Most family bizs don’t last this long, but Yong Seng Coffee is still roasting after 5 decades
For more than five decades, Yong Seng Coffee has been a fixture at Tiong Bahru Market.
It has weathered the rise of instant coffee, the café boom that’s transformed the neighbourhood in the 2010s, and, more recently, the emergence of a specialty coffee scene that has made Singaporeans increasingly discerning about what goes into their cup.
Through it all, the Tay family has continued roasting the same honest Nanyang-style kopi that they first sold door-to-door in the 1960s.
Vulcan Post spoke with Marcus Tay, 34, the third-generation owner of Yong Seng Coffee, about how a family business built on trust and tradition has remained relevant across generations—and how he is carefully introducing the brand to a new generation of coffee drinkers without losing the values that have sustained it for decades.
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Going from door-to-door to sell coffee
Founder of Yong Seng Coffee, Tay Yiong Theng./ Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
The story begins with Marcus’s grandfather, Tay Yiong Theng, who started his career in the coffee industry at just 13 years old, taking orders and delivering drinks at a coffee stall. The stall owner noticed his interest and eventually taught him the art of Nanyang coffee roasting.
Armed with that knowledge, Tay struck out on his own in 1960, roasting coffee in the mornings and selling it in the evenings. Back then, roasting was done in a wok over wood fire, requiring constant attention and careful control of the heat.
To get customers, he did what any resourceful hawker of that era did. He knocked on doors in the neighbourhoods around Tiong Bahru and Jalan Kukoh, moving through the streets on foot with his hawker cart while he roasted coffee beans on the go.
Eventually, the hustle paid off. Tay earned enough to formally incorporate Yong Seng Coffee in 1974, opening a stall at Tiong Bahru Market and pooling resources with partners to operate a shared roastery—giving him the capacity to supply not just walk-in customers but also businesses at coffee shops, school canteens, and other businesses, too.
Marcus’s father joined the fold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, helping with deliveries and working the factory floor. By the time Marcus was old enough for primary school, he was already spending his school holidays following his grandfather around on his coffee deliveries.
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A business built on trust
Marcus, the third-generation owner, mainly runs the stall at Tiong Bahru Market./ Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
What has kept Yong Seng Coffee going across three generations? Marcus’s answer centred on ethics.
“My grandfather had a very strong principle of being honest and transparent with his customers,” he said. “Because of that, he built a lot of trust, and a lot of our long-term customers have been with us since they were kids.”
Over the years, the trust between customers and Yong Seng Coffee has been tested by rising costs.
According to Marcus, coffee bean prices have climbed two to three times since before COVID-19, driven by adverse weather conditions in the Indonesian archipelago—where most of their beans are sourced—reduced supply, and surging global demand, including from large international coffee chains buying up Indonesian beans in bulk.
Rising energy costs have also followed, making each roasting batch more expensive as gas prices rise.
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Faced with that pressure, the family made a difficult choice. Rather than quietly reduce the quality of their coffee while holding prices steady, they raised prices and told their customers why.
“Surprisingly, they understood,” Marcus said. “A lot of them gave feedback that they would rather pay a bit more and have the same quality, than maintain the same price and experience a drop in quality.”
That personal relationship with customers, especially with regulars, has become a defining feature of how Yong Seng Coffee operates.
Keeping the roasting process traditional
Yong Seng Coffee’s former roastery, which the business operated out of until 2021 before shifting production to a facility run by its long-time roasting partners. / Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
Yong Seng’s roastery operation runs through a partner facility today, but the Tay family controls every step of the process and craft detail. The original shared roastery wound down around 2021 when the older partners retired.
The setup involves a 60kg roaster for the core kopi blends and a 15kg roaster for specialty coffees. Each month, the team processes just over 1,000kg of beans, roasted in weekly batches and stored in an 800 sqft processing facility where blending and online orders are also handled.
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For traditional kopi specifically, the roasting process runs in two stages: first roasting the beans, then coating them with sugar and margarine, before cooking them, taking roughly 40 minutes per batch.
On the other hand, the specialty coffees undergo a cleaner, shorter process at around 20 minutes.
For every new coffee bean that comes in, Marcus first runs a small-batch test roast on a 1kg machine to develop its ideal roast profile before scaling it up on the main roaster.
The challenge, he said, is that consistency still relies heavily on human skill and intuition. Roasters need to read the beans, account for changes in humidity, and spot subtle differences before the machines can.
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Yong Seng’s coffees start at S$7.60 per 300g.
Making the online shift
Yong Seng Coffee’s coffee is offered in drip bags, apart from being freshly ground on the spot./ Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
When Marcus joined the family business in 2019, Yong Seng was entirely a physical operation. He was in his late 20s, coming from a career in internal audit, and the gap between how the business operated and how his generation shopped was immediately obvious.
As such, Marcus went on to modernise Yong Seng Coffee’s packaging and launched a website to open the store to online orders.
The timing turned out to be fortuitous. Not long after, COVID-19 hit, and the wet market was no longer easily accessible. Customers who couldn’t get to Tiong Bahru Market found them online instead, and that period helped establish a digital customer base that has stayed.
Going online also opened the door to expanding the product range in ways that the physical stall—with its early morning hours and limited space—couldn’t accommodate. Yong Seng now offers multiple grind sizes (fine, medium, and coarse), a range of online-exclusive formats including single-serve sachets, batch brew sachets, and drip bags, bringing in new customer profiles by providing convenience.
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Expanding Yong Seng’s range of grind sizes was a meaningful shift, particularly for customers buying its specialty coffee beans. For years, offering only a medium grind kept operations simple and order fulfilment efficient.
Introducing more grind options meant processing orders individually rather than in batches, inevitably slowing things down. But for home brewers using equipment such as moka pots, pour-overs, or French presses, the right grind size can make a significant difference to the final cup.
It’s a trade-off Marcus is happy to make—one that reflects the care and craftsmanship he believes good coffee deserves.
We figured we should do it. It allows the coffee to be better presented to the customer, and they’re able to brew it better.
Bridging Asian kopi and specialty coffee
Yong Seng Coffee offers both kopi (Nanyang coffee) and specialty coffee./ Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
Perhaps the most personal addition Marcus has made to the business is the #dYScover collection—a rotating lineup of single-origin specialty coffees that changes every two months, chosen by Marcus himself, from beans sourced through a trusted trader.
The idea came from his own relationship with coffee. He used to prefer specialty coffee over kopi, and when he first joined the business, he half-wondered whether the future was in moving entirely toward specialty. Moreover, with many café concepts popping up in Singapore over the years, Marcus realised the demand for specialty coffee was becoming on par with local kopi.
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What the #dYScover range does is give customers a reason to come back regularly and explore beans from all over the world, from South America to the Caribbean.
Marcus selects each offering with an eye toward variety, avoiding repeated origins and flavour profiles where possible. The current offering for Jun and Jul includes beans from Guatemala, alongside the core collection blends that have been there since the beginning.
The collection has also helped shift some customers’ perceptions of kopi itself. Many older customers, accustomed to the earthier, more bitter profile of traditional Nanyang coffee, initially resist anything that tastes acidic, a quality that’s natural in Arabica beans and which Marcus finds adds sweetness and complexity to a cup.
However, with the #dYScover collection, getting customers to try something new besides kopi, and to understand why it tastes the way it does, has become a norm for Yong Seng Coffee.
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“I get to educate my customers, and they get to enjoy good coffee,” he said. “I think that’s a win-win.”
Staying deliberately small
Yong Seng Coffee typically roasts about 1,000kg of coffee a month./ Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
One thing Yong Seng has not done is expand aggressively.
There are no plans for multiple outlets, no wholesale push into supermarkets, and no ambition to see their beans sitting on shelves in chain stores—not because the opportunity hasn’t arisen, but because Marcus is wary of what that would mean for quality.
“We can’t control how quickly it moves,” he said of wholesale retail. “It could sit on the shelf for two or three weeks, and by the time the customer gets it, it’s not the experience we want them to have.”
The business, as Marcus’s grandfather always ran it, has avoided taking on significant debt and prioritised keeping cash flow healthy. Growth has come slowly and deliberately.
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The online store expanded its reach without requiring new physical space. “We evolve very slowly, but consistently,” Marcus said.
For now, Marcus is focused on deepening what Yong Seng already does well—roasting honest kopi, introducing customers to good coffee from around the world, and being transparent with the people who keep coming back.
His advice to anyone looking to enter the coffee business in Singapore distils the same philosophy his grandfather started with: offer something consistent, improve openly, and don’t rely on marketing spend to do the work that product quality should.
“Consumers in Singapore are smart enough to see that,” he said. “If you’re consistently improving and transparent about it, I think the local consumers appreciate that and will support the business.”
One of our favourite Amazon Echo devices is down to its lowest ever price for Prime Day. As tomorrow’s the last day of the sale, we’d recommend acting fast.
With an 11-inch, full HD screen, the Echo Show 11 is a good-sized smart home hub for streaming content, viewing recipes and managing your paired smart home devices. Although there’s no HDR support, the display size and resolution ensure content looks clear, with bright images and decent contrast too.
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By default, the display will show a slideshow of either your own or pre-set Amazon photos, alongside additional information including news headlines and recipe ideas – making this an ideal device for the kitchen. The display is customisable too, so you can pick and choose exactly what you want to see.
There’s also Visual ID built-in which uses the camera to detect who’s standing in front of the device, and will show personalised information accordingly too.
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Naturally as an Amazon device, the Echo Show is fitted with Alexa, which means you won’t even need to lift a finger to control your devices, as you can simply just use your voice to turn certain gadgets on or off. You can also use Alexa to set timers, alarms and get reminders on your calendars and reminders.
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However, you don’t have to use your voice for everything – though it’s certainly a convenient way of controlling the device. Instead, you can control your connected devices simply by the touchscreen.
Otherwise, the Echo Show 11 is fitted with a 2.8-inch woofer and dual full-range drivers. In real-world terms, that means it’s powerful enough to handle bass at volumes up to around 75%.
Overall we awarded the Echo Show 11 with a four-star rating, with Home Technology Editor Dave Ludlow concluding “excellent audio and zippy performance, built around a large screen makes this the ultimate smart display.”
Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.
World Cup watchers, there’s another category for you in today’s Connections: Sports Edition. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.
Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.
Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: Hoosier schools.
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Green group hint: Fore!
Blue group hint: Gridiron guides.
Purple group hint: Stopping the scoring.
Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Amperity co-founders and co-CEOs Kabir Shahani, left, and Derek Slager. (Amperity photo).
Seattle-based customer data startup Amperity conducted layoffs this week, the company confirmed to GeekWire, citing a transformation related to its use of more artificial intelligence.
The company did not specify how many jobs were cut, only that “a number of talented people are leaving.” Amperity’s headcount remains over 200 globally in offices across Seattle, New York, the U.K., Australia and Argentina.
“Amperity is transforming how it operates as a company, building AI into how we work across the organization,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “That shift changes where we’re investing and the shape of the team we need going forward.”
That move replaced Tony Alika Owens — a former Salesforce executive recruited as CEO in 2024 — in what Amperity called a planned “mutual transition.” Longtime CFO Amy Kelleran Pelly also took on added responsibilities and became president while retaining her CFO role.
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Slager and Shahani said at the time that the rise of AI created a major opportunity for the company. And Thursday’s statement about layoffs reiterated that view.
“These decisions are about building a stronger Amperity for our customers. That’s where our focus is, and that’s what this next chapter is about,” the company said.
Founded in 2016, Amperity is one of Seattle’s most prominent enterprise software startups. It built its business around helping large consumer brands unify customer information from multiple systems into a single profile.
The company has raised more than $180 million from investors including HighSage Ventures, Tiger Global, Declaration Partners, Madrona and others.
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Amperity is ranked No. 32 on the GeekWire 200, a list of the top privately-held tech companies in the Pacific Northwest.
from the the-open-web-includes-the-ability-to-scrape dept
The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find security flaws, and investigate discrimination. Crawling the web allows non-profits like the Internet Archive to preserve historical copies of websites. Tools for automated comparison shopping allow consumers to find the best deals on items they want to buy. And so on.
Yet the open internet access is increasingly under threat from publishers and Big Tech companies alike. Fearing lost advertising and licensing revenues, website operators increasingly claim that they need to lock down their sites from bots that crawl public web content to train or operate AI models. Some companies are even trying to embed their business models into internet standards by changing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technical standards that shape much of the internet.
Many of their economic anxieties are understandable. AI bots can strain websites’ infrastructure, in some cases, degrading site performance or taking them offline altogether. Upgrading systems costs money that some sites may not have. And AI is likely to disrupt the business models many publishers adopted in response to the rise of the internet, if users rely on AI overviews instead of visiting source websites.
However reasonable these fears may be, the answer is not to changethe IETF standards from neutral protocols thatencourage openness to restrictive requirements designed to monetize internet access.
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The worst of these proposed standards would give websites far greater ability to automatically block legitimate, lawful scraping and crawling. For example, the AI Preferences working group is working on proposals to give publishers a way to express “preference signals” against crawling web data for AI-related purposes, including to train models, generate outputs, and help users search the web. These preference signals would be expressed through robots.txt and could potentially become legally binding in some jurisdictions.
Another working group, called Web Bot Auth, is pursuing efforts to protect sites from overly-aggressive bots that strain website resources—a positive goal that could meaningfully improve the internet in the AI era. But Web Bot Auth is simultaneously pursuing a much more dangerous path as well: standards changes that would enable sites to cryptographically identify bots so that they can more easily block anyone they wish—not just “bad” actors, but competitors, dissidents, or anyone who hasn’t paid for the right to access sites using automated tools. If sites restrict crawling to a preapproved list of cryptographically authenticated bots, they could require licensing payments from those wishing to crawl their sites. This would close off the open web to researchers, archivists, and startups without the ability to pay for automated access.
Websites may have legitimate reasons to worry about AI’s impacts on their traffic and advertising revenue, but those reasons must be weighed against the benefits of the open web. These proposals would effectively give website operators veto power over a wide range of important uses—from the investigations and archival works described above to accessibility tools for people with disabilities, to research efforts aimed at holding governments accountable.
That is why we are fighting back against these threats to open access. EFF and our allies in the open internet community have successfully resisted some of the most dangerous IETF proposals thus far—and won’t stop working to protect the open web from efforts to manipulate internet standards to undermine the right to freely access the internet in any legal way, including with automated tools.
Liquid AI, founded by former MIT computer scientists, today released its smallest AI language model yet, LFM2.5-230M, and enterprises would do well to consider it for their uses in data extraction and local deployment on smartphones, laptops and robotics.
This is a 230-million-parameter foundation model explicitly designed for on-device agentic workflows, and as Liquid states in its release blog post, that small size makes it possible to run nearly “anywhere.” According to Liquid, it also outperforms models more than 4X its size on selected benchmarks, specifically doing better at data extraction than the 800 million parameter count Alibaba Qwen3.5-0.8B (Instruct) and 1-billion parameter Google Gemma 3 1B.
Liquid AI LFM2.5-230M benchmark comparison chart. Credit: Liquid AI
The model targets developers and engineers building lightweight data extraction pipelines and autonomous edge systems.
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Operating under a dual-use commercial license, the model remains free for individuals and companies generating less than $10 million in annual revenue, while requiring a paid enterprise agreement for larger corporations.
This release distinguishes itself from other small AI models by utilizing the LFM2 architecture to achieve high inference speeds without the massive memory overhead typical of parameter-heavy transformers.
While major AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and others push parameter counts into the hundreds of billions or trillions to achieve frontier performance, a parallel race focuses entirely on the edge and local deployments.
Liquid AI’s launch of LFM2.5-230M signals a pivotal shift toward architectural efficiency over brute-force scaling. By squeezing 19 trillion tokens of pre-training into a 230-million-parameter footprint, the company demonstrates that edge devices do not need massive computational power or persistent cloud connections to execute complex, multi-step agentic workflows.
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How LFM2.5-230M works
The LFM2.5-230M model diverges from standard transformer architectures, relying instead on the LFM2 framework. This architecture functions as a hybrid system, interleaving gated short-range convolutions with grouped-query attention to process information efficiently.
For those tracking the evolution of efficient architectures, Liquid’s approach shares a similar conceptual goal: managing long contexts and sequential data effectively on edge hardware without the quadratic memory costs of pure attention mechanisms. The model supports an expansive 32K context window, allowing it to ingest substantial documents or continuous streams of robotic telemetry.
When analyzing the performance charts provided in the release, the architectural efficiency becomes visually apparent. The model maintains a memory footprint of under 400MB while achieving prefill and decode speeds that outpace comparable models like Gemma 3 1B IT and Granite 4.0-H-350M.
On a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen4 CPU, the model reaches a decode speed of 213 tokens per second. Even on a highly constrained Raspberry Pi 5, the model maintains a decode rate of 42 tokens per second. Furthermore, internal benchmarking shows the GPU inference stack delivers lower end-to-end latency than competing small models across all concurrency levels.
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Why it matters for enterprises
To understand why a 230-million-parameter model is necessary, one must look at how enterprises currently manage data.
Organizations have traditionally relied on rigid, rule-based Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) scripts to move and process data. However, these legacy systems are notoriously brittle; a simple change in a document’s layout or a schema update can break the entire pipeline.
To solve this, the industry is shifting toward “AI ETL,” where machine learning infers mappings, detects schema drift, and adapts to changes automatically. In a modern lightweight data extraction pipeline, an AI model connects to unstructured sources—like PDFs, emails, or web forms—and structures the data into formats like JSON without requiring hardcoded rules.
For enterprises, using a massive flagship model like Claude Opus 4.6 (which costs $5.00 per million input tokens) to parse routine invoices, format addresses, or route telemetry data is economically unviable.
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This is where models like LFM2.5-230M become critical. Designed explicitly as a lightweight extraction engine, it allows companies to automate repetitive formatting and data parsing at a fraction of the compute cost and latency, running directly on local hardware rather than relying on expensive, continuous cloud API calls.
Small Model Benchmarks: LFM vs. The 3B Class
The AI industry in mid-2026 is seeing a renaissance in “small” models, but the definition of “small” varies wildly.
Recently, the open-weight community was stunned by Weibo’s VibeThinker-3B, a 3-billion-parameter model built on a Qwen2-style backbone that achieved a massive 94.3 on the AIME 2026 math benchmark, rivaling 600-billion-parameter behemoths through aggressive data curation and reinforcement learning.
Similarly, Google’s Gemma 4 family — which recently crossed 200 million downloads — pushes frontier AI to the edge, including the E2B (2 billion parameters) designed specifically for mobile and IoT deployments.
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By contrast, Liquid AI’s LFM2.5-230M operates in a completely different weight class. At just 230 million parameters, it is roughly one-tenth the size of Google’s smallest Gemma 4 model and VibeThinker-3B.
Because of its microscopic footprint, LFM2.5-230M is not designed to compete on reasoning-heavy workloads like advanced math, coding, or creative writing—a constraint Liquid AI explicitly acknowledges.
However, in its intended domains of data extraction and tool calling, the model punches well above its weight class.
Benchmarks released by Liquid AI show LFM2.5-230M scoring 43.26 on the BFCLv3 tool-use benchmark, dominating IBM’s Granite 4.0-350M (39.58) and completely outpacing larger 1-billion-parameter models like Google’s Gemma 3 1B IT (16.61).
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Liquid AI LFM2.5-230M benchmark comparison bar chart. Credit: Liquid AI
On CaseReportBench for data extraction, it scores 22.51, decimating the Qwen3.5-0.8B (Instruct).
LFM2.5-230M proves that while 3-billion-parameter models like VibeThinker are solving advanced calculus, a 230-million-parameter model is the superior, highly optimized choice for executing structured tool calls and keeping agentic pipelines running efficiently on constrained hardware.
Advanced research uses
Because it excels at tool calling, LFM2.5-230M functions primarily as a skill-selection layer. Liquid AI demonstrated this capability by deploying the model on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot.
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Running entirely on-device via the robot’s onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin compute module, the model successfully processes complex environmental commands.
As noted in the company’s technical blog, the model takes a free-form instruction like, *”Hold still for 2 seconds, then walk forward at 1 meter per second for 3 meters, hold a forward one-leg kneel for 5 seconds, and walk backward at 0.5 meters per second for 3 meters,”* and automatically translates it into a structured multi-step plan calling on pre-trained low-level skills provided by NVIDIA’s SONIC framework.
The base and post-trained models are available immediately on Hugging Face, with native day-one support across the inference ecosystem for llama.cpp (GGUF), MLX, vLLM, SGLang, and ONNX.
Dual-use, custom LFM Open License
Liquid AI ships LFM2.5-230M under the LFM Open License v1.0. Despite the word “open” in the title, this is not an Open Source Initiative (OSI) compliant license; it operates as a restricted, dual-use commercial framework.
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For independent developers, researchers, and early-stage startups, the license functions identically to open-source software.
Users receive a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, and distribute the model, provided they retain original copyright notices and prominently state any modifications.
However, the license includes a strict “Commercial Use Limitation”. Any legal entity generating $10 million or more in annual revenue loses the right to use the model commercially under this agreement.
Large enterprises crossing this financial threshold must negotiate a separate, paid commercial agreement with Liquid AI to deploy the model in production.
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This strategy protects the company from having its intellectual property absorbed by major technology conglomerates for free, while still seeding the model at the grassroots developer level.
However, Notion urged users to export drafts and scheduled emails by September 21, since those won’t automatically carry over to an alternative app. Notion noted that users can also save their Notion Mail setups and “export your snippets and auto label instructions to use elsewhere.”
“If you have auto label set up in Notion Mail, you won’t have to rebuild it. Create a Custom Agent in a few clicks, and we’ll bring your existing rules over for you,” the X post explained. “And if you’re already running Notion agents to manage email, they’ll continue running. Your email connection in Notion stays in place.”
Organizations that relied on Notion Mail in a regulated environment might have to transition from Notion Mail earlier.
“If you rely on HIPAA coverage, you should plan to transition off Notion Mail by June 30, 2026,” Notion’s support page reads.
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Skiff reportedly served 2 million users, giving rivals like Proton Mail a run for their money before the Notion acquisition. As a Gmail client that didn’t support end-to-end encryption, Notion’s AI-centric approach to email lacked the privacy focus that Skiff carried as an email provider. Still, Notion Mail was built with Skiff’s infrastructure and by former Skiff executives, making its impending demise feel like a sort of swan song for Skiff.
Although Notion is killing its Skiff-influenced email client, it may continue leveraging the human resources and other productivity ideas (around calendars and storage, for instance) gained through its Skiff acquisition as it tries to compete more strongly against rivals like Google Workspace. Notion, however, has strayed from releasing direct follow-up products to Skiff’s portfolio.
Jazz centennial campaigns can become a lazy excuse to wheel out the same greatest-hits package with a new hype sticker. Craft Recordings is taking a more credible route. Its Original Jazz Classics series will mark the 100th birthdays of Miles Davis and John Coltrane on August 14 with new vinyl editions of Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet and Coltrane’s self-titled 1957 Prestige debut; two records that capture both men before history turned them into monuments.
Cookin’ documents Davis’ First Great Quintet—Miles, Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones during the legendary 1956 Prestige sessions that also yielded Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. Meanwhile, Coltrane captures Trane’s first session as a leader, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in May 1957, just as his unmistakable voice was beginning to emerge from the hard-bop crowd.
Both reissues will feature AAA lacquers cut from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio, 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI, and Stoughton Tip-On jackets with obi strips; the same sensible formula that has made the revived OJC line one of the more reliable modern options for collectors who want the real albums, properly presented, without being asked to sell a kidney for a One-Step. Digital editions will arrive simultaneously in 24-bit/192kHz hi-res formats.
They also continue a busy run for OJC, which has recently returned Wes Montgomery’s Full House, Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete’s From All Sides, Thelonious Monk’s Alone in San Francisco, The Young Lions, Lee Morgan’s Introducing Lee Morgan, and Bobby Timmons’ This Here Is Bobby Timmons to vinyl with the same core AAA, RTI, and tip-on-jacket approach.
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Related Reviews:
Miles and Trane at Full Boil
There are jazz records that arrive carrying the weight of history so heavily that listeners forget to enjoy them. Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet is not one of those records. Yes, it documents Miles Davis’ First Great Quintet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, but it still moves like a great band caught on a particularly historic night.
Recorded on October 26, 1956, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio, Cookin’ was drawn from the same pair of Prestige sessions that also produced Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. Davis had already signed with Columbia and needed to finish his Prestige obligations, but there is nothing contractual or dutiful about the results. The quintet had spent months refining this material on the road, and the sessions were approached much like a club set: little fussing, few second guesses, and enough confidence to make difficult music sound almost casual.
The album opens with “My Funny Valentine,” a beautiful reminder that Davis did not need volume or velocity to take command of a room. With Coltrane sitting out, Miles works against Garland, Chambers, and Jones with a measured, almost conversational sense of space. From there, the temperature rises quickly. “Blues by Five” has all the relaxed authority of a band that knows exactly where the pocket lives, while “Airegin” lets Coltrane begin to push against the tune’s hard-bop architecture with the restless energy that would soon define his own work.
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The closing pairing of “Tune Up” and “When Lights Are Low” gives the full group room to stretch without ever losing the plot. Garland brings elegance, Chambers keeps everything grounded, and Philly Joe Jones drives the proceedings with the kind of alert, propulsive swing that makes lesser drummers sound like they are waiting for a bus.
Cookin’ is not Miles at his most radical, nor is it Coltrane at his most searching. That is precisely why it remains so essential. This is a great working band at the moment when its collective instinct, individual brilliance, and pure sense of swing were all firing at once.
Coltrane’s Coltrane: The First Step Toward a New Jazz Language
Before John Coltrane became the spiritual force behind Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and some of the most searching music ever committed to tape, he was a gifted but unsettled tenor player trying to establish his own voice. Coltrane, recorded on May 31, 1957, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio, is his first album as a leader and it catches that voice coming into focus in real time.
The timing matters. Coltrane had spent much of the previous two years alongside Miles Davis in the First Great Quintet, including the 1956 Prestige sessions that produced Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. By the time of this date, he was no longer in Miles’ band and had begun the difficult work of rebuilding both his career and his life. Later that summer, he would join Thelonious Monk, beginning one of the most important short-term partnerships in jazz. But Coltrane is where the transition becomes audible.
This is not yet the relentless Coltrane of the early ’60s, but the hunger is already there. “Bakai,” written by Calvin Massey, opens with a slightly off-kilter, almost teasing arrangement before the band settles into a muscular groove. “Straight Street” and “Chronic Blues,” both Coltrane originals, reveal a player determined to stretch hard-bop language without throwing away its swing, blues feeling, or melodic discipline in the process.
The personnel shifts across the two sides. Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Albert “Tootie” Heath bring some of the easy authority associated with the Miles Davis orbit to the first half, while Mal Waldron’s more percussive and angular piano work gives the latter half a different edge. Trumpeter Johnnie Splawn and baritone saxophonist Sahib Shihab add weight and contrast to several of the arrangements, but this remains Coltrane’s statement from beginning to end.
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There are softer moments, most notably the elegant “Violets for Your Furs” and “While My Lady Sleeps,” yet even those ballads carry an underlying tension. Coltrane was not interested in pretty sounds for their own sake. He was already pushing through the chord changes with a directness and urgency that made clear he had far more on his mind than simply becoming another excellent tenor saxophonist.
Coltrane is not the finished monument. It is more interesting than that. This is the sound of an artist standing at the threshold, still rooted in hard bop but beginning to see a much larger horizon.
Although paperbacks are a much-loved aspect of the literary world, they are not really intended to last the decades the way that hardcover books are. Beyond the typical ravaged covers, paperbacks also tend to suffer from a warped spine, where the formally flat spine gets a definite inwards curve due to the ravages of moisture, temperature, failing glue and the passing of time in general. If this bothers you, then [Book Care Studio] shows a simple technique using which these spines can be flattened again.
All that you need for this approach are two cutting boards and two clamps to provide some clamping force on the book, along with a heat gun and some patience.
The book is clamped between the two boards with the spine sticking out. By putting said spine flat on e.g. a table and pushing on the opposite side while alternatingly briefly releasing the clamps, the spine can be forced into a flatter state. Without forcing this and then flipping the paperback sandwich around to heat the spine with the heat gun, the glue of the binding in the spine can then be softened sufficiently that a few of these push-heat cycles should be enough to straighten the spine.
Other than rebinding the book as for example public libraries are wont to do with a hardcover conversion of flimsy paperbacks, this simple approach should clean up a ratty-looking paperback collection. While one can definitely argue that half the charm of old paperbacks are the wrinkles, curves and intense smell of acidifying paper, it’s always good to have options like this at one’s disposal.
The Trump administration has reportedly asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns. The model will initially be offered to a small group of partners, with the government “approving access customer by customer during this preview period,” reports The Information. The request came from conversations with the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the report said.
Both are well-regarded ATX boards with built-in Wi-Fi, and both represent meaningful savings if you’re mid-build or planning an upgrade. And both punch above their discounted price.
The two boards target different platforms entirely — one is AMD AM5, the other Intel LGA 1700 — so this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison. Think of them as two separate opportunities: one for Ryzen 7000/8000/9000 builders, and one for 12th/13th/14th Gen Intel builders.
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More on the PRO X870-P WiFi — AMD AM5
At this price, the PRO X870-P Wi-Fi sits in an interesting spot: it’s the X870 chipset — AMD’s current-gen platform with full PCIe 5.0 support — at a price that previously would have bought you a mid-range B650 board. The X870 chipset brings wider PCIe 5.0 support and Wi-Fi 7 as a platform requirement (rather than an optional add-on), and AMD has committed to AM5 support through at least 2027, which means whatever Ryzen processor you pair with this board today will have a clear upgrade path for several years.
The connectivity package at this price is genuinely impressive. Wi-Fi 7 with its 320MHz channel width delivers noticeably lower latency and higher throughput than Wi-Fi 6E — the kind of upgrade you notice on a busy home network. The 5Gbps Ethernet port, USB4 at 40Gbps, and Thunderbolt 4 are the kind of specs that usually appear on more expensive boards. Three M.2 slots (including one Gen5) gives you flexibility for fast SSDs now and room to expand later.
MSI’s PRO series is positioned more toward productivity and professional use than the flashier gaming-branded boards, which means the design is restrained — minimal RGB, clean silver heatsinks, no aggressive aesthetics. Whether that’s a positive depends entirely on what you want your build to look like. Best Buy reviewers have praised it as straightforward to install and stable from the first boot, with multiple builders noting it’s working well with everything from Ryzen 7700X to the 9800X3D.
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One honest note: the PRO X870-P is tuned more for stability and accessibility than aggressive overclocking. If you’re planning to push DDR5 kits to their absolute limits or run a flagship Ryzen 9 chip at sustained all-core maximum TDP, a higher-end X870E board would give you more VRM headroom. For the majority of builds — including enthusiast setups — it handles everything without issue.
More on the B760 Gaming Plus WiFi Gaming Motherboard
The B760 Gaming Plus WiFi is the more straightforward recommendation of the two — it’s a well-established board with a substantial real-world track record. The 840+ reviews on Amazon at 4.4/5 tell a consistent story: this board works reliably, installs without drama, and delivers good performance across a wide range of Intel builds.
Intel’s LGA 1700 platform supports 12th, 13th, and 14th Gen Core processors, which means there’s a wide choice of CPUs available at various price points — everything from a budget Core i3 to the Core i9-14900K. It’s worth noting that Intel has moved on to the LGA 1851 socket for its newest Arrow Lake generation, so this platform won’t support 15th Gen CPUs. That said, for builds centered on a 13th- or 14th-Gen processor, the B760 remains a very solid foundation.
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Wi-Fi 6E built-in is a practical inclusion at this price — it saves you from buying a separate wireless adapter and keeps the build clean. 2.5 Gbps Ethernet provides fast wired connectivity for those who prefer a cable. Two M.2 Gen4 slots comfortably handle primary and secondary NVMe SSDs, and PCIe 4.0 x16 is more than adequate for any current GPU.
Reviewers have specifically praised the B760 Gaming Plus WiFi for its stability across sustained workloads — one reviewer noted it handled “AAA applications and multitasking effortlessly” over ten months of use without a single stability issue. The reinforced PCIe slots and robust VRM heatsinks contribute to a build quality that feels more substantial than budget Intel boards at a similar price.
Although paperbacks are a much-loved aspect of the literary world, they are not really intended to last the decades the way that hardcover books are. Beyond the typical ravaged covers, paperbacks also tend to suffer from a warped spine, where the formally flat spine gets a definite inwards curve due to the ravages of moisture, temperature, failing glue and the passing of time in general. If this bothers you, then [Book Care Studio] shows a simple technique using which these spines can be flattened again.
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