• The Week #129

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    • After years of regularly and then sporadically saving for retirement, I've finally automated it again...kinda. If I were in the US, I'd have access to regular retirement accounts and things could be deducted in a tax efficient way from my pay check. As an American, I also can't take advantage of any non-US retirement savings schemes (🤪). So what I'm basically left with is depositing some amount into into a regular taxed brokerage account.

      What I've setup is: an automatic from Wise to my US bank account, and a few days after an automatic withdrawal from my US bank account to Vanguard. The two bits I can't automate are: the wire/furikomi from my Japanese bank account to Wise and once the money is actually in Vanguard, purchasing of ETFs (VOO index funds, mostly). My hope is that Wise will send me an email with the amount I need to send in yen each month (because exchange rates change).
    • Setting this up makes really happy. It's been one of those tasks in the back of my head for quite a while and the crap exchange rate made it even less attractive. The exchange rate is still horrible (but less so). I reckon it will all even out in the end. But perhaps the best bit is I discovered I can now purchase fractional ETFs.

      I'll explain. Let's say I have $200, and I want to buy 1 share of VOO (a S&P 500 index fund) that I'll sell off when I rewrite, and it costs $350. Normally,I have to hold my $200, not earning anything, wait until I had $350 and hope that by the time I did the cost hasn't risen to $400 and make my purchase. Now I can just buy $200 worth of the stock, which makes it much easier to invest the same amount each month, no matter the price of the stock.
    • There was a bunch of noise on the bird site with the owner doing stupid, stupid shit. Like blocking linking the other sites stupid. ON THE INTERNET. :facepalm: Good riddance. So glad I've made my home on the internet my own domain / IndieWeb enabled.
    • I've been making really good progress on my major refactoring of the Tanzawa. This has me mostly pulling logic out of ModelForms and moving them into application/domain functions that I can reuse throughout my site. The create methods have been refactored and the update methods are mostly so. I reckon I'll need another pass at views themselves as they're a bit crufty, still. 
    • We had a Christmas social at work to celebrate the year and it was a lot of fun. We've grown so much in the past year. We went to Soul Food House in Tokyo. I've been wanting to try that place for years, but it's in central Tokyo – some place I'm not going to go unless I'm in the area. Maybe it was the classic American cooking, or maybe it was  the Christmas poem read in an English accent, but it finally felt like Christmas is starting.
    • Friday was Leo's Christmas pageant where the school puts on a play about the birth of Jesus and  then they sing some Christmas songs. When thinking about the amount of chaos you'd expect at a pre-school production of...anything, and then reflecting on the various happenings (kids crying, kids running around, props falling over) that happened during the production...I came to the conclusion that there was just the right amount of chaos this year that it kept things interesting. Not enough and it gets kinda boring, "what are these kids? professionals?" you think to yourself. But they really hit the mark so well, I even heard one of the moms mention the chaos during the show. I'm looking forward to next year when it's Leo's grade's turn to have speaking roles...and maybe a bit less chaos.

  • The Week #128

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    • We bought tickets to visit America for 2 weeks during February 🎉. Leo will turn 5 in Texas. I'm really excited for him to meet everyone. I'm also excited to see what happens when he's throw into a pure English environment. It's only two weeks, but will he come back speaking more English, even if just a temporary boost? Ticket prices were still a bit painful, but not ludicrous like they were 6 months ago.
    • The US not having a proper public transit system sure makes visiting a pain because it means you've got to rent a car. Which means me getting an international driver's permit (my US license expired and I can no longer renew it online). And also means me potentially futzing with a child seat after a 14 hour flight...so much better to just have trains that connect people to the places they want to go.
    • Last week I started on some upgrades to Tanzawa that will allow me to update reply/bookmark titles without resorting to the Django admin. And as I started, I realized that there was a yak that needed shaving. It was time to do the next chunk of refactoring: moving my business logic out of views/django forms and into re-usable "application" functions.

      It's a much larger chunk of work, but also very important. You see, to share as much code as possible during my initial development of Tanzawa, my micropub endpoint mostly just converts the micropub request format to that of my authoring views, and uses the same forms for processing.

      This is problematic, not because not because it doesn't work, but because it's all too entangled together. It's a problem because it doesn't make sense that editing my author form will effect my micropub endpoint (so change it as little as possible 🙃). 

      My functional end-to-end tests for posting just test micropub under the assumption that they're the same, so I never bothered writing tests for my author views because if it busted, I could always fallback to any micropub client for posting.

      All of this is a long-winded way to say I've got a lot of refactoring ahead of me, but it's a lot of fun making things not just work, but making them right – with tests.
    • I started watching The Playlist, a drama about starting Spotify. I''m really liking it. Each episode is told from the perspective of one founding / important member or another, which is something I've never seen before.
    • I made some overnight white bread with Leo, as his request. Each time I make this, I think I should make it more often. It's vastly superior to anything I can buy locally in the shops. If I could find a loaf like this, it'd be at least ¥1,000.  And because it's done overnight, it's much easier to manage the fermenting/timing of things. Slam it in the fridge and bake it the next day (or so) when you have some time.
      Overnight white bread

  • The Week #127

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    • I migrated my blog from a digital ocean droplet to fly.io. No longer having a background thread running about remembering to do server maintenance and so forth is great. My site is also loading a lot quicker than it was before – how much of that is fly.io vs the server is now in Narita, Japan instead of Germany...I'm not sure. Either way, happy days.
    • And for some more inspiration from Simon Willison I started experimenting with using Github Issues as lab notebook. The base idea is to collect all ideas / findings as I work on a particular issue on the issue as comments and so forth.

      My tweak is, I want to use Brid.gy to post the issue and backfeed my own (or others) comments on them to my own website. Other people's comments should work already, but not your own comments (yet). So I'll either need to write the integration or create an alter ego for posting my comments. Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde could be fun.

      All of these posts will be in the new Tanzawa stream.
    • Leo rode his bike to a friend's house, but the friend wasn't outside, so we continued on to the park for a bit. On the ride back we heard the infamous calling of the yakimo truck. I think of it like hearing the sound of the ice cream man driving around the neighborhood when you're a kid, but for fresh roasted sweet potatoes. He's literally roasting them while he drives around in his truck. A bit of autumn / winter goodness.

      Leo's recently taken to eating sweet potatoes. As we passed him he said they smelled good, so we turned around and bought a couple from him. And they were really good. The insides were starting to caramelize... I'm looking forward to hearing that siren song again.

  • The Week #126

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    • A week off of Twitter and I find I don't really miss it. There's also been a number of really good blog posts and videos about this current moment in social media / internet space and time. The one that I'm finding that resonates the most with me is PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet.
    • I got Tanzawa running, or at least 500ing on on fly.io. This time next week, I should hopefully have my blog off of my own server and on to fly.io, hopefully with some instructions for how you can do the same as well. 

      This is one task that's been eating at me for a while. There's been some features that I've wanted that would require background tasks and or cron jobs. Processing tasks/cronjobs in my current setup would require me to add more processes to the server and is a non-starter, so I've been at an impasse. I'm using uWSGI to run Tanzawa on Fly, like I do with Sunbottle, which solves the background task issue as well. I'm excited about working on Tanzawa again. 
    • We've been going to the park near our house more on the weekends. Leo has gotten good enough at riding his bike that he can go down the hills using his brakes. For the uphill portion of the journey, I usually push him on the back to give him a boost. This weekend we practiced going up the hill while standing and pedaling, which got him further than he usually does. I really enjoy watching him just cruse around the park on his bike from area to area – it's almost like an extension of his being.
    • While at the park, the firemen from the fire station across the street invited us over and let the kids sit inside the fire engine (both the full size and the small kei-version). The fire station also got delivery of a new ambulance (set to replace the current one), but we couldn't see inside that one, not even they've been in it yet.
    • Last night around story time, rather than laying down in his spot to listen to stories, Leo was trying to avoid going to sleep so he laid on me and told me to read to him there. Of course that's not going to happen because we both can't see the book at the same time. I told him lights out (no story) unless he lays in his spot. He didn't move, so I turned off the lights and he did something he hasn't done since he was a newborn: he fell asleep laying on my chest 🥰. Back in those days he was much smaller and couldn't even cover my torso. Now, he's well past my knees. I let him lay there for a while before moving him over so I could relive the "old" days and think happy thoughts.

  • The Week #125

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    • I signed out of Twitter for probably the first time since I opened the account 2007. Regular readers of my blog can probably guess, but the straw that broke the camels back was letting 45 back on the platform. Life's too short to spend it in proximity to self-important fascists. If you're interested in my Twitter-like microblogging, I'm on Mastodon. 
    • After getting my flu shot the previous week, this week I got my omnicron booster, shot #4. I went with what was readily available and switched back to team Pfizer. Beyond my arm being incredibly sore for a day, I didn't have any real side effects this round.
    • Leo is taking more and more interest in letters and realizing that there's information encoded about the world all around him. When walking to school today he saw where stop (Tomaere) was written on the street – and he read "re" and asked what the middle character "ma" was. Though he kept insisting it said "rema" on the street because that's the order they're written in 🤣.
    • Next to our house is a field. Part of it had a huge vegetable patch where one of our neighbors would grow everything under the sun. The owner of the land sold it recently and it will be turned into houses. After my neighbors harvested all their veg and grass and weeds took over the patch at an incredible rate. You'd hardly realize it used to be cultivated land, unless you look closely.

      I'll miss living at the end of the street and not having any through traffic, but it was bound to happen. I'm glad we got over 3 years, especially while Leo was little, so he could play out front without needing to worry about cars.

  • The Week #124

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    • Last week I joined Mastodon and this week I've got to say, I'm enjoying it. Social media without the algorithms and outrage machine makes connecting with people on the web great again. While I'm using indieweb.social, browsing some hashtags, I also discovered some instances like social.coop and mastodon.green where I've been able to find some interesting people to follow. I also donated to my first patron to help keep indieweb.social's lights on.
    • The US mid-terms happened and, by Jove the Dems managed to hold the Senate and the House is still up for grabs (though leaning Republican, slim majority). Typically when there's full party control of House/Senate/Executive by the same party, the mid-terms results in 60 seat losses in the house, but that wasn't the same this year at all. That's incredible. Given all of the "red wave" talk in the media to see them be so wrong is great.

      I reckon there's a number of reasons for this: Roe vs Wade energizing women, the Biden admin making actual action on climate with the ira, and Gen. Z getting out the vote. To his credit Michael Moore was on TV a few days before the election saying that the red wave won't materialize because of sheer numbers i.e. the number of registered Dems out numbers R's, so if people show up the Dems will win. People showed up.

      Glad to see that my hastily prepared ballot was accepted and counted.
      Better luck next time
    • Leo has been getting more and more into his own room. He decorates it with things he's made and makes lists of stuff he needs for it (mirror and a printer?). On Saturday he said that he was going to sleep in his own room, instead of with us. Or rather we (me and him) were going to. He slept like he always does and I slept...about the same as usual (so-so).

      Sunday he said that he was going to sleep by himself. We did the regular reading routine in his bed and I left after he fell asleep. Going back to my own bed, it felt a bit lonely. I've grown so accustomed to just being able to roll over, open my eyes, and see the little guy snoozing. Leo starting to sleep in his own room by himself is a bit more bittersweet than I was expecting it would be. Thankfully he came in to our room at 2:30am and joined us 🥰.

      I've heard people (in the West) argue against co-sleeping with kids when they're young because it's difficult to get them to sleep in their own room...but he's taking all leadership here. 

  • The Week #123

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    • Twitter seems like it's being driven into the ground. The good news is that the people I follow there are starting to (or already were and I've just noticed) using Mastodon. I've made an effort to to start filling out my profile. You can follow at @jamesvandyne@indieweb.social. Thus far I'm really liking it. It feels like the internet before it all became siloed into 3 websites Twitter/Insta/FB.
    • I added graphs to Sunbottle. Right now I can see today's generation vs yesterday's generation, which is fun to compare. I've thought about maybe adding my battery storage levels, or buying / selling kWh, but going to keep it simple for now. Getting a Django project up on fly.io makes me want to try and get my blog/Tanzawa on there as well, so I can stop running my own server.
    • Thursday was Culture Day. In the spirit of the holiday, Leo said he wanted to visit Ikea. So we went and celebrated Swedish culture and ate meat plantballs. We picked up a couple of those 3-teir carts to help organize the washroom and to keep from piling stuff on the dining table (we can pile it in the cart instead! 🤣)
    • I'd been wanting to visit Kua'aina for a week or so, but I didn't tell anybody. It's been a while and their burgers are really good. Sunday, Leo woke up and said he wanted to visit the Aquarium with me. Whenever we visit the aquarium, we always visit Kua'aina. Two birds with one stone! Great minds think alike! All the phrases!

      After the aquarium / lunch, we went for a walk on the beach and Leo played a bit in the water. It really is fun to just go and hangout with him. It's gotten a lot easier as he's gotten older, too because we can chat / he uses to toilet / mostly feeds himself. I know I'll miss these days when he's older/busier, so for now I'm just trying to soak it all up.
      Autumn beach days

  • The Week #122

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    • I released Sunbottle, the name gave to my solar generation/usage collector, as open source and have put it up at solar.jamesvandyne.com. My co-workers gave me some good ideas for different things I could calculate e.g. including the carbon intensity of the grid at the time and so forth. I might make a small API so I can include some data on my homepage as well.
    • It was Halloween! This year I actually stumbled upon a proper carving pumpkin in my neighborhood. Leo drew the face on the pumpkin and I did the carving as I couldn't find the little kid-friendly carving knifes you can find in the US.
    • We're slowly starting to graduate from animation-only movies to more story/live actions movies. We watched a Hocus Pocus as our first Halloween movie. Leo didn't find it scary at all, which was good.
    • Saturday was a rare Saturday where we didn't have anything scheduled or planned. We decided to take it easy and take Leo to ride his bike at the park next to sakai-gawa. When we lived in Texas, we used to bring Sophie with us all sorts of places (we also didn't have a kid). I feel a bit guilty that we can't do that as much here, so we brought her with us as well and she was all smiles and sparkly eyes.
    • I sent in my ballot for the 2022 mid-term election in the US. As I live abroad without a determined return date, Texas only allows me to vote in federal elections i.e. I have no say in the governor race. I understand the logic and mostly don't mind, except this year, I'd like to vote for Beto. This year I can only vote for my congressperson and as my district is gerrymandered  the likelihood of my guy winning is slim-to-none.
    • Speaking of elections Lula won the Brazilian presidential election. I'd been trying not to read too much about it to avoid disappointment in the case where he lost. Certainly a win for the Amazon and by extension, the rest of humanity.

  • The Week #121

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    • The installer finished setting up my panels and battery. One of the reasons we went with the installer that we did was because they tried to get us the most possible generation on our roof. Most of the installers we chatted with put square panels on our roof. But these guys used the non-square panels as well to completely cover our south facing roof. Not only does it look nice and clean, it generates more power, and reduces maintenance on an entire section of our roof.
      Edge to edge panels
    • One of the last things they did was setup the app that would allow me to monitor my generation etc.. directly from my phone. Problem is, it's slow and clunky. So I did what any programmer would do and spent a few hours this week reverse engineering things, so I could make a tool to record my data and display it how I want.

      I've tracked most of the progress in this twitter thread. When this is done, I should back-fill this thread into Tanzawa (but I don't support videos yet...?)....But the basic idea is I want to show my generation/state in plain English and in terms that make it easier to understand just how much electricity my little system has produced. I plan to integrate this with the Octopus' api so I can build a proper "payback" page based on my tariff and so forth. Most people use excel. I make a website.
      Bottling the sun

      If you have any ideas for factoids to display at the bottom, let me know!
    • Sunday was a beautiful warm autumn day, about 24 degrees out. As we dropped by the in-laws, I decided to take advantage of them being closer to sakai-gawa and go for a run along the river. My goal was to run for 40 minutes and 5k, both of which I managed 🙌🏻. Lately when I've been running I've been trying to focus only on time and forgetting pace and distance. It makes running a lot more enjoyable, at least at first.

  • The Week #120

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    • What a week. PyCon JP was held over the weekend and Kraken had a booth. I've been help coordinate and did the final setup of the booth before day-1 and it was a lot of fun. Besides working the booth, telling people about Kraken, what we do, and that we're hiring, I also got to chat with a number of former co-workers. I also got to meet an old teammate that I'd never met in person before, though we worked together for about a year.
      A co-worker and me workin the booth
    • On Saturday we went camping for the first time with some friends in Nishi-Tanzawa. This too was heaps of fun and I look forward to going again.  We had a bit of bad luck with our location because it was mostly covered in rocks. I learned two very important lessons with this trip: the pegs and hammer included aren't worth the plastic they're made of and sometimes you need to muscle things together.
      The river along the campsite

      The plastic pegs and hammer issue was mostly (I believe) a bad luck of the draw for location. It was non-stop rocks so everywhere I'd try to put the peg I'd get rock. Eventually I found it worked better to dig a bit, clear the rocks and continue. Was it the "right" thing? Not sure, but it worked. So next on my list things to buy for camping is some proper steel pegs and a heavy / fat hammer for getting them into the ground.  I also learned that Workman, a store that specializes in work-wear and such in Japan, also has camping gear. Coleman steel pegs were about ¥400 each last I saw them, and they're about ¥100 from workman. Doable. ( I just checked their site and they have some that you can screw into the ground....seems very convenient,  but I'm not bringing my drill-gun – feels like cheating.)

      The other lesson was that, when building the dome of our tents that you're not going to break it when bending the dome to get the roof in place. I think we maybe bought too much tent (a 2-dome tent), but I reckon we're going to always want to some kind of shade to hang out in when we're not sleeping, so it saves us from building 2 different things.

      The mountains and river were beautiful. Definitely looking forward to a second trip, maybe in spring.
    • A year after starting our initial quote requests and 7 months after signing a contract, we finally got our solar and battery installed! As of this writing it's still not 100% finished – everything is installed, but I think there's still a bit of work to do around the breakers.

      When we discussed the layout of the panels, they'd said that the panels would come to the very edge of the roof – and they weren't lying. This is only possible because Sharp makes non-rectangular panels. I'll make a separate post my panels when they're all hooked up and running.
      Panels right to the edge of the roof
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