• The Week #124

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    • Last week I joined Mastodon and this week I've got to say, I'm enjoying it. Social media without the algorithms and outrage machine makes connecting with people on the web great again. While I'm using indieweb.social, browsing some hashtags, I also discovered some instances like social.coop and mastodon.green where I've been able to find some interesting people to follow. I also donated to my first patron to help keep indieweb.social's lights on.
    • The US mid-terms happened and, by Jove the Dems managed to hold the Senate and the House is still up for grabs (though leaning Republican, slim majority). Typically when there's full party control of House/Senate/Executive by the same party, the mid-terms results in 60 seat losses in the house, but that wasn't the same this year at all. That's incredible. Given all of the "red wave" talk in the media to see them be so wrong is great.

      I reckon there's a number of reasons for this: Roe vs Wade energizing women, the Biden admin making actual action on climate with the ira, and Gen. Z getting out the vote. To his credit Michael Moore was on TV a few days before the election saying that the red wave won't materialize because of sheer numbers i.e. the number of registered Dems out numbers R's, so if people show up the Dems will win. People showed up.

      Glad to see that my hastily prepared ballot was accepted and counted.
      Better luck next time
    • Leo has been getting more and more into his own room. He decorates it with things he's made and makes lists of stuff he needs for it (mirror and a printer?). On Saturday he said that he was going to sleep in his own room, instead of with us. Or rather we (me and him) were going to. He slept like he always does and I slept...about the same as usual (so-so).

      Sunday he said that he was going to sleep by himself. We did the regular reading routine in his bed and I left after he fell asleep. Going back to my own bed, it felt a bit lonely. I've grown so accustomed to just being able to roll over, open my eyes, and see the little guy snoozing. Leo starting to sleep in his own room by himself is a bit more bittersweet than I was expecting it would be. Thankfully he came in to our room at 2:30am and joined us 🥰.

      I've heard people (in the West) argue against co-sleeping with kids when they're young because it's difficult to get them to sleep in their own room...but he's taking all leadership here. 

  • The Week #123

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    • Twitter seems like it's being driven into the ground. The good news is that the people I follow there are starting to (or already were and I've just noticed) using Mastodon. I've made an effort to to start filling out my profile. You can follow at @jamesvandyne@indieweb.social. Thus far I'm really liking it. It feels like the internet before it all became siloed into 3 websites Twitter/Insta/FB.
    • I added graphs to Sunbottle. Right now I can see today's generation vs yesterday's generation, which is fun to compare. I've thought about maybe adding my battery storage levels, or buying / selling kWh, but going to keep it simple for now. Getting a Django project up on fly.io makes me want to try and get my blog/Tanzawa on there as well, so I can stop running my own server.
    • Thursday was Culture Day. In the spirit of the holiday, Leo said he wanted to visit Ikea. So we went and celebrated Swedish culture and ate meat plantballs. We picked up a couple of those 3-teir carts to help organize the washroom and to keep from piling stuff on the dining table (we can pile it in the cart instead! 🤣)
    • I'd been wanting to visit Kua'aina for a week or so, but I didn't tell anybody. It's been a while and their burgers are really good. Sunday, Leo woke up and said he wanted to visit the Aquarium with me. Whenever we visit the aquarium, we always visit Kua'aina. Two birds with one stone! Great minds think alike! All the phrases!

      After the aquarium / lunch, we went for a walk on the beach and Leo played a bit in the water. It really is fun to just go and hangout with him. It's gotten a lot easier as he's gotten older, too because we can chat / he uses to toilet / mostly feeds himself. I know I'll miss these days when he's older/busier, so for now I'm just trying to soak it all up.
      Autumn beach days

  • The Week #122

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    • I released Sunbottle, the name gave to my solar generation/usage collector, as open source and have put it up at solar.jamesvandyne.com. My co-workers gave me some good ideas for different things I could calculate e.g. including the carbon intensity of the grid at the time and so forth. I might make a small API so I can include some data on my homepage as well.
    • It was Halloween! This year I actually stumbled upon a proper carving pumpkin in my neighborhood. Leo drew the face on the pumpkin and I did the carving as I couldn't find the little kid-friendly carving knifes you can find in the US.
    • We're slowly starting to graduate from animation-only movies to more story/live actions movies. We watched a Hocus Pocus as our first Halloween movie. Leo didn't find it scary at all, which was good.
    • Saturday was a rare Saturday where we didn't have anything scheduled or planned. We decided to take it easy and take Leo to ride his bike at the park next to sakai-gawa. When we lived in Texas, we used to bring Sophie with us all sorts of places (we also didn't have a kid). I feel a bit guilty that we can't do that as much here, so we brought her with us as well and she was all smiles and sparkly eyes.
    • I sent in my ballot for the 2022 mid-term election in the US. As I live abroad without a determined return date, Texas only allows me to vote in federal elections i.e. I have no say in the governor race. I understand the logic and mostly don't mind, except this year, I'd like to vote for Beto. This year I can only vote for my congressperson and as my district is gerrymandered  the likelihood of my guy winning is slim-to-none.
    • Speaking of elections Lula won the Brazilian presidential election. I'd been trying not to read too much about it to avoid disappointment in the case where he lost. Certainly a win for the Amazon and by extension, the rest of humanity.

  • The Week #121

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    • The installer finished setting up my panels and battery. One of the reasons we went with the installer that we did was because they tried to get us the most possible generation on our roof. Most of the installers we chatted with put square panels on our roof. But these guys used the non-square panels as well to completely cover our south facing roof. Not only does it look nice and clean, it generates more power, and reduces maintenance on an entire section of our roof.
      Edge to edge panels
    • One of the last things they did was setup the app that would allow me to monitor my generation etc.. directly from my phone. Problem is, it's slow and clunky. So I did what any programmer would do and spent a few hours this week reverse engineering things, so I could make a tool to record my data and display it how I want.

      I've tracked most of the progress in this twitter thread. When this is done, I should back-fill this thread into Tanzawa (but I don't support videos yet...?)....But the basic idea is I want to show my generation/state in plain English and in terms that make it easier to understand just how much electricity my little system has produced. I plan to integrate this with the Octopus' api so I can build a proper "payback" page based on my tariff and so forth. Most people use excel. I make a website.
      Bottling the sun

      If you have any ideas for factoids to display at the bottom, let me know!
    • Sunday was a beautiful warm autumn day, about 24 degrees out. As we dropped by the in-laws, I decided to take advantage of them being closer to sakai-gawa and go for a run along the river. My goal was to run for 40 minutes and 5k, both of which I managed 🙌🏻. Lately when I've been running I've been trying to focus only on time and forgetting pace and distance. It makes running a lot more enjoyable, at least at first.

  • The Week #120

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    • What a week. PyCon JP was held over the weekend and Kraken had a booth. I've been help coordinate and did the final setup of the booth before day-1 and it was a lot of fun. Besides working the booth, telling people about Kraken, what we do, and that we're hiring, I also got to chat with a number of former co-workers. I also got to meet an old teammate that I'd never met in person before, though we worked together for about a year.
      A co-worker and me workin the booth
    • On Saturday we went camping for the first time with some friends in Nishi-Tanzawa. This too was heaps of fun and I look forward to going again.  We had a bit of bad luck with our location because it was mostly covered in rocks. I learned two very important lessons with this trip: the pegs and hammer included aren't worth the plastic they're made of and sometimes you need to muscle things together.
      The river along the campsite

      The plastic pegs and hammer issue was mostly (I believe) a bad luck of the draw for location. It was non-stop rocks so everywhere I'd try to put the peg I'd get rock. Eventually I found it worked better to dig a bit, clear the rocks and continue. Was it the "right" thing? Not sure, but it worked. So next on my list things to buy for camping is some proper steel pegs and a heavy / fat hammer for getting them into the ground.  I also learned that Workman, a store that specializes in work-wear and such in Japan, also has camping gear. Coleman steel pegs were about ¥400 each last I saw them, and they're about ¥100 from workman. Doable. ( I just checked their site and they have some that you can screw into the ground....seems very convenient,  but I'm not bringing my drill-gun – feels like cheating.)

      The other lesson was that, when building the dome of our tents that you're not going to break it when bending the dome to get the roof in place. I think we maybe bought too much tent (a 2-dome tent), but I reckon we're going to always want to some kind of shade to hang out in when we're not sleeping, so it saves us from building 2 different things.

      The mountains and river were beautiful. Definitely looking forward to a second trip, maybe in spring.
    • A year after starting our initial quote requests and 7 months after signing a contract, we finally got our solar and battery installed! As of this writing it's still not 100% finished – everything is installed, but I think there's still a bit of work to do around the breakers.

      When we discussed the layout of the panels, they'd said that the panels would come to the very edge of the roof – and they weren't lying. This is only possible because Sharp makes non-rectangular panels. I'll make a separate post my panels when they're all hooked up and running.
      Panels right to the edge of the roof

  • The Week #119

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    • This week was Leo's "play day" (what they call undoukai/field day in pre-school). This year I had to help set things up a bit as a "dad volunteer", but truth be told, we didn't do much, we just help hang the banners that spread across the field.

      When Leo woke up that day he told Mom that he's going to do his best. And when he didn't win, he looked to us and said "I did my best!", with a look of confidence on his face. During the x meter dash he didn't get discouraged and walk halfway through like last year. Instead, he just look ahead and ran. The dance that his class performed was also really good and he nailed it.

      The tug of war was a nail biter as his class was at a natural disadvantage because they ere down a man. Each of the 4 teams got two rounds. His class lost the first round. After a long struggle in the second round, it looked like they were going to loose the second round too, but then they got a second wind and tugged their way to victory and 3rd place over-all.

      Being down a man also affected the relay (oldest class only) because the kid that was out was in the top grade, so another kid in had to run twices. Their teacher picked the kid in soccer club who is really fast and they came out on top!

      Another week and I am privileged to say I'm super proud of Leo and his effort on sports day – even if he didn't win, he did his best and had a positive attitude throughout.
    • James made a release of indieweb-utils v0.3.1. I helped do some code review for it and rearranged the docs a bit. Hats off to James on his hard work on the project!
    • We're releasing a thing at work next week, so I started playing with it a bit as an excuse to fiddle with Rich, a python library for "rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal", as I've been meaning to for a while.

      I like the library a lot so far. I need to fiddle more so I can figure out how to make it interactive, if it's possible. Like ncurses, but less 90's. So what did I make? I made a little program that, when given a date range will fetch your usage and do some calculations.
      September usage

      This is all in python, so I think it might be fun to integrate into my blog somehow. Maybe a chart of monthly electric usage? Or my daily usage (for the previous day) an arrow indicating if it was up, down, or the same? What do you think?

  • The Week #118

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    • I turned 37 years old. Last week at our friend's house we celebrated two birthdays with a larger cake, so on the actual day-of, we opted for individual slices. I took the day after off (so Leo would be in school until mid-afternoon) and we made a quick trip to Kamakura. Yumi bought me a nice new long sleeve shirt from Patagonia and I bought myself a beanie for winter. I bought some bread next door of Patagonia and it turned out to be legit sourdough, I haven't had that in years. Finally we got lunch at Oxymoron, this great curry place which has huge lines on the weekends, and not so much on a random Thursday.
    • We got an email from our solar installers and they got everything, so we're ready for install on October 17th and 18th. Unfortunately it's past "prime time" for the year in terms of generating electricity, but it should still help us save quite a bit of money as the fuel adjustment costs continue to increase.
    • It looks like this past weekend was the last warm weekend of the year, so we went to the beach to play in the water. Usually it's just me and Leo making unplanned trips by subway-train-monorail, but this time all 3 of us by car. The beach is so much better (as a quasi-local) without the beach houses up.
    • I'm experimenting with putting my phone in monochrome to reduce its desirability. I must say, I think I like it more in monochrome as the entire experience is so much more calm. I can't say for certain if it will be a long-term change, but so far I really like it. 

  • The Week #117

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    • I changed the top page of my site from being a list of posts to being a more "curated" view. With just the latest 3 statuses being shown (and no next button to easily view older ones), they feel less permanent/easier to write. I've still got a few "widgets" I'd like to add to the front page before it's "complete", but that's requisite on getting the data into my site first.
    • Japan announced it's going to opening up to tourist and visa-waver travel again from October 11th, provided you have either 3 shots or a negative post prior to boarding. After 2.5 years closed, I imagine it's going to be quite the cluster at the airport as they re-learn how to deal with actual volume again. I'm also curious how things are going to go when people who are used to mask free life come, en masse, to largely still-masking-at-least-in-the-shops-trains Japan. Clash of the cultures?
    • We had a public holiday on Friday to celebrate the first day of autumn. We met with some longtime friends for lunch at their house, which was a nice change of pace. We hadn't seen this set of friends in about a year. Because we're usually the ones doing the hosting of social events, it's nice not to have to get the house looking presentable just to have it messed up a couple hours later.
    • Leo took a test at swimming. Before he went he told us "I have something important to say" and he took my wife to his room where he said "I'm gonna do my best on the test later". For his test he had to push off from the edge and glide for 3 meters while keeping his head underwater for 5 seconds. He passed with flying colors. What's more is, after the test, he received a special recognition from Y.M.C.A. for embodying their core values: caring, honesty, respect, and responsibility. This wasn't an "everybody gets a medal" situation either, only one person class could receive it. I'm really proud of him.

  • The Week #116

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    • Nanmadol, the biggest typhoon/tropical storm since accurate recordings began made landfall in Japan. It's blowing sustained winds are 108 kilometers per hour (67 mph) and gusts up to 162 kilometers (100 miles) per hour. Nanmadol is actually over Yokohama/Tokyo as I write this. Usually typhoons pass quite quickly, but this storm seems like it's taking its time boating along at around 20kph. I enjoy a good storm less than I did when I was younger, perhaps because I'm responsible for handling any damage might occur.
    • We made reservations to go camping next month at Well Camp Nishi Tanzawa. We'd talked about it before, but neither of us went camping as a kid, so it's a bit daunting to get started. One of our friends from pre-school whose husband camps and is trying to get his family more into camping invited us, so we decided it's now or never. Getting the basics camping for a family is relatively expensive. I'm justifying it in my head in two ways: it's good preparation for disasters and each successive trip is quite affordable. Not to mention it gets us out into the Japanese mountains and countryside which is so beautiful. 
    • I started on a redesign just the main page of my blog (and really for Tanzawa as a whole). Rather than just being a list of full blog posts, I'm going to make it more summary driven. I plan to remove the streams sidebar from the homepage, so I'll have the full horizontal area to use. Right now I'm thinking about a just a small feed at the top with my last 5 "status" posts (truncated and linked to the full post) at the top. 

      Other widgets I want, but I'm undecided where / how they'll look are: 
      • "Last seen at: ...", with a link to my latest checkin post 
      • A 4x4 widget with my recent photos (unsure if this should depend on proper Photo posts or just show the recently uploaded/public photos).
      • A list of recent posts (non-status, things with titles).
      • Maybe some kind of map with recent checkins.
      • Would love to integrate weather or other real-time / stats data.

  • The Week #115

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    • On Sunday I went for my first ride in about a week. This was an easy paced 20km, just exploring a bit. On the cycle routes it's so easy to get into the zone – just you and the machine, cranking faster and faster until...it's you've reached your exit and it's time to slow down.
    • The same day, Leo also decided he wanted to go to Baba's house – back on (a different) bike and cranked out another 15km round-trip. Which is to say, my legs are a bit tired on Monday. Not sore, just tired.
    • Speaking of being tired, Leo's starting to speak a lot more English to me. The first words he says to his mom, who is expecting Japanese first thing, are "I'm Tired". Focusing these past few months speaking as much English as possible seems to be paying off. Or maybe it's the Netflix Teen Taitan's Go! subscription (so, so good).
    • I found this fantastic series on Arte called When Bread Becomes Art. It documents different bakers in different parts of Europe. My favorite episode so far The Power of Fermentation, mostly because of this scene where they're in Denmark where he's teaching a sourdough baking class at this marina and :chef-kiss:, it just seemed so nice. It reminded me of our visit to Gustavsberg (though that's Sweden, not Denmark). Nice cool summer weather, ocean near by, sourdough bread – sign me up.
    • It looks like Japan is finally going to open its borders back up to vaccinated / negative PCR travelers and reinstate  visa waivers. After over 2.5 years of being closed it will be nice – maybe my parents or siblings can visit? I'd love to visit the US, but with flights being about $4,000 round-trip per person, ¥144/USD exchange rate, and all the other costs, it's not happening. Hopefully opening the borders will increase the availability of flights and reduce the prices to realistic levels.
    • We did this fun thing at work during summer where we'd try to get customers to reduce electricity usage during peak demand hours and in exchange they could win some prizes (as an employee, no prizes for me 😀). Since it ended the team made a nice summary page where you can see how much electric you saved and how that translates into CO2 / Trees. I managed to save 3.5kWh or about 2kg of CO2, which is about the same amount of CO2 as 13.5 trees would absorb in a month. Yes, we need systemic change, but it's neat to see the impact you can make by turning up the AC a degree here or there.
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