• 🔗 Oliver Smith for Dreamstate Artist Series (January 10, 2021)

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    Oliver Smith on #InsomniacTV for a special, 2-hour edition of the #Dreamstate Artist Series livestream! 💙 Stay Home and dance with #OliverSmith

    Follow Insomniac founder, @Pasquale Rotella: https://instagram.com/pasqualerotella

    https://InsomniacShop.com - Use code INSOMNIACTV for 10% off!

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    This set by Oliver Smith is absolutely banging. Especially at the 18 minute mark. I know what's going to be on loop this week.
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  • The Week #28

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    • 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.

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    Bought a new book to read with Leo before bed.



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    Today's feature is a non-user facing feature: allowing tanzawa to be configured using a .env file via django-environ. Beyond letting me keep production settings / paths / secret keys out of git or keeping a separate settings.py for production, it also let me enable secure session cookies. Secure cookies with some apache/nginx configuration allows the url generated when you upload an image use https instead of http, which keeps the padlock in your browser locked.
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    Today I fixed image generation on linux ( turns out image/webp isn't recognized by python mimetypes on linux yet? ). I've also added permalinks for all posts. This will allow me to link directly to posts manually, but also sets me up for syndication and webmentions.

    Progress may be slowed next week as my laptop might be getting its battery replaced.
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    Dynamic image format conversion is working nicely. I added a new feature to the image processing this morning as well.  Rather than just strip geo data, I'm removing all exif data.

    However, it also occurred to me that you may want to display a subset of that data on your website e.g. which camera the photo was taken with etc... So I'm saving all exif data to json before stripping it from the file itself. This should allow you to expose only the data you want explicitly in your templates. 🙌🏻

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    Adopting new image formats (webp/avif/apng) in place for legacy formats (jpeg/png/gif) is an area where websites simultaneously increase quality and reduce transfer size.  I've got dynamic file format conversion working locally so browsers that support the new formats will automatically get the smallest file possible and older clients fallback to legacy formats. Just needs a bit more massaging before I merge it.

  • 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).


  • Checkin to 二俣川二丁目公園

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    in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

    Can play and watch the bullet train.






  • Start a blog

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    You should start a blog today by Juhis struck a cord with me and I thought I'd pile on. You should start a blog today.

    Like many I blogged a lot in the early 2000's. Those early blogs captured my frame of mind for that period, but they're long gone. Also like many, I stopped blogging sometime after Twitter and Facebook became popular.

    Over the years I tried to start back up again. "I should blog more", I'd tell myself. I'd always try to focus on writing "evergreen" content or writing "professional" content and after a short burst, stop.

    Discovering the IndieWeb helped remind me that I'm writing for me on my blog. It doesn't have to always be professional all the time. This past year or two regularly blogging again has helped me remember just how magical the internet is. That I can write something in Japan and people find it and respond to it from all over the world – all using open-standards – brings a smile to my face.

    Why should you start a blog today?


    • Develop better ideas. Many people develop their ideas by writing. They sit down with idea A and as the write about it, they gain some further insight and get idea B, which leads to idea C and so on. None of this would have been possible without sitting down to write. And you're not going to write unless you have a place to do so.

    • Be your own reference. When you're debugging a problem at work, chances are you're not the first person to run into that issue. Writing it down on your blog will not only help you gain a better understanding of the problem and help others solve the issue, but also in a year when you run into the same issue, you've got a refresher waiting for you on your blog.

    • Honest record of the past. Our memories aren't the best. Having a blog will help you remember just what you thought and felt, for better or for worse, when those events weren't so near.

    • Own your data. Twitter is a micro blog. Instagram is a photoblog. But these blogs aren't yours. Yes, you provide the photos. And yes, you provide the witty content. But all of it disappear in an instant at some company's discretion. Putting your data on your own blog protects you and your memories.

    It doesn't matter where you start your blog, or how cool your domain is, or how many people read it, or what programming language it's written in. What matters is that you start.

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