• The Week #24

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    • It's not everyday a man goes to war, but this week started my war with the crows. I usually try to keep on good terms with them because crows are smart, their beaks are ginormous and I stand out - they know where I live. They started razing the trash.

    Like most trash areas in our neighborhood, ours is a collapsable green box made of green netting with an aluminum frame. Before we moved here a truck backend in to ours and broke / deformed our top. More over, most trash spots are on flat ground, our's is on a small decline. With the decline unless the sides are square crows and pick at the trash from the gap between the ground and the frame. Since the truck hit our trash, when the box is square there's a crow-size hole to let them come and go freely from the top.

    The provisions that the neighborhood associated put on helped – the panels tied to the netting kept the crows at bay. But they were just thin styrofoam and degraded after a couple of months. Rather than get more thing styrofoam that looks temporary, I took matters into my own hands. I found some nice hard plastic (like you'd make a lawn sign out of, but thicker) and tie-wrapped it to the netting so that it extends a bit beyond the frame closing most of the gaps. I'm happy to report we won the first battle. Let's see how it continues to hold up.


  • I found Website Carbon Calculator and added their small bit of JS that calculates the carbon cost of each page load and displays it in a widget. It's down at the very bottom with my recent checkins / categories and such. Check it out.

  • It's almost Christmas. I've finished my shopping and everything that hasn't already arrived should arrive in the next day or two. As has become tradition, I send my dad a BBQ'd brisket from Salt Lick. Expressing the cold pack of meat to Washington costs almost as much as the meat itself. I wish they shipped to Japan.

  • The last time I went to the Salt Lick was with my dad. We got the all you can eat, which doesn't have any to gos. But somehow my dad managed to get a container of bbq to go, took it back with us to the hotel, put it in the freezer, and took it carry-on with him 5-hours back to Washington. Maybe this is where I get my sense of optimism, that anything's possible if you just give a go.

  • We went to the beach for the first time in what feels like forever. Didn't go in to the water, but just to enjoy the views. Winter Shonan is the best. The crowds from Tokyo are gone and it's just locals and surfers – it's great. We usually go with the entire family around the New Year. I think it's because when we used to live in the US, we'd visit for the new year, and the one place we always missed was Shonan and Enoshima, so we'd always visit.

  • I'm thinking of moving Past Projects to the wiki. Moving into the wiki would keep in line with my digital garden concept. All listy type stuff goes into the wiki. On the other hand, this could become a blog + profile style site in the future (really just moving the blog off the front page), and in such a case keeping past projects with a similar style as the rest of the site is desirable.

  • 🔗 How and why I stopped buying new laptops

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    Being an independent journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that I need to pay for quality.
    This is article about How and why I stopped buying new laptops from Low Tech Magazine about reducing your environmental impact by avoiding the upgrade cycle and using your old (or used) laptop inspires me to continue using mid-2014 Macbook Pro as long as possible.
    The author favors older Thinkpads because of their repairability. Repairability gave me a pause when I originally purchased my laptop. Thankfully it hasn’t been a problem yet, but I fear it may take my machine before it’s time.
    1. Tagged with
    2. computing

  • Checkin to Katase Nishihama Beach (片瀬西浜海水浴場)

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    in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
    Shonan ❤️ 🇯🇵
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    I haven't been posting all of my runs to my blog lately, but this week I managed to catch the sunrise and the sunset at almost the same location. Yokohama is the best. 🇯🇵

    Sun goes up.



    Sun goes down



  • 🔗 Code With Me - Plugins | JetBrains

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    Code With Me is a new service created by JetBrains for collaborative development and pair programming.
    I've been doing a lot of remote pair programming at work lately. This Code with Me plugin for PyCharm looks like it could make it a lot easier. Can't wait to try it out.
    1. Tagged with
    2. python
    3. programming

  • 🔗 STEALING UR FEELINGS

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    Meet the new AI that knows you better than you know yourself
    Stealing ur feelings is a brilliant interactive video that shows the danger of facial recognition and how it's already being abused by advertisers. All the more reason to keep wearing a mask, even post-covid.
    1. Tagged with
    2. internet
    3. privacy

  • 🔗 Codeberg.org

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    Codeberg is founded as a Non-Profit Organization, with the objective to give the Open-Source code that is running our world a safe and friendly home, and to ensure that free code remains free and secure forever.
    I haven't used Codeberg (a GitHub alternative), but their copy on front page strikes me.
    No tracking. Your data is not for sale.
All services run on servers under our control. No dependencies on external services. No third party cookies, no tracking.
Hosted in the EU, we welcome the world.
    Using external services for every last thing, you end up with your data being spread out amongst multiple (unknown to you) vendors, each with different security-implications / privacy policies / regulations all across the world. It makes your service more brittle (increased points of failure) and less secure (increased attack vectors). Seeing a service make this central to their product is refreshing.
    Focusing on privacy and hosting in non-US owned/operated datacenters in the EU will be a competitive advantage when going up against the US tech companies in the future, if it isn't already.
    1. Tagged with
    2. computing
    3. privacy
    4. programming

  • The Week #23

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    • In addition to reading and writing notes about Atomic Habits, I've also started to re-read some books that inspired me in the past and write notes so I can reference them later. This week is the fantastic book Web Form Design ( my notes ). Do you really need a book about such a mundane topic? When you consider that forms are the bottleneck for all online interactions, yes.

    • I managed to run 5km 3 times last week using Habit Stacking. The habit is basically as follows "After a cup of coffee at 5:30am I will run for 30 minutes". Since I'm not fast enough for a 30 minute 5km yet, it usually works out to 30 ~ 35 minutes.

    • Stacking my running habit around coffee is what seems to work for me. When I first started running (and managed to sustain the habit for 5 or 6 months) in 2018, it was also similar. Except Leo was an infant and I couldn't make coffee at 4:30am without fear of waking him. Since it was summer and the sun rises around then in Japan, I'd go for a run with my endpoint being one of the local 7-11's, where I could get an ice coffee and walk home.

    • I tried the Plant Balls on a trip to ikea, and they're proper tasty. Technically I got the meatballs and my wife got the plant balls and we shared one, but I think they're my new default.

    • I bought my first proper bookshelf and it's in the minimal style of bookshelf I've always wanted (photo in my tweet). I wish I had the space so I could chain multiple shelves together for a wall of books. Like most of the rest of the furniture in my house, it's from Muji. And it's properly screwed into the walls because this is Japan.

  • Checkin to IKEA Restaurant & Cafe (IKEAレストラン&カフェ)

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    in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

    Veggies balls!

  • The Week #22

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    • Japan OKed free Covid-19 vaccinations for residents. The goal is June 2021 for everyone to get vaccinated - just in time for the Olympics :) Unfortunately in the mean time, numbers continue to rise, though it appears that they're starting to level off a bit.

    • As I'm the head of the block this year in my neighborhood, I have some extra duties, like attending a monthly neighborhood association meeting and disseminating information to my block. Each month a portion of the heads have a neighborhood patrol duty. We walk our block with official day-glow green neighborhood watch vests, a lantern, a mini-light saber (used by all the traffic guys), and two long pieces of wood.

    The guy in front slaps to wood together twice and we repeat an announcement in unison. This time it was "空きすの用心、火の用心", or "Take precautions against burglars. Take precautions against fire". It seems appropriate for this time of year. The patrol took about 20 minutes, helped me close my rings for the day, and I got to see parts of the neighborhood I'd never been.


  • I finished reading The Little Prince. It's one of those books that's a classic and everyone says you should read. I quite enjoyed it. It's the first book I finished reading cover-to-cover in ages (I tend get what I need from books about mid-way through and move on). Perhaps that it was less than 100 pages made it easier to finish.

  • I started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I'm compiling my notes on my wiki. The first few chapters remind me a lot of The Power of Habit (and he says as much in footnotes) - but it has some ideas that I really like. So far my favorite is " Each action is a vote for the type of person you want to become".

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