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Checkin to Doutor Coffee Shop (ドトールコーヒーショップ)
My usual Tully’s started opening at 10 instead of 7am. -
The Week #104
by James- This post marks 2 years of doing "The Week" 🎉. As things "open up" (they were never closed) and life returns to normal, I'm finding it difficult to remember to write these posts. But once I do sit down and write them, I am grateful I took some time to reflect on the week.
- The Rainy season ended this week in Tokyo – 2 - 3 weeks early than it should've and we didn't even get much rain (I feel). It's been hitting over 35C in Yokohama, which is mid-summer temperatures. Hopefully we'll get some good summer rains to help cool things down. As a kid, I used to like summer, but any more I mostly dread it. How much hotter is it going to be this year because we continue to dig stuff out of the ground and burn it?
- America continues its backwards slide with Roe vs Wade being overturned. We all knew it was coming after the leak, but it's still shocking and disappointing. The Democrat's response to this has also been fairly tone-deaf...reading a poem? Singing "God Bless America"?...and tell us to effectively vote harder? We did. We do. Give is details for how you're going to codify this into law. We can't rely on this court, full of people who lied under oath to secure their seat, to make impartial decisions. The only politician that I see communicating effectively about this is AOC.
- I played a bit with Fly.io in an attempt to get Tanzawa deployable without running your own server. I couldn't get it running as I kept getting "Command not found" errors, when fly ran the container. This is confusing as the command exists when I run the container locally...another one for next week, perhaps.
- I found this song by CHOUJI - 奮闘中 (funtou-chu (hard at work)) and I really like it. I used to listen to a lot of J-hiphop/J-reggae when I was in college. I should do more of that.
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Checkin to Nanosh
Green tea something or another. -
by JamesI keep thinking about old projects in the Gnome2 days, when I used desktop Linux and how much fun desktop computing used to be. Everything was open – either by choice via open standards or by force e.g. reverse engineering messenger clients, which then allowed the data to be local and open. You to do cool things like Beagle (and really Nat's Dashboard app before that).
Dashboard (right) pickuped the context of your current activity and showed you handy information.
These days everything seems to be closed and or web-based. Your data is only accessible via apis that you don't control. And with the rise of mobile, we've grown to expect our data to be accessible everywhere...but really, how many times have you been hard press because you couldn't access a random file at a random place at a random time?
Has this expectation has does us more harm than good?
Often these services sell themselves as a way to simplify. Simply put all of your data into a magic directory and it will be made available everywhere. But how many people actually manage to do this? On your Mac, a lot of apps automatically save data for you, and chances are it's not in one of those magic directories.
So now you're left with a false sense of security and an increased complexity of trying to remember where your files are. Not to mention they could be deleted at anytime by someone/algorithm in a random organization e.g. Dropbox/Google closing your accounts.
Maybe it's just nostalgia and rose tinted glasses...but maybe it's not. -
The Week #103
by James- Regular readers of this blog know that despite me owning a car, I'm not a fan of them. As such, I try to use my car as little as possible.
Each time I drive it, I know I'm making climate change worse and I add another car to the streets, which make the streets, no matter how careful I drive, a more hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. I sometimes wonder if I had an EV instead of a fossil fuel burning car that I'd be more willing to use my car (but this would result in a worse environment for not-cars (and arguably cars, too...)).
But I digress. This week I filled up my car with gas. The last time I did this was February 12th of this year. 4.5 months ago. I'm getting awfully close territory of the gasoline in my car going bad. Makes me happy but also a bit sad (such a waste of money buying a car I don't use...which also makes it difficult to argue to replace it with something electric). - Leo's swimming class this week had some survival swimming training this week. Survival in the sense of "what happens when you fall in the water wearing your clothes", so they don't panic. They also practiced using improvised floating devices, in our case an empty 2L pet bottle.
- Sunday was Father's Day. We went out to Minatomirai in Yokohama and just hung about. Leo played in the water features in front of the art museum and MarkIs. There's signs that say not to, but everyone does it. I think it's just a liability thing. I saw a number of kids slip and fall, a few hit their head and after a cry get back at it. Leo was wearing water so he didn't have any issues with slippage.
We also rode a few rides at the Cosomo World across from Queen's east. I've never seen / ridden a merry-go-round with 2 stories on it. The ride was quite short (only 2 minutes?), but it takes around 5 minutes for the staff to get everybody on / temperature checked etc... All good fun. - Nacho, my jalapeño plant, is absolutely thriving. Really looking forward to having fresh jalapeños. Depending on the number and when they're ready, I may also make some jalapeño poppers (cream cheese stuffed jalapeños) on the grill (my mom sent me a stand used for grilling them shaped like an armadillo years ago in shipment of stuff, thinking it was mine (it wasn't). That stand is currently keeping my compost elevated off the ground).
Jalapeõs!
- Regular readers of this blog know that despite me owning a car, I'm not a fan of them. As such, I try to use my car as little as possible.
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Checkin to コスモワールド メリーゴーランド
Merry-go-rounding in his Tube shirt. -
Checkin to 美術の広場 噴水
The signs say to not play here, but there’s no way you have fountains like this and _not_ have kids playing. -
by JamesI posted this last year, too. But the ajisai season is my season. Better than cherry blossoms, imo.
Post run Ajisai -
Back in Japan from London
by JamesI've been back in Japan for almost 3 weeks and am finally getting 'round to writing the final "wrapup" post for my trip to London. A common question people ask me is "What was the best thing/worst thing about the trip", which I'll answer here as well.
Best thing: Hands down, the bicycle culture in London. There's heaps of bike lanes throughout the city. Some are just paint, but many are proper protected bike lanes. I saw cargo bikes, cargo bikes with children in them (wish I could do this!), and even paramedics on a bike (all of his gear was bike-packed in panniers). Perhaps my favorite though, and I saw him twice, was this morning commuter that had his pug riding with him between his hands sitting on a little platform. The only regrettable thing is my cards didn't seem to work with the Boris bikes, so I couldn't rent a bike and cycle about.Cycle lanes Cycle routes Cycle shortcuts
Worst thing: I had to think about this and the worst thing I could come up with wasn't even that bad, but there was trash everywhere. Not bits of paper or candy wrappers, but like a random garbage sack, only one on the street, so it's not even trash pickup day/time, sitting there smelling things up. It could be hyper-sensitivity because Japan is really clean, generally speaking.
The flight back to Japan was good. On the flight to London, I didn't realize that I could select my seat before checkin, so I ended up with a window seat. Sitting in a window seat on long haul flights isn't fun as it makes it harder to get up and move about when you please. This time about I managed to snag one of the last aisle seats.
The seating in premium economy is quite nice. You can't lay flat like you can in business, but you the seats slide out (so no front passenger getting in your space / nearly breaking your laptop with a sudden recline (true story)) and you have leg support.Premium Economy on JAL
Food was also quite nice, though the combination was a bit odd – lasagna and soba?Main meal
With everything going on in Ukraine, just like the flight there, we couldn't fly over Russia. As such we took the southern route back, which added a couple of hours to our flight time.14 hours of fun!
Upon arrival in Japan we all had to do covid tests. If I had arrived 2 days later, I wouldn't needed to do the arrival test. It was just a simple saliva test, but my mouth was quite dry by then, so I had to really work to get enough. They hung a photo of a lemon to help you salivate.No covid for me
Getting through the covid test queue was straight forward enough. But with the number of steps in the flow, I can see why the government has done away with it. There's no way that it could handle more passengers than it was already.
Most of things post has been not about London, but the trip back from London, so I'll end with this. London is great. Despite being about 36% smaller than Tokyo, the amount of diversity you experience in London is night and day different. I can't wait to go back. -
🔗 Cool desktops don’t change 😎 - Tyler Cipriani
by JamesAnd while it’s tempting to switch to one of the endless new apps out there, there are good reasons to trust old tools.
I think about this, probably more often than I should, not just with software, but also my trusty mid-2014 MacBook Pro. There's a place and time for new shiny, but it's just so comfortable using tools you're used to.
Worth a read for the photo of his Thinkpad alone. Love the Mastodon (though I'm not a user) sticker that reads "Every tweet feeds the beast!"- Tagged with
- computing
