It was Golden Week.
On Sunday (Constitution Day), I went for a ride with Emma over to Ōizumi Gakuen. It was a nice reminder of how something that can seem impossible (will Emma ever learn to ride a bicycle?) can become so mundane. It was also terrific weather. Really, almost all of Golden Week was great. The oppressive Japanese summer is undoubtedly on its way but right now, it’s fantastic.
On Monday (Greenery Day), the fantastic weather continued and, in a juxtaposition so on the nose that you might suspect its veracity, I started teaching John to ride a bicycle. Does John even own a bicycle? He does as of last week! (I forgot to mention it in Weeknotes #328.) The impetus is the upcoming third-year bicycle safety class that John has coming up. I can confirm that, as with Emma, the entire enterprise feels impossible.
On Tuesday (Children’s Day), we all went over to Ogikubo. Eri and I are considering sending Emma to Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School and Eri was curious to see the school (from the outside) in person. While she and Emma were doing that, the boys and I finally got over to Suginami Children’s Traffic Park (Japanese). The website doesn’t really do it justice—Google Maps gives you a better sense of it. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was almost time to turn around and meet back up with Eri and Emma for lunch.
Of course I also spent time working on Crossmate, my crossword app. I honestly would have spent more time on Crossmate but ran out of tokens for use with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex early on Saturday. While I was out of tokens for use the coding agents, I was able to chat with Claude and with its help, I set up a Tangled instance on my Linode. I had it up for about 15 minutes before I reconsidered. One opinion that I’ve been developing over the past six months is a view that there’s too much emphasis put on the social aspect of open source—issues, PRs—and not enough on the software part. Tangled has an emphasis on decentralisation that I like but thinking about the social expectations that come with making a repository generally available made me extremely uncomfortable and so I turned off the Tangled server and instead had ChatGPT help me get code.inqk.net more automated. I can now push my Crossmate repository and have a (admittedly bare bones) web version available for all to see. I don’t have any plans to move my other projects off GitHub just yet but it is something I’m considering.
I watched an NBA game! I complained last week that the post-broadcast games were not being edited down (removing commercials, game delays) but it turns out that’s not true. I don’t know how much more I’ll watch but I do intend to get a little bit more into the swing of things.
I was reading about Massive Attack’s Heligoland on Wikipedia after linking to it as my musical selection last week and there’s a quote in that article from Robert Del Naja about the previous album, 100th Window. I can see what Del Naja meant about merging the electronic and the organic but that’s part of what I love about that album. You get a taste of that in its opening track, ‘Future Proof’ (Apple Music).
I definitely think @tangled.org is very cool but I’m thinking I don’t really want a social network attached to my code hosting. I’m experimenting with boring old HTML files for a web-based repository explorer.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777984215.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-05T21:30:15+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-05T21:30:15+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777906089.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I’m successfully running a Tangled knot!", "content_html": "I’m successfully running a Tangled knot!
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777906089.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-04T23:48:09+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-04T23:48:09+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777644420.html", "title": "Weeknotes #328", "content_text": "The Iran War continues to drag on.I neglected to mention last week that Tim Cook announced he will step down as Apple’s CEO at the end of August. He will remain at Apple but instead take the position of executive chairman. Given that position and the fact that Cook’s replacement, John Ternus, is currently the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, I’m not sure much is going to change. I would like to see an option for a user to be able to get root access to their iPhones and iPads but I don’t honestly think there’s any likelihood of that any time soon.And yet… here I am continuing to work on apps for Apple’s platforms. Specifically, I got my collaborative crossword app to the point where I was able to collaboratively play a crossword with Eugenia. It was pretty fun but we absolutely tore through the puzzle and it’s got me a little concerned that the reason there aren’t a lot of collaborative crossword puzzle apps is that they make solving a crossword far too easy. In any event, if Listless is anything to go by, polishing this is going to take quite a bit of time.Not coincidentally, I switched my ChatGPT subscription back to the US$20/month plan so that I could get more access to OpenAI’s Codex.I took Emma and John to see the Super Mario Galaxy Movie on Saturday morning. I understand that critics are tearing the film to shreds but I chose to see its almost complete disdain for a plot as a mark of honesty. This is a movie that is about showing you a bunch of well-animated action cut scenes and that’s all. This feels like the appropriate amount of depth to expect in a movie about the Mario video game character.After getting out of the movie, I dragged the kids to meet for lunch with Tom (who just happens to be visiting on holiday). In an unplanned bit of serendipity, after lunch finished we were able to meet with Eri and Rowan in Kōrakuen. I swapped out Emma and John for Rowan and we took Rowan for a trip down to Gotanda (near where Tom was staying).Then on Monday, I caught up for lunch with Brandon (who also just happens to be visiting on holiday). We went to get curry and I made a complete mess of my shirt. It was so bad I had to keep strategically folding my arms when I got back to the office lest everyone see how bad it was.The NBA post-season began about two weeks ago and I paid to watch it and then… didn’t. Part of the issue is that I don’t especially like the way that Amazon is handling full game replays. In previous years, a couple of hours after the game had finished, a full game replay would become available that cut out all the stoppages so that you saw everything that happened but without any of the frequent breaks that occur in a live broadcast so you can be shown more ads. This year, there’s either the full game replay but it’s not an edited version. It’s just the full game. There is an ‘all possessions’ edit which cuts out everything except the few seconds before a basket is made or the ball is turned over but I find this an incredibly jarring experience and not one that gives you a proper flavour of the game.I’m not sure why I took so long to watch 12tone’s breakdown of Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ but it’s characteristically very good.I did not wait long to watch Folding Ideas’ video essay on being invited to Beast Games. It’s not one of his best but still has its moments.I must have listened to Massive Attack’s 2009 album Heligoland (Apple Music) sometime before this week but if I did, I have no memory of it. It came across my radar thanks via Apple Music’s Friends playlist (thanks Brandon!).", "content_html": "The Iran War continues to drag on.
I neglected to mention last week that Tim Cook announced he will step down as Apple’s CEO at the end of August. He will remain at Apple but instead take the position of executive chairman. Given that position and the fact that Cook’s replacement, John Ternus, is currently the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, I’m not sure much is going to change. I would like to see an option for a user to be able to get root access to their iPhones and iPads but I don’t honestly think there’s any likelihood of that any time soon.
And yet… here I am continuing to work on apps for Apple’s platforms. Specifically, I got my collaborative crossword app to the point where I was able to collaboratively play a crossword with Eugenia. It was pretty fun but we absolutely tore through the puzzle and it’s got me a little concerned that the reason there aren’t a lot of collaborative crossword puzzle apps is that they make solving a crossword far too easy. In any event, if Listless is anything to go by, polishing this is going to take quite a bit of time.
Not coincidentally, I switched my ChatGPT subscription back to the US$20/month plan so that I could get more access to OpenAI’s Codex.
I took Emma and John to see the Super Mario Galaxy Movie on Saturday morning. I understand that critics are tearing the film to shreds but I chose to see its almost complete disdain for a plot as a mark of honesty. This is a movie that is about showing you a bunch of well-animated action cut scenes and that’s all. This feels like the appropriate amount of depth to expect in a movie about the Mario video game character.
After getting out of the movie, I dragged the kids to meet for lunch with Tom (who just happens to be visiting on holiday). In an unplanned bit of serendipity, after lunch finished we were able to meet with Eri and Rowan in Kōrakuen. I swapped out Emma and John for Rowan and we took Rowan for a trip down to Gotanda (near where Tom was staying).
Then on Monday, I caught up for lunch with Brandon (who also just happens to be visiting on holiday). We went to get curry and I made a complete mess of my shirt. It was so bad I had to keep strategically folding my arms when I got back to the office lest everyone see how bad it was.
The NBA post-season began about two weeks ago and I paid to watch it and then… didn’t. Part of the issue is that I don’t especially like the way that Amazon is handling full game replays. In previous years, a couple of hours after the game had finished, a full game replay would become available that cut out all the stoppages so that you saw everything that happened but without any of the frequent breaks that occur in a live broadcast so you can be shown more ads. This year, there’s either the full game replay but it’s not an edited version. It’s just the full game. There is an ‘all possessions’ edit which cuts out everything except the few seconds before a basket is made or the ball is turned over but I find this an incredibly jarring experience and not one that gives you a proper flavour of the game.
I’m not sure why I took so long to watch 12tone’s breakdown of Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ but it’s characteristically very good.
I did not wait long to watch Folding Ideas’ video essay on being invited to Beast Games. It’s not one of his best but still has its moments.
I must have listened to Massive Attack’s 2009 album Heligoland (Apple Music) sometime before this week but if I did, I have no memory of it. It came across my radar thanks via Apple Music’s Friends playlist (thanks Brandon!).
Got app notifications working with my new Crossword app!
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777517308.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-30T11:48:28+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-30T11:48:28+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777265206.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I made a complete mess of my shirt but still had a great time having curry with @sangsara.bsky.social today.", "content_html": "I made a complete mess of my shirt but still had a great time having curry with @sangsara.bsky.social today.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777265206.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-27T13:46:46+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-27T13:46:46+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777039560.html", "title": "Weeknotes #327", "content_text": "I finally made Listless available in the App Store. I don’t expect it to be used by anyone other than me but it’s a free app so you don’t really have much to lose if you do decide to check it out. If you’re curious why I even wanted to build a to-do list app, I also wrote a blog post. It goes into a bit of detail about the rationale for Listless as well as my experience using LLM-based coding agents to make it.I mentioned two weeks ago that I had immediately started work on a second app. This one is a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been meaning to create for ages. I love doing crosswords but I find simple ones too easy and the more complex ones too frustrating. One thing I discovered during the pandemic is that if I work on a crossword together with another person, that drastically increases the ones I can complete. Since then I’ve been wishing for some kind of app that would support that kind of solving. I had originally thought I might create a web app but I could not work out how I could do it without using a server (there are peer-to-peer technologies like WebRTC but these still require a server to at the very least establish the communication). A native iOS app can get around these problems by using iCloud (or at least that’s my working assumption).A couple of weeks back, John started attending a programming class every second Saturday. People with freakish memories might remember that I tried enrolling John (and Emma) in a programming school back in 2024. I wasn’t especially happy with that program; mostly because I didn’t feel it was worth the price. In all honesty, I’m not sure this one is better but it is entirely built around Minecraft so John is of course intensely interested in going each time. The main reason I thought it might be a good idea was actually as a way to meet children his age with similar interests. For that reason, I haven’t roped Emma yet (she’s got plenty of friends from school).I started intermittent fasting again and while I haven’t been as disciplined as I have been in the past, there has been a reduction in my weight (which is nice). I’ve done my best to pair that with exercise on the treadmill I mentioned two weeks ago. So far I haven’t done any actual running yet but have instead stuck to walking. I think it’s going well. Whenever I spend money on something for exercise I often have a burst of interest that quickly burns out. It’s too early to tell whether that pattern will repeat all the way through but the burst of interest part is definitely holding true.Patrick Willems has an amazing video essay about music videos. It’s part history lesson, part 90s eulogy and part silly sketch as he delivers the essay in sections that each recreate a classic music video. Oh, and my Bluesky post about it got reposted by Willems which was nice.Australian electronic dance act, Pnau, has a new single called ‘Tu Corazón’ (Apple Music) that I’ve been listening to intensely. If the name ‘Pnau’ doesn’t mean anything to you, Wikipedia tells me they produce music in the genres of ‘electronic’ (OK) and ‘wonky pop’ (wat?).", "content_html": "I finally made Listless available in the App Store. I don’t expect it to be used by anyone other than me but it’s a free app so you don’t really have much to lose if you do decide to check it out. If you’re curious why I even wanted to build a to-do list app, I also wrote a blog post. It goes into a bit of detail about the rationale for Listless as well as my experience using LLM-based coding agents to make it.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I had immediately started work on a second app. This one is a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been meaning to create for ages. I love doing crosswords but I find simple ones too easy and the more complex ones too frustrating. One thing I discovered during the pandemic is that if I work on a crossword together with another person, that drastically increases the ones I can complete. Since then I’ve been wishing for some kind of app that would support that kind of solving. I had originally thought I might create a web app but I could not work out how I could do it without using a server (there are peer-to-peer technologies like WebRTC but these still require a server to at the very least establish the communication). A native iOS app can get around these problems by using iCloud (or at least that’s my working assumption).
A couple of weeks back, John started attending a programming class every second Saturday. People with freakish memories might remember that I tried enrolling John (and Emma) in a programming school back in 2024. I wasn’t especially happy with that program; mostly because I didn’t feel it was worth the price. In all honesty, I’m not sure this one is better but it is entirely built around Minecraft so John is of course intensely interested in going each time. The main reason I thought it might be a good idea was actually as a way to meet children his age with similar interests. For that reason, I haven’t roped Emma yet (she’s got plenty of friends from school).
I started intermittent fasting again and while I haven’t been as disciplined as I have been in the past, there has been a reduction in my weight (which is nice). I’ve done my best to pair that with exercise on the treadmill I mentioned two weeks ago. So far I haven’t done any actual running yet but have instead stuck to walking. I think it’s going well. Whenever I spend money on something for exercise I often have a burst of interest that quickly burns out. It’s too early to tell whether that pattern will repeat all the way through but the burst of interest part is definitely holding true.
Patrick Willems has an amazing video essay about music videos. It’s part history lesson, part 90s eulogy and part silly sketch as he delivers the essay in sections that each recreate a classic music video. Oh, and my Bluesky post about it got reposted by Willems which was nice.
Australian electronic dance act, Pnau, has a new single called ‘Tu Corazón’ (Apple Music) that I’ve been listening to intensely. If the name ‘Pnau’ doesn’t mean anything to you, Wikipedia tells me they produce music in the genres of ‘electronic’ (OK) and ‘wonky pop’ (wat?).
I wrote an announcement post for my new app, Listless. I explain why I made it and some of how it went.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776751339.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-21T15:02:19+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-21T15:02:19+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776636530.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Listless, my aggressively limited to-do list app for Apple platforms, is now broadly available. I created it as an experiment to see if I could make an app with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex that still felt polished. The app is free.", "content_html": "Listless, my aggressively limited to-do list app for Apple platforms, is now broadly available. I created it as an experiment to see if I could make an app with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex that still felt polished. The app is free.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776636530.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-20T07:08:50+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-20T07:08:50+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776581550.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I wish the clock on iOS 26 had a ’reduce giganticness’ setting.", "content_html": "I wish the clock on iOS 26 had a ’reduce giganticness’ setting.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776581550.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-19T15:52:30+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-19T15:52:30+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776562363.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I finally reverted Spotlight’s keyboard shortcut to Cmd+Space. You win, world.", "content_html": "I finally reverted Spotlight’s keyboard shortcut to Cmd+Space. You win, world.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776562363.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-19T10:32:43+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-19T10:32:43+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776436080.html", "title": "Weeknotes #326", "content_text": "The weather in Tokyo is pretty fantastic at the moment. The sun is often out and it’s pleasantly warm without being disgustingly humid. And so it was that on Saturday we took the kids to Shakujii Pond to finally go out on the pedal-powered boats they have for rent over there. A fun time overall but my God, am I out of shape. Pedalling the two boys around was absolutely exhausting.After that I took Rowan to Omiya on the E5 shinkansen and then came back to Tokyo on the E7. It was my first time using my IC card to walk through the shinkansen ticket gate and it was great.Speaking of bullet trains, a few weeks back Rowan started watching Netflix’s 2025 Bullet Train Explosion (新幹線大爆破) on quasi-repeat. I finally sat down to watch it with him and was surprised how good it is. And not just ‘good for a Netflix film’ but genuinely good. It’s technically a sequel to the 1975 film The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破) but it doesn’t require any knowledge of that film to enjoy. For a Western audience, the train-will-explode-if-it-slows-down plot will seem like a rip-off of Speed but that’s because the 1975 film did that concept first.I was extremely perturbed in March when I discovered one night that Emma was having a ‘conversation’ with Google’s AI Mode. After confirming that there’s no real way to disable this (AI Mode can be disabled for a child’s account but then the child can just log out of their account to regain access), I blocked Google entirely. That wasn’t much of a solution, though, since most search engines now offer the option to convert your search query into a chat with an LLM-based chatbot. I asked a friend with a daughter that’s the same age as Emma what he was doing and he admitted he didn’t have a good solution. He got back to me a few days later, though, to ask whether I had thought of using Kagi. Kagi is the paid search engine that requires a login to use. I imagine that makes it a tough sell to new customers but it’s perfect in my case because it means I could whitelist it as a site on Emma’s iPad and then ensure Kagi’s chatbot is disabled for Emma’s account. This does mean paying around US$200 a year for the family plan which isn’t exactly cheap but ultimately worth it for me.Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month and this interview in Esquire was one of the better pieces that I read. I link to it, though, as an excuse to note the absurd amount of it took me to properly understand the iconic ‘Yum’ iMac poster (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see this post on Matt Fuller’s blog). The image is of course an overhead shot of a circle of iMacs, shot from directly above. For years, however, I saw an image of visually distorted computers that were stretched vertically, evoking the classic scene from Day of the Tentacle where the characters are travelling through time in the Chron-a-Johns (YouTube).My all-time favourite run of albums is Björk’s sequence of studio albums that begins with 1993’s Debut and ends with 2001’s Vespertine. I remembered an interview in which Björk expressed frustration about the different way that credit is apportioned to male and female artists who work with producers. I had misremembered her as referring to Mark Bell (she actually referred to Matmos) and I suspect that’s because he is credited in the title to the version of ‘Immature’ that is on Homogenic—technically, ‘Immature (Mark Bell’s Version)’ (Apple Music). All of that is an absurdly long wind-up to mention that I wondered what else Mark Bell had done and was saddened to discover that he died at 43 in 2014 (Wikipedia). I am 43.", "content_html": "The weather in Tokyo is pretty fantastic at the moment. The sun is often out and it’s pleasantly warm without being disgustingly humid. And so it was that on Saturday we took the kids to Shakujii Pond to finally go out on the pedal-powered boats they have for rent over there. A fun time overall but my God, am I out of shape. Pedalling the two boys around was absolutely exhausting.
After that I took Rowan to Omiya on the E5 shinkansen and then came back to Tokyo on the E7. It was my first time using my IC card to walk through the shinkansen ticket gate and it was great.
Speaking of bullet trains, a few weeks back Rowan started watching Netflix’s 2025 Bullet Train Explosion (新幹線大爆破) on quasi-repeat. I finally sat down to watch it with him and was surprised how good it is. And not just ‘good for a Netflix film’ but genuinely good. It’s technically a sequel to the 1975 film The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破) but it doesn’t require any knowledge of that film to enjoy. For a Western audience, the train-will-explode-if-it-slows-down plot will seem like a rip-off of Speed but that’s because the 1975 film did that concept first.
I was extremely perturbed in March when I discovered one night that Emma was having a ‘conversation’ with Google’s AI Mode. After confirming that there’s no real way to disable this (AI Mode can be disabled for a child’s account but then the child can just log out of their account to regain access), I blocked Google entirely. That wasn’t much of a solution, though, since most search engines now offer the option to convert your search query into a chat with an LLM-based chatbot. I asked a friend with a daughter that’s the same age as Emma what he was doing and he admitted he didn’t have a good solution. He got back to me a few days later, though, to ask whether I had thought of using Kagi. Kagi is the paid search engine that requires a login to use. I imagine that makes it a tough sell to new customers but it’s perfect in my case because it means I could whitelist it as a site on Emma’s iPad and then ensure Kagi’s chatbot is disabled for Emma’s account. This does mean paying around US$200 a year for the family plan which isn’t exactly cheap but ultimately worth it for me.
Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month and this interview in Esquire was one of the better pieces that I read. I link to it, though, as an excuse to note the absurd amount of it took me to properly understand the iconic ‘Yum’ iMac poster (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see this post on Matt Fuller’s blog). The image is of course an overhead shot of a circle of iMacs, shot from directly above. For years, however, I saw an image of visually distorted computers that were stretched vertically, evoking the classic scene from Day of the Tentacle where the characters are travelling through time in the Chron-a-Johns (YouTube).
My all-time favourite run of albums is Björk’s sequence of studio albums that begins with 1993’s Debut and ends with 2001’s Vespertine. I remembered an interview in which Björk expressed frustration about the different way that credit is apportioned to male and female artists who work with producers. I had misremembered her as referring to Mark Bell (she actually referred to Matmos) and I suspect that’s because he is credited in the title to the version of ‘Immature’ that is on Homogenic—technically, ‘Immature (Mark Bell’s Version)’ (Apple Music). All of that is an absurdly long wind-up to mention that I wondered what else Mark Bell had done and was saddened to discover that he died at 43 in 2014 (Wikipedia). I am 43.
Did footnotes on Substack stop working for everyone else, too?
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776149416.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-14T15:50:16+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-14T15:50:16+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775826960.html", "title": "Weeknotes #325", "content_text": "We celebrated (I use the term loosely) Easter Sunday by giving the kids far too much chocolate. As per tradition, there was one Lindt chocolate rabbit each but it was really Mum’s chocolate eggs that were the star.I had what I thought was supposed to be my last visit to the doctor on Tuesday. I say ‘supposed to be’ because although on my previous visit, the doctor had said that this Tuesday would be my last visit, at the end of the examination he asked me to come back again in two weeks. He said the fracture was healing well so I’m not sure why I really need to come again—he is quite old and might simply not remember what he said in the previous examination—but it actually suits me to do one more X-ray so I didn’t argue. The reason for this is that I’ve been waiting to start using the treadmill I purchased a week or so back and I’m a little concerned the impact that the, er, impacts of repeated footfalls will have on the fracture. Now I can exercise for a bit over week and then see how the bone is handling it.Going back to Easter for a second, Amanda Lehr’s classic 2022 piece for McSweeney’s, ‘Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ’, came across my radar and should prompt at least a chuckle if you have almost any familiarity with Christianity.Possibly also related to Easter, the Mac version of Listless sat in App Review purgatory for the week as I waited for it to get to the front of the queue. (Not coincidentally, I finally got back on top of my e-mail and once again attained Inbox Zero!) App Review did eventually clear it on Friday but I’ve been in two minds about whether I push out this initial release right away or submit a fix that addresses the rather embarrassing fact that the ‘Listless Help’ option in the Help menu on macOS merely causes an alert to appear that says ‘Help isn’t available for Listless.’While I am not in the same league as Brandon is when it comes to apps created by coding agents, I did start a new one while waiting for App Review. This one is meant to be a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been wishing existed for years. Hopefully I’ll have more details next week.I mentioned to my pseudonymous all-purpose sounding board sogaiu that I was working on a crossword app and he asked what format I was using to store the puzzles. Specifically, he wondered if I was going to use XD, a file format for crosswords created by Saul Pwanson. When I said that I hadn’t heard of XD, he pointed me to this brilliant talk from 2019’s csv,conf (side note: one of the greatest conference names of all time). It’s 20 minutes and I think is a fun watch even if you aren’t in the midst of making a crossword app for iOS.I’d forgotten what a killer album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia is (Apple Music). There’s only one hit song (well, maybe two if you want to include ‘Get Off’ together with ‘Bohemian Like You’) but I was listening to it this week and found every track still tickled my fancy. How much of that is 25-year nostalgia talking? Give it a spin and see for yourself!", "content_html": "We celebrated (I use the term loosely) Easter Sunday by giving the kids far too much chocolate. As per tradition, there was one Lindt chocolate rabbit each but it was really Mum’s chocolate eggs that were the star.
I had what I thought was supposed to be my last visit to the doctor on Tuesday. I say ‘supposed to be’ because although on my previous visit, the doctor had said that this Tuesday would be my last visit, at the end of the examination he asked me to come back again in two weeks. He said the fracture was healing well so I’m not sure why I really need to come again—he is quite old and might simply not remember what he said in the previous examination—but it actually suits me to do one more X-ray so I didn’t argue. The reason for this is that I’ve been waiting to start using the treadmill I purchased a week or so back and I’m a little concerned the impact that the, er, impacts of repeated footfalls will have on the fracture. Now I can exercise for a bit over week and then see how the bone is handling it.
Going back to Easter for a second, Amanda Lehr’s classic 2022 piece for McSweeney’s, ‘Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ’, came across my radar and should prompt at least a chuckle if you have almost any familiarity with Christianity.
Possibly also related to Easter, the Mac version of Listless sat in App Review purgatory for the week as I waited for it to get to the front of the queue. (Not coincidentally, I finally got back on top of my e-mail and once again attained Inbox Zero!) App Review did eventually clear it on Friday but I’ve been in two minds about whether I push out this initial release right away or submit a fix that addresses the rather embarrassing fact that the ‘Listless Help’ option in the Help menu on macOS merely causes an alert to appear that says ‘Help isn’t available for Listless.’
While I am not in the same league as Brandon is when it comes to apps created by coding agents, I did start a new one while waiting for App Review. This one is meant to be a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been wishing existed for years. Hopefully I’ll have more details next week.
I mentioned to my pseudonymous all-purpose sounding board sogaiu that I was working on a crossword app and he asked what format I was using to store the puzzles. Specifically, he wondered if I was going to use XD, a file format for crosswords created by Saul Pwanson. When I said that I hadn’t heard of XD, he pointed me to this brilliant talk from 2019’s csv,conf (side note: one of the greatest conference names of all time). It’s 20 minutes and I think is a fun watch even if you aren’t in the midst of making a crossword app for iOS.
I’d forgotten what a killer album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia is (Apple Music). There’s only one hit song (well, maybe two if you want to include ‘Get Off’ together with ‘Bohemian Like You’) but I was listening to it this week and found every track still tickled my fancy. How much of that is 25-year nostalgia talking? Give it a spin and see for yourself!
I see Netflix fixed their awful Apple TV scrubbing behaviour. Great job, everyone. We did it.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775712400.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-09T14:26:40+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-09T14:26:40+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775619012.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Easter has no doubt impacted things but the iOS version of Listless has been ready to publish for days and I’m still waiting for the macOS version to even go into review.", "content_html": "Easter has no doubt impacted things but the iOS version of Listless has been ready to publish for days and I’m still waiting for the macOS version to even go into review.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775619012.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-08T12:30:12+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-08T12:30:12+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775267360.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Inbox zero!", "content_html": "Inbox zero!
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775267360.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-04T10:49:20+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-04T10:49:20+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775227020.html", "title": "Weeknotes #324", "content_text": "The Iran War continued. I feel helpless to do more than pray an ever-increasing number of Americans recognise the stupidity of this latest instance of military adventurism and fix their ire on the maniac they foisted upon the rest of us.In more positive news, the Artemis II mission lifted off successfully on Thursday Tokyo time (ABC News). That said, after reading Maciej Cegłowski’s post about the safety of the heat shield I hope this doesn’t become a more tragic story.On Sunday, Emma and I went to see Hoppers. I somehow made the mistake of thinking that the screening began at 3.30 pm when it in fact started at 3.10. Even with all the advertisements they play these days, the movie had begun by the time we got inside. Alas. The film itself was… fine. Nothing about it was awful but I thought the humour was forced in a few places and the simplicity of its politics wore on me as the film went on. I realise that a nuanced exploration of the complexity of balancing development and conservation isn’t what you expect in a film for children, but if any animation studio was going to pull that off, I’d have bet on Pixar.I had more fun watching Enola Holmes with John and Rowan over a few nights this week. Letterboxd tells me I watched it in November 2021 which sounds about right (although I am surprised that I didn’t write it about it at all in the weeknotes from that period). Back then, I remember being disappointed with it but this time I was content to enjoy the time the film spends with its characters, especially Millie Bobby Brown’s Enola. Letterboxd also tells me that I saw Enola Holmes 2 almost exactly a year later in November 2022 but I have no memory of seeing it at all (and once again didn’t write about it). I plan to have an update about it in next week’s update.I had hoped to be able to say that Listless was available in the App Store. Alas, that’s not the case. I submitted it for App Review and am now waiting with my fingers crossed.In a decision I fully expect to regret, I purchased a treadmill from Amazon that Eri and I can fold up and stash under our bed. The idea was that I can use it to go running in the evening, regardless of the weather conditions outside (which in summer get especially hideous). I’m keen to try it out but decided to wait until the doctor gives me the all clear given my fractured toe. So far, he’s been happy with how it’s healed and suggested that if it continues as it has for the past few weeks, next Tuesday will be the last time I need to see him.The Public Domain Review has a post about the caricatures that Claude Monet drew in his teenage years that I found fascinating.Jenny Nicholson put out a video essay on the worst (best?) Twilight knock-off. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes so probably not something I can recommend to a general audience. It’s not on quite the same level as her Evermore video or her Vampire Diaries video but those set an extremely high bar.I can’t remember exactly how I came across Olivia Dean’s ‘So Easy (To Fall in Love)’ (Apple Music) but I guarantee it’ll have you shimmying around the house in no time.", "content_html": "The Iran War continued. I feel helpless to do more than pray an ever-increasing number of Americans recognise the stupidity of this latest instance of military adventurism and fix their ire on the maniac they foisted upon the rest of us.
In more positive news, the Artemis II mission lifted off successfully on Thursday Tokyo time (ABC News). That said, after reading Maciej Cegłowski’s post about the safety of the heat shield I hope this doesn’t become a more tragic story.
On Sunday, Emma and I went to see Hoppers. I somehow made the mistake of thinking that the screening began at 3.30 pm when it in fact started at 3.10. Even with all the advertisements they play these days, the movie had begun by the time we got inside. Alas. The film itself was… fine. Nothing about it was awful but I thought the humour was forced in a few places and the simplicity of its politics wore on me as the film went on. I realise that a nuanced exploration of the complexity of balancing development and conservation isn’t what you expect in a film for children, but if any animation studio was going to pull that off, I’d have bet on Pixar.
I had more fun watching Enola Holmes with John and Rowan over a few nights this week. Letterboxd tells me I watched it in November 2021 which sounds about right (although I am surprised that I didn’t write it about it at all in the weeknotes from that period). Back then, I remember being disappointed with it but this time I was content to enjoy the time the film spends with its characters, especially Millie Bobby Brown’s Enola. Letterboxd also tells me that I saw Enola Holmes 2 almost exactly a year later in November 2022 but I have no memory of seeing it at all (and once again didn’t write about it). I plan to have an update about it in next week’s update.
I had hoped to be able to say that Listless was available in the App Store. Alas, that’s not the case. I submitted it for App Review and am now waiting with my fingers crossed.
In a decision I fully expect to regret, I purchased a treadmill from Amazon that Eri and I can fold up and stash under our bed. The idea was that I can use it to go running in the evening, regardless of the weather conditions outside (which in summer get especially hideous). I’m keen to try it out but decided to wait until the doctor gives me the all clear given my fractured toe. So far, he’s been happy with how it’s healed and suggested that if it continues as it has for the past few weeks, next Tuesday will be the last time I need to see him.
The Public Domain Review has a post about the caricatures that Claude Monet drew in his teenage years that I found fascinating.
Jenny Nicholson put out a video essay on the worst (best?) Twilight knock-off. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes so probably not something I can recommend to a general audience. It’s not on quite the same level as her Evermore video or her Vampire Diaries video but those set an extremely high bar.
I can’t remember exactly how I came across Olivia Dean’s ‘So Easy (To Fall in Love)’ (Apple Music) but I guarantee it’ll have you shimmying around the house in no time.
The v1.0 of Listless has been submitted to the App Store for review.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775175628.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-03T09:20:28+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-03T09:20:28+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775173407.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Either almost nobody writes in to the Wall Street Journal’s China newsletter or Eugene P. Grace must have been a career diplomat at the State Department.", "content_html": "Either almost nobody writes in to the Wall Street Journal’s China newsletter or Eugene P. Grace must have been a career diplomat at the State Department.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775173407.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-03T08:43:27+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-03T08:43:27+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775022780.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Does the term ‘simple majority’ imply the existence of a ‘complicated majority’? Wrong answers only, please.", "content_html": "Does the term ‘simple majority’ imply the existence of a ‘complicated majority’? Wrong answers only, please.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775022780.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-04-01T14:53:00+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-01T14:53:00+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774744517.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I’m glad to see @gruber.foo is as aghast at how bad Netflix’s tvOS video player is as I am. How did this ship?", "content_html": "I’m glad to see @gruber.foo is as aghast at how bad Netflix’s tvOS video player is as I am. How did this ship?
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774744517.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-29T09:35:17+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-29T09:35:17+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774620300.html", "title": "Weeknotes #323", "content_text": "Australia played Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup Final on Saturday. It unfortunately wasn’t being broadcast on any free-to-air channels (I think it was possible to watch on the streaming service DAZN) but I was able to get the Apple TV app for the Australian broadcaster, Ten, to work and we watched it that way. It was a little bittersweet that Australia lost (ABC News) but the Japanese goal was so good and their defence at the end of the game so impressive that it was impossible not to recognise the better team won. I hope the disappointment doesn’t dent the enthusiasm girls in Australia have for soccer (and the broader viewing public for watching it).I updated my iOS devices to iOS 26 under protest. My friend sogaiu drew my attention to the DarkSword exploit (Google Cloud Blog) and I was frustrated to discover that my phone cannot be protected by upgrading to iOS 18.7.4 or higher. This is because Apple has gated iOS 18 releases after 18.7.3 so that they can only be installed on devices that cannot run iOS 26. In other words, if I were rocking an iPhone XS, I could install 18.7.7 but since I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, I can’t. With extreme reluctance, I put iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad and my personal customer satisfaction with Apple decreased further. I live in hope that JD Power reaches out to me so that this information can be aggregated into a metric to which Tim Cook might pay attention.Speaking of frustration with Apple, I ran into one of those iOS 26 bugs that developers have been complaining about since last June. After Eugenia expressed frustration that there wasn’t a way to delete all the items in Listless, I replaced the Settings button with an ‘overflow’ button that opens a pop-over menu. So what’s the problem? In iOS 26, buttons that open pop-over menus contain a morphing animation between the button and the menu. This works fine if you have the button located in a navigation toolbar. If you don’t do this (I don’t do this) then the morphing animation is broken. As the pop-over menu morphs back into the button, certain effects that have been applied to the button (e.g. a drop shadow) do not appear until a few frames after the morph has finished. After some searching around, I did discover a way to mitigate things but it was still surprising to discover that extremely noticeable visual glitches like this are still part of iOS 26. Fingers crossed for iOS 27, I guess.I mentioned sogaiu above and he also told me about a documentary from the studio Noclip about Rocket League that’s distributed freely on YouTube (part 1, part 2). I liked them but actually preferred the extended interview with Dave Hagewood, the founder and, at the time, CEO of Psyonix. It is a little disappointing that the documentary was made relatively recently after Rocket League’s release; I’d be curious for an update, particularly one that covers the acquisition of Psyonix by Epic Games.Did you realise that the 20th anniversary release of the soundtrack to the Bourne Identity is called the ‘Tumescent Edition’ (Apple Music)? Did you know that ‘tumescent’ means swollen or expanded? I assume this is the kind of stuff you all read this to learn.", "content_html": "Australia played Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup Final on Saturday. It unfortunately wasn’t being broadcast on any free-to-air channels (I think it was possible to watch on the streaming service DAZN) but I was able to get the Apple TV app for the Australian broadcaster, Ten, to work and we watched it that way. It was a little bittersweet that Australia lost (ABC News) but the Japanese goal was so good and their defence at the end of the game so impressive that it was impossible not to recognise the better team won. I hope the disappointment doesn’t dent the enthusiasm girls in Australia have for soccer (and the broader viewing public for watching it).
I updated my iOS devices to iOS 26 under protest. My friend sogaiu drew my attention to the DarkSword exploit (Google Cloud Blog) and I was frustrated to discover that my phone cannot be protected by upgrading to iOS 18.7.4 or higher. This is because Apple has gated iOS 18 releases after 18.7.3 so that they can only be installed on devices that cannot run iOS 26. In other words, if I were rocking an iPhone XS, I could install 18.7.7 but since I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, I can’t. With extreme reluctance, I put iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad and my personal customer satisfaction with Apple decreased further. I live in hope that JD Power reaches out to me so that this information can be aggregated into a metric to which Tim Cook might pay attention.
Speaking of frustration with Apple, I ran into one of those iOS 26 bugs that developers have been complaining about since last June. After Eugenia expressed frustration that there wasn’t a way to delete all the items in Listless, I replaced the Settings button with an ‘overflow’ button that opens a pop-over menu. So what’s the problem? In iOS 26, buttons that open pop-over menus contain a morphing animation between the button and the menu. This works fine if you have the button located in a navigation toolbar. If you don’t do this (I don’t do this) then the morphing animation is broken. As the pop-over menu morphs back into the button, certain effects that have been applied to the button (e.g. a drop shadow) do not appear until a few frames after the morph has finished. After some searching around, I did discover a way to mitigate things but it was still surprising to discover that extremely noticeable visual glitches like this are still part of iOS 26. Fingers crossed for iOS 27, I guess.
I mentioned sogaiu above and he also told me about a documentary from the studio Noclip about Rocket League that’s distributed freely on YouTube (part 1, part 2). I liked them but actually preferred the extended interview with Dave Hagewood, the founder and, at the time, CEO of Psyonix. It is a little disappointing that the documentary was made relatively recently after Rocket League’s release; I’d be curious for an update, particularly one that covers the acquisition of Psyonix by Epic Games.
Did you realise that the 20th anniversary release of the soundtrack to the Bourne Identity is called the ‘Tumescent Edition’ (Apple Music)? Did you know that ‘tumescent’ means swollen or expanded? I assume this is the kind of stuff you all read this to learn.
Being ‘forced’ by Apple to upgrade to iOS 26 because they artificially gate security fixes on iOS 18.7.3 and up is leaving a pretty sour taste in my mouth.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774143192.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-22T10:33:12+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-22T10:33:12+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774015740.html", "title": "Weeknotes #322", "content_text": "The war between the United States and Iran continues to drag on. In a shocking twist, it seems victory might not be the fait accompli it was initially presented as being. President Trump attempted to bully several countries into providing maritime forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before then saying the U.S. didn’t need their help (ABC News). He remains a deep embarrassment to all Americans.It’s coming around to that time of year where I start trying to work out how to get the kids some Easter eggs. After confirming that Amazon once again has a paltry selection, I asked ChatGPT. It responded by asking whether I meant British-style hollow chocolate eggs. It hadn’t occurred to me that the large, hollow chocolate Easter eggs that seem universal to me are, in fact, culturally specific. Apparently, these kinds of eggs are the default form of Easter egg in Britain (and culturally similar countries like Australia) but not necessarily elsewhere (including in the U.S.). I asked ChatGPT for its sources and the webpages it referenced didn’t seem to me to say that quite so plainly but it would explain why large, hollow Easter eggs are virtually impossible to find in Japan (smaller eggs, hollow or solid, can be purchased relatively easily).For that reason, on Saturday, I went with John and Rowan to Azabu (which has a high concentration of western ex-pats) looking for decent Easter eggs. Alas, I didn’t find any. Mum did bring some over when she visited and I have purchased the trusty old Lindt bunnies so that’ll probably be enough chocolate anyway.Today (i.e. Friday 20 March) is Vernal Equinox Day public holiday in Japan (Wikipedia). Happy equinoxing to all who celebrate.Eugenia graciously agreed to beta test Listless. She immediately alerted me to the fact that scrolling (somewhat of an important activity in a list app) didn’t work on iOS 26. I had been testing solely on iOS 18 on development in the—as it turns out naïve belief—that if I had things (you know, like scrolling) working in iOS 18, they wouldn’t break in iOS 26. Joke was on me. I eventually got it fixed but it took a long amount of time and honestly had me questioning whether I shouldn’t just can the entire thing. In gratitude, I added a blue-to-green colour scheme for Eugenia who is a crazy person who doesn’t like purple.I watched Nerdwriter’s video on the use of jazz music in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the HBO spin-off series from Game of Thrones) and that got me interested in the show. Which, when it comes to Game of Thrones, means it’s time to watch Alt Shift X’s channel. His videos on the series are great.I think I have a pretty good handle on who actually reads these updates and so for some of you, this will be the first time anyone links you to Sam Henri Gold’s post about the MacBook Neo and for others it will be the umpteenth.The English Language & Usage StackExchange has you covered on the etymology of ‘umpteen’, by the way.Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is pretty tops (Apple Music).", "content_html": "The war between the United States and Iran continues to drag on. In a shocking twist, it seems victory might not be the fait accompli it was initially presented as being. President Trump attempted to bully several countries into providing maritime forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before then saying the U.S. didn’t need their help (ABC News). He remains a deep embarrassment to all Americans.
It’s coming around to that time of year where I start trying to work out how to get the kids some Easter eggs. After confirming that Amazon once again has a paltry selection, I asked ChatGPT. It responded by asking whether I meant British-style hollow chocolate eggs. It hadn’t occurred to me that the large, hollow chocolate Easter eggs that seem universal to me are, in fact, culturally specific. Apparently, these kinds of eggs are the default form of Easter egg in Britain (and culturally similar countries like Australia) but not necessarily elsewhere (including in the U.S.). I asked ChatGPT for its sources and the webpages it referenced didn’t seem to me to say that quite so plainly but it would explain why large, hollow Easter eggs are virtually impossible to find in Japan (smaller eggs, hollow or solid, can be purchased relatively easily).
For that reason, on Saturday, I went with John and Rowan to Azabu (which has a high concentration of western ex-pats) looking for decent Easter eggs. Alas, I didn’t find any. Mum did bring some over when she visited and I have purchased the trusty old Lindt bunnies so that’ll probably be enough chocolate anyway.
Today (i.e. Friday 20 March) is Vernal Equinox Day public holiday in Japan (Wikipedia). Happy equinoxing to all who celebrate.
Eugenia graciously agreed to beta test Listless. She immediately alerted me to the fact that scrolling (somewhat of an important activity in a list app) didn’t work on iOS 26. I had been testing solely on iOS 18 on development in the—as it turns out naïve belief—that if I had things (you know, like scrolling) working in iOS 18, they wouldn’t break in iOS 26. Joke was on me. I eventually got it fixed but it took a long amount of time and honestly had me questioning whether I shouldn’t just can the entire thing. In gratitude, I added a blue-to-green colour scheme for Eugenia who is a crazy person who doesn’t like purple.
I watched Nerdwriter’s video on the use of jazz music in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the HBO spin-off series from Game of Thrones) and that got me interested in the show. Which, when it comes to Game of Thrones, means it’s time to watch Alt Shift X’s channel. His videos on the series are great.
I think I have a pretty good handle on who actually reads these updates and so for some of you, this will be the first time anyone links you to Sam Henri Gold’s post about the MacBook Neo and for others it will be the umpteenth.
The English Language & Usage StackExchange has you covered on the etymology of ‘umpteen’, by the way.
Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is pretty tops (Apple Music).
I subscribe to two daily news summary e-mails but I’ve let them both back up. I’m going through them now and am up to mid-February. Am half-wondering if I should always read these messages with a monthlong delay.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773724704.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-17T14:18:24+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-17T14:18:24+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773704078.html", "title": "", "content_text": "It’s quite possible this is a me problem but the amount of hackery I’ve had to do to get my (ostensibly) SwiftUI-based to-do list app to work the way I want on macOS has honestly surprised me. In a bad way.", "content_html": "It’s quite possible this is a me problem but the amount of hackery I’ve had to do to get my (ostensibly) SwiftUI-based to-do list app to work the way I want on macOS has honestly surprised me. In a bad way.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773704078.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-17T08:34:38+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-17T08:34:38+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773409620.html", "title": "Weeknotes #321", "content_text": "I filed my tax return. That wouldn’t be that noteworthy except that this was the first year we did it after purchasing the house. The Japanese Government provides a mortgage deduction for the first 13 years or so of a mortgage and for all but the first year, it’s automatically calculated and deducted. But this was the first year so I had to lodge an income tax return together with the paperwork they need. I was a little disappointed to discover that our house wasn’t built to be at the highest levels of energy efficiency and so isn’t eligible for a larger deduction.Eri’s still recovering from a nasty case of the flu so I took Rowan to his preschool at the beginning of the week. I suspect my doctor would be a little concerned to hear that given the fracture in my little toe but hopefully the bicycle is relatively safe for fractured little toes. It doesn’t involve you repeatedly slamming your foot into the ground like walking or running do and surely that counts for something.I continued to make progress on Listless, albeit slowly. This week I learnt the hard way that one of the perils of reimplementing a standard list of items is that you don’t get the behaviour of a standard list of items that you might otherwise expect. This was extremely apparent one day when I tried to select multiple to-do list items and found that holding Shift as I pressed the Up key did nothing. It now does what you would expect but it’s made me concerned that there are no doubt dozens of these little UI behaviours that Listless’s custom list is not going to have. Well, maybe not dozens but at least a dozen.It’s been a while since I found the time to read one of Matt Lakeman’s travelogues. I read his recent one about Afghanistan and it was excellent.Speaking of reading, I didn’t finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth before we had to take it back to the library but I worried that it might have been a bit too dense for John and Rowan’s bedtime so I replaced it on my last library visit with Michael Bond’s original A Bear Called Paddington. I’m a big fan of the CG animated series The Adventures of Paddington that began in 2019 and it’s interesting to see how that retelling differs from the original.I finally watched the third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I enjoyed it more than Glass Onion and I appreciate that Rian Johnson is not content to just remake Knives Out. If anything, my main problem with the movie was that I thought Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud was too good. I realise others might be familiar with O’Connor from things like the Crown but this is the first I’d seen him in anything and I thought he easily stole the film. No small feat when you’re sharing the screen with Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and more.If you’ve seen the movie—and there are spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t—I would recommend Rian Johnson’s Notes on a Scene for Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel. It’s somewhat akin to a director’s commentary but rather than being the entire film just involves Johnson explaining a scene. Well worth the 23 minutes or so.I mentioned last week that I was delighted when Apple Music informed me that Gnarls Barkley had a new album out (called Atlanta). I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed much of a taste for it over the past week. I’ve instead spent a lot of time in my Heavy Rotation playlist. One of the songs in it is ‘She Said (Big Jet Plane)’ a cover by the French electronica producers known as Trinix of ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone (Apple Music). I’m not sure why it has a tweaked title. They’re French, I guess?", "content_html": "I filed my tax return. That wouldn’t be that noteworthy except that this was the first year we did it after purchasing the house. The Japanese Government provides a mortgage deduction for the first 13 years or so of a mortgage and for all but the first year, it’s automatically calculated and deducted. But this was the first year so I had to lodge an income tax return together with the paperwork they need. I was a little disappointed to discover that our house wasn’t built to be at the highest levels of energy efficiency and so isn’t eligible for a larger deduction.
Eri’s still recovering from a nasty case of the flu so I took Rowan to his preschool at the beginning of the week. I suspect my doctor would be a little concerned to hear that given the fracture in my little toe but hopefully the bicycle is relatively safe for fractured little toes. It doesn’t involve you repeatedly slamming your foot into the ground like walking or running do and surely that counts for something.
I continued to make progress on Listless, albeit slowly. This week I learnt the hard way that one of the perils of reimplementing a standard list of items is that you don’t get the behaviour of a standard list of items that you might otherwise expect. This was extremely apparent one day when I tried to select multiple to-do list items and found that holding Shift as I pressed the Up key did nothing. It now does what you would expect but it’s made me concerned that there are no doubt dozens of these little UI behaviours that Listless’s custom list is not going to have. Well, maybe not dozens but at least a dozen.
It’s been a while since I found the time to read one of Matt Lakeman’s travelogues. I read his recent one about Afghanistan and it was excellent.
Speaking of reading, I didn’t finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth before we had to take it back to the library but I worried that it might have been a bit too dense for John and Rowan’s bedtime so I replaced it on my last library visit with Michael Bond’s original A Bear Called Paddington. I’m a big fan of the CG animated series The Adventures of Paddington that began in 2019 and it’s interesting to see how that retelling differs from the original.
I finally watched the third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I enjoyed it more than Glass Onion and I appreciate that Rian Johnson is not content to just remake Knives Out. If anything, my main problem with the movie was that I thought Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud was too good. I realise others might be familiar with O’Connor from things like the Crown but this is the first I’d seen him in anything and I thought he easily stole the film. No small feat when you’re sharing the screen with Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and more.
If you’ve seen the movie—and there are spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t—I would recommend Rian Johnson’s Notes on a Scene for Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel. It’s somewhat akin to a director’s commentary but rather than being the entire film just involves Johnson explaining a scene. Well worth the 23 minutes or so.
I mentioned last week that I was delighted when Apple Music informed me that Gnarls Barkley had a new album out (called Atlanta). I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed much of a taste for it over the past week. I’ve instead spent a lot of time in my Heavy Rotation playlist. One of the songs in it is ‘She Said (Big Jet Plane)’ a cover by the French electronica producers known as Trinix of ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone (Apple Music). I’m not sure why it has a tweaked title. They’re French, I guess?
‘Decile’ is a word.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773319851.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-12T21:50:51+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-12T21:50:51+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773203510.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I don’t have a modern enough iPhone that can run this but how is Analogue 585MB in size?", "content_html": "I don’t have a modern enough iPhone that can run this but how is Analogue 585MB in size?
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773203510.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-11T13:31:50+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-11T13:31:50+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772808660.html", "title": "Weeknotes #320", "content_text": "On Saturday the United States and Israel attacked Iran in flagrant violation of international law (ABC News). Some people point to this as evidence that international law is not real. This is childish. National laws are broken all the time. This does not mean they cease to exist. The slightly more sophisticated version of this argument points out that without a global government with a monopoly on violence, we shouldn’t expect international law to be anything more than a fig leaf. I think this argument is wrong, too. All stable regimes, no matter how brutal, govern through submission. We can refuse to provide the submission that Donald Trump wants. The refusal does not need to be explicit; it can be demonstrated by public commitments that are antithetical to the thoughts of Trump. In this case, the principle of rule of law. I hope Australia and Japan maintain such a commitment and I hope one day that the United States joins us.On Tuesday, I went back to the doctor for another X-ray. The good news is that it’s unlikely that I will need surgery. However, the doctor recommended that I continue to be cautious and avoid physical activity that puts unnecessary weight on the foot. He’s still expecting it to take around two months to heal completely.While I continue to toil away on Listless, Brandon vibe-coded two projects! The first is Collagen. This is a cool little web app for creating collages of album covers. The second is Urban Jungle. I’m honestly a little embarrassed at what Brandon put together in such a short amount of time. I’m not sure why my progress with Listless has been comparatively slower. I am trying to do something relatively custom but if you look at what Brandon’s done, it’s hardly the case that these are clones of each other.I don’t have an app available in the App Store but that didn’t stop me putting together a marketing page. As anyone who looks at the marketing page for my previous app, Flext, will immediately recognise, I leaned pretty heavily on that. I am happy with how it turned out and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely proud of the tagline ‘Do more with less’.The app itself is mostly working. I’ve cleaned up most of the bugs affecting ordinary interactions. In my testing, it works reliably to create and record tasks to do.I remembered once again that 30-minute television shows are awesome and started watching Yes Minister again. It remains fantastic. Less fantastic was the brief glimpse I caught of the 2013 revival of Yes, Prime Minister on YouTube. Were you aware there had been a 2013 revival (Wikipedia)? I wish I wasn’t.A much more pleasant YouTube video is this video essay by the channel Scores Unstitched. In the video, Cait Frizzell (the creator of Scores Unstitched) entertainingly explains the use of vibrato in opera singing. Frizzell is charming and delightful and at 18 minutes, it never feels like homeworkApple Music finally told me about some new music that I care about! Gnarls Barkley, legendary duo from the 2000s, is back with a new (and apparently final) album (Apple Music)! I’ve only listened to it once and as much as I wanted to like it, nothing grabbed me on first listen. I’ll give it a bit of a go and see if my attitude changes.", "content_html": "On Saturday the United States and Israel attacked Iran in flagrant violation of international law (ABC News). Some people point to this as evidence that international law is not real. This is childish. National laws are broken all the time. This does not mean they cease to exist. The slightly more sophisticated version of this argument points out that without a global government with a monopoly on violence, we shouldn’t expect international law to be anything more than a fig leaf. I think this argument is wrong, too. All stable regimes, no matter how brutal, govern through submission. We can refuse to provide the submission that Donald Trump wants. The refusal does not need to be explicit; it can be demonstrated by public commitments that are antithetical to the thoughts of Trump. In this case, the principle of rule of law. I hope Australia and Japan maintain such a commitment and I hope one day that the United States joins us.
On Tuesday, I went back to the doctor for another X-ray. The good news is that it’s unlikely that I will need surgery. However, the doctor recommended that I continue to be cautious and avoid physical activity that puts unnecessary weight on the foot. He’s still expecting it to take around two months to heal completely.
While I continue to toil away on Listless, Brandon vibe-coded two projects! The first is Collagen. This is a cool little web app for creating collages of album covers. The second is Urban Jungle. I’m honestly a little embarrassed at what Brandon put together in such a short amount of time. I’m not sure why my progress with Listless has been comparatively slower. I am trying to do something relatively custom but if you look at what Brandon’s done, it’s hardly the case that these are clones of each other.
I don’t have an app available in the App Store but that didn’t stop me putting together a marketing page. As anyone who looks at the marketing page for my previous app, Flext, will immediately recognise, I leaned pretty heavily on that. I am happy with how it turned out and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely proud of the tagline ‘Do more with less’.
The app itself is mostly working. I’ve cleaned up most of the bugs affecting ordinary interactions. In my testing, it works reliably to create and record tasks to do.
I remembered once again that 30-minute television shows are awesome and started watching Yes Minister again. It remains fantastic. Less fantastic was the brief glimpse I caught of the 2013 revival of Yes, Prime Minister on YouTube. Were you aware there had been a 2013 revival (Wikipedia)? I wish I wasn’t.
A much more pleasant YouTube video is this video essay by the channel Scores Unstitched. In the video, Cait Frizzell (the creator of Scores Unstitched) entertainingly explains the use of vibrato in opera singing. Frizzell is charming and delightful and at 18 minutes, it never feels like homework
Apple Music finally told me about some new music that I care about! Gnarls Barkley, legendary duo from the 2000s, is back with a new (and apparently final) album (Apple Music)! I’ve only listened to it once and as much as I wanted to like it, nothing grabbed me on first listen. I’ll give it a bit of a go and see if my attitude changes.
Anecdata but over the past day, the amount of time Apple is taking to process internal TestFlight builds of my app (these don’t have any human review) has increased from near-zero to 5-10 minutes.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772670198.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-05T09:23:18+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-05T09:23:18+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772657061.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I’ve just learnt the term ‘undo toast’ and I think it is delightful.", "content_html": "I’ve just learnt the term ‘undo toast’ and I think it is delightful.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772657061.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-05T05:44:21+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-05T05:44:21+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772496928.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Looking at the newly released M4 iPad Air, I’m feeling really happy about my purchase of a refurbished M2 iPad Air last year. The devices are identical in all the ways I care about.", "content_html": "Looking at the newly released M4 iPad Air, I’m feeling really happy about my purchase of a refurbished M2 iPad Air last year. The devices are identical in all the ways I care about.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772496928.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-03-03T09:15:28+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-03T09:15:28+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772201880.html", "title": "Weeknotes #319", "content_text": "Last Saturday I kicked the sofa in our living room as I was walking past and, as it turns out, fractured the middle phalanx of the little toe on my right foot. It hurt of course immediately after impact but the pain subsided pretty quickly. I did notice that the toe was at a slightly odd angle and that a large amount of blood appeared to have pooled under the skin of some of the other toes. I might have put off going to the doctor altogether except that I remember reading in someone’s weeknotes (apologies because I have forgotten) about a similar situation and so I trundled over on Tuesday and, after an X-ray, learnt the bad news. I’ll go back to the same doctor for another consultation next week and hopefully it’s something that will be able to heal on its own.If it does require more treatment than that, I’ll always wonder how much was due to the decision to visit Chichibu on Monday. That was the Emperor’s Birthday holiday (Wikipedia) and with some slightly warmer weather, it seemed like a nice little day trip to go on with Mum, Dad and the kids. John had come with the flu and so was out of action but it meant an opportunity for Rowan to finally take the Seibu Laview train (Wikipedia) to the end of the line.Speaking of trains, I had reason to learn that the oil painting of the annoying guy talking to the young woman on the train that’s become something of a meme is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (The Annoying Gentleman) (Wikipedia). Woltze is also the artist who painted Der Brief (The Letter) (Wikipedia), another oil painting that’s become something of a meme. Once is luck but twice surely means he’s a time traveller, right?My to-do list app has a name: Listless. I still haven’t put the source up somewhere but that is on the cards. In the meantime, I was very happy to be able to get it onto my iPhone. It turns out that TestFlight can be used to distribute apps to members of a development team without requiring you to go through App Review. After a misstep with the initial app record I created, I have versions now on my iPhone and on my Mac that both support the interaction model I want and are (sort of) able to sync data via iCloud. The syncing wasn’t completely rock-solid in my initial testing (which isn’t a great sign) but hopefully it’s something I can get sorted out without too much fuss.I was finally able to get Dad to watch Knives Out and, with relatively little prompting, Glass Onion. As I thought might be the case, he had a hard time getting past Daniel Craig’s Louisiana accent. Still, he watched both. He took them in spurts which was nice as it meant we had an opportunity to discuss what he was thinking as he watched. I was very impressed by what he noticed that I’d missed on my first watch.I quite liked Secret Galaxy’s History of Darkwing Duck. I remember wondering as a kid how it was meant to integrate with Ducktales but it turns out that it wasn’t ever intended to be the same continuity.This song is from last summer but I’ve been belatedly enjoying sombr’s ‘12 to 12’ over the past week or so (Apple Music).", "content_html": "Last Saturday I kicked the sofa in our living room as I was walking past and, as it turns out, fractured the middle phalanx of the little toe on my right foot. It hurt of course immediately after impact but the pain subsided pretty quickly. I did notice that the toe was at a slightly odd angle and that a large amount of blood appeared to have pooled under the skin of some of the other toes. I might have put off going to the doctor altogether except that I remember reading in someone’s weeknotes (apologies because I have forgotten) about a similar situation and so I trundled over on Tuesday and, after an X-ray, learnt the bad news. I’ll go back to the same doctor for another consultation next week and hopefully it’s something that will be able to heal on its own.
If it does require more treatment than that, I’ll always wonder how much was due to the decision to visit Chichibu on Monday. That was the Emperor’s Birthday holiday (Wikipedia) and with some slightly warmer weather, it seemed like a nice little day trip to go on with Mum, Dad and the kids. John had come with the flu and so was out of action but it meant an opportunity for Rowan to finally take the Seibu Laview train (Wikipedia) to the end of the line.
Speaking of trains, I had reason to learn that the oil painting of the annoying guy talking to the young woman on the train that’s become something of a meme is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (The Annoying Gentleman) (Wikipedia). Woltze is also the artist who painted Der Brief (The Letter) (Wikipedia), another oil painting that’s become something of a meme. Once is luck but twice surely means he’s a time traveller, right?
My to-do list app has a name: Listless. I still haven’t put the source up somewhere but that is on the cards. In the meantime, I was very happy to be able to get it onto my iPhone. It turns out that TestFlight can be used to distribute apps to members of a development team without requiring you to go through App Review. After a misstep with the initial app record I created, I have versions now on my iPhone and on my Mac that both support the interaction model I want and are (sort of) able to sync data via iCloud. The syncing wasn’t completely rock-solid in my initial testing (which isn’t a great sign) but hopefully it’s something I can get sorted out without too much fuss.
I was finally able to get Dad to watch Knives Out and, with relatively little prompting, Glass Onion. As I thought might be the case, he had a hard time getting past Daniel Craig’s Louisiana accent. Still, he watched both. He took them in spurts which was nice as it meant we had an opportunity to discuss what he was thinking as he watched. I was very impressed by what he noticed that I’d missed on my first watch.
I quite liked Secret Galaxy’s History of Darkwing Duck. I remember wondering as a kid how it was meant to integrate with Ducktales but it turns out that it wasn’t ever intended to be the same continuity.
This song is from last summer but I’ve been belatedly enjoying sombr’s ‘12 to 12’ over the past week or so (Apple Music).
I did indeed fracture my little toe. Boo.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1771974680.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-02-25T08:11:20+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-02-25T08:11:20+09:00" }] }![Wikipedia](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Woltze#/media/File:Berthold_Woltze_-_Der_l%C3%A4stige_Kavalier.jpg\"){kind=link}
![Wikipedia](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Woltze#/media/File:Berthold_Woltze_-_Der_Brief.jpg\"){kind=link}