When I sent my ballot from Japan to Houston, I was stressed that it wouldn't get there, or I'd mess something up and my ballot wouldn't be counted. Thankfully it appears that I count as one of the over 1,000,000 early votes in Harris County.

First mug cup since February.

Some Apple apps bypass some network extensions and VPN Apps. Maps for example can directly access the internet bypassing any NEFilterDataProvider or NEAppProxyProviders you have running

I understand why Apple would want its apps to access the internet unencumbered by potential nefarious network filters installed on a system, but at the same time it's my computer. And that decision should me left up to me. More and more I think my next computer should be Thinkpad running Debian.

Amazing how much cardio endurance you lose after just a week. Beautiful sunset tonight. 🏃🙌🏻

■26日、就任後初の所信演説で方針を示す■ＥＵが既に掲げた目標を日本もようやく追いかける■高い基準の達成に日本企業も厳しい対応を迫られる

1. Tagged with
2. japan
3. climate change

On my vacation, I took some time away from technology. I needed the break. I’ve been using technology less since I returned. I’ve been reading books. Once I have finished reading Kill Switch, the sequel to Kill Process, I’m going to read Moneyball. It’s been over a year since I read books th...

The major difference between the feeds of the Social Dilemma and your RSS feed is one is algorithmly designed to addict and manipulate, while the other is just a chronological list of stuff you're interested in reading. What I do in these cases is I give a quick glance at the unreads for something that really interests me and then mark everything as read.

My feed list is only about 10 - 15 items at the moment, it's quickly expanding as I find interesting people on the IndieWeb, so it may not be as viable of a strategy for a larger number of feeds.

• The project at work has morphed from a monolith to a service based architecture with multiple services, background tasks, and databases (of different vendors and versions). I finally had a couple of days to Dockerize it all and use docker-compose to start it in the right order and clean up environmental variables. Feels nice after the fact but it was a slog.


• Leo's still at the age where he's a bit picky about carbs. It's usually bread or rice and he'll turn his nose at any kind of pasta, soba, udon or any other noodle. I made a lasagna and this time I involved him a bit more. Once the sauce was started he asked what I was cooking and I showed him and he said it look delicious ("looks like curry"). Then I had him help assemble the lasagna by sprinkling the cheese between the layers. The boy gobbled it up and we have expanded our range of acceptable foods 🙌🏻


• I've been using Sony MDR-7605 for 9 years now. The original pads on them lost the outer layer years ago but recently the pad itself has been slipping off the headphone itself. I finally broke down and spent the ¥1,000 ($9.50?) to get some new paddings and they're good as new.


• The car went in for it's 6 month inspection over the weekend. I got some information about getting a drive-recorder installed in it before our trip next month. The advancements in cameras lately has made it so you can get complete 360 coverage with a single camera for not too much money. Hopefully I'll never be in the case where I'd need the footage from it.


• I started listening to some podcasts again. Usually I only listen to Build your SaaS, but this week I discovered My Climate Journey and really enjoyed it. It made me a bit more optimistic about us actually making the transition away form fossil fuels.


• Jacob linked me to a great episode of Reconcilable Differences. I've always been a fan of Merlin Mann and the money quote this time is "At this point social media is more trash than website". Couldn't agree more.

Lovely sunset this evening in Yokohama. A nice break from the gray skies.

I finished watching Long Way Round while waiting for new episodes of Long Way Up. The adventure travel reminded me a lot of blogs I used to read when I was in high school¹ and college² and dreaming of studying abroad in Japan and living in Japan in general.

In those days, we'd blog, maybe post a bad photo or two, and commented on each others' sites. Nobody knew each other in real life, but, over time, you'd get a real sense of community. You were of course following the posts, but there were also a regular cast of commenters that you'd also get a sense of knowing. It felt authentic...and innocent.

Why can't we have this today - but on larger scale? How would you even find these sites on the modern web? Everything is hidden behind "the algorithms" and or paid for by a marketing campaign. Can you even find them?

¹ Sushicam.com was a great photo blog by a guy living in Japan. I used to have a few prints of his and also bought his old Canon 10D - until my parents said "If you have enough money to buy a camera, you have enough money to pay rent".
² Justin Klein was a great blog from a traveling programmer. Not just Japan, but all over the world.