• ⛰️ It only took me about 2.5 years to get around to it, but I made some basic Brid.gy integration into Tanzawa. Right now it only supports posting to Mastodon, but that's all I use it for right now. I had considered doing a native integration with Mastodon (and indeed, there's an open issue for it), but decided against it because I didn't want to faff around with figuring out ActivityPub...especially when my site already marks things up using microformats.
  
  The integration manifests itself as a new button that says "🐘 Send to Mastodon". When clicked the elephant starts spinning, the backend sends a webmention to Brid.gy, and if successful, the button transforms to say "View on Mastodon". The button jumps around a bit during the whole process, but I'll sort the fine details "later".
• 🇸🇪 We went to Idea to pick up another Eket cabinet, bringing our total to three, as well as some frozen meatballs and so forth. Ikea used to be one of the places we could take Leo to and he would not have a meltdown...you'll notice the past tense in this sentence.
  
  After we ate lunch and did some browsing on the second floor, when we got downstairs where all the small things are, Leo noticed the play area...and had a melt down because he couldn't play there...it's not like we didn't try, but there were 50 kids ahead of him, we would've been waiting 2 hours... how I would like to be able to go anywhere without one meltdown or another.
• 🏥 I went to the hospital to remove some varicose veins on my right leg. I've had them most of my life (they're from (I presume) from damage done when I was first born and the doctors were poking around to give me a feed for whatever they gave me) and the past couple of years they've been getting worse...and visible when wearing shorts.
  
  This is notable because it was my first time being hospitalized in Japan, so the entire experience is new. I found over during check in that they decided to move me from a shared room on the 2nd floor to a private room on the 4th floor. I'm no sure why they decided that, but I'm glad they did.
  
  The surgery itself was smooth and I was awake for half of it. I've never been awake for any surgery, so it was an interesting sensation to feel the pressure of tugging(?) without actually feeling anything. For the second half they put me to sleep and apparently they had to use more / it took longer than expected to knock me out.
  
  Dinner was really good – though perhaps that was as I hadn't eaten in 24 hours by the time surgery was finished and I was awake. Rice, fish, steamed spinach, and some carrots and peas with ground chicken.
  
  I shouldn't be surprised but there's no WiFi in the hospital, so I'm finishing this post tethered to my phone. I can walk fine, except my leg is wrapped in a bandage and it hurts a bit. I'm glad it's over and without any issues...and I look forward to being able to run again (perhaps a week per the doctor).
  
  Cost wise I think my total out of pocket is supposed to be around 14-man (940 usd at current exchange rates)... I don't think I would have gotten this done if I was living in America as I can imagine it being easily 5 - 10x, even with insurance.
  
  Update: Total cost was 7.2man or about 470 usd.

Many platforms these days have some gamification features. One of the common features is awarding users/members/players different badges to reward their loyalty and activity in the platform.
I decided to award some to myself since I self-host my blog and have no one else to give me badges.

1. Tagged with
2. blogging
3. indieweb

Small groups of humans turning off their phones and paying attention for half an hour in their local park is obviously not, in itself, the revolution that will bring the attention frackers to their knees.

1. Tagged with
2. attention
3. education

New research published in Science Advances paints an uncharacteristically upbeat picture for the planet. This is because more realistic ecological modeling suggests the world's plants may be able to take up more atmospheric CO2 from human activities than previously predicted.

"However, simply planting trees will not solve all our problems. We absolutely need to cut down emissions from all sectors. Trees alone cannot offer humanity a get out of jail free card."

1. Tagged with
2. co2
3. climate change

CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning journey.

1. Tagged with
2. programming
3. css

Walkable, mixed-use planning is the key to getting young people outside again and enabling their independence.

1. Tagged with
2. urban design

• 🤮 The bug got me. Unfortunately it didn't really kick in until I was in the office in Tokyo. I left a bit earlier than usual and rode the green car home. Riding the green car is usually quite nice, but I was miserable the entire way.
  
  On the way I picked up some ice cream from baskin robbins for Leo...which I won't get into why...but it's ridiculous. After buying ice cream as I'm walking back to the station I felt increasingly worse and got more annoyed with each step at the entire situation. My annoyance culminated in breaking the wa the restroom...worrying that his ice cream will melt and I'll have to listen to a, no pun intended, melt down.
  
  But the moment I got home, Leo was appreciate and said thank you. I b-lined to bed and slept for 12 hours. At its peak I had a 38.3c  (101f) fever. Thankfully when I woke up in the morning I felt much better. I still have a bit of a lingering cough that's getting a bit better each day.
• 📸 We got the entire family together for Leo's shichi-go-san photos and family photos.  Leo as dressed in hakama and Yumi, and myself dressed in kimono. As we rescheduled on short notice, the adults didn't have the option of picking any kimono we wanted. Rather, we had to pick from their stock that day.
  
  We were afraid that they'd only have a bunch of light colored kimono, as that's was the majority of the choices to begin with, and that it would make me ghosty. Thankfully that wasn't the case. They had some nice darker blue options. Yumi's had a couple of good options as well.
  
  Leo did a few different poses in a two different hakama. His favorite was his samurai pose where he got to hold a katana as a prop. Besides Leo's single shots, we also took a family portraits, one with the 3 of us and another with everyone. Each time we take family photos like this, I always think we should do this more often.
• 🔗 I added a new bookmarks page on my site. The new display of bookmarks is more streamlined giving clear distinction between the site I'm linking to and my commentary about it. I also added tags, which is a first in Tanzawa, so I can better group and categorize the links I'm sharing.
  
  Under the hood, there weren't that many changes required to enable this. But having this clear difference in styling between different post types is encouraging me to share more links that I find via my blog.
• ⛰️ Other minor improvements to Tanzawa this week are improved RSS representations for different post types. Mostly it's replacing words with emoji. But the main improvement has been getting my run photos and routes appearing properly in micro.blog.
  
  Getting the photos and routes to appear in micro.blog required:
  
   1) Stop using svg when rendering the route for feed readers and instead use img because svg isn't on the allow list for the timeline. This was easy as I already have a url for creating pngs of the route that I use for previews when sharing.
  2) Using absolute uris for my image paths. Relative paths worked fine in feed readers, but not in micro.blog.
  
  

  

  
  I also added webmentions to the front page, which is quite reminiscent of  following the latest comments on a blog, like people did back in blogging boom. 
• 👂 Spoke too soon - Leo woke up on Monday with an ear ache 😫 Can't we all just get better?
• 🤖 I want to end this post on a positive note – I followed the best bot on the fediverse: @hackers_gifs, which shows gifs of the movie Hackers every few hours.