• I hoped we'd make it a week without Leo's school being closed, but we weren't so lucky. Thursday was canceled because of a close contact somewhere, but re-opened on Friday. It looks like we're in the clear, at least for now. That said, dropping Leo off in the mornings is noticeably quieter as about half of his class is taking off by choice.
• Relatives in Tokyo managed to get Omicron and thankfully it was just a fever for a night.
• We signed up Leo for swimming classes at the local Y and he had his first non-trial lesson. We can watch from outside the pool and he looked like he had a blast. I'm sure he'll be swimming like a fish in no time.
  
  I know I took swimming a swimming class as a kid, but only as my mom told me so. I must have been young enough when I took them as I have zero recollection of the class itself. Swimming has always felt like one of the things "everyone can do naturally", but that isn't the case.
  
  Basic swimming is such an important life skill. I'll breathe a bit easier when we go to the beach during summer once this is finished.
• I'm trying not to blog about my runs every week, but this week was notable because I ran 3 times. Since I've been slowing down I've been switching my focus to time more than distance. But since I'm not slowing down that much, an extra 15 minutes adds another couple of kilos. Two of my runs were over  6km, 50% more than my usual 4km course.
• In one of the episodes of Shinkarion (Leo's favorite train/mech show), they have the Evangelion Shinkansen (since retired) as a guest mech. When it's transforming from a train to a mech they play part of the opening song for the anime. Leo's constant singing of it inspired me to start watching Evangelion for the first time since high school. It's as intense as I remember.
•  Like most Japanese front doors we have two locks. And for a while the bottom lock has been acting strange. In the mornings it would take a lot of force to unlock it from the inside. But it'd be fine some afternoons. I carry both the card for the autolock and the backup key, just incase the electrics stop working.
  
  After cycling back from Shonandai, we went to open the door and neither worked on the bottom lock. I got locked out of my house. It sounds like it's getting caught on something. We called our house maker because "that's what you're supposed to do" and they were, as anticipated, useless. You'd think they'd have, at a minimum, a local "lock guy" to recommend, but that's not the case.
  
  We find a locksmith he comes out about an hour later. I'm glad I didn't lock the car so we could at least sit inside of it where it was a touch warmer. While we're waiting I'm thinking about Sophie, hungry and may not get dinner tonight. I'm thinking about work and how funny it'd be to have to take leave because I can't physically reach my computer. 10 minutes after arriving he manages to jimmy the bottom lock open. I've never been more happy to get inside of my house.
  
  After he opened it, he took it apart to see if he could deduce what the issue was. It's not the lock itself. It appears to be the hole in the frame where the lock latches on to is slightly off. The lock itself appears to be fine. Who knows. Best ¥5,500 I've spent in a while.

• The same as Michael, we had an outbreak of covid amongst family,  so Leo's school closed all week.  It's re-opened now, let's hope it stays that way. Winter break just never ends for this boy 😅.
• I finished watching Generation 56k, it was really enjoyable. I was disappointed it was only 6 episodes long to start. I'm looking forward to Season 2.
• So far I'm keeping pace with my goal of 100 runs in 2022. In January I ran 9 times for a total of 40km. My recent focus has been to run slower and keep my heart rate down, which is proving more difficult than anticipated. But just letting myself slowdown has made running more enjoyable.
• I've made some more small contributions to indieweb-utils this week. James and I seem to be in a bit of a groove timezone wise. I'll send my reviews/PRs in the morning before work while he's winding down/sleeping. And he typically responds / handles them while I'm winding/down sleeping. And still the project moves forward.
• DHH wrote a good post about  We can't live without friction, about how the friction is a great filter. It's important to remember this because of the years of engineering frictionless reactions to things in social media is a large part why it can be such a cesspool (my words, not his).
  
  For a few days I was thinking it might be fun to add a comments form to Tanzawa posts, so I could perhaps replicate the communities that used to form around a given blog. Where your blog would connect not just you and a reader, but your readers, too. I think I'm going to let that stew for a bit longer, and perhaps add an email link in my footer for non-webmention responses.
• I started looking at the quotes we got for solar panels and a battery again, mostly for two reasons:
  1. Disaster preparedness. We're overdue for a big quake in the Kanto area. Having a stable, rechargable power supply would be really nice if the power was cut because of it and remove a lot of stress. The battery is small enough (6.5kWh) that we'd still need to conserve electricity, but we wouldn't be in the dark or without heat.
  2. 2.6kWh is a small system. And based on the generation estimates it would only ever produce about half of our usage during fall/winter. We might get a few months in early summer where it can cover all of our usage. Post-lunch dishwasher runs would be "free". But it's more about the feeling I get when I come back from walking Sophie and the sun shines down on my house: that feeling of missed opportunity.
  I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but it's back on my radar. Again.

Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all.
...
This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

It’s increasingly difficult to buy a non-smart TV, so your only options are to never connect it to the internet (impossible on a Samsung), use router level DNS blocking (until the TVs start using encrypted DNS) or connect something like an Apple TV and use that exclusively.

Despite the new gatekeepers' best efforts, the old Internet never completely disappeared. Personal websites created by individuals that have always been the meat of the old Internet are still around. They are still about exploration, innovation, fun, and all the rest.

Building stuff on the internet is fun. No lie.

1. Tagged with
2. blogging
3. internet

• I added a proper favicon to my blog and Tanzawa. It's something I've thought about for a while but delayed doing because "doing it right" requires making heaps of files in different sizes. But then I saw a blog post by Adam about how to add a favicon to Django and it included a svg example. Using svg for my favicon means I forgo Safari support for now, but it would let me generate the icon from site settings . And since the code samples were plug and play, I decided to do it. Yay favicon.
• We took Leo to the big park nearby to practice his cycling. We're still practicing the push start, but he's getting really good. He navigated through people, barricades, and dogs without hitting any of them. He's gaining for confidence too as he told me not to run after him. The best part, at least for me, was that he got to experience the joy of cycling while watching his favorite trains roll by.
• Omicron has officially found its way into Leo's pre-school with a couple of kids getting diagnosed with it. We have no idea which class (or multiple classes?) the people infected with it are in, so we have no idea of our potential exposure. With how transmissible this variant is, my assumption that it doesn't matter who had it or which grade and we'll probably be testing positive in a week or so. Hopefully not, though. 
  
  For now school is closed for half a week, but I expect for that to be extended. The hardest part of the extensions/sudden closures is that winter vacation never ends. Each morning he wakes up and asks if he has to go to school, and if he does, he starts crying. This happened after summer break too, but after a week of school, he got into the routine and it wasn't an issue. This time we can't get back into the routine.
• Since we're going to be staying home a lot more again, I caved and bought a Switch to play with Leo. I'm a bit conflicted about my decision. On one hand, almost 4 feels early to be playing video games. On the other hand, I seem to recall playing NES/playing on my 8088 and I turned out fine (or at least I think I did). It's not like he'll be playing by himself – we'll always play together. It's probably fine. 
  
  I picked up Mario Kart and Minecraft. Minecraft is probably too hard for his age, but it's similar to his Legos in that he can build stuff. Mario Kart's auto accelerate and steering assist is brilliant for young and old alike.
• I started leading part of a new global team, the first of its kind, at work. While I can't talk about the details of what we're building, it is exciting to be shaping and developing new core functionality that the rest of the company will depend on.
• I switched my electric from Octopus' initial offering (no longer available) to their new 100% renewable Green Octopus plan. While I liked being on a fixed tariff (where the price of each kWh doesn't change with usage), supporting renewables with my wallet, in even a small way, felt like the right thing to do. Especially when you consider the average kWh in Japan costing 500g~ of carbon. Compare this with the UK where it's closer to 10g of carbon/kWh... Green Octopus is also currently cheaper than Standard Octopus, which won't always be the case.