One of my internet-friends created something very nice. Dr. Bunsen is a data wrangler in the real world and he put his skills together to create a beer recommendation service called BeerAI. You can read about the project on his website
To make beer recommendations, BeerAI uses several low rank approximation techniques in conjunction with collaborative filtering and nearest neighbor methods. The latent factor models capture hidden features of the data that haven’t been explicitly modeled, thereby providing some of the novelty in the recommendations.
Episode 65 of Nerds on Draft is freshly canned and includes one of the best IPAs I’ve ever had and a bunch of discuss about task managers (again). Jeff and I check in on how it’s going with 2Do for iOS and Mac and talk about rough edges and favorite features.
The latest Nerds on Draft is out. We go against our better judgement and drink a pumpkin beer and talk about photography.
Coincidentally the new Mac Power Users cover photography from the professional angle but come to a lot of similar conclusions. Take a listen to both if you like to take pictures with an iPhone.
It also looks like the latest Overcast update now works with Squarespace podcasts like Nerds on Draft.
Flowingdata.com is a great site. They also have good taste in beer.
Taking the route above, a trip to 70 breweries, you get about 197 hours of drive time across 12,299 miles. You stop in 28 states and pass through a total of 40.
A new YouTube show from First We Feast brings Dogfish Head’s own Sam Calgione to the computer screen. Many of the DFH beers seem more like research projects. They are fun to try but not anything I want on a regular basis. And that’s o.k.
I’ve seen Sam lecture on a variety of topics and I think this new show looks terrific. I’m thrilled to get more insight into what goes on in Sam’s head.
This is what it looks like when a massive industry is disrupted by those with less money and power. There’s a huge amount of money in selling beer and it’s one of the oldest industries in the US. While craft beer only makes up a very small percentage of total production the trend is clear. The incumbents are showing their teeth.
Distributors are buying politicians and ever more restrictive laws to control the exploding craft beer market.
We’ve shipped two significant updates to our beer-hobbyist app TapCellar in the last 3 weeks.1 The first update included a large number of performance improvements, increased the off-line database to over 45,000 craft beers, changed the way we sync with BreweryDB, and added several new In App Purchase features I’ll describe below. The second update made the IAP actually work (sorry about that).
New Features There are a couple of new features we added as part of the “Pro” upgrade in TapCellar.
I don’t really agree with the rankings but it’s hard to argue with a blind tasting, not to mention these are some of the best IPAs on the planet.
Given enough time and/or beer I’m likely to talk about task management. That’s exactly what happened in the latest Nerds on Draft episode.
I happen to manage projects for a living so I spend a lot of time putting things in lists and then removing them from lists. I’ve used a lot of different systems (or at least gave them a fair shot). But, you may have noticed a drop in the number of Macdrifter articles in the past year about project and task management.
Terry Dorsey updated is utillity for exploring your TapCellar data. He does some clever things with command line output for producing simple charts. I really like his average grade by style output. This is precisely the reason we made TapCellar and made the data portable.
It’s worth checking out just for the Ruby scripts.
