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The Week #75
by- There must've been 3 or 4 earthquakes last week. I was jamming to The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and, right as my train was about to pull up, I thought I felt something. Then a few seconds later the metal roof covering the platform started to creak and groan. Yikes. All was fine. Hope the big one doesn't hit anytime soon, but glad we anchored the fridge.
- Speaking of the Beatles, Leo's really liking them. When I put on I'm Looking Through You on Rubber Soul reaction was immediate and he said "this song is good" (in Japanese).
- Leo's begun to take more interest in the small bicycle he's borrowing from his cousin. He can keep his balance easily on his little pedal-less bike and this week we started practicing pedaling more. He's starting to get the hang of it and I was able to let go for about half a second. Going to see if I can double / triple that over the next week.
- With super-low numbers of covid (average 101 nation wide / day and less than 1 death average) Japan feels like it's returning to the before times. This may be short lived with the new variant, but for now I'm trying to enjoy it.
- Mentions from micro.blog seem to be working again (from other people). I didn't change anything, so it must've been a bug on their end not sending them. Either way, glad to see them going through again.
- I think we've decided to hold off on getting a solar system on the roof for the time being. We'd be able to fit at most only 2.6Kwh on our roof, not the almost 4Kwh from our initial discussions. With a system that small we could augment our electricity usage, but there's no way we'd be able to generate what we use, let alone fill up a battery for nighttime usage. And with the FIT down to ยฅ17 /Kwh, the hope of making money on excess seems unlikely.
Where it does makes sense to me still is that the cost of electricity is likely to continue going up. Having some panels would take the sting off during the day and having a battery would let me "fill up" when the electricity is cheap overnight.
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Picking Your Mode of Transport
byI can get from my house to the in-laws three different ways: by car, by subway, and by bike.
The drive from my house to the in-laws, according to the Honda app linked to my car, emits about 200g of carbon into the air. That's not including the other externalities such as local air pollution, noise, and just being traffic. It costs about ยฅ100 in fuel and maintenance. This is only economicaly because a neighbor lets us park on some of their land for free. Otherwise we'd need to add ยฅ400 - ยฅ600 for temporary car storage. There is no view, just narrow roads. Depending on traffic, it takes about 20 - 30 minutes and I arrive feeling stressed.
Going by the subway costs ยฅ252 one way and there's a 10 minute walk on either side. This is more efficient than the car because a) there's many more people riding the same vehicle, b) it's electric (though that power may be coming from coal). The view is nothing, because it's mostly underground. Total trip time is about 30 - 35 minutes.
Lastly, I can go by bicycle. It costs me nothing. It's powered by peanut butter and bananas. The view is rice fields and a river. I arrive feeling happy and calm, because I was looking at nice scenery and getting some exercise.
While the concept of a personal carbon footprint was invented by big oil,ย each trip we can take that doesn't emit carbon emissions does make difference. Each trip is an opportunity. An opportunity to pick the means of less impact. Less noise. Less pollution. Less traffic. Less carbon.
But it's also an opportunity to inspire your community. It's an opportunity to be the change you want to see. At first it might just be you. But someone might see you and think "I can do that." and take their bike next time. And someone seems them riding their bike and has the same thought. It an opportunity to normalize riding a bike as transport in your community.
More people ride bikes when they see people riding bikes. More people riding bikes means more demand for proper infrastructure. More people riding bikes means less local air pollution and a happy, healthier, calmer community.
When you have the choice, take your bike. -
byI had a really neat idea about Tanzawa ๐ก. I could use the django sites framework to allow one to manage multiple blogs from a single Tanzawa instance. My inspiration was how people used to have a photo blog separate from their main blog, you could do it with Tanzawa, too. I was also thinking about my not often used anymore Instagram account and how that's just a photoblog, really.
It would still be a bit of work, but not too much. I think I'd just need a table to relate streams to sites and update the public views to take that into account. -
Checkin to Taniya (่ฎๅฒใใฉใ ่ฐทใ)
by in Chuo, Tokyo, Japan -
Checkin to TGใชใฏใใในใจใใธใผๆ ชๅผไผ็คพ
by in Chuo, Tokyo, JapanBig Constantine ๐โค๏ธ -
Checkin to Tully's Coffee
by in Tokyo, Tokyo, JapanEnjoying a nice cup before work. โ๏ธ -
Response to
byFor the last week or two, I have been thinking whether there is a December blogging series I could take on, similar to how Advent of Code publishes a new coding challenge every day throughout Advent.
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From now up until December 24th, I hope to write a blog post every day about a blog that I find interesting.Fantastic idea. Looking forward to the Advent James! -
byPlugins can now be enabled and disabled in production (when running in gunicorn/uWSGI) without bringing the server down ๐.
The issue was that only a single process (the one that handled the request) got the plugin dynamically enabled. When the other processes tried to lookup urls/templates from the plugin, it didn't exist as it's not enabled and returned an error. -
How to Gracefully Restart A Parent Process
byWhen enabling or disabling plugins in Tanzawa, for urls to register correctly across all sub-processes, you must restart all processes, not just fiddle with the process that made the request.
The complete changes are in PR #121, but the line of interest is below.import os import signal os.kill(os.getppid(), signal.SIGHUP)
Where getppid gets the process id of the parent process (gunicorn, uwsgi, etc...) and sends it a HUP signal. -
The Week #74
by- This is really an update from last week, but I forgot to add it, so I'm putting it first week. After a bunch of small earthquakes we finally got around to anchoring our fridge to the wall so when the big one comes our fridge hopefully doesn't fall over and smash us.
- I finished the first iteration of Tanzawa Plugins. But while it's merged, it's not quite ready for general usage, yet. Some of trickery I do to dynamically enable plugins works on the development server, but errors when run via gunicorn. I'm not sure if it's the fiddling with migrations, fiddling with INSTALLED_APPS,ย fiddling with url routes, or a combination of all the above, but it causes internal server errors and doesn't recover until I restart the process. Such is life when you're playing with
fireinternals. Maybe my next plugin will be a Sentry plugin ๐.ย - Plugins still aren't feature complete, though. I'd still like to be able to do things add cron jobs or have plugins schedule tasks, but that will require moving from gunicorn to uWSGI so I can keep inline with my "single process" goal. Oh, and I wrote some documentation about how to make custom plugins.
- All of this to say my site now has a /now. It's still a rough draft of what I wrote during my lunch break, but really happy to see it live and working.
- I've run habit and ran 3 times last week. Running 2 short runs during the week at lunch (when it's warmer outside) has made it easier to hit my goal. It takes a lot more gumption to go out and run when it's dark and 2c outside.
- My Darn Tough warranty replacement socks came! Due to stock issues they're not the same ones I sent in, but they're close (my replacement is a full calf, instead of a half-calf). The process was smooth, no questions asked, no fiddling.
- We were out at the park on the weekend and decided to take the train to the grandparents and pick something up. As the grandparents were on their way home from shopping right as we arrived at their station, so they offered to picked us up. And when we peered into the car we saw Leo's cousins in the car. We had no clue they were visiting (again). So naturally Leo decided he was staying at their house. Was nice to have another kid-free night โบ๏ธ.