Updates from Michael Camilleri

Weeknotes #321

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:47:00 +0900

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?

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:50:51 +0900

‘Decile’ is a word.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:31:50 +0900

I don’t have a modern enough iPhone that can run this but how is Analogue 585MB in size?

Weeknotes #320

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:51:00 +0900

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.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:23:18 +0900

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.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:44:21 +0900

I’ve just learnt the term ‘undo toast’ and I think it is delightful.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:15:28 +0900

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.

Weeknotes #319

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:18:00 +0900

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).

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:11:20 +0900

I did indeed fracture my little toe. Boo.

Weeknotes #318

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:32:00 +0900

Mum and Dad arrived in Japan. Their plane landed at Haneda 30 minutes ahead of schedule (!) so we were a little late meeting them but fortunately it wasn’t by too much. And in indeed, traffic was looking grim in the other direction so we chose to wait that out, have dinner and take John and Rowan up to the observation deck to watch the aeroplanes. I do feel a little embarassed by how familiar I am with Terminal 3 at this point.
In what might be the most quotidian paragraph I’ve ever written in these updates, I finally noticed that I’d been putting the bath lid on upside down for the past year or so.
I meant to write last week about the brief power outage we had one weeknight. I’m not sure what caused it and it came back on relatively quickly but it did mean that the Raspberry Pis and the Synology NAS were shut down improperly. It’s always a bit of a pain to get those back up and running after that happens so I finally bit the bullet and bought an uninterruptible power supply. Now if the power does go out, the router, the Raspberry Pis and the NAS will switch over to the battery. The Mac Mini—which is a bit further away—isn’t connected and that’s got me wondering if I should buy a very small UPS for it, too.
I’m back to playing Wordle. I’m not sure what this portends.
I made progress with the iOS version of my to-do list app. I can now create, complete, clear and delete tasks with gestures reminiscent of Clear. It doesn’t work quite the same as Clear does but I think that’s for the best. I still haven’t got a development build put onto Eri’s old phone but I think I’ll do that in the next week. Right now I’m wrestling with just getting the menu bar items in the macOS version to display properly and wow, is SwiftUI seemingly completely broken in this respect.
Freddie deBoer wrote about his disgust at basketball analysts who encourage NBA teams to make themselves worse (i.e. to ‘tank’) so as to increase their chances of getting the top pick in the annual draft. DeBoer jokingly proposed in response the ‘Luol Deng law’ that it’s better to win than to lose and it’s better to have good players than bad players. I’m a bit torn because while I agree with deBoer, I feel a bit hypocritical given my team, the San Antonio Spurs, benefited twice from the tank-to-draft approach: landing one of the greatest power forwards of all time in Tim Duncan in 1997 and then lucking into freak-of-nature Victor Wembanyama in 2023.
French house producer, Tristan Casara (who performs under the stage name The Avener), first came to my attention for his remix of the Black Keys’s 2011 hit, ‘Lonely Boy’. I linked to this way back in 2020 in Weeknotes #5 (!!). This has been one of my most-played songs over the past six years according to Apple Music so it’s perhaps not surprising that I would find myself listening to another of his songs on quasi-repeat. This time it’s ‘Supernova’, a collaboration between Casara and fellow Frenchman, Axel Brethes (who performs as Axelino), that was released this month (Apple Music). I don’t think it’s as good as ‘Lonely Boy’ but if French electronica tickles your fancy, give it a spin.