It’s now June and we still don’t have a deal between the United States and Iran. I am hoping that these people know what they’re doing but being extremely dubious of this potential. (Related.)
A couple of weeks ago, I took Rowan over to Yokohama to ride a Keikyu train and while we were over there we went to a large electronics retailer. They had a commensurately large toy section where I was finally able to pick up some toy catalogues. Rowan’s birthday is coming up next week and I’ve been delighted that he’s been picking out the toys he wants from the catalogue. I’m sure relatively speaking, I spent very little time as a child reading toy catalogues but I can assure everyone that my memory has flipped that right around. I am pleased that, for the moment at least, that’s the case for Rowan as well.
I don’t want to jinx things but I think Crossmate is close to being finished. The last major feature I wanted to add was game replays. I realise that might sound absurd for a crossword solving application. However, since Crossmate is designed to be played asynchronously, I thought that players may enjoy seeing how the puzzle was solved, particularly during the times when they weren’t watching the puzzle. There were a few kinks but I think it’s working well so far. Each device keeps an append-only journal of the moves it takes (this also allows me to offer undo/redo). After a game is completed, each participating device saves its journal to iCloud. These sync down to the other clients and then, once it’s available, you can ‘watch’ a replay of all of the moves in the game.
I am one of those people who, whenever there’s uncontrolled adulation for the visionary nature of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, bring up his full-throated hype around the metaverse (or as Huang cringily referred to it as, the ‘omniverse’). It will not be a surprise to hear that I greatly enjoyed this exploration of the metaverse fever dream by Nick Heer. Indeed my only complaint about it is that it doesn’t spend any time on Nvidia.
Stephen Colbert was effectively fired by the gutless wonders over at CBS. After his final show, he went on the public access television show Only in Monroe (YouTube). Fans might remember that Colbert went on this show back in 2015, just before he became the host of the Late Show (YouTube). Surreal Colbert is the best Colbert.
I finally watched some more of the NBA play-offs. Just in time to see the San Antonio Spurs dispatch the Oklahoma City Thunder to become Western Conference winners and then, unfortunately, lose their first game of the NBA Finals (at home) to the New York Knicks.
While I take some pride in the fact that I remember both watching the music video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on ABC TV’s Rage and thinking the song was cool, the truth is that Oasis were the first band that I ever really felt were ‘mine’. Obviously things went off the rails after Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? but I’ve always loved ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’ (Apple Music) from 1997’s Be Here Now. I know it’s derivative and repetitive but isn’t that the essence of Oasis?
I’m in a bit of a shock discovering that @bengolliver.bsky.social has left the Greatest of All Talk. I haven’t listened to the final episode where Ben discusses things; don’t think I’m ready yet.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780275216.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-06-01T09:53:36+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-06-01T09:53:36+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780189137.html", "title": "", "content_text": "The notification logic in this game is going to be the end of me.", "content_html": "The notification logic in this game is going to be the end of me.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780189137.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-31T09:58:57+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-31T09:58:57+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780065780.html", "title": "Weeknotes #332", "content_text": "Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).", "content_html": "Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.
I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.
Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.
Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.
With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.
While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).
I can finally set YouTube Shorts to zero and it is glorious.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779736143.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-26T04:09:03+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-26T04:09:03+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779732434.html", "title": "", "content_text": "So I spent most of the day trying to get a live communication channel working in Crossmate using WebRTC before I eventually gave up and replaced it with a WebSockets implementation that took about an hour.", "content_html": "So I spent most of the day trying to get a live communication channel working in Crossmate using WebRTC before I eventually gave up and replaced it with a WebSockets implementation that took about an hour.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779732434.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-26T03:07:14+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-26T03:07:14+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779573549.html", "title": "", "content_text": "I fear I’m never going to stop tweaking the sync code in my Crossword app.", "content_html": "I fear I’m never going to stop tweaking the sync code in my Crossword app.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779573549.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-24T06:59:09+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-24T06:59:09+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779459660.html", "title": "Weeknotes #331", "content_text": "John can ride a bicycle! (Sort of.) I mentioned last week that John was gliding and we continued to do that until on Sunday I said to see how far he could go with his feet on the pedals. I ran along beside him for a bit as he pedalled and then let gave him a gentle push. Much to our mutual surprise, he was able to maintain his balance for a few beats before things steadied enough for him to make it a metre or so. Success! Unfortunately, I was in the office for the first half of the week and then the weather was sour over the second half but it does feel as if it’s all downhill from here (pun, of course, very much intended).I meant to mention this last week but I underwent my annual medical examination on (what is now, last) Friday. In 2025 I was flattered when the examiner commented positively on my weight going down to 65. This year… not so much positivity. Nothing terrible but the examiner did ask if anything had changed in my diet. I’m hoping that ends up being motivation to get out of my current rut.My iPhone complained that I was out of space. At first, I wondered if it had something to do with Crossmate. I don’t think it does—or at least not directly. Indirectly, though, all the time I’ve been spending on Crossmate has caused things like podcasts and RSS feeds to back up to an extraordinary level (I had over 100 episodes in my queue). Podcasts aren’t the only problem but the iPhone Storage section of Settings suggests it’s a significant contributor. What can I do in response? It’s tempting to throw money at the problem and just buy a iPhone 17 Pro Max now but I’d rather wait til the refurbished version comes out next February. I went through and made the difficult decision to unsubscribe from a bunch of shows and I’ll see if there are any more alerts.I also declared RSS bankruptcy and marked all of my outstanding items as read. It had got up to over 200 and while I kept meaning to go and read them, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.I did make more progress with Crossmate. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reworked the sync architecture but it’s one more than it was last week. I’m still not completely happy with it, though, and I’m worried that it might be the case that trying to do this with CloudKit is a fundamentally bad decision. This blog post was both reassuring (CloudKit is good because you don’t need to run your own server) and worrying (CloudKit is bad because you don’t get to run your own server). I remain resolutely opposed to running a server and so don’t have much choice but to keep trying to make it work.Trash Theory has a great video (for Millennials) about Veruca Salt and the alternative classic ‘Seether’. I didn’t read music magazines when I was a teenager but I think I nevertheless had some sense that maybe Veruca Salt weren’t ‘real’.This video does a great job dispelling that false notion. They were absolutely real and the song absolutely kicks arse.I mean what else could it be (Apple Music)?", "content_html": "John can ride a bicycle! (Sort of.) I mentioned last week that John was gliding and we continued to do that until on Sunday I said to see how far he could go with his feet on the pedals. I ran along beside him for a bit as he pedalled and then let gave him a gentle push. Much to our mutual surprise, he was able to maintain his balance for a few beats before things steadied enough for him to make it a metre or so. Success! Unfortunately, I was in the office for the first half of the week and then the weather was sour over the second half but it does feel as if it’s all downhill from here (pun, of course, very much intended).
I meant to mention this last week but I underwent my annual medical examination on (what is now, last) Friday. In 2025 I was flattered when the examiner commented positively on my weight going down to 65. This year… not so much positivity. Nothing terrible but the examiner did ask if anything had changed in my diet. I’m hoping that ends up being motivation to get out of my current rut.
My iPhone complained that I was out of space. At first, I wondered if it had something to do with Crossmate. I don’t think it does—or at least not directly. Indirectly, though, all the time I’ve been spending on Crossmate has caused things like podcasts and RSS feeds to back up to an extraordinary level (I had over 100 episodes in my queue). Podcasts aren’t the only problem but the iPhone Storage section of Settings suggests it’s a significant contributor. What can I do in response? It’s tempting to throw money at the problem and just buy a iPhone 17 Pro Max now but I’d rather wait til the refurbished version comes out next February. I went through and made the difficult decision to unsubscribe from a bunch of shows and I’ll see if there are any more alerts.
I also declared RSS bankruptcy and marked all of my outstanding items as read. It had got up to over 200 and while I kept meaning to go and read them, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
I did make more progress with Crossmate. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reworked the sync architecture but it’s one more than it was last week. I’m still not completely happy with it, though, and I’m worried that it might be the case that trying to do this with CloudKit is a fundamentally bad decision. This blog post was both reassuring (CloudKit is good because you don’t need to run your own server) and worrying (CloudKit is bad because you don’t get to run your own server). I remain resolutely opposed to running a server and so don’t have much choice but to keep trying to make it work.
Trash Theory has a great video (for Millennials) about Veruca Salt and the alternative classic ‘Seether’. I didn’t read music magazines when I was a teenager but I think I nevertheless had some sense that maybe Veruca Salt weren’t ‘real’.This video does a great job dispelling that false notion. They were absolutely real and the song absolutely kicks arse.
I mean what else could it be (Apple Music)?
I am appreciating it having cooled down a bit.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779336600.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-21T13:10:00+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-21T13:10:00+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778850000.html", "title": "Weeknotes #330", "content_text": "We are in mid-May and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The Japanese snack food giant, Calbee (maker of many of my favourite flavours of potato crisps), announced that they would switch to black-and-white packaging due to rising costs related to the Iran War (BBC).I mentioned last week that I have started to teach John how to ride a bicycle. This did not go especially well. In a move that I hope will not be scarring, I decided to take away John’s video game privileges until he improved the amount of ‘gliding’ down the very slight incline where we’re practising. I was worried this was putting too much stress on him but as the week progressed, his willingness to practise improved noticeably and he did start to get better. By Wednesday he was gliding for a couple of seconds at time and I deemed that worthy of the reward of a play session of Princess Peach: Showtime!.I will admit that one of the things that is making it difficult for John is that bicycle is too big. I worried about this at the time I bought it but deferred to the advice of the salesperson (who was obviously incentivised to tell me it was fine). I figured that even in the worst case where it was truly too big, John could grow into it. Still, as noted, we are making progress so that’s something.Crossmate continues to progress. Development bogged down a bit as I rearchitected the way remote moves are synced between players. My initial design had a separate row for each move in a table that was associated with each game. This led to a rapidly growing table as a game progressed and made things especially painful when joining a game from another device that was logged into the same iCloud account. Instead, I switched to an approach where each player in a game has a ‘moves’ log. Each player saves each of their moves to their log, these logs are synced between players and then Crossmate uses a reconciliation process to convert the logs into the game’s current state. I imagine most collaborative games are two players playing on their phones so now we’ve reduced all those separate move records to just two. It is true that there could be a fair amount of churn but I debounce updates as a player fills out squares and this limits the number of server pushes required. As neat as that sounds, it was only by around Friday that it felt like things were finally in a good place.I liked this video from Mark Brown on his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel about how Grand Theft Auto 3 was able to fit Liberty City into the paltry memory of the PlayStation 2. I don’t think this will be of interest to someone with no affinity for video games but Brown does an exceptional job explaining technical details in a way that I think almost anyone can understand (while still having enough detail for a more technically-minded viewer). I was impressed enough that when I saw he had a video about improving a UI element in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I sat John down in front of it and he watched the entire 24 minutes.Speaking of technically-minded viewers (or, I guess, in this case readers), I enjoyed this post from Tyler Hillery about why there’s a ‘gap’ in between the lowercase and uppercase letters in the ASCII ordering system.Miike Snow’s 2016 hit ‘Ghenghis Khan’ came into my AirPods via some playlist and my goodness it’s catchy (Apple Music).", "content_html": "We are in mid-May and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The Japanese snack food giant, Calbee (maker of many of my favourite flavours of potato crisps), announced that they would switch to black-and-white packaging due to rising costs related to the Iran War (BBC).
I mentioned last week that I have started to teach John how to ride a bicycle. This did not go especially well. In a move that I hope will not be scarring, I decided to take away John’s video game privileges until he improved the amount of ‘gliding’ down the very slight incline where we’re practising. I was worried this was putting too much stress on him but as the week progressed, his willingness to practise improved noticeably and he did start to get better. By Wednesday he was gliding for a couple of seconds at time and I deemed that worthy of the reward of a play session of Princess Peach: Showtime!.
I will admit that one of the things that is making it difficult for John is that bicycle is too big. I worried about this at the time I bought it but deferred to the advice of the salesperson (who was obviously incentivised to tell me it was fine). I figured that even in the worst case where it was truly too big, John could grow into it. Still, as noted, we are making progress so that’s something.
Crossmate continues to progress. Development bogged down a bit as I rearchitected the way remote moves are synced between players. My initial design had a separate row for each move in a table that was associated with each game. This led to a rapidly growing table as a game progressed and made things especially painful when joining a game from another device that was logged into the same iCloud account. Instead, I switched to an approach where each player in a game has a ‘moves’ log. Each player saves each of their moves to their log, these logs are synced between players and then Crossmate uses a reconciliation process to convert the logs into the game’s current state. I imagine most collaborative games are two players playing on their phones so now we’ve reduced all those separate move records to just two. It is true that there could be a fair amount of churn but I debounce updates as a player fills out squares and this limits the number of server pushes required. As neat as that sounds, it was only by around Friday that it felt like things were finally in a good place.
I liked this video from Mark Brown on his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel about how Grand Theft Auto 3 was able to fit Liberty City into the paltry memory of the PlayStation 2. I don’t think this will be of interest to someone with no affinity for video games but Brown does an exceptional job explaining technical details in a way that I think almost anyone can understand (while still having enough detail for a more technically-minded viewer). I was impressed enough that when I saw he had a video about improving a UI element in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I sat John down in front of it and he watched the entire 24 minutes.
Speaking of technically-minded viewers (or, I guess, in this case readers), I enjoyed this post from Tyler Hillery about why there’s a ‘gap’ in between the lowercase and uppercase letters in the ASCII ordering system.
Miike Snow’s 2016 hit ‘Ghenghis Khan’ came into my AirPods via some playlist and my goodness it’s catchy (Apple Music).
I am spending an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting CloudKit sync issues and I feel like the TestFlight people might need some of my help.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778736646.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-14T14:30:46+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-14T14:30:46+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778735302.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Ugh, so annoyed with myself. I had a complete brain explosion and simply didn’t notice I was reusing an incorrect letter in Wordle. Lost my streak as a result.", "content_html": "Ugh, so annoyed with myself. I had a complete brain explosion and simply didn’t notice I was reusing an incorrect letter in Wordle. Lost my streak as a result.
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778735302.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-14T14:08:22+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-14T14:08:22+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778616201.html", "title": "", "content_text": "Tokens refreshed!", "content_html": "Tokens refreshed!
", "url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778616201.html", "author": { "name": "Michael Camilleri", "url": "https://inqk.net", "avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg" }, "date_published": "2026-05-13T05:03:21+09:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-13T05:03:21+09:00" }, { "id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778249520.html", "title": "Weeknotes #329", "content_text": "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).", "content_html": "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.