The Week #27

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  • This week marked my 10 year wedding anniversary. We got married in typical Japanese fashion, a trip to city hall to fill out the paperwork. For some reason we didn’t think to take a photo when we got married, which I regret. I think it was a combination of everyone looking far too busy to ask and that, at least at that time, you don’t really take photos inside city hall.

I remember the couple after us was what appeared to be a a Russian? woman and this old guy with one of those furry hats with the flaps on all sides. It may or may not have been a marriage for love, but I hope they’re doing well.

  • Sophie went to the vet and got her numbers done again. They’re now perfectly in the normal range! The doctor is decreasing her medication and we’ll check again in a couple of months to see how she responds if we can keep the lowered amount. My wallet hopes we can.

  • The battery officially died on my laptop this week, which has slowed progress on Tanzawa. It’s a mid-2014 MacBook Pro, so almost 7(!) years old. Usually I’d think about replacing it and recycling this one by now, but it works fine. And when I consider the ecological cost of manufacturing a new laptop, I want to use my current machine for as long as possible. A new battery should extend the life so I can use it for a full decade.


  • Speaking of Tanzawa, despite battery woes, I still made a bunch of progress. I got image support working, so you can add / remove images from posts.

    I’ve started working on image processing and optimization. I strip all gps exif data from photos when they’re uploaded, but before I do, I’m storing the gps coordinates in the database. Why? By default I want to preserve privacy, you don’t necessarily want to share your exact location when you’re sharing a photo of the garden.

    But I have this idea of letting you group entries (checkin, status, photos, blog posts) together as a trip and display it on a map. And in those cases we may want to use the coordinates, so having them available but not public by default is a good compromise.

    Another goal is Tanzawa is to use as little energy as possible, which means images must be small so we transmit as little data as possible. I figured out how I can do that, without generating a zillion thumbnails and sized photos (though resizing is part of the solution).