Here’s how to do it properly with the Gimp.

1. Create a new image with a transparent background (c’mon, you gotta know how to do that!)
2. Using the text tool select a nice font and add some nice text with a color of your choice
   
3. Set the background color to your theme’s background color
   
4. The most important step: right click the text layer and choose Filters->Web->Semi-Flatten. Your text should now have some “smudge” around the edges:
   
5. Click File->Save as and save the file as a gif. You’re done!

If you skip step 4 your text will most likely look like crap! The Semi-Flatten function will replace partial transparency with the background colour, creating a nice smooth edge. That’s what you want. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that with Gimp, so I hope this short tutorial will help others.

My blog uses the cool unwakeable wordpress theme. If you’re using this theme (or any similar theme) you probably want to change the “unwakeable” logo with your own text. Ben Gray has a short tutorial on how to do that with Photoshop, but those instruction didn’t quite work for Gimp, so I wrote my own short tutorial. If using this theme, use a background image of (roughly) size 200×42 px, save the file as title.gif and upload to wp-content/themes/unwakeable-1.x/images. Easy!

In any case, I was really happy to win a one evening coffee course at Robert Paulig’s Coffee Institute in Helsinki. The course was simply awesome – great tips for brewing coffee, a lot of free coffee, different coffee varieties, really good time, some more coffee, a little bit of espresso, a few cappuccinos, some Irish coffee, Frezza Mocha, French coffee, hotshots, and oh – just when you thought they’d run out of coffee – a few more cups of the world’s most addictive beverage! If you ever get a chance to participate, I highly recommend this course. First part of the course – which coffee goes with which pastry:

Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia – all really good, but you need to watch out what kind of pastry you serve with each. They recommend you should always serve darker roast with spicier foods, for example cheese cake with French roast, and mild roast with mildly flavored foods. Sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it? If you serve a very strong roast with subtly flavored cake, you will not taste any of the finer aromas of the cake, and on the other hand, mildly roasted coffee will not taste much like coffee when served with very spicy foods.

Now on to the main thing: How to brew great coffee. 10 easy steps should do it:

1. Buy a real coffeemaker. The water needs to heat to 92-96°C. A cheap machine will not heat the water enough and will result in a disappointment. A Moccamaster should do (no, they didn’t bribe me, honest!).
2. Clean your coffeemaker daily. Wash the coffee pot, funnel and other necessary parts of the machine with sodium bicarbonate (cooking soda), use a solution of 3 table spoons per 1 liter of water in order to wash off any coffee grease accumulated in the coffeemaker.
3. Store the coffee grounds in your fridge, always seal the package properly and never pour the grounds to another container – oxygen is the coffee bean’s worst enemy!
4. Use clean, fresh water. Move to Finland if the water in your area sucks.
5. Always use the right size filter, never buy cheap filters.
6. Don’t pour water in to the coffeemaker with your coffee pot, otherwise coffee grease will start to collect inside the coffeemaker, resulting in a rancid taste at worst.
7. When pouring grounds in to the filter, even the grounds gently – but don’t shake the filter to do so. If you do, fine coffee dust will fill the pores of the filter resulting in an uneven brew.
8. Use 7g of grounds per 1.25dl of fresh water.
9. When ready, stir the coffee gently with a spoon, otherwise the strongest coffee will be left at the bottom.
10. The coffee will stay good for max half an hour. Enjoy!