• It's been 20 weeks since I started doing the week. Let's go for 20 more!


• I started getting my feet wet with desktop linux again. I last ran linux on my desktop the around 2003 or 2004 running Gentoo. I liked that computer, it was a full tower with a sticker of Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) smashing a swastika in two that said Stop Racism, it was great. But X11 was fiddly and OS X gave me my unix without the fiddling.

To my surprise Ubuntu just worked on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro. Wifi works, resume from sleep works, printer works, everything that used to be fiddly "just works". I'm able to connect to my Mac Mini and remote control it and access it's shares (my Drobo). monadical wrote a nice blog post that details settings for Mac users on linux to make them feel a bit more "at home". The little things like adjusting the mouse movement and so forth.

In the event that I switch full-time to Linux, it seems like I could use icloud photos downloaderto automatically sync my photos from iCloud to my computer.

• Covid cases are back on the rise again in Japan. Kanagawa has roughly doubled its number of daily cases lately. Hopefully we can all take this seriously again and get the numbers back in check. I feel Japan squandered a real opportunity at the end of the state of emergency for New Zealand like results. Instead we ended it early.



• Crew 1 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the SpaceX Dragon bound for the ISS. This flight has a lot of firsts: first operational crew flight on a commercial rocket, first operational crew flight launched from the US since the shuttle shuttered, first night launch in a decade, and most importantly, the first time they'll have ramen in space.

  I know one of the astronauts on the flight from our time living across from Johnson Space Center, so I was holding my breath a bit more than usual when watching the launch. I'm very happy it was a success.




• I went to Hamleys in Sakuragi-cho in Yokohama. The last time I went was just before covid. If you've never been to Hamleys, imagine you're a kid and you've just walked in to Santa's warehouse, that's what it's like. They've got every toy under the sun, a clown making the rounds heaps of toys to play with and even one of those pianos you play with your feet, albeit not as big.

  But not this time. Covid seems to be taking a toll on the business. A lot of the shelves were empty and a large central section was now dedicated to easy revenue makers: capsule toys. It still had part of the magic you'd expect from a giant toy store, but it still felt like a store that's not too far from shuttering. I hope it makes it through all of this. It seems silly to worry about the viability of a toy shop around Christmas, yet here we are. To help the cause we bought Leo some Clever Cogs.




• I've had my digital garden for a week so far and I'm starting to make good use of it. Dumping parts of my brain of things I'm thinking about has been helpful. So I've documented some print settings that are common when copying a license and ideas for future improvements to Airbot.

• Joe Biden is the President Elect and I couldn't be happier. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted. I can run again. While I hope the darkness of the past 4 years can now give way, I also recognize that shockingly large number of people saw the racist, lying, self-dealing, and narcissist behavior of the last four years and said "Yes, that's who I want to represent me".


• I watched Joe Biden's first speech as president elect and it sounds exactly like what the country needs. It's what presidents are supposed to sounds like. Not red states and blue states – it's the United States.


• I took the last week off for an autumn break and made my first visit to Saitama. It was a great trip and my first time leaving Kanagawa since February.


• I've been looking for a place to capture / collect knowledge and ideas for a while. I had thought my blog might be the place, but blogs are streams. Once a post is published it's done and not usually edited again. I'm looking for someplace where I can take an idea or list and refine it and connect the dots over time.

I initially considered org-roam or something emacs based, but I'm not always on my computer, syncing notes across computers, exporting to html, setting up some kind of deploy pipeline is more than I want to deal with. I also considered modifying nomiso to make it more wiki-like and support public notes, but I don't really have the time to dedicate to that right now.

Tiddlywiki also seemed promising. Other people on the indie web use it and there's ways to get webmentions working, but I couldn't get it working with a password for editing.

Last night I installed mediawiki and started my digital garden. The subdomain (tw) was from my initial experiments with Tiddlywiki. Although I'm using mediawiki and not tiddlywiki, I decided to leave the domain as tw because when I visit twitter, I type "tw" and Firefox autocompletes the rest. Let's see if I can use my wiki enough for Firefox to recommend my wiki instead of twitter.

• One of my side projects is running an air quality bot for the city of Houston called @Kuukihouston. Basically what it does is scrapes pollutant data from The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, stores it in a databases, and tweets if thresholds are exceeded or updated to cross that threshold.

I noticed it hadn't tweeted in a while but appeared to be working. Surely the city Houston didn't suddenly stop dumping benzene into the air (though a man can dream). Turns out they TCEQ started returning 404 Not Found responses to my bot. I hadn't yet moved the server to Frankfurt to be powered by sustainability energy so it was a good excuse to move it and see if it would start working.

Sure enough after moving to a fresh ip address, Kuukibot came back to life and started tweeting again.

• I started experimenting more with IndieWeb Post Kinds. I tried a bookmark and a reply to James' post about RSS, but I'm not sure if it sent webmentions like it should've. One thing's for certain my blog needs some style adjustments - replies don't have enough space between them and the next post. Finding a good mapping between Wordpress "Kind" and the IndieWeb "Post Kind" is difficult, as well.


• I've rearranged the footer of my site. Site meta was deleted, Categories was moved to the right, and I've added post kinds to encourage me to use them more. While I backfeed all of my Swarm checkins to my blog, I filter them from my homepage and main rss feed as it creates too much noise. But I still wanted a place to list them on my site, so my most recent 5 checkins are listed as well.


• I've been ignoring my Bedtime and watching Long Way Up/Down/Round. While it's been good to have some time to travel with my mind it's been bad for daily energy levels. This week I'm going to try and get to bed on time so I can wake easier.

• The project at work has morphed from a monolith to a service based architecture with multiple services, background tasks, and databases (of different vendors and versions). I finally had a couple of days to Dockerize it all and use docker-compose to start it in the right order and clean up environmental variables. Feels nice after the fact but it was a slog.


• Leo's still at the age where he's a bit picky about carbs. It's usually bread or rice and he'll turn his nose at any kind of pasta, soba, udon or any other noodle. I made a lasagna and this time I involved him a bit more. Once the sauce was started he asked what I was cooking and I showed him and he said it look delicious ("looks like curry"). Then I had him help assemble the lasagna by sprinkling the cheese between the layers. The boy gobbled it up and we have expanded our range of acceptable foods 🙌🏻


• I've been using Sony MDR-7605 for 9 years now. The original pads on them lost the outer layer years ago but recently the pad itself has been slipping off the headphone itself. I finally broke down and spent the ¥1,000 ($9.50?) to get some new paddings and they're good as new.


• The car went in for it's 6 month inspection over the weekend. I got some information about getting a drive-recorder installed in it before our trip next month. The advancements in cameras lately has made it so you can get complete 360 coverage with a single camera for not too much money. Hopefully I'll never be in the case where I'd need the footage from it.


• I started listening to some podcasts again. Usually I only listen to Build your SaaS, but this week I discovered My Climate Journey and really enjoyed it. It made me a bit more optimistic about us actually making the transition away form fossil fuels.


• Jacob linked me to a great episode of Reconcilable Differences. I've always been a fan of Merlin Mann and the money quote this time is "At this point social media is more trash than website". Couldn't agree more.

• It rained all week from Typhoon #14. Thankfully it did a U-turn as it got close to Japan and the winds never picked up.


• We've started planning a small trip to Moomin Valley Park next month. It's only an hour and a bit by car from our house. It's the only Moomin park outside of Finland. It will be my first time to Saitama prefecture and first time leaving the Yokohama/Shonan area since February. Looking forward to it.


• Nils gave a thought provoking talk that tries to answer the question:

Is it ethical to invest time into learning and using technologies from companies that pay little or no taxes?

Though I tend to naturally prefer community based tech (python, django, vue.js) compared to corporate open-source tech (swift, react etc..) I hadn't much considered the ethics. The gist is that taxes benefit society as a whole, so we can have collective goods like roads and schools. Also as these huge companies don't pay their taxes, it allows them to amass vast fortunes for an unfair advantage over smaller companies that do pay their taxes. This advantage puts these smaller companies out of business, reducing choice and the total number of good well paying jobs.

In terms of software when these large companies make these open source projects - what actually happens? People (non-employees) spend their time/free time learning and using their tech, improving their tech, and further entrenching the large corporation's advantage.

Rather than learning an evergreen skill, like JavaScript, and improving JavaScript for everyone people spend their free-time working for corporations like Facebook on projects like React by filing issues, fixing bugs, making components for, writing blog posts about and improving the image of the company - for free.

It seems so backwards, doesn't it?

• A few months ago when we took Sophie to the vet, one of her numbers was really high – usual is 200 - 230 and she was scoring 1700. Since then she's been taking medicine twice a day and eating a new food. We took her to the vet for another checkup and she was down to just slightly elevated levels!


• I voted in the 2020 election. Or at least sent my ballot. I really hope they don't find some reason to invalidate it.


• The St. Marc Cafe near our house lost to covid at the end of last month and went out of business. It's a chain, so I can always get their chocolate croissants at another location, but our St. Marc Cafe was in a newly remodeled in a family restaurant building, so it was more spacious than a regular cafe.


• We had our a neighborhood association meeting for the first time in 3 months. I had to attend as I'm head of the block this year. They take proper precautions so it can be safe (check temperatures at the door, open windows, masks required, staggered meetings to reduce people in the building). I always forget how mentally taxing concentrating on listening to Japanese for an hour.


• I've been trying to build my RSS habit again using NetNewsWire. I've been using it on iOS for months, but not so much on my Mac. The main stumbling block in syncing and habit building. Syncing only works (as of this writing) via Feedly and Feedbin, both paid services with a bunch of extras. Looking closer, Feedly does seem to have a free account for up to 100 sources, which is more than enough for me. The next hurdle will be remembering to open the app, instead of Firefox.

• I turned 35. 🎂🥳 We celebrated at Bill's for breakfast while looking over the ocean. Leo picked out a singing Thomas (the train) birthday card for me.


• We went to my favorite Starbucks for lunch on Saturday and Leo has progressed to eating an entire tuna-cheese melt. I didn't think he'd eat it all as he's only 2.5 and a bit years old, but he did.


• More people getting interested in sustainable web design. James recently started working to make his site more sustainable and I totally dig it.


• Someone should make a site scanner to help you improve the sustainability of your site - analyze images, css, and then give you tips for how to improve it. Doing it all and doing it right would be a large undertaking.


• I've started thinking about getting solar panels again. It won't happen this year, but maybe next year or the year after that. In doing research I found this cool site that will, given a postal code, give you estimated solar generation based on the weather from the past 10 years. Using that you can plunk in your usage actual numbers into a spreadsheet and better estimate when they'll pay for themselves.