I finally submitted my visa extension application and was a bit miffed to discover that apparently my ‘application to make an application’ (as I derisively called it last week) finished processing on Wednesday 29 September. I hadn’t realised because I’d been expecting an e-mail saying that this occurred. Would I have been able to submit my application before the fees went up otherwise? I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think that I may well have. Hopefully the processing itself doesn’t take too long. I keep reminding myself that if we were in Australia this would take (much) longer and cost (even) more.
John came down with something during the week and was running a slight fever by Tuesday afternoon. The fever was gone by Wednesday morning but we kept him home just to be safe. He’s had a persistent sniffle but otherwise doesn’t seem too ill. Rowan has similar nasal congestion and, by Friday, Eri and I had come down with, too. The symptoms for Eri and me seem worse than for the boys and so far Emma hasn’t come down with anything. Is this a mild strain of the flu? Eri had heard it had already started to go around so perhaps that’s what it is.
I kept working on Wattle. Is this a waste of time? Probably. A more productive person would stop at where it is now and move on but I can’t help myself, I suppose. I don’t like putting things down while they’re still half-done and Wattle feels half-done, at least in terms of its documentation. So this week I spent time working on that documentation and one of the things I find is that when I write documentation about a software system, it often causes me to see flaws in the design. Perhaps flaws is overstating it. It’s more that I see incompleteness.
Does everyone remember the time before Gmail was broadly available? In order to register an account, you needed to have an invitation from someone who had one. Despite studying computer science in the early 2000s, I didn’t land an invite until it became open to everyone and by that time addresses like michael.camilleri@gmail.com or m.camilleri@gmail.com were long gone. And so I resisted using my Gmail account for Google services (e.g. YouTube) preferring instead to use the inqk.net account I could use through Google Apps For Your Domain (later G Suite, later Google Workspace). That worked well up to the point where Google essentially made that a paid service, at which point I jumped ship and started using an ordinary, Gmail account.
All of which is a painfully long way of explaining that there’re years of video essays that I watched in the mid- to late-2010s that YouTube doesn’t know I’ve seen. And it’s for this reason that this week I found myself watching 8-year-old Lessons from the Screenplay videos. I think the one I enjoyed the most was his analysis of how Jurassic Park used its characters to explore its themes.
Last week I linked to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ and Brandon reached out to mention the similarities he hears between the Grace album and Coldplay’s Parachutes. I can’t say it jumps out as clearly to me but in listening to the album I was reminded again how much I love this era of Coldplay. I linked to ‘Spies’ a long time ago and it’s still my favourite track but ‘Trouble’ is a very close second (Apple Music).
I had been hoping to submit an application to renew my residency visa before 1 October when new fees that substantially increase the price for applications come into effect. Alas, as you might expect, everyone else also had this hope and I was unsuccessful.
Specifically, what happened was that I had planned to use the Immigration Services Agency’s website to lodge my application from the comfort of my very own home (I have not forgotten what happened last time). I had been organised enough to visit my nearby government office and get the documents I’d needed. On Monday, I opened up the Immigration Services Agency website and joined the Queue. (The agency had been organised enough to put in place CloudFlare’s waiting room system to ensure that everyone wasn’t simply hammering ‘refresh’ as hard as they could.)
That took seven hours but I got through and was all ready to make my application. Unfortunately, I had not been organised enough to check whether I was going to need anything else. It turned out that before you can make an application through the website, you have to make an application to make an application through the website. I did that but, as of Friday 2 October, I still haven’t had that application be processed. I’m going to wait a day or two of next week to see if they get it done but if they haven’t, it looks like I will have to make the trek down to Shinagawa again.
Obviously I should have made my website use application earlier. One of the reasons I had not done so was that I’ve been busy continuing work on my fork of Janet. I think that’s sufficiently completed for me to give more details!
Wattle is a Lisp-like programming language that reimplements Janet (the language I’ve used for most of my programming projects over this decade) in Zig (the systems programming language I’m most excited about) with the syntax of Clojure (my favourite programming language syntax). It’s the language that I have been meaning to make for about six years. I don’t know if it will ever be used by anyone other than me but I am expecting I’ll likely use it for any command-line tools I want to make in the future.
Because Wattle’s runtime works very similarly to Janet’s, it’s been relatively straightforward to port two of my projects (Blueshift and Predoc) over to it. The most attractive aspect of the language to me is that Wattle lets me write in a Lisp-like language and then generate self-contained executables that can be cross-compiled for different architectures. No longer do I need to worry about having the right version of Ruby installed on both my development machine and my production server. Instead, I can have a single file that I compile on my Arm-based Mac, send over to my Intel-based server and just run. Indeed, that’s what I’ve been doing with Blueshift since Friday. It’s fantastic.
If I’m being honest, the vast majority of Dan Barracuda’s 18-minute breakdown of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ went over my head. But Barracuda is so excited, and so talented, that I think if you like the original, you’ll enjoy the video.
Conveniently, I have not linked to Buckley’s song (Apple Music). How does this keep happening? I really thought I must have linked to something from Buckley by now but no. I apologise for the error.
It was Silver Week (Wikipedia): a five-day weekend where Monday was Respect for the Aged Day, Wednesday was Autumnal Equinox Day and so under Japanese law, Tuesday was an ‘extra’ holiday.
I was thinking that I didn’t remember a five-day weekend last year and it turns out it’s only in years where you have Respect for the Aged Day be Monday and Autumnal Equinox Day be the Wednesday. This triggers the application of the rule under Section 3(3) of the Act on National Holidays (国民の祝日に関する法律) (a copy of which is available in English). The rule turns an ordinary weekday into a public holiday if it’s surrounded by two public holidays. This doesn’t happen very often: the next time will be 2032.
Does all of that ring a bell? Almost certainly not for you but I did wonder if I’d written about this before and it turns out yes. In this weeknote in 2022, I wrote:
I was going to call the week ‘Silver Week’ but after a quick glance at Wikipedia’s entry) I realised that wouldn’t be correct. Silver Week refers to a rare occurrence where a week in September will have three consecutive holidays. Since the holidays here were on Monday and Friday that doesn’t technically qualify. Instead we’ll have to wait til 2026.
Since it is September, that meant it was time for the Pretty Cure movie, Star Detective Precure! The Movie: The Mysterious Garden and a Secret Pair. For those not in the know, this is the film for this year’s series, Star Detective Precure! (Wikipedia). I took Emma and John to our local cinema on Saturday and, at the risk of sounding far more invested in this series than would be healthy, I was a little disappointed. I thought last year’s film had a story that better resonated with the show itself. This year lacked that and instead really felt like they were going through an obligatory part of the formula.
I mentioned back in May that Eri and I are considering sending Emma to Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School from 2028. On Sunday, they held their Cultural Festival and I took Emma down there (giving me my first chance to go inside the school). Since it was a ‘cultural’ activity day rather than an observation day, I didn’t see classes being run but I could see the facilities, talk to some of the overseas staff members (who teach the classes in English) and walk around the campus a little. I admit I was expecting to see more biracial children.
The weather for the first few days of Silver Week was pretty miserable but things cleared up a bit on Tuesday and we decided to use the opportunity to take the kids to Ueno Zoo. We’ve gone a few times now and every time I feel like every time I think the same thing: you get a decent look at a lot of the animals but this in part that’s because of how small the enclosures are and that always makes me feel guilty.
Eri took Emma and John back home but I went with Rowan to catch a shinkansen. He’d said he wanted to go on an E5 train but I went to the wrong platform. We didn’t have time to jump on the E7 and so waited for the next train. To my immense surprise (and I’m a little ashamed to admit delight), the train that pulls up next is the E2 (Wikipedia). I could hardly believe it. The E2 is the last active service Tohoku Shinkansen model I’ve ridden and, prior to Tuesday, I’d honestly given up much hope that was ever going to happen. It runs a handful of times a day (maybe it’s only once at this point?) and there’s apparently no easy way to determine when this will be. It was great to be able to tick it off the list.
Speaking of things that are hard to believe, apparently I haven’t linked to Noah Guthrie’s cover of ‘Sexy and I Know It’ before (Apple Music). I’ve now done that, too.
It was my birthday. I have reached the grand old age of 44. I was a little surprised to see that this year Ginza Cozy Corner had Sanrio characters for the seasonal selection box of tarts and cakes it regularly sells. Then I saw that’s exactly what they did last year and I felt even older.
I had completely forgotten about the iPhone preorders starting at 9 pm JST on Saturday (why Saturday this year?) when Brandon messaged me at 8.57 pm to wish me luck getting an order in. That set off a mad dash to my phone to place my forgotten order. Fortunately, I had gone through the pre-preorder process the day before and all the critical information was ready to go. I launched the Apple Store app and (a force quit or two later) put in a preorder for a 256GB iPhone 18 Pro Max in the new burgundy colour for pick-up from the Shinjuku store on Friday. Then, on Friday, I went down, waited about 10 minutes and came back home, phone in hand and money out of wallet. I was busy all day and only got around to setting it up in the evening but so far, it seems very good. Not sure it was worth the price but let’s see.
Speaking of prices, Japan is greatly increasing its visa application fees starting from 1 October. I felt bad about not submitting my visa application back in June before discovering that the earliest I could submit a renewal was 14 September. That said, here we are on Friday 18 September and I still don’t have everything ready to go. Next week for sure.
I got my Zig implementation of Janet to a point where I consider it ‘done’. Of course, that then meant it was time to move to using it as the base for a fork of Janet that I hope I’ll be able to announce in the next weeknote.
I started watching Only Murders in the Building again. The theme song started playing in episode 1 and I wondered why I’d waited so long. The experience of watching it can never be back in 2023 as I felt trapped in that hospital ward but it’s still an incredible amount of fun. I wish the kids were old enough to enjoy it with me. I really think that theme song might be my favourite of all time.
A couple of weeks ago I watched Barry Ferns’ video on Steven Bartlett, a YouTuber who I’m vaguely aware of but have never really paid much mind. I thought it was fine, mostly confirming my priors that this genre is mostly there as a vehicle for advertising. Ferns made a follow-up video, ‘Diary of a CEO Responded to My Takedown. I Wasn’t Ready For This’, and if you’ve got an hour, I recommend it. It goes through the research you may have been familiar with regarding parasocial relationships before developing into something interesting.
If you want something a little lighter, Brennan Pollack (AKA Ego Dip) made one of his reconstruction videos about Arctic Monkeys’ ‘505’. I remember listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare a lot in 2007 while I was working in Mikunigaoka on the JET Programme. I’m old now and didn’t realise that it had apparently become popular on TikTok but I’m glad it did. The song is great (Apple Music).
We received our first Level 4 flood warning on Tuesday evening at around 9.30 pm. Level 4 is the level at which evacuation is recommended. This is the first warning we’ve had since moving into the house and it was certainly unnerving. I like the area where we live but it does come with a greater flooding risk than any of the previous places we’ve been in since coming to Tokyo. Apparently, evacuation in a flood situation can mean retreat to the upper levels of a building if the level of inundation expected is minor. So, given that Nerima’s official hazard map shows our street as having up to 50 cm of flooding, we decided not to leave the house and instead bring the kids upstairs. A real time-ish measure of the river’s water level indicated the rate had already started to ease at the time the Level 4 announcement was made and, sure enough, over the next two hours the waters fell back down and it all ended without any flooding at all.
Apple’s annual iPhone event was streamed in the early hours of Thursday morning. Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pros and the much-anticipated foldable iPhone, iPhone Duo. There was no mention of the ordinary iPhone 18 (or a successor to the iPhone Air) but the rumours are that those will be announced early next year. I’m not sure what to do. My iPhone 14 Pro Max is four years old and I’d like to upgrade but the new Pro Max starts (starts!) at ¥240,000. My 14 Pro Max cost ¥165,000 in 2022 and, at the time, I was able to trade-in my 13 Pro Max for ¥89,000 which made that price feel a lot more reasonable. My 14’s Lightning Port no longer works and it has some dings on its frame that mean it’s not eligible for a trade-in so if I do upgrade, I’m paying the full price. There’s also the fact that—charging port aside—my phone is actually doing just fine. The battery capacity is down to 75% but the Pro Max’s battery is so large that most of the time, that’s more than enough. I really only notice when I’m out all day with no opportunity to charge—and even then, so long as I put the phone on low power mode, it’s not an issue. If I hold out til February, I’ll likely be able to buy a refurbished iPhone 17 Pros Max for a reduced price; how much less, I don’t know.
I’m not sure how I’ve managed to go this long without having seen this but back in November 2021 Michael Arndt, the screenwriter for Toy Story 3, put up an amazing video on YouTube. It’s a recording of a lecture he originally delivered back in 2011 at Pixar about the lessons he learnt in the writing of Toy Story 3. Pixar famously has an iterative story process where they produce animatics (which they call ‘story reels’) that they screen for their core creative team to watch and evaluate during the development of a film. The amazing thing about Arndt’s video is that he got permission to include a number of these story reels for several key scenes in Toy Story 3 so that he can illustrate how he originally wrote it and then how the finished scene in the film turned out. It is 72 minutes but if you have any interest in story or film, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I was asking ChatGPT what ever happened to 1990s alternative rock band, the Presidents of the United States of America, and after we went back and forth a bit, it recommended that I might enjoy their little-noticed 2004 album, Love Everybody (Apple Music). I’m not sure how I feel about passing on a recommendation from a chatbot but I did think it was pretty good.
Rowan has always been excited to watch competitive activities. Since he became infatuated with soccer, I’ve been meaning to take him to an actual match. Going to a J-League match would make more sense but I wasn’t sure if it would rain on Sunday so I asked ChatGPT for options and it recommended a 2 pm game between JR East and Honda Suzuka in the annual Intercity Baseball Tournament (Wikipedia). Given the tournament is an amateur competition, the tickets were not expensive and I was able to get three seats (I dragged John along too) right down near the field in between home plate and first base.
It actually turned out far better than I was expecting. Getting into the stadium took a bit of time but we arrived at our seats just as the game was beginning. JR East was off to a quick start, scoring three runs in the first innings. In the third, one of the JR East batters hit a home run. It was starting to look a bit one-sided but in the fourth, Honda scored three runs and forced a pitching change. By this point, the boys were getting restless and since I didn’t want to be home too late, so we made an early exit. JR East won 8-4 in the end (results).
Before the game, I took John and Rowan to the Taco Bell that’s on the outside of Tokyo Dome. This might have been the first time I’ve ever had Taco Bell and I can’t say I’m in an enormous hurry to return.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I had begun a port of the Janet programming language from C to Zig and that it was proceeding well. I was hoping to have more to report in the following week (i.e. last week) and yet observant readers would have noticed I didn’t mention any software projects at all. That wasn’t a portent of failure but it did indicate that the process was taking longer than I had expected. Here we are more than two weeks later and it’s still not done. I now have an implementation that I think basically works but with inadequate documentation. That’s what I’m working on now; we’ll see how that goes.
One interesting aspect of the work has been the clear tendency of LLMs to personify. I’ve gone back and forth across a number of sessions reminding Claude Code not to personify functions, interfaces, runtimes, etc. My friend sogaiu pointed out that the obvious reason this would occur is that so much of the written text the large language models are trained upon is writing by humans about humans.
I liked the YouTube video from Brent Forrester on how he wrote the Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’. I’d like to believe there’s an alternate universe where I became a comedy writer and I enjoy how these videos let me vicariously experience that reality.
Speaking of YouTube, in 2024 I wrote about the (I suppose) infamous video ‘How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ and the epic response ‘How “How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really)’. Video essayist Christopher Bingham is doing a series of videos about Star Wars and he’s made his own, ‘Star Wars Wasn’t “Saved in the Edit”’ that is quite a bit shorter (albeit still 34 minutes in length).
In exhibit 6,382,983 of how long it can take me to warm to an album, I wrote about Beck’s Colors back in 2020 (i.e. more than six years ago). At the time, I said the album hadn’t grabbed me like some of his earlier work. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I love this album now. I try not to repeat recommendations so this week I’m linking to the song (Apple Music) but know that I think you should listen to the whole thing.
I rode over to the library with Rowan on Saturday to return some books. Just before we were finishing up, the heavens opened up and a torrent of water started to fall. In any other situation, I probably would have waited it out but I needed to get home so that I could pick John up from his programming class. Not feeling there was any alternative, I left Rowan at the entrance, ran out into the downpour, grabbed the bicycle and brought it back to collect Rowan. He got in the (fortunately) covered child-seat and, after making sure he was secure, I took off into the rain. The ride from the library to our house is about 5 minutes and I think the only time I’ve been as wet is when they made us practise swimming fully clothed at primary school.
On Sunday, I got a haircut and then took Rowan over to the Edion in Yokohama I mentioned back in June. When we went last time, we found their toy department had Lego catalogues and while I’m sure they can’t be the only retailer who has copies, I have to admit that I’ve yet to find them anywhere else. The one we got in June was for the January to June ‘releases’ (I’m not sure of the jargon) and I figured that, given it’s almost the end of August, they should have the July to December catalogue. Sure enough, they did and Rowan has been asking me repeatedly which combination of sets he can get for Christmas.
I bought SuperDuper! 4 for some reason and then got a bit stuck trying to work out how I was meant to replicate the way I do my back-ups with SuperDuper! 3. There, I back up to a sparse disk image (Wikipedia) that sits on my external hard disk. I don’t know if this is an especially good idea but it means that I can use my external disk as an external disk for storage. Surprisingly, SuperDuper! 4 didn’t offer any apparent mode to ‘import’ my existing workflow. I tried to replicate it myself but couldn’t work out for the life of me how to set the disk image as a destination. Then I remembered what John Siracusa had said in a recent episode of Accidental Tech Podcast about trying to drag and drop in situations where you want to indicate something to the application and—sure enough—it worked. I dragged the disk image onto the app and it made it a destination. (The disk image itself failed because the disk images that SuperDuper! 3 use aren’t compatible with SuperDuper! 4 apparently but once I created a new disk image, I was able to get it all sorted.)
Emma asked me if I posted to Instagram or YouTube and when I told her that I post things to my own website, she asked me if she could create her own website. I probably should have done more to cultivate this desire but I instead found myself warning that it was quite difficult to make your own website (at least unless you want to host it at Squarespace). I did find an app called Sitely that I thought looked interesting. I loaded it onto her iPad and told her that she can try to create things with it but that I could only offer limited help. We’ll see how that goes.
Casey Muratori has another keynote from the Better Software Conference in the vein of last year’s ‘The Big Oops’. This one is called ‘The Root of the Root of All Evil’ and if the idea of a two-hour lecture on the history of optimising computer programs gets your heart racing, he delivers the goods once again.
Speaking of longer pieces of media, I can’t believe I’ve yet to recommend the Stone Roses’ practically-10-minute 1989 banger, ‘Fools Gold’ (Apple Music). That oversight is corrected.
I’m proud to report that Eri and I are not complete parenting failures. Yes, that’s right: we successfully took the kids to the pool at least once this summer. It wasn’t the nicest day on Saturday. While it’s still miserably hot, the typhoon season has commenced and the sky is frequently overcast. As a result, we didn’t get to enjoy that sublime mix of hot and cold you get when you’re in a pool in summer. Still, it did mean the pool wasn’t especially crowded and we didn’t have to wait in the queue like I recall was the case two years ago.
We then followed that up on Sunday by taking the kids to have another set of shichi-go-san photos taken (Wikipedia). I wrote about doing that back in 2023 when John was five. That’s how old Rowan is now and while Emma and John are technically the wrong ages, it’s nice to have some classy photos of all the children and this is quite possibly the last time we’ll do that with all of them as a group.
I’m burying the lede, though, because the most important thing that happened all week was that I finally finished filing my loose documents. Many were literally years old at this point and should probably just have been thrown out but I feel better having these records organised and accessible on the off chance I ever need them. As an added bonus, our bedroom now looks like a bedroom again rather than the site of an embezzlement investigation.
Rounding things out on Friday was the monthly basketball practice that I started attending back in June. I neglected to write about the practice in July but I went then so this is now the third time. I did get a cramp at one point but the highlight was a steal I made.
After my success making Claret, I decided that it was time to finally see if I could use LLM-based coding agents to tick off another item on my programming bucket list: converting Janet’s C implementation to one in Zig. I regret to report that despite starting this on Monday, it’s still not finished. It’s been intensive enough in terms of token usage that I’ve temporarily upgraded to Anthropic’s $100/month level to make sure I can have it grinding away in a mostly continuous fashion. I think I’m about 80% of the way through and—at the risk of tempting fate—I think it’s going to work. Hopefully I have good news to report in the next update.
Speaking of LLMs, sogaiu linked me to this talk by Gerben Wierda (YouTube). Wierda does a good job, I think, of explaining how the way that LLMs can make it look like there’s ‘comprehension’ when there really isn’t.
I realised I hadn’t watched any episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds from last year (let alone this year) so now I have that on my list of things to watch. Oh, and Ludwig is finally back for a second season.
Charli XCX released her Music, Fashion, Film album in June. I’ve been listening to it on and off for the past month and while it doesn’t reach the heights of brat, I do still like it quite a lot. I’m particularly fond of the melancholy of ‘SS26’ (Apple Music).
As regular readers will have realised, I often try to start these with some comment on the news du jour but I don’t really have much to say at the moment. Last week the U.S. intervened (or implied they would intervene) to prop up the yen which I guess… thanks? (ABC News) I’m not looking forward to discovering the starting price of the upcoming iPhones 18 and anything Scott Bessent wants to do to help me with that is appreciated.
Speaking of the news, I appreciated the most recent episode of Geopolitical Cousins (the podcast by two geopolitical analysts, Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic). I mentioned this podcast last year but to recap: it’s a podcast where geopolitical analysts Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic discuss recent geopolitical events from the perspective of analysts who write advisory notes to investment clients. They’re clear it’s not investment advice (and I don’t use it for that) but I appreciate that it gives their discussions a different flavour to what you tend to get from journalists or academics. They’re also on YouTube.
Tuesday was Mountain Day (obligatory Wikipedia link). Rowan and I ‘climbed’ (by escalator) the ‘metaphorical mountain’ of the new Yodobashi Camera in Ikebukuro to visit their sprawling toy floor. I generally try not to buy toys randomly for the kids but I couldn’t resist getting Rowan the Lego Creator 3-in-1 Aircraft: Race Plane (31160) and then, for Emma and John, the cheapest sets they had from Lego’s Minecraft collection (21583 and 21266). Rowan has now learnt why the sets have different age ranges. His manual dexterity has improved in the past few months but 31160 has a number of small pieces that require a decent amount of finger strength to manoeuvre into place and that’s currently beyond him.
I mentioned last week that I had used LLM-based coding agents to work on an incomplete Janet project and I wondered whether I would use it to work on Persimmon. I did indeed do this and then I moved on to finally making my own Janet dialect. Back in 2020 (!), in the same weeknote where I noted that Joe Biden had won the presidential election (!!), I mentioned that I had written a parser I called Claret that parsed a more Clojure-like syntax into Janet data structures. Well, once I had the persistent immutable data structures available with Persimmon, I decided to make a standalone program that uses Janet’s VM but swaps out Janet’s immutable data structures for Persimmon’s. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or not but this more ambitious Claret is now up on GitHub.
There’s a version of Lumines Remastered on the App Store and came away disappointed. I tried to play it on the iPad and I don’t think that’s the right way to play it. If you have a game controller you pair with your iPad this might be great but they haven’t bothered to code in support for hardware keyboards.
Anyone who has played the first level of Lumines will be very familiar with Mondo Grosso’s ‘Shinin’’. I wondered if it was available to stream and it turns out it is (Apple Music).
Somehow it is August already.
They made an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. I had hoped to watch it with all three children but Emma said she wasn’t that interested and, truth be told, Rowan’s enthusiasm was at least 90% due to the popcorn I had opened into a bowl. I thought the film itself was fine. It was fun to see the characters again but I admit that it’s been less than a week and I’m struggling to remember much of what happened.
It’s perhaps not that surprising given Rowan’s always enjoyed watching me play Rocket League on the Xbox (in a way that neither John nor Emma were) but he saw me watching some highlights from the FIFA World Cup and has become semi-obsessed. Eri is bearing most of the brunt of it; Rowan insists on ‘playing soccer’ with her in the playroom at least once a day. ‘Playing soccer’ consists of him trying to kick the ball into the wardrobe (i.e. the goal) while she stands in front of said wardrobe. It’s got to the point where I am wondering if we need to consider finding him a club. Although, given how he handles it when I lose in Rocket League, I’m not sure that’s going to be much fun for all involved.
I went on a bit of a bender and had Claude and Codex working on multiple Janet projects simultaneously. The main thing I was able to do was finally get Loopy finished. This is an HTTP server that wraps Mongoose v7.0. I’ve had it in a semi-completed state for more than a year but there were a few elements that I needed to fix and I kept putting it off. Then it got to the point where I didn’t really remember how all the pieces fit together. Coding agents to the rescue! Now I’m wondering if this means I might finally finish Persimmon and Watchful. Time will tell.
When I was little, Dad had a prayer that he used to recite with me before I went to bed. I’ve been trying to remember it for years to no avail before realising that of course he would have said the same thing to Monica. I asked her and while she didn’t remember it perfectly, she remembered enough that I was able to track it down. In the extremely unlikely event that you too have been wanting to know this information, it’s called the ’Vesper Verse’ and goes like this:
Lord, keep us safe this night,
Secure from all our fears;
May angels guard us while we sleep,
‘til morning light appears.
More information is here.
John Gruber linked to Brendan Leonard’s excellent comic ‘Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick’.
Speaking of excellent things, Brent Forrester has such a video on YouTube in which he discusses what makes the Simpsons episode ‘Lemon of Troy’ so good. Lots of people make videos like this on YouTube of course but Brent Forrester also wrote the episode which, you know, lots of people have not done.
I was listening to a Triple J Hottest 100 playlist (as one does) when ‘Dogs Are the Best People’ by Australian alt-rock band, the Fauves (Wikipedia) came on. As I listened to Andrew Cox’s nasally drawl, I realised there was another song on the edge of my mind that I kept wanting to remember. In what is obviously one of the themes of this weeknote, I did a bit of digging and discovered it was 1998’s ‘The Charles Atlas Way’ (Apple Music).
I feel bad about how little attention I’ve been paying to the Iran War. What is happening with it? Do you know? I think it’s off again but maybe at the time you read this, that won’t be the case.
Eri took Emma and John to see the Chiikawa movie, Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island on Sunday (Tokyo Weekender). I’d been able to nab a car again to drive us all around (we were worried it was going to rain) and so while Eri was with the older kids, I drove Rowan over to a park he’d spotted a few times out the window of the Seibu Shinjuku trains. Well, no. First, I took him to the wrong park (Heiwa-no-Mori Park) but then I took him to to correct park (Ochiai Park). Ochiai Park is a bit run down in the way that playgrounds often are in Japan but it crams in an impressive array of amenities: a caged basketball court, swings, slides and two flying foxes.
I really thought I’d mentioned ‘flying foxes’ in a previous weeknotes but my searching suggests no. Wikipedia says this term is used in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland (…?) to refer to the zip lines that are sometimes found in children’s playgrounds.
It was truly an action-packed day on Sunday because after the movie/park, we went to Denny’s for lunch and then over to Ferdinando’s for afternoon tea. We haven’t seen him and his family in quite a while so it was nice to catch up again.
Crossmate is now at v1.2.0. The biggest new feature is the chronicle, a compressed record of an entire game (including all player moves). The idea is to allow the original database records to be destroyed after the game with each player retaining their own (significantly smaller) independent copy. That way, if another player deletes the records of a game, it doesn’t impact any other players. I had something like a chronicle (called an archive) but it wasn’t trying to completely replace the game record. I decided to try a different approach after noticing that Crossmate is already using 60MB of my iCloud Storage. Honestly, I’m not sure how that’s possible given how the only data being stored is textual. My theory is that Apple creates additional metadata when you update records in iCloud’s database and because of how many updates can occur in a single game in Crossmate, that can build up to be quite significant after a month or so. By replacing all of that with a single record, I’m hoping the impact on storage will be negligible.
Nikhil Suresh wrote a blog post about the current ‘A.I.’ moment that I thought was very good. Suresh argues many executives realise the reality of LLM-based systems does not match the hype but that these executives are incentivised not to say this publicly because it risks embarrassing their suppliers/customers. I think I’m more optimistic about the potential of LLM-based systems than Suresh (I prefer to call the technology ‘LLM-based systems’ but we’re talking about the same thing). My own opinion is that LLMs in the 2020s are similar to personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The difference, at least as I understand it, is that the enthusiasm towards computers was somewhat tempered. There’s very little temperance around this technology at the moment.
Andrew Kelley gave a talk at the Software Should Work conference that was held in Columbia, Missouri from 16-17 July. It’s called ‘Don’t Take the Black Pill’ and is up on YouTube. Kelley is famous for being the creator of the Zig programming language, but this talk isn’t really about Zig, languages or anything like that. Instead, Kelley argues for maintaining hope.
Kelley goes on a brief aside in his talk to speak positively about Ninajirachi’s song ‘Infohazard’ (Apple Music). I concur. It’s terrific; as is its music video (YouTube). (I’m a little embarrassed to say that despite Ninajirachi being Australian, this is the first I had heard of her. Given she swept a whole bunch of the Australian music industry’s awards last year, this, if nothing else, proves that I am very solidly in middle age.)
On Saturday, Eri took Emma to an open day at Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School, which unfortunately was limited in capacity so wasn’t something we could all attend. I wasn’t expecting to find any Times Car car-sharing cars available (I am aware how many times I just wrote the word ‘car’), but lo and behold there was one available on short notice so I booked it and then took John and Rowan over to Hobby Center Kato, the model train shop that’s attached to the Kato Precision Railroad Models head office (Wikipedia). Since it’s not really the purpose of the building, the shop isn’t that big but it does have a rather intricate diorama set up on the ground floor that was fun to see. I probably flubbed the entire trip by not spending the money to ‘play’ with the upstairs diorama. I think the idea is that you get a train and a brief window of time to operate it on a dedicated track so that, in theory, you don’t mess things up for anyone else but I know my boys and I’m not confident they would have, like life, found a way.
I wish I’d had somewhere more interesting to go for lunch but the best option was a nearby Gusto, a Japanese ‘family restaurant’. I’ve written about visiting family restaurants a couple of times before, but in looking for a good explainer for readers unfamiliar with Japanese Western cuisine (not a typo), the Government of Japan actually has a decent English-language webpage. My tax dollars hard at work, I guess.
Monday was Marine Day (Wikipedia) and I decided to celebrate by taking Emma and John to see Toy Story 5. The movie has been out for a few weeks now and I was a little surprised at how few cinemas around us were showing the subtitled version (i.e. the English dub). The easiest to go to was the Toho Cinemas in Shinjuku which I’m not sure I’d ever visited. This is the one with the Godzilla sticking out the top. It’s a bit of a shame that the district where the cinema is located, Kabukichō (Wikipedia) is a red-light district because the cinema would otherwise be the obvious choice for us to frequent. We went at 9 in the morning so nothing risqué was even open but the short walk from Seibu Shinjuku Station to the cinema was pretty rough on the nose.
I think the opinion we’re supposed to express about TS5 is that it’s emblematic of the complete creative bankruptcy of the U.S. entertainment industrial complex but I am going to zag and instead tell you the movie was great. If you want an example of how bad things can get, there is at least one in cinemas right now—from Disney no less—but it’s not TS5. The reason Toy Story 5 avoids this problem is that it’s not really a Toy Story movie in the sense that these films are about Woody and Buzz. It’s really like a spin-off, with the focus this time on the cowgirl Jessie. I don’t know if Pixar can pull this trick again but it worked a treat this time.
I had some inchoate sense that AT Protocol (Wikipedia), the protocol behind Bluesky, is better than alternatives like ActivityPub (Wikipedia). I only just came across this but in January of this year, Dan Abramov (a proponent of AT Protocol), wrote a good primer that helps make that sense much more solid.
Speaking of links to the web, I thought about writing to Hank Green (Wikipedia) about Crossmate as I know he’s into word games. I wanted an e-mail address and went to his personal website to find one. There’s not one listed there but his website is delightful.
I was talking to Eugenia about the band Garbage (we were discussing the first CDs we’d bought in the 90s) and that prompted me to go back and listen to Version 2.0. I mostly bought the CD for ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’ (Apple Music) but the whole album is a banger.
Emma, John and Rowan finished school for the term which of course means we’re now in Hell. I plan to switch to working from home two days a week rather than three but I’m not sure what we’re going to do to keep them occupied. Oh, and the summer heat is oppressive enough that I think we might actually be in Hell.
Rowan wanted to go out on a shinkansen and so I made a deal that if we did that, we had to go to a museum first. I thought the easiest choice (given its relative proximity to Tokyo Station) was the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Wikipedia). I’ve written about MOMAT before (the abbreviation is not a typo) and it remains one of my favourite galleries in Tokyo almost because of its relative lack of popularity. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction but I thought it was excellent. I’m not familiar with Sugimoto and while the exhibition is arguably the equivalent of a greatest hits album, for someone new to work this was great. I must say that Rowan held up exceptionally well. I wasn’t sure whether I’d spend the entire time wrestling him but fortunately no.
Crossmate passed App Review and is on the App Store! So far I’ve had literally zero (zero!) responses from Apple pundits I’ve told about it so it seems unlikely to set the world on fire. Still, if you’re eager to get into my good books, check it out unprompted (well, outside of this prompt) and then tell me how amazing it is.
Speaking of things with a limited audience, Josh Kingsford (the comedian behind the YouTube channel Comedy Without Errors) has released the last instalment in his sprawling 5-part series about Louis C.K. (full playlist). Kingsford explores the allegations against Louis C.K. that led to his cancellation, C.K.’s response to these allegations and C.K.’s return to cultural relevance (he released a novel, Ingram in November 2025 and his new Netflix special, Ridiculous, premiered on 30 June 2026). The entire thing runs for more than six hours. I can really only recommend it to people who loved C.K.’s comedy as much as I did. The short version? C.K. is an extremely talented liar without contrition. I disagree with some aspects of Kingsford’s argument in the final video about separating the art from the artist but in this case, I agree that it’s extremely difficult to do that with C.K.
I really liked Mike Masnick’s essay, ‘Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet’. Masnick is the author behind the website, Techdirt. He’s been writing about online platforms for some time and his essay, ‘Protocols, Not Platforms’, was an important influence on the AT Protocol (the highest profile usage of which is the microblogging site, Bluesky). In ‘Enshittification’, he explains how the architecture of an online services shapes the incentives that prevent (or at least limit) these services becoming worse for users over time.
To fit this week’s theme, I think the musical selection needs to be something pretty esoteric. Is it fair to put Thievery Corporation’s ‘Lebanese Blonde’ (Apple Music) into that category? I’m not sure but let’s.
On Sunday, I took Rowan (and John) to get a haircut. I was really impressed with how Rowan handled it. I do still have to stand beside him and help him stay still but fortunately the barber is comfortable with me doing this. Have I written about Cut House Bright (Google Map) before? I’m always worried it’s about to go out of business. It’s on the second floor in a dingy building, the decor is… rustic might be the kindest thing I can say and it doesn’t seem to have many customers. I started going there because it was very close to our old apartment and I was impressed with how quickly the barber cut my hair. When it was time to start taking John and Rowan to get haircuts, I thought the barber’s speed, together with the fact he didn’t seem awash in customers, might make him amenable to two boys who sometimes need some help to sit still. While I’m not sure he’s completely fine with me standing next to Rowan as he cuts his hair (John’s fine on his own), we seem to have come to an unspoken understanding that I’m not sure I could replicate with anyone else.
Of course, as is tradition, after the haircut we then went to Asobono. For the first time, Rowan wasn’t especially interested in the Plarail toys (Wikipedia). This might be because we now have some in the house. Yes, after years of resisting, we were gifted a small amount of track by a nearby biracial family who moved to the UK this week. Speaking of which, in a cruel bit of timing, Eri made friends with the mother of a nearby biracial family just before they moved to the UK this week. Alas.
The oppressive summer heat is here. I ordered a thermal curtain that I hope might improve the heat flow in our living room. Probably the aspect of our house I dislike the most is the fact that the living room is on (what as an Australian I want to call the first floor but in sane counting systems is) the second storey. By itself, that’s not a problem. What makes it terrible is that the stairs that lead up to the room have no door or barrier at all. As a result, all the heat from downstairs rises up and all the cold air leaks down and the room is often a couple of degrees warmer than downstairs. I’m not sure the thermal curtain will do that much but you’ve got to be in it to win it. I think that’s how that phrase goes.
Speaking of oppressive summer heat, I finally pulled the trigger and booked our flights to Australia for Christmas (I kid, Sydney summers are not oppressive at all compared to Tokyo). The ticket prices weren’t as bad as I had feared but they were still expensive and so I made sure to check not just ANA’s prices (our preferred airline) but also JAL and Qantas. Well, turns out Qantas was significantly cheaper and so after a decade or so since I swore never to fly with them again, we are flying with them again.
I submitted Crossmate to the App Store for App Review. As of this writing, it has not yet entered review. I hope there aren’t any problems.
I made a brief mention last week to the 1990 album, the Simpsons Sing the Blues and Brandon sent me an iMessage saying he’d had that album, too. That prompted a short discussion of what an odd piece of Simpsons merchandise it is. You can read more on the Wikipedia page or put it on for a spin (Apple Music). It’s… pretty weird.
Rowan woke up on Saturday morning complaining about pain in his ear. Eri and I decided that I should take him to the ENT clinic that’s close to our house. I forgot you could book online (and so skip most of the waiting part) and so, as a result, Rowan and I ended up having to sit in the waiting room for almost two hours. This would have been difficult enough but after about 90 minutes, Rowan started complaining that his stomach hurt. Sure enough, he then proceeded to vomit. I managed to stop this from going all over the floor and, somehow, over most of our clothes. There was a mad dash to the bathroom and an emergency visit by Emma with clean shirts and, after waiting about half an hour more or so, we were able to see the doctor. I’m still not sure what he had. He took Monday and Tuesday off school but nobody else fell ill.
Unsure if Emma or John would feel sick, we didn’t venture further away than a trip to the library. That’s not especially notable except that this was the first time John went there on his bicycle. Well, sort of. I did have to push him along each time he came to a stop (he’s not able to push off from a standing start yet). Still, that’s the farthest cycling trip he’s gone on so far.
One benefit of staying close to home was that I was able to rush to the computer when I noticed that, a few days prior, I had inadvertently pasted my PGP key’s passphrase into the source code for Crossmate. I’m not hosting Crossmate’s repository on GitHub but even still, I quickly rotated to a new PGP key and uploaded the public key to all the locations where I was using the old key to verify my identity. I hope I never have to live those 15 minutes again.
I finally finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth to the boys. I understand why everyone raves about this Jules Verne guy. Definitely put him on your ‘one to watch’ list.
I randomly watched an episode of the X-Files. I stopped watching the show around the time of Season 6 or 7 and this was ‘Invocation’ from Season 8 so it was all new to me (Wikipedia). I don’t know how well the older episodes would hold up but I found the entire thing a bit of a tough watch. Why was I watching this in the first place? It was all because I was reading Billie Eilish’s Wikipedia page and was surprised to see that her mother, Maggie Baird, was an actress. It mentioned she was in an episode of the X-Files and that got me curious.
Pseudonymous YouTube 12tone has a video about the 90s classic, ‘Two Princes’ by Spin Doctors. I want to say that this was the first single I ever bought but I now don’t remember how I acquired it. I remember that it was on a cassette tape but my recollection is that it was one of those compilations that were so popular in that 90s (it wasn’t a ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ compilation but very much in that vein). The thing is that I don’t think I would have enough money to have bought it by myself so perhaps I cajoled Mum or Dad into getting it for me. Except I believe the only times I ever did this were for the Simpsons Sing the Blues (Wikipedia) and the theme song to 1996’s Mission: Impossible.
Oh, and 12tone makes the interesting observation that the two new types of rock groups in the early 90s were grunge bands and jam bands. I hadn’t thought of ‘Two Princes’ (Apple Music) as a jam band song but, after his dissection, I absolutely see it now.
Apple dramatically increased their prices (John Gruber has a nice table). There haven’t been increases yet on iPhones but given new Pro models are set to be announced in September, you’d have to assume they’ll be price increases then, too. I was still debating internally whether I would upgrade to the new models or wait for a refurbished orange iPhone 17 Pro in February of next year. Depending on that price hike (and assuming it doesn’t apply to refurbished models), February is looking increasingly likely.
…and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
On Tuesday evening I played basketball for the first time in… look, it’s literally been so long that I no longer remember. I have a vague recollection of going once or twice to somewhere in Kita-ku after we moved to Tokyo. I think it would have been while we were still living in Bunkyō-ku so let’s say that it’s been at least 10 years. I am pleased to report that, despite my fears, I did not tear any muscles or otherwise noticeably damage anything. There was a bit of soreness a day or two later but honestly, less than I was expecting. No steals but I did make a turn around fadeaway so that was nice.
Basketball was on Tuesday and in true me fashion, on Monday, I realised that I had neglected to buy any basketball shoes (I used to have a pair but, well, that was 10 years ago, right?). Not knowing at this point whether I would be down one working Achilles tendon within the next 24 hours, I purchased a pair of Nike Court Vision Mid Next Nature thinking that, if nothing else, I could at least wear them as normal shoes. ChatGPT was correct that the reason these are not recommended for playing actual basketball is that they lack the padding you would expect.
JD Vance is so easy to dislike that I’m not sure how good this really is but I appreciated the New Yorker’s review of his memoir, Communion.
Of course there was more work on Crossmate. The largest user-facing features this week were tips banners and a synced playing time clock but I also made changes to preserve formatting and keep titles when importing puzzles, encrypt push notifications end-to-end, speed up joining shared puzzles and increase the palette of assignable colours. I swear this is getting close to a final release.
I’ve been wondering what’s going on with the spate of big budget movies that went straight to streaming (the one that I was most tempted by was Apple’s Fountain of Youth). Patrick Willems explains it all in a 57-minute video essay. TLDW: Movie studios who (mostly) know box office bombs when they see them left these for the streamers and the streamers were just excited to have blockbusters that sound good on paper and feature big name stars.
Olivia Rodrigo released You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love two weeks ago. On first listen, nothing grabbed me like some of the stand-outs on Sour or Guts but over the course of this week I did find myself coming back numerous times to ‘U + Me = <3’ (Apple Music). Is that because Rodrigo shamelessly mines the music of my youth? I mean, what do you think? (How shameless? She literally has Robert Smith sing on one of the tracks.)
The United States and Iran officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Wednesday that maybe ended the war (ABC News). It sounds like a terrible ‘deal’ for the United States, the people of Iran and most of the rest of us who have been strapped in for the ride. I don’t know if this is truly going to be Trump’s Katrina—indeed whether he is capable of even having that kind of moment—but I suppose what else can us non-Americans do at this point but cross our fingers?
In more positive news, John turned nine this week. We gave him Super Mario Odyssey, one of the One Block mods available from the Minecraft Marketplace and The Village: An Official Minecraft Novel (the conclusion of Max Brooks’ trilogy). The latter John hasn’t quite got yet; I promised once I finish reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth to him and Rowan, I’ll move onto it.
This is the part in the update where I talk again about Crossmate so feel free to skip over this. There was quite a bit of work this week so it’s a rare child list:
I mentioned last week that I was preparing for a public beta and I haven’t quite got to that point but I have created a second beta testing group and sent the link to it to a handful of people I don’t know personally. Incredibly, the second person (Jose, a friend of Brandon’s) happened to select as his first puzzle a New York Times puzzle that broke the parser. I’m sorry for the rough first game experience, Jose, but I’m extremely grateful you found it.
Feeling a bit indebted to Jose, at his request I increased the maximum player cap to three and he, Brandon and I played the first game of Crossmate with more than two people. It was a huge relief that it didn’t completely fall over.
Jose also requested Crossmate natively support turn-by-turn mode. Obviously you can do this right now with a friend if you manage it yourself but I see the appeal of having it be something support by the game. I’m a bit worried about scope creep keeping this in a beta forever (I am very tempted to work on a Mac version) and so think it might be something I wait for 1.1 or 1.2 to do.
I invited Brendan Quigley (a crossword maker) and Jason Snell (an Apple pundit) to check out the app but did not hear back from either. I can’t actually see the identities of people who join the TestFlight through the public links I sent them so perhaps one of them did join to check it out and it wasn’t for them (there are five people in the ‘public’ TestFlight but I do not know who one of them is). I’m still wondering if I should try to send it to anyone else or instead release it publicly and post a link to Hacker News and Lobsters.
I realise I’ve been so wrapped up in my own things that I neglected to mention that Apple held WWDC two weeks ago. As I’ve done in prior years, I’m slowly working my way through the videos that look the most relevant to me. In years past, this has felt a bit silly—less so this year! I’m extremely excited by what Apple showed of macOS Golden Gate. The revisions to Liquid Glass all look welcome and I’m excited at the possibility of what might be possible with a local coding agent (YouTube). This is possible now of course but I know I’ll feel more comfortable doing it using a model from Apple.
It seems unlikely that Fitz and the Tantrums will ever release something bigger than ‘HandClap’. Still, I started listening seriously to last year’s release, Man on The Moon, and it’s been growing on me. ‘Withdrawls’ is the song I’ve listened to the most (Apple Music).
Rowan turned five. I have no memories I can consciously recall before that age and so the first four years have always felt special to me in a way that the rest of childhood won’t because of the (quite probably wrong) sense that I am the exclusive keeper of these memories. That also makes me sad because I am so terrible at that job. I went back and looked at the weeknote when John turned five and I cannot remember John ever asking for Edward and Henry. I guess it’s a good thing I started writing these weeknotes.
The birthday day itself went well. I finally cracked and after constant pleading bought my first Pura-Rail trains. I held out on buying any track but I have put batteries in them and they’ve been zooming across the floors since he opened them. Pura-Rail trains fit on Brio tracks but don’t grip the wood as well as I think they grip the official—and truly, truly ugly—blue plastic ones. For future reference (since there’s an extremely good chance I’ll forget this), it was an ALFA-X and a Doctor Yellow.
Here we are in June and I have yet to write my annual spring list of podcasts I have on rotation. Now it’s true that I often do this in summer (see last year’s) but this is the first year I’m seriously considering not writing a post. The truth is that since I started using coding agents, the amount of time I’m spending on podcasts has completely plummeted. I finally accepted reality this week and deleted almost all the episodes in my backlog because short of another multi-month hospital admission, there was no way that I would get through them. I haven’t turned off the subscriptions yet but that might come next. These posts are the ones that I get the most feedback about by far so I’m reluctant to stop completely but that is the conclusion I feel like I’m barrelling towards.
So of course I spent more time on Crossmate as I ready it for a ‘public beta’ (read: the randos I can solicit to give it a shot). Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and it was fortuitous timing because one of its strengths is meant to be security vulnerability detection. It dutifully identified a couple of question decisions regarding my Cloudflare Workers and we got those fixed (I think).
Or perhaps I should say I hope because as I write this, the Fable model has become unavailable in response to the United States directing Anthropic to stop making it available to foreign nationals (Anthropic’s statement). On a purely selfish level, this is disappointing because in my completely unscientific testing, I did find Fable 5 an improvement over Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. It was going away on 22 June (for subscriptions like mine) but hopefully I’ll have a chance to use it again soon.
I also put up a marketing site for Crossmate so if you’re wondering what it looks like, there is a screenshot there. If you know how to install apps through TestFlight and want to check it out, drop me a line. The e-mail address is on the marketing page.
There was a post on Bluesky about the most 80s song you could think of. My friend sogaiu linked me to the music video for Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘Power of Love’ (YouTube) and just wow. Speaking of being five, this particular song is one of the earliest that I can remember but I don’t think I’d ever seen the music video for it. It is quite a trip.
I’ll make that the musical selection for the week (Apple Music) but know that in actuality it was another week of a lot of ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’.
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?
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).
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)?
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).
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).
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!).
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?).
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.
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!
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.
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.
The war between the United States and Iran continues to drag on. In a shocking twist, it seems victory might not be the fait accompli it was initially presented as being. President Trump attempted to bully several countries into providing maritime forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before then saying the U.S. didn’t need their help (ABC News). He remains a deep embarrassment to all Americans.
It’s coming around to that time of year where I start trying to work out how to get the kids some Easter eggs. After confirming that Amazon once again has a paltry selection, I asked ChatGPT. It responded by asking whether I meant British-style hollow chocolate eggs. It hadn’t occurred to me that the large, hollow chocolate Easter eggs that seem universal to me are, in fact, culturally specific. Apparently, these kinds of eggs are the default form of Easter egg in Britain (and culturally similar countries like Australia) but not necessarily elsewhere (including in the U.S.). I asked ChatGPT for its sources and the webpages it referenced didn’t seem to me to say that quite so plainly but it would explain why large, hollow Easter eggs are virtually impossible to find in Japan (smaller eggs, hollow or solid, can be purchased relatively easily).
For that reason, on Saturday, I went with John and Rowan to Azabu (which has a high concentration of western ex-pats) looking for decent Easter eggs. Alas, I didn’t find any. Mum did bring some over when she visited and I have purchased the trusty old Lindt bunnies so that’ll probably be enough chocolate anyway.
Today (i.e. Friday 20 March) is Vernal Equinox Day public holiday in Japan (Wikipedia). Happy equinoxing to all who celebrate.
Eugenia graciously agreed to beta test Listless. She immediately alerted me to the fact that scrolling (somewhat of an important activity in a list app) didn’t work on iOS 26. I had been testing solely on iOS 18 on development in the—as it turns out naïve belief—that if I had things (you know, like scrolling) working in iOS 18, they wouldn’t break in iOS 26. Joke was on me. I eventually got it fixed but it took a long amount of time and honestly had me questioning whether I shouldn’t just can the entire thing. In gratitude, I added a blue-to-green colour scheme for Eugenia who is a crazy person who doesn’t like purple.
I watched Nerdwriter’s video on the use of jazz music in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the HBO spin-off series from Game of Thrones) and that got me interested in the show. Which, when it comes to Game of Thrones, means it’s time to watch Alt Shift X’s channel. His videos on the series are great.
I think I have a pretty good handle on who actually reads these updates and so for some of you, this will be the first time anyone links you to Sam Henri Gold’s post about the MacBook Neo and for others it will be the umpteenth.
The English Language & Usage StackExchange has you covered on the etymology of ‘umpteen’, by the way.
Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is pretty tops (Apple Music).
I 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?
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.
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).
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.
Snow fell late Saturday night and we awoke to a layer a few centimetres thick covering the neighbourhood. Emma and John went out and had a snowball fight and Rowan and I made his first snowman. The eyes were mostly left to the imagination but I did procure an actual carrot for the nose which made it feel worthy of some kind of merit badge.
The last time it snowed like this was when we were living in Mukodaichō. Adrien was staying with us and I viscerally remember he and I standing in the street trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to use a shovel to crack the ice into which the melted snow had frozen. As a result, I was determined this time to shovel it while it was still fresh. The problem was that we no longer had the shovel we’d had back then, so that meant I had to race off to the local gardening shop. Snow was lightly falling but I felt vindicated in going when I did once I saw they’d already sold out of their plastic shovels and only had a couple of metal ones left in stock. Shovelling fresh snow was indeed pretty straightforward and by the afternoon, we had a neatly shovelled section of the street outside our house.
One of the disadvantages of living in Japan is that no television channels (over the air or cable) show cricket. One of the advantages of living in Japan is that this apparently means I can watch the T20 World Cup via the ICC’s website. That’s how I found myself at 1.20 in the morning watching the end of the India vs U.S. match. They don’t have replays and I keep falling asleep before the matches I care about are on but it’s at least something. I wonder if the Ashes were watchable this way.
Last week, I wrote about trying to listen the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack from Baz Luhrmann. This made me wonder about the name ‘Baz’. In Australia, that would make you expect his actual name is Barry but it turns out it’s… Bazmark (?). According to Wikipedia, he was born Mark Anthony Luhrmann but got the nickname ‘Baz’ at school. While still in school, he changed his first name by deed poll to ‘Bazmark’.
I got a Mac version of my to-do list app running and switched over to making the iOS version. I’ve found it rougher going so far. That might seem counterintuitive but I think it’s because I’m using gestures as the primary mode of interaction on the phone whereas I was satisfied with the Mac version relying on more traditional affordances like checkboxes and context menus. I’m also at something of a disadvantage in that I can’t pair my iPhone with the Mac so that I can send development builds to it. The reason is because the Lightning port on my ancient iPhone 14 Pro Max is broken and to ‘pair’ an iPhone and a Mac you need to make the initial connection via a cable.
That problem might soon be solved, though, as Apple finally started selling refurbished iPhones 16. This is relevant because Eri has wanted to upgrade her even more ancient iPhone 13 Mini and so as soon as they were in stock, I pounced and bought her one of the iPhone 16 models. I’ve kept her old phone running for the last couple of days while we make sure everything has copied across but once it has, I plan to repurpose it as a development unit.
I’m a few months late to this but Raye’s ‘Where is My Husband!’ is very groovy (Apple Music).
We’ve somehow fallen into the habit of getting McDonald’s for lunch once a weekend. I feel somewhat guilty about this and so when Emma asked a week or so ago if we could go to our local Jonathan’s instead (Jonathan’s being a chain of ‘family restaurants’), I said that was a great idea. It would be overly dramatic to say those were famous last words but, as the saying goes, we regret the error. When I wrote about Jonathan’s back in 2023, I said I was disappointed at the quality of the food. This remains my position.
My weight was back up to 72kg on Saturday so I’m trying once again to get back in the swing of intermittent fasting. I’ve already been more successful this time around so that’s a plus. The real trick will be stringing together a few decent weeks.
I’ve long loved the to-do list app, Clear. It was originally created by Phill Ryu (who doesn’t have a web presence any more outside of… LinkedIn?) (product manager), David Lanham (design) and Milen Dzhumerov (programming). I don’t think it’s really fair to attribute everything in group projects to any one person but I’m going to attribute everything in this group project to one person: Dzhumerov. Once he’d left (in 2014), the app stagnated. A couple of years ago, development restarted (but without Dzhumerov) and… well, it’s just not the same. Notably for me, the Mac app and iCloud sync were removed. The iOS app is fine but I’ve been missing the old version for years now. This week, I decided to give OpenAI’s Codex a go at it. That lasted all of about 30 minutes before I ran back to Claude Code. I don’t have much to show for all the time but it has been a refreshing change of pace from all the Janet coding I’ve been doing. The most surprising thing so far has been the far slower speed of token usage. My best guess is that the language server protocol plugin that Claude Code can use to connect to Swift’s language server makes certain tasks a lot more efficient than in a language like Janet.
Speaking of programming, I’m not the biggest Casey Muratori fan in the world but I thought his talk, the ‘Only Unbreakable Law’, was pretty good.
I saw a number of people linking to Mike Swanson’s long essay on ‘backseat software’ and with good reason. For me, it was painfully well-timed for an upset series of messages I sent AgileBits, the developers of 1Password. I was railing against a nagging notification the Mac app recently ‘gained’ that will not go away until you install the 1Password browser extension. I’ve been assured it will eventually disappear once I’ve been using this version of the app for six months (not a typo).
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet soundtrack is sort of on streaming platforms but sort of not (here’s the 10th Anniversary version on Apple Music). Maybe it’s accessible where you are. I feel like this happened repeatedly for ‘soundtrack albums’ that were all the rage during the 90s. To be clear, these are albums that aren’t the score but instead are pop music that is either featured in or somehow related to the film. I can imagine that in many cases, the rights that were secured were narrow and phrased in such a way that a streaming release doesn’t ‘count’. It’s a real shame.
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![Wikipedia](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Woltze#/media/File:Berthold_Woltze_-_Der_Brief.jpg\"){kind=link}