The battery officially died on my laptop this week, which has slowed progress on Tanzawa. It’s a mid-2014 MacBook Pro, so almost 7(!) years old. Usually I’d think about replacing it and recycling this one by now, but it works fine. And when I consider the ecological cost of manufacturing a new laptop, I want to use my current machine for as long as possible. A new battery should extend the life so I can use it for a full decade.

Speaking of Tanzawa, despite battery woes, I still made a bunch of progress. I got image support working, so you can add / remove images from posts.

I’ve started working on image processing and optimization. I strip all gps exif data from photos when they’re uploaded, but before I do, I’m storing the gps coordinates in the database. Why? By default I want to preserve privacy, you don’t necessarily want to share your exact location when you’re sharing a photo of the garden.

But I have this idea of letting you group entries (checkin, status, photos, blog posts) together as a trip and display it on a map. And in those cases we may want to use the coordinates, so having them available but not public by default is a good compromise.

Another goal is Tanzawa is to use as little energy as possible, which means images must be small so we transmit as little data as possible. I figured out how I can do that, without generating a zillion thumbnails and sized photos (though resizing is part of the solution).