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by JamesSmall quality of life improvements today in Tanzawa: admin pages gained mobile navigation and added a link to the admin on the public pages when you’re logged in.
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by JamesGrowing up in the US where you from building to car to building, wearing long-sleeves in summer for UV protection didn't seem necessary. Whenever I tried my shirts and jackets weren't made for it so I lasted 3 minutes before changing clothes.
Really enjoying my Terre Planing Hoody – keeping me protected in the hot/humid Japanese summers with 50 UPF and doesn't give me heatstroke. -
Checkin to Starbucks
Get that caffeine into my blood. -
The Week #48
by James- The official covid numbers are going down and vaccination seems to be ramping up. I still don't have any idea when I'll be able to make an appointment for an appointment, but I found some clinics that don't want to waste any shots and will let anybody sign up for the cancellation wait list. The catch is that you may need be there in 2 hours. I signed up for the cancellation wait list at Caps Clinic in Musashikosugi ( full list here ). Those that are more centrally located can register at multiple locations to up their chances.
- The plants are growing like their supposed to. Compared from a couple weeks ago everything is absolutely massive.
Future Tomatoes - I went to Patagonia in Kamakura to buy a light jacket to protect me from UV during the summer. The jacket itself is designed for fishing / being on the beach, so it should handle the humid Japanese summers.
- Visiting Patagonia always inspires me to want to do better by the earth. Not just they products themselves and their messaging, but the films and propaganda they produce that aren't about their products are very well done.
- We the Power: The Future of Energy is Community Owned is one such movie. It's about the fight in Europe to allow communities in generate their own electricity from their own rooftops and some of the challenges they face from the incumbents. And once the incumbents lose and start embracing renewables, they're trying again to take control back from communities, "just let us manage it".
- This fight in many ways reminds me of computing and open-source. I love my Apple laptop and I've been on the Mac for coming up on 2 decades, but sometimes I feel like I'm selling my values short and should use something of, by, and for the community.
- Tanzawa has a license. I've just got a couple more bugs to squash before I feel like I can open the repository. Inspired by Patagonia, I think Tanzawa's marketing site is going to have a prominent propaganda section. Home. Download. Propaganda.
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Response to
by JamesModern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones.
I wasn't concerned when the iPhone first came out and third party apps could only be installed via the App Store. Unlike Android, having a single place to go to install apps is arguably a much better customer experience. Having the manufacturer manually approve each app that's installable on your phone seemed warranted as data was super expensive and you didn't want an app misbehaving on your 3G connection giving you surprise bills. This approval process provided some assurance this wouldn't happen.
However in the years since the AppStore's release, mobile phones have become central to modern society. Even in Japan, a country famous for holding on to fax machines and personal stamps, it's becoming harder to exist without one of their devices.
Because of the cellphone's new role as the interface for interacting with society, a closed AppStore and closed devices that only allow you to interact with society via a benevolent dictator's approved was feels increasing anti-democratic.
No matter how benevolent of a dictator they may be, they're still a dictator. -
Picking a License for Tanzawa
by JamesAs Tanzawa is getting closer to being something I can release for other people to use, I've been trying to decide on the best license for it and my goals for the project. The most likely scenario is that Tanzawa will only power my blog or a handful of blogs and that I'll be the only regular contributor. I'd love to be proven wrong, though 😀.
My main goal for Tanzawa is to provide a system that slightly-technical folks can use to create their own home online. My secondary goal is to explore low-resource computing and using Tanzawa as my proving ground. If I can find a model that would allow me to build a revenue stream around Tanzawa, that would be great, but it's not a primary focus.
I've considered all of the main open source licenses: Apache, AGPL, MIT, and BSD-3. Each license is appealing to me for different ideological reasons.
Before researching licenses a bit, I had thought I would pick the AGPL. I really like changes would need to be released to the community. Wordpress uses the GPL, too.
But then I started thinking about the possibility of building software around Tanzawa to support paid hosting for Tanzawa blogs. This bit wouldn't be open source and it may require some custom hooks into Tanzawa. Picking the AGPL would lock me in needing to release these changes. Being the original author, I could just dual license it to myself, but it gets a bit murkier if anyone contributes to the project.
I considered the MIT and BSD licenses together. BSD is basically public-domain in my mind. You're free to use Tanzawa how you please and keep all your changes to yourself. I'm not entirely opposed to this, and I'm sure it happens in reality with GPLed code. This said if someone uses Tanzawa to build something, I'd like them to acknowledge that what they've built is built on Tanzawa. While I think scenario is a low probability, it's not zero.
The last license I considered is the Apache license. What sets it apart from other licenses is its stance on software patents. Basically is someone contributes to Tanzawa and then sues me (again, low probability), they lose their right to use the software. But not being able to be sued gives me a piece of mind I can't get with the other licenses.
Now to merge license files into the repository. -
Checkin to Starbucks
Time to work on Tanzawa for a few. -
by JamesSince your data is yours with Tanzawa each record can be inspected and modified via the django admin. Small clean today was to change the names from the table/model to proper verbose names.
Django admin in Tanzawa -
by JamesI really enjoyed Make Your Life Better by Doing Less by Scott Young. People tend to focus on a better life by adding things to our lives. But adding things spreads us thin, guaranteeing that we don't improve in where it really matters. Rather, we should subtract and focus on those things that really matter to us.
I think about my morning running habit. Or more accurately, my lack of running habit., You see, I used to run a few times a week, but I kept adding more to my plate. First it was a habit of reading Twitter for 5 minutes. Then I added Slack for 10 minutes. Oh and Hackernews. One cup of coffee. No, make that two.
Beyond filling my head with noise when I first wake up, it pushed my morning schedule and spread me thin. Sleeping in five minutes breaks my entire schedule and it's much easier to skip a run when I tell myself "I don't have the time".Previously, I’ve asserted that the hard way is often the easy way. Committing to doing something you know will be hard, paradoxically, often results in an easier time than opting for something that seems easy.
This passage reminded me of when I decided to build Tanzawa instead of making a custom theme for Wordpress for my IndieWeb-ified blog. It's much harder to build your own CMS than to just point and click – but getting it the way I want is much easier.Instead of clarifying our pursuits into the few, difficult obstacles they represent and deliberately crafting strategies for dealing with them, we’ve opted for a myriad of seemingly easy problems. Except the easy problems end up filling up our lives, leaving little room for what really matters.
I couldn't say it better myself.
