I like coffee. I like RSS. So naturally, I dig Benjamin Brown's News Brews project, which crawls through RSS feeds and takes "the relative frequency at which different coffee-growing regions are mentioned" to determine their respective bean proportion in the blend.

In English, that means if Ethiopia is mentioned 30 times, Kenya 20 and Colombia 50, your brew would be 30 percent Ethiopian, and so on. (You could, of course, fill the respective canisters with all the same bean to make a standard cup, but where's the fun in that?)

On top of flaunting the ever-popular steampunk look, it grinds the coffee fresh before it brews, so you don't need a separate grinder. The only downside is that it's drip—he told me he thought about French press, but the mechanics didn't work out. It still made a pretty damn good cup at the show, though. – Matt Buchanan

News Brews [Project Page]
NYU ITP 2007 [Gizmodo]

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