's possible to make a large quantity order with olive, but I've asked. I'm also talking to a wood turner based on southern Germany, who has a chemical process for changing oak wood into solid black (called "smoked oak") and they're also making light wood samples for me out of maple. Besides the possibility of changing our black handle, I'm interested to see if we can "up our game" and offer both a more attractive standard handle (in both black and light wood) as well as optional woods and colors for those who might like that. Very much looking for to hear your thoughts. -john

2021-12-24

The DE1 firmware has a physics model of the pump we use, which allow it very closely estimate the flow rate. It's much more accurate than a standard flow meter, which typically can't handle flow rates under 2 ml/s. And the latency is much better, being able to notice very quick transitions, such as a channel opening and closing in a coffee puck. But our approach has one big weakness. The pumps we use behave very differently if the electrical voltage and frequency is not what we expected. That's why, in the de1app, there's a settings->machine->calibration setting for "Flow". If you own a bluetooth scale, you can use that to perfectly calibrate your DE1, and many people have done that. However, I've been really not happy with a few extreme cases, where our default calibration is way off: * South Korea and USA when running 240V, with its unusual electrical frequency of 60hz in the 220/240 range. * Japan, with 100V and two different frequencies, of East vs West Japan Last week, it occured to me that we could calibrate our machines for the two most common cases: USA and EU, and for all other countries, we could recalibrate that person's machine to the country where that machine is being shipped. The downside is that this can delay shipping their DE1 by up to a day, but I think it's worth it so that customers who don't recalibrate (in the current system) don't have a less-perfect experience. I also decided that when a machine is going to a country that isn't the default voltage/frequency, that I'd print on the invoice itself, in yellow type, the suggested flow calibration. We'll do it for you, but you've got it in writing too. More importantly, my boxing team can see the bright yellow print, and knows to hand that machine back to an engineer, to recalibrate for that person's country. I'm a bit embarrassed that it's taken me so long to figure out how to solve this calibration question. Sometimes a problem just has to percolate in our brains for a long time, before an obvious solution surfaces. -john

2021-12-23

New: shortcut to customer support Fairly frequently, we get email from customers asking for an order receipt, or tracking information, or complaining that they never got any emails from us. The cause of all these problems is spam traps, annoyingly deleting the emails we're sending you. To work around the unreliability of email, years ago I programmed an extensive web-based support and order archive system. However.... lots of people don't even realize it exists, as the link to it was buried under "Info/Customer Login". As of today, if the system knows you (you've sent us email or bought something), your name and a shortcut icon, now appears at the top of every page on our website. Click it, and you'll get the page above. Every email we've ever sent you is there, as well as shopping carts you haven't paid for, the payments we've received, and orders. For every order, we detail every box we sent you, provide receipts, packing lists, and package delivery tracking. It's fairly complete. If you've never bought or emailed us, the link at the top says "Customers" so you know you probably don't need to click it. Just a small improvement, but hopefully it'll make the wealth of features I built, more findable and more frequently used. -john

2021-12-22

I always judge a cafe by its font Sitting this sunday with Bugs and Mohammed Magdi at soon-to-switch-from-La-Marzocco-to-Decent cafe The Third @hethird.hk I thought about my rule, of "always judge a café by its font". It's advice that holds remarkably true, and works well for restaurants too. I think the reason it works is: if the owners are able to pay attention to something as insignificant as the font, its kerning and presentation, then likely they are also paying close attention to everything leading up to this. At The Third, besides the cool sign, I noticed that the green paint reminded me of Hong Kong's historic street trams. Holding a phone up of this PANTONE color @hktramways I did find a match, and brought it up with the cofounder. Yah, it's all on purpose, and throughout the cafe are decorative touches that refer to the trams. From wood benches to sliding windows, it's all tram inspired. This attention to detail carried through to the coffee, food, and overall experience. What's your experience been?

2021-12-20

Free portafilter stand improvement Starting today, our portafilters stands come with a pre-cut small silicone tube that you can slide over the metal, if you want to protect the paint on your portafilter handle. This change is especially useful if your stand is touching a grinder, which causes a lot of vibrations, and makes the portafilter handle vibrate as well. In that case, the sound produced is annoying, and you get micro-scratches in your wood handle paint. This small piece of rubber is available free to all part portafilter stand customers, on request, as part of any other purchase you're making with us. Please contact us before you pay for your next accessory order, so we can zero out the cost of https://decentespresso.com/c?s=75747+1 from your order. Thanks to customer Brian C, raising this issue on Diaspora, and trialing a solution, for this. Many others also chimed in with their own suggestions. We worked on it a bit more ourselves, to find just the right material, density and thickness: no smell, stays in place. Then we had the right length precut for us, and a slit cut down the belly so that it's ready-to-be-used by you. Those of you receiving a portafilter stand from us now will get one of these in your box, and you can decide whether you want it on or not. Just another example of the design and manufacturing partnership we have with our customers. -john

2021-12-17

We've been working for about a year, on replacement pieces that go inside the espresso machine group head, that direct water onto the puck. A few goals we have: - getting copper out of the water path - cleaner: coffee oils and particles seem to like to stick to copper, so regular cleaning to keep the best flavor, is important. Other materials are easier to keep clean. - better temperature accuracy: - - First, copper is not an insulator, so it soaks up heat, and transmits that to water. That helps stabilize the water temperature, which is why traditional machines love all that metal, but it decreases our ability to quickly change the water temperature under software control. We want to do that (for instance) at the start of espresso making, to bring the coffee puck up to the defined brewing temperature - - Secondly, the copper interferences with our ability to accurately measure the water temperature directly above the puck. We're instead measuring some water that hits the puck, and some water that's hitting the copper. If we make these parts out of an insulating material, we can get much more accurate coffee peak temperature readings, and then compensate both faster and more accurately. - better water distribution: our water distribution approach is in two passes. We've tested our designs made from a resin called Ultem. However, we're finding that in about a third of our machines, cracks appeared after six month's use. So, we're now trying two different materials: - solid teflon: this is my preferred material. - PEEK: this is really exotic and gorgeous stuff, even more expensive than Ultem. Next year, we'll start to make this part, and it'll be offered as an optional low cost replacement for existing customers. We're also increasing the thickness of this part by about 4mm, so bring the "head space" above a puck in line with the E61 standard. That will naturally increase the body/thickness of espresso, and there are several third-party "spacer kits" currently available that do this. For this that don't want the decreased headspace, you can move to a slightly larger espresso basket, to keep the same headspace as today. -john

2021-12-16

Start outdoors, move indoors: new Birmingham Decent Cafe � A big congrats to Birmingham, UK based "Coffee by the Casuals" @casuals_coffee who started out with a Decent espresso home setup https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ-2v-tBOeU/ which morphed into an outdoor stand, and many, many gigs. The visibility and experience enabled them to now move indoors, about to launch a permanent cafe at One Colmore Square @onecolmoresquare It's really rewarding to be a part of someone else's journey, but Bugs� is particularly touched by the opening of this cafe, as it's a 10 minute walk from where she used to live. We wish them continued success, and will help them in any way we can! -john

2021-12-14