• Last week's getting locked out of the house caused some hassle this week, not with the locks or door, but with the car. We were waiting in the car while the locksmith did his work and as it was dark out, we turned on the interior lights (you can see guess this is going).  In the rush of finally being able to get inside / on with our evening, we forgot to turn them off.
  
  The next time we went to use the car (Friday?) the automatic sliding doors didn't work...immediately I figured the battery was dead. Thankfully I carry a pair of jumper cables in my car (though usually I'm the one giving the jump). 
  
  Thankfully my neighbor across the road was home and let me connect my my cables and give me a jump.
• I fiddled around with Minecraft on my switch for a few minutes to figure out how it works. I can see how people sink hours and hours into this game building cool stuff. Leo also wanted to play. The controls are pretty complex, with one control stick being movement and the other being looking around,  so I have to help him frequently while he masters it.
• Leo turned 4. For his birthday he got two small Lego sets: a 4+ helicopter and since he's taken to Minecraft, a little Minecraft set. We went and picked out a cake together. He picked a simple cream / strawberry cake (though he skips the strawberries).
  
  We shared cake and pizza at the grandparent's house. While I enjoy celebrating with the family, I am looking forward for Leo having a proper birthday party with friends someday.
• As I mentioned, Tanzawa got it's first non-me user! Exciting and illuminating of all of the little issues that exist in the back of my head as a "someday" or have just learned to work around. 😅
• The covid numbers seem to be starting a downwards trend. Most recently we've had 3 days with fewer cases (by the hundreds or thousands) of the same day the previous week. With this trend and constant public pressure, it seems like Japan will finally start letting non-tourists into Japan again. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but hopefully we'll stay open "for good" or at least long enough for the rest of our team to move to Japan. They've been waiting for over a year now.
• I ordered two books that I'm really looking forward to reading: Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in our Lives and Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. The first I suspect may just be preaching to the choir for me, but I know I'll learn something from it. The second, I read the sample chapters a month or two ago and I really enjoyed it. I got both of them in print, rather than e-books, as per usual. (I was quite tempted for the Kindle versions, and they're easy to read that way, but I want to spend less time looking at my phone).
  

  

• I discovered The Linda Lindas, an all girl punk band from L.A. (the YouTube offers a good suggestion for a change). Really good music. My favorite so far is Missing You, about being stuck in the house during the pandemic. And the line about wanting to eat at grandma's place is punk as f.
• As part of my reconsidering solar / batteries for the house, I did some searching. And in that search I discovered that a) I can get a Tesla Powerwall in Japan and b) Despite being double the capacity (13.5 kWh), they seem to be cheaper than domestic counterparts (6.5 kWh).
  
  I've asked a local installer for a quote for a system and I'm patiently awaiting it. My theory is that it will cost a bit more than the all Sharp system I was quoted before, but who knows.

• 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.

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