• The Week #109

    by
    • We spent the night at the Odawara Resort & Spa with Yumi's sister and her kids. It was a lot of fun, though quite tiring. The main attraction is the collection of swimming pools, both indoor and outdoor. You're free to use them before the official checkin time as well.

      Traveling like this is lots of fun, as there's nice air conditioned activities for the kids built in. We swam in the pools for probably 5 hours, total. A few hours before dinner and again after dinner.
      The door on the right is actually full of water and leads to the outdoor pool
    • We got a new sofa that is long enough to lay down on and finally makes the living area feel complete. Now that we have two sofas, we've arranged them facing each other. The idea is that we'd rather chat or read than focus in the TV.
    • The green bean plant has a case of leaf miners that I've let get out of control. I let it get that far because I couldn't decide how to combat them. I'm not an organic gardener (or a proper gardener really), but I hated the idea of spraying some wonder chemical on food that I'm going to ingest. Turns out, neem oil might could do the trick. And as it's just a vegetable oil, I don't need to worry about eating something that, we find out, causes cancer or something as so many of the pesticides do.

  • The Week #108

    by
    • My Uncle Kelly passed away. He was just 61 years old. He was a good man. He was very good mechanically and could build any machine you could dream of (or at least he could from my perspective). I'm simultaneously filled with sadness of his passing, worry for my mom (they were twins), and anger at the American health insurance "norms" that results in people enduring pain longer than they should, going to the doctor when they can't bear it any more, and ultimately find something too late. Rather than rant about things I cannot fix, I feel like I should write a proper post about him, so that's all I say for now. Uncle Kel, you will be missed.

      Disclaimer: The rest of this post was written before this bullet. It feels a bit flippant in the wake of things, but I'm leaving it as a record of the week before he passed.
    • My first week with Tanzawa Health has been a success. I've logged my weight and mental state each day. While I'm tempted to start building graphs so I can visualize the data I'm collecting, I'm also in no rush – just having that single reference point is enough to keep me on the right track.
    • I (finally) started working on adding support for photo posts. It's still a ways away, but I think I know what / how I want them to look. Photos will also the first feature where I introduce HTMX / Hyperscript into Tanzawa as I migrate away from Turbo/Stimulus.

      Why migrate away from Turbo/Stimulus? I'm not a fan of the webpack build process I need to use for it, which means I'm hesitant to fully embrace it and my app suffers because of it. HTMX / Hyperscript seem to have been embraced by the Django community as well (Turbo comes from the Rails community), so it also makes sense to use the preferred tool of the ecosystem. I'll outline my plans for photos in another blog post.
    • I did the 2022 Sotestu Stamp Rally with Leo. Stamp Rally's are a common summer activity in Japan. Basically you're given a booklet and at select stations there's a stamp station inside/outside the station. Once you complete the selected stations, if you're early enough in the season, you can collect a small prize.

      Completed Stamp Rally! 6 overlayed stamps to make this image.


      We visited all 10 stations and got the prize! I had thought about checking in to each station/location so I could make a trip and get a nice map, but decided against it and just focused on hanging out with Leo. I'm glad I did that.
    • Over a year ago Sophie knocked over a cup of coffee (being places we she shouldn't be!) and killed my wife's 2014 Macbook Air. I took it apart, cleaned it and tried to fix it, but it wasn't quite right, so about a year ago we bought a replacement. It's been sitting in my office collecting dust ever since, as I procrastinated clearing the hard drive and taking it to Apple to recycle.

      I charged it up and went to delete everything on it when I realized – it's working perfectly again. Sound is working. WiFi is working. Keyboard is fine. Trackpad is also fine. Half of it wasn't working a year ago. Maybe a year of the cold and heat let it fully dry and sort itself out?

      As we already got a replacement machine for it, I fiddled a bit with Fedora 36 on it (via a live-usb). Naturally as it's Fedora, it requires some faff to get WiFi working (which will probably require installing, as a reboot is required for new drivers, I think). But I was able to even get that far because I could share WiFi from my computer over bluetooth and it just worked! I'm amazed.

      I think Fedora might be my new OS once it starts to become a hassle to use my Mac because of outdated software. Big Sur is the last macOS my computer is compatible with, so I'm already not able to run the latest OS.

  • The Week #107

    by
    • With the rapid rise in cases of covid in Japan, it's only natural that it hits close to home. Someone in Leo's pre-school got it, so his week ended early and we're back to doing the random closures of school that we did in spring.

      Leo had a 39 degree fever on Wednesday night, so it's possible he got it as well. We tested him, but it came back negative, so maybe it was something else.
    • Europe is having a heatwave reaching temperatures not forecasted to occur until 2050. That combined with a single man (a "Democrat", no less) blocking US federal climate action has made it a rough week. We've got to get off fossil fuels...
    • I made an inquiry to the guys that are installing our solar, as they also do electrification work, to see about what it would cost to get an IH hob and water heater installed at the same time as our panels. My guess is probably 5 - 6k.
    • We have a trip planned for the end of the month with my sister-in-law and Leo's cousin's to a nearby resort hotel for a night. It has a nice pool and I didn't have any swimming trunks, so I bought some.

      I bought a new pair of Quicksilver trunks. Seeing all of the surf brands reminded me of growing up in Huntington Beach. Being a beach town in California, most everyone wore Quicksilver, Billabong, Roxy, or other surf brands. I never wore any of their clothes as it was too expensive for us (though I did have a sweet Rip Curl backpack for a couple of years). Though I haven't thought about these things in 20 years, being able buy the things we couldn't afford growing up without thinking much about it makes me feel incredibly fortunate.
    • I made a new Health plugin for Tanzawa. It's most immediate goal is to provide a way for me to track my weight / and mental health without any fuss. Why not use some app on my phone? There's a couple of reasons and regular readers of my blog can guess:

      1. My data would be locked into some application or service that I'd have no control over.
      2. The interface would likely require more taps and swipes to record 2 small data points. ( Inputting it directly into Apple Health requires like 7 taps and heaps of scrolling)
      3. The data collected would almost certainly be sold off to big tech for additional profiling.
      4. Health can start to becoming the bones of my future Strava / health-related integrations.

      The most important part though is that it's not public in any way, unless I want it to be. My hope is that I'll be able to find trends and course-correct easier. Things like: "Hey, you've had 3 days in a row feeling sad. Maybe you should talk about it?", or "You're down 2kg over this time last month, great job!", or, conversely, "You're up 2kg since the last month. Are you stress eating?".

      I can't emphasize enough how much having a platform like Tanzawa, which allows me to quickly and easily add forms / data to a database without  thinking about design (just match what I already have), or where I'm going to host it (already hosted), or any of the faff with a new project (✅), is so empowering. It makes it possible to go from idea to running in production in a day.

  • The Week #106

    by
    • The news of the week is Abe assassination. Unbelievable. I'm certain this will be dominating the news cycle for the months to come here in Japan. Such a needless loss of life.
    • After a nice lull in cases, the past couple of weeks, Covid cases have been on an upward trend, and are indeed doubling week over week. I think we've finally got the new omnicron variant here taking over. For whatever reason, people seem to be less worried about it this time around...perhaps pandemic fatigue? Or maybe as hospital numbers haven't really changed?
    • Leo saw his first movie in theaters. We went to tsujido to watch the latest Anpanman movie, and he did great. The theater had cushions for the kids to use that raises their seats up by about 4cm. Leo carried it to his seat and out of the theater, refusing my help. He didn't get up or talk the entire movie. Swarm tells me it's my first movie in theaters in 5 years.
    • The battery on my laptop is degrading much quicker than I had anticipated it would. The battery life had felt much shorter recently and indeed, CoconutBattery says it's at 93% of it's capacity. I imagine that's normal for a better that's 2 years old, but it's only been in used for less than 18 months 150-ish cycles. People on twitter tell me that that's pretty good...I just felt like it would have been 95% or 96%?
    • In Garden news, We planted a basil plant and a blueberry bush! The basil is giving off positive vibes next to the tomatoes. I have no idea how the blueberry bush is going to turn out, but having a bush makes it feel like we're eventually going to start putting plants into the ground, instead of planters, sometime. 

      About a month ago I tried a jalapeno from my plant and it still tasted like a bell pepper. This week I tried another one. Foolishly I took a big bite thinking "it's probably bell peppery". Boy was I wrong. The milk did nothing to soothe. My theory for the spiciness is that nacho channels his rage at the heat of summer directly into the chilis. Like solar panels, but instead of electricity we get spice.

  • The Week #105

    by
    •  After finishing Digital Minimalism, I've been skimming it again to write some notes, internalize the lessons, and start creating a plan to introduce the ideas properly into my life. It made me realize there are a few areas where I believe something or want to do something, but I'm not: consistently reducing meat intake, hitting my running goals, reducing my scroll time...and it was kind of depressing.

      "Prioritize demanding activity rather than passive consumption", it sounds easy but it's hard. Finding something to fill those gaps (hours per day!) that isn't just fiddling on my computer is difficult. It's so much easier to just sit and scroll instead of going for a run, or fiddling in the garden. Easier still when it's 35 degrees outside so it's miserable.

      One of the suggestions is to make the activities both scheduled and social, so it fulfills more of our social needs as humans. I'm having trouble finding these types of groups/clubs at a quick search...but it would be nice to find a group so I can create more connections in my local community.
    • On the way to the office on Friday and cousin facetimed me while I was on the train. Rather than just texting him back and continuing the conversation via Messages (low-bandwidth), I decided to apply some of the lessons in Digital Minimalism and you know...talk to people (high-bandwidth)...with my voice (ugh, I know, right?) . We Facetimed while I was walking to the office. I'm not usually one to talk on the video phone in public, but it was a lot of fun to catch up. A good way to spend 10 minutes in the roasting summer heat.
    • After work on Friday we had a welcome party for members from the UK who have been waiting to get into Japan for the past 18 months. We went to Vector brewing in Shinjuku. 3 hours all you can drink craft beer + 8? different dishes. The star was wonderful beer butt chicken (DDG it) which really good. I felt like there was too much meat overall . i.e. The only dish without any meat was the pickled veg at the start, even the salad had roast beef or the potato salad was mixed with tuna. Either way, the food was delicious, beer even better, and company even better still. Can't complain.
    • I've long been against getting an internet connected speaker in my house. Something about having an internet connected mic in my house just seems too ripe for abuse. Yes, my watch, phone, and computer are all technically similar, but the speakers are the only ones that are explicitly designed internet connected mics, not just a by-product of software.

      Which is to say, we decided to get a HomePod Mini. My hope is that we can use it for playing music from Apple Music without turning on the TV. Less "Baby bus" and more Jack Johnson, Ryan Adams, David Bowie. Should've had this revelation a week ago, as apparently Apple's adjusted all prices up ~25% in Japan to account for the weak yen 🤣😭.

  • The Week #104

    by
    • This post marks 2 years of doing "The Week" 🎉.  As things "open up" (they were never closed) and life returns to normal, I'm finding it difficult to remember to write these posts. But once I do sit down and write them, I am grateful I took some time to reflect on the week.
    • The Rainy season ended this week in Tokyo – 2 - 3 weeks early than it should've and we didn't even get much rain (I feel). It's been hitting over 35C in Yokohama, which is mid-summer temperatures. Hopefully we'll get some good summer rains to help cool things down. As a kid, I used to like summer, but any more I mostly dread it. How much hotter is it going to be this year because we continue to dig stuff out of the ground and burn it?
    • America continues its backwards slide with Roe vs Wade being overturned. We all knew it was coming after the leak, but it's still shocking and disappointing. The Democrat's response to this has also been fairly tone-deaf...reading a poem? Singing "God Bless America"?...and tell us to effectively vote harder? We did. We do. Give is details for how you're going to codify this into law. We can't rely on this court, full of people who lied under oath to secure their seat, to make impartial decisions. The only politician that I see communicating effectively about this is AOC.
    • I played a bit with Fly.io in an attempt to get Tanzawa deployable without running your own server. I couldn't get it running as I kept getting "Command not found" errors, when fly ran the container. This is confusing as the command exists when I run the container locally...another one for next week, perhaps.
    • I found this song by CHOUJI - 奮闘中 (funtou-chu (hard at work)) and I really like it. I used to listen to a lot of J-hiphop/J-reggae when I was in college. I should do more of that. 

  • The Week #103

    by
    • Regular readers of this blog know that despite me owning a car,  I'm not a fan of them. As such, I try to use my car as little as possible. 

      Each time I drive it, I know I'm making climate change worse and I add another car to the streets, which make the streets, no matter how careful I drive, a more hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. I sometimes wonder if I had an EV instead of a fossil fuel burning car that I'd be more willing to use my car (but this would result in a worse environment for not-cars (and arguably cars, too...)).

      But I digress. This week I filled up my car with gas. The last time I did this was February 12th of this year. 4.5 months ago. I'm getting awfully close territory of the gasoline in my car going bad. Makes me happy but also a bit sad (such a waste of money buying a car I don't use...which also makes it difficult to argue to replace it with something electric).
    • Leo's swimming class this week had some survival swimming training this week. Survival in the sense of "what happens when you fall in the water wearing your clothes", so they don't panic. They also practiced using improvised floating devices, in our case an empty 2L pet bottle.
    • Sunday was Father's Day. We went out to Minatomirai in Yokohama and just hung about. Leo played in the water features in front of the art museum and MarkIs. There's signs that say not to, but everyone does it. I think it's just a liability thing. I saw a number of kids slip and fall, a few hit their head and after a cry get back at it. Leo was wearing water so he didn't have any issues with slippage.

      We also rode a few rides at the Cosomo World across from Queen's east. I've never seen / ridden a merry-go-round with 2 stories on it. The ride was quite short (only 2 minutes?), but it takes around 5 minutes for the staff to get everybody on / temperature checked etc... All good fun.
    • Nacho, my jalapeño plant, is absolutely thriving. Really looking forward to having fresh jalapeños. Depending on the number and when they're ready, I may also make some jalapeño poppers (cream cheese stuffed jalapeños) on the grill (my mom sent me a stand used for grilling them shaped like an armadillo years ago in shipment of stuff, thinking it was mine (it wasn't). That stand is currently keeping my compost elevated off the ground).
      Jalapeõs!

  • The Week #102

    by
    • While Leo was at swimming, I finished reading Digital Minimalism. There's too much (good) for me to say about it in this post. It certainly made me in the right frame of mind when reading technology is diminishing us (thanks Colin for the link), as  I was shaking my head in agreement the entire time.

      One of my main takeaways was to schedule on your calendar explicit time for  leisure. Too often we say we don't have time to do something, but we do, we just don't prepare for it. We often thing "great, I have an entire day to myself", then we don't plan what we're going to do, and end up just scrolling or binge watching one of the streaming services.

      The other  main idea was this leisure should be active. That doesn't mean it needs to be physical, reading literature is active as it requires you to think. While programming on Tanzawa technically fits the bill, I don't think it should count as active leisure as it's mostly the same as what I'm doing at work. Already this shift in mindset is helping me run more.
    • Speaking of Tanzawa, I gave a tech talk about Tanzawa and the IndieWeb at work. Unfortunately, I forgot to click the record button, so only members of the team that were there that day / in Japan could see it. Preparing the talk made me realize just how far it's come in the past year and a bit...The good news is it encouraged one teammate to resume her site some more and another co-worker is interested in using Tanzawa itself :)
    • There's this German beer chain that I'd been meaning to visit for the past 2.5 - 3 years, but you know, covid. I finally had a chance to go there for beers and sausage with a friend in Fujisawa. I also got to deliver some Marmite as a taste of home for my friend. He asked if I got a jar for myself to try it...but alas, I chickened out.
    • The Yen hit a 24-year low against the dollar at ¥135 per dollar. We keep thinking about a trip back to the US so Leo can meet his grandparents, but with flights being around $6,000 and the exchange rate what it is, it would easily cost $10k just for a week or so back... Hopefully the exchange rate sorts itself out to more regular ¥105 - ¥110 per dollar rates. If it decides to dip to ¥75 per dollar (the rate after 3/11 when my parents were visiting us) while we're in the US, I wouldn't mind, either. 

  • The Week #101

    by
    • I spent most of this week recovering from jet lag, trying to get back into groove of regular life. After managing to go two weeks without catching the 'rona,  it's all finally caught up with me and I caught a small cold.
    • I finally got around to doing my US taxes this year. Thankfully Americans abroad have a 2-month delayed due-date. Doing my taxes is always hugely stressful. Not because they're complicated, but because the software I was using (TurboTax) isn't designed for Americans abroad, you've got to do all of the conversions from JPY to USD yourself. Which also means finding/picking an exchange rate etc..

      This year I found and used ExpatFile.tax, and wow is it a breath of fresh air. I'm able to put in what I earned in JPY and it handles all of the conversions for me. It seems pretty intelligent about FEIE (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion – where the first $100k or so of income is tax free, but means you can't use tax advantaged things like Roth IRAs etc...) and the FTC (Foreign Tax Credit).

      I've always used FEIE because it's "easier". This year after reading their blog post Why the FTC is better than the FEIE, I was prepared to use FTC..and as a bonus there was a Covid child tax credit I'd be able to use if I did, so I'd actually get a $1000 return this go around. But alas, after inputting my wife's income (as she's still a tax resident), they suggested I use FEIE, as per usual. Maybe next year...I'm almost looking forward to doing them next year. Almost.
    • This post on installing a payphone in your house brought back a lot of youthful memories and how often we used payphones back then. He installs a Pacific Bell phone, the same as I used, so it's hits all of the nostalgia points. Most of the time when I used payphones though, it was just me calling my dad collect and in the space for the name saying "DadI'mAtTheMallPickMeUp" as 2 second gap to say your name. Not Phreaking, but still workin' the system.
    •  Digital Minimalism is proving to be a quick read and enjoyable read. I want to finish the book before I do the 30-day "detox", but the idea of being intentional about when and why we use technology is really resonating with me.

      Particularly about this idea that we let tools and services into our life because they promise some benefit: news,  and so forth. And while they do provide that benefit some of the time, most of the time we use it, it's just mindless usage and time sinks. The actual cost in time/attention for that little benefit is not in our favor.

      This really sounds like me and Twitter. Wake up, scroll to see what the other gaijin are up to in Japan, repeat. It's not focused and it's a huge time sink preventing me from doing things I'd actually like to be doing. Perhaps I can find a way to collect these people into a list and use my RSS reader to catch up on the gossip once a week?
    • If it's not possible, that might even be a nice micro-service. Create a RSS feed that's updated weekly with the tweets (no replies?) of a handful of accounts. This way it acts as a firewall between you and social media.

  • The Week #100

    by
    • I made it to 100 consecutive weeks "The Week"! The last ~5 weeks or so, I wasn't sure if I was going to make it 100 weeks in a row, but I have. I've done a bit more thinking since last week, and I think I'll continue doing these roundups for a while longer / foreseeable future.
    • I'm back in Japan and it's good to be home. London is great, I wouldn't mind living there for a year or two someday. But your own bed in your own home? Nothing beats it. I will, however, miss the easy access to shawarma and falafel.

      I'll also miss working with the rest of the team in London. We'll still be working together, remotely of course, but it's a good group of people. Getting work done is the main reason for the trip, but building these team relationships in person are another, just as important reason, for having trips like these.

      Expect a London roundup post later this week as a cap-off to the London trip.
    • I meant to include this last week, but forgot. Last week saw the launch of a new tube line, the Elizabeth line, in London. As that doesn't happen everyday, I started searching around and I found this great YouTuber, Geoff Marshall, who makes great videos about all things trains in the U.K. Very good channel and if you like public transport, I highly recommend it.

      I was planning to take the Elizabeth line to Heathrow, but I found out that it's not running on Sundays yet. 
    • After taking Tanzawa trips through the paces these past 2-weeks, I think I'm quite happy with how it worked out. The main pain-point is that when I checkin with Swarm, I use swarm to also post to Twitter. However, that tweet url isn't associated with the post automatically, so I have to manually lookup the tweet url, add it to syndication urls, and then tell brid.gy to "discover" posts.

      For a single checkin every now and again, it's a fine workflow. But for an actual trip, it's a hassle. First, I need to build in some native syndication into Tanzawa (not just to Twitter, but wherever).  Once that's finished, then I can set my checkins to automatically syndicate to Twitter and post my backfed Swarm checkins to Twitter via my blog.

      Third, I think I want to add push notifications to LINE or Telegram when I get webmentions on my blog, so I can tell when the checkin has been backfed or if I get comments via micro.blog etc..
Previous 13 of 23 Next