The Week #28

by


  • I made good progress on Tanzawa this week. Last week I got image uploads working. This week I got the base of what is required for image uploads to preserve privacy and reduce energy consumption.

To preserve privacy, Tanzawa is automatically stripping all exif data. But rather than just throwing it away, I’m archiving it in json in database. Why?

Two reasons: 1) I can’t quite articulate the sales pitch well yet, but I want Tanzawa to become your home on the internet, exif data is your data, and Tanzawa should facilitate you accessing / using your data as much as possible. 2) You could totally build a photoblog or Flickr-like gallery very easily with Tanzawa if only you could access exif data...and you can.

The other goal is to be as “low-energy” as possible. Do as little computation as possible and send as little data across the wire as possible. To that end images are now automatically converted to webp the first time a user visits the page with a browser that supports it. Subsequent visits will get the pre-converted image. No need to introduce background tasks (two extra processes, redis and celery) to reformat pictures that may never be used. 🙌🏻

Once Pillow supports avif (seems soon), it will offer that as well, for even more savings.

  • With all that focus on Tanzawa, I didn’t run once in the mornings. Running in winter is hard.

  • My mid-2014 MacBook Pro’s battery finally bit the dust becoming quite unreliable. I took it in to the local authorized repair shop to get it replaced and since it’s “vintage” they have to order parts from Apple, and thankfully they still have some in their warehouse.

    Upon the initial inspection the battery had started to bulge as well, but I hadn’t noticed. They’re replacing the battery and the top case for about ¥30,000 (300 usd). Much cheaper than a new machine, especially as it meets my needs perfectly.

    No computer for a week means no code progress on Tanzawa, but it does give me time to plan and run again.


  • One of my goals as if late is to reduce meat consumption and increase veggie intake. We’ve been doing well, in most dishes using half the meat we’d normally use and adding veg in its place. As we can’t really go out and eat, ^1 I bought a book that had vegan recipes from around the world. A lot of the recipes are curries and sorts from India, Vietnam, Thailand or already vegetarian dishes from the Middle East and such — foods with flavors we would normally only get by eating out. I’m excited to try it out.

  • I found and binge watched Pretend it’s a City, a documentary about Fran Lebowitz. She’s hilarious and there’s a lot of lovely shots of New York.


    • ^1 despite a state of emergency, nothing technically stopping us from eating out, except for a fear of getting a virus and death.