The Week #149
by
James
- This week was Golden Week in Japan. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were all public holidays and so many people also took Monday / Tuesday off to get a full 9 days off in a row. I took Tuesday off as Leo's school was closed for a day off in-lieu for an event last Saturday.
- I took advantage of that day off with Leo and we went to Minatomirai to watch Super Mario Brother's Movie. We arrived far too early to the theater as Leo couldn't wait at home. We killed some time by looking (and buying) some of the movie goods: a new bento box, some Mario themed iron-on patches, and clear files and by grabbing lunch from the concession stand.
Leo looooved the movie. The entire time he was smiling and giving me a thumbs up when there was a scene that he liked. After the credits there was an unhatched Yoshi egg...I wonder if there's going to be a Mario Brother's Movie 2 out next year or so. With it making over a billion (with a b) dollars worldwide so far, I wouldn't be surprised. - After the movie we went to Blue Bottle Coffee and played a bit in the fountains in front of the Yokohama Art Museum. At Blue Bottle I picked up their little free paper to take home. It's written in both English and Japanese and about coffee. I "scanned" it using the notes app on my iPhone to share it on my blog...which came through as a pdf.
Not being able to share non-images on my blog caused me to work a bit on Tanzawa so I could at least upload and select a PDF. PDFs still don't quite display on my blog how I'd like (using the default trix "attachment" styles), but it's enough. Including something heavier weight like PDF.js to embed them seemed a bit much considering how rarely I'll be uploading PDFs on my site.
One benefit of this work was that I was able to dive into some of the original code from Tanzawa that was a bit crufty and clean it up. Working on Tanzawa isn't much different than gardening – you've got to weed / maintain things. - We played at a number of parks that we usually don't play at. One of the parks had a "log house", which is a city-run log house looking building that kids can play inside. There's rope nets going up the wall to climb to the second floor with rope net bridges. There's also a slide, a good selection of books, blocks, a basketball hoop, and some other play things.
I mention this because the city did a really good job of designing the street in front of this park. Instead of the usual narrow 2-way road without any trees, they put it a one-way street with greenery on both sides, and curves in the road.Traffic calming street design
Behind this park and the log house was actually a 400 panel 100kWh solar farm! I know this, not because I'm a huge nerd (bethatasitmay), but they had a nice placard at the service door that detailed this / the installer.110mWh solar array in Yokohama - My trusty 2014 Macbook Pro's battery started swelling, which I noticed as my computer would open itself after I'd close the lid. Perhaps it was just the hinges were loose and they finally reach the point where I needed to open it up and tighten them. Indeed, they were very loose (my computer's monitor would shake sometimes if I was typing vigorously enough) and tightening the screws did fix that, it did not fix my self-opening computer problem. Upon further inspection I can see a (very) small bend in the bottom of my laptop.
Which is to stay, after almost 8.5 years of loyal service it's time to get a replacement. While I've mentioned and have been tempted by the Framework laptop for it's serviceability, it's not available in Japan. I'm also not entirely sure of making a sudden, unplanned jump from macOS to desktop linux...especially after multiple decades on macOS.
I've purchased an M2 Air with 512GB storage and 16GB of ram. It boggles my mind that it's exactly the same specs as I got almost a decade ago in my current computer. While I'm excited for a new computer, I'm also bummed I'm losing a loyal companion.
That said, I'm happy that battery replacement in January 2021 got me another 2 and a bit years out of the machine. That brought my costs down to about $0.87 /day ( $2699 (before tax) / 3090 days). I would've loved to have gotten a solid 10 years out of it, but it wasn't in the cards this time.