I've been fiddling with that new health feature I've been thinking about the past couple weeks.

No (admin only) visualizations or anything yet, but I'll probably add some graphs at some point. My main priority is starting to get data input.

I've got a couple of ideas for improvements for my blog that I've been pondering recently.

1. A plugin to make it easy to track health related data. This wouldn't necessarily become a blog post but rather, due to the sensitive nature of health data, would rollup into a "health" page, which would be private. Mostly I'm thinking of a dead simple form to input weight in kg and eventually graph it.

The important part about is that it doesn't immediately take you to the graph or show you the previous results when inputting data, so you don't end up in a negative spiral if it goes the wrong direction.

2. A "books" feature that would let you store the books you're reading. Then when you're reading and find a quote you like, you can save the quote along with your notes. This would become a blog post, but would rollup into a "books" section. Similar to how Trips.

I imagine the list page would be a list of book covers with the title. Clicking on it would then take you to a page that shows all of the quotes/posts in the order that they appear in the book.

This is my favorite street in my neighborhood.  Lovely trees on both sides make it walkable in this heat wave. Juxtaposed with the cars burning fossil fuel that are making the problem worse.

I 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).

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.

I posted this last year, too. But the ajisai season is my season. Better than cherry blossoms, imo.

Taking the Southern route back to Japan, which means I’ll have literally circumnavigated the globe on this trip.

Starting on a new book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport and while I’m reading it the woman’s phone next to me is emitting (presumably) candy crush sound effects and iMessage message noises non-stop. Makes it difficult to concentrate 😀.

A pigeon went on a bit of explore through the front door of the restaurant I was just eating at.