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.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1783693740.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-07-10T23:29:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-07-10T23:29:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1783090680.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #337",
"content_text": "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.",
"content_html": "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.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1783090680.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-07-03T23:58:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-07-03T23:58:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1782484500.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #336",
"content_text": "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.)",
"content_html": "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.)
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1782484500.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-06-26T23:35:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-06-26T23:35:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1781878140.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #335",
"content_text": "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).",
"content_html": "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).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1781878140.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-06-19T23:09:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-06-19T23:09:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1781272980.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #334",
"content_text": "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?’.",
"content_html": "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?’.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1781272980.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-06-12T23:03:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-06-12T23:03:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780666080.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #333",
"content_text": "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?",
"content_html": "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?
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780666080.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-06-05T22:28:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-06-05T22:28:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780065780.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #332",
"content_text": "Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.
I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.
Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.
Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.
With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.
While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1780065780.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-05-29T23:43:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-05-29T23:43:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779459660.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #331",
"content_text": "John can ride a bicycle! (Sort of.) I mentioned last week that John was gliding and we continued to do that until on Sunday I said to see how far he could go with his feet on the pedals. I ran along beside him for a bit as he pedalled and then let gave him a gentle push. Much to our mutual surprise, he was able to maintain his balance for a few beats before things steadied enough for him to make it a metre or so. Success! Unfortunately, I was in the office for the first half of the week and then the weather was sour over the second half but it does feel as if it’s all downhill from here (pun, of course, very much intended).I meant to mention this last week but I underwent my annual medical examination on (what is now, last) Friday. In 2025 I was flattered when the examiner commented positively on my weight going down to 65. This year… not so much positivity. Nothing terrible but the examiner did ask if anything had changed in my diet. I’m hoping that ends up being motivation to get out of my current rut.My iPhone complained that I was out of space. At first, I wondered if it had something to do with Crossmate. I don’t think it does—or at least not directly. Indirectly, though, all the time I’ve been spending on Crossmate has caused things like podcasts and RSS feeds to back up to an extraordinary level (I had over 100 episodes in my queue). Podcasts aren’t the only problem but the iPhone Storage section of Settings suggests it’s a significant contributor. What can I do in response? It’s tempting to throw money at the problem and just buy a iPhone 17 Pro Max now but I’d rather wait til the refurbished version comes out next February. I went through and made the difficult decision to unsubscribe from a bunch of shows and I’ll see if there are any more alerts.I also declared RSS bankruptcy and marked all of my outstanding items as read. It had got up to over 200 and while I kept meaning to go and read them, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.I did make more progress with Crossmate. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reworked the sync architecture but it’s one more than it was last week. I’m still not completely happy with it, though, and I’m worried that it might be the case that trying to do this with CloudKit is a fundamentally bad decision. This blog post was both reassuring (CloudKit is good because you don’t need to run your own server) and worrying (CloudKit is bad because you don’t get to run your own server). I remain resolutely opposed to running a server and so don’t have much choice but to keep trying to make it work.Trash Theory has a great video (for Millennials) about Veruca Salt and the alternative classic ‘Seether’. I didn’t read music magazines when I was a teenager but I think I nevertheless had some sense that maybe Veruca Salt weren’t ‘real’.This video does a great job dispelling that false notion. They were absolutely real and the song absolutely kicks arse.I mean what else could it be (Apple Music)?",
"content_html": "John can ride a bicycle! (Sort of.) I mentioned last week that John was gliding and we continued to do that until on Sunday I said to see how far he could go with his feet on the pedals. I ran along beside him for a bit as he pedalled and then let gave him a gentle push. Much to our mutual surprise, he was able to maintain his balance for a few beats before things steadied enough for him to make it a metre or so. Success! Unfortunately, I was in the office for the first half of the week and then the weather was sour over the second half but it does feel as if it’s all downhill from here (pun, of course, very much intended).
I meant to mention this last week but I underwent my annual medical examination on (what is now, last) Friday. In 2025 I was flattered when the examiner commented positively on my weight going down to 65. This year… not so much positivity. Nothing terrible but the examiner did ask if anything had changed in my diet. I’m hoping that ends up being motivation to get out of my current rut.
My iPhone complained that I was out of space. At first, I wondered if it had something to do with Crossmate. I don’t think it does—or at least not directly. Indirectly, though, all the time I’ve been spending on Crossmate has caused things like podcasts and RSS feeds to back up to an extraordinary level (I had over 100 episodes in my queue). Podcasts aren’t the only problem but the iPhone Storage section of Settings suggests it’s a significant contributor. What can I do in response? It’s tempting to throw money at the problem and just buy a iPhone 17 Pro Max now but I’d rather wait til the refurbished version comes out next February. I went through and made the difficult decision to unsubscribe from a bunch of shows and I’ll see if there are any more alerts.
I also declared RSS bankruptcy and marked all of my outstanding items as read. It had got up to over 200 and while I kept meaning to go and read them, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
I did make more progress with Crossmate. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reworked the sync architecture but it’s one more than it was last week. I’m still not completely happy with it, though, and I’m worried that it might be the case that trying to do this with CloudKit is a fundamentally bad decision. This blog post was both reassuring (CloudKit is good because you don’t need to run your own server) and worrying (CloudKit is bad because you don’t get to run your own server). I remain resolutely opposed to running a server and so don’t have much choice but to keep trying to make it work.
Trash Theory has a great video (for Millennials) about Veruca Salt and the alternative classic ‘Seether’. I didn’t read music magazines when I was a teenager but I think I nevertheless had some sense that maybe Veruca Salt weren’t ‘real’.This video does a great job dispelling that false notion. They were absolutely real and the song absolutely kicks arse.
I mean what else could it be (Apple Music)?
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1779459660.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-05-22T23:21:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-05-22T23:21:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778850000.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #330",
"content_text": "We are in mid-May and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The Japanese snack food giant, Calbee (maker of many of my favourite flavours of potato crisps), announced that they would switch to black-and-white packaging due to rising costs related to the Iran War (BBC).I mentioned last week that I have started to teach John how to ride a bicycle. This did not go especially well. In a move that I hope will not be scarring, I decided to take away John’s video game privileges until he improved the amount of ‘gliding’ down the very slight incline where we’re practising. I was worried this was putting too much stress on him but as the week progressed, his willingness to practise improved noticeably and he did start to get better. By Wednesday he was gliding for a couple of seconds at time and I deemed that worthy of the reward of a play session of Princess Peach: Showtime!.I will admit that one of the things that is making it difficult for John is that bicycle is too big. I worried about this at the time I bought it but deferred to the advice of the salesperson (who was obviously incentivised to tell me it was fine). I figured that even in the worst case where it was truly too big, John could grow into it. Still, as noted, we are making progress so that’s something.Crossmate continues to progress. Development bogged down a bit as I rearchitected the way remote moves are synced between players. My initial design had a separate row for each move in a table that was associated with each game. This led to a rapidly growing table as a game progressed and made things especially painful when joining a game from another device that was logged into the same iCloud account. Instead, I switched to an approach where each player in a game has a ‘moves’ log. Each player saves each of their moves to their log, these logs are synced between players and then Crossmate uses a reconciliation process to convert the logs into the game’s current state. I imagine most collaborative games are two players playing on their phones so now we’ve reduced all those separate move records to just two. It is true that there could be a fair amount of churn but I debounce updates as a player fills out squares and this limits the number of server pushes required. As neat as that sounds, it was only by around Friday that it felt like things were finally in a good place.I liked this video from Mark Brown on his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel about how Grand Theft Auto 3 was able to fit Liberty City into the paltry memory of the PlayStation 2. I don’t think this will be of interest to someone with no affinity for video games but Brown does an exceptional job explaining technical details in a way that I think almost anyone can understand (while still having enough detail for a more technically-minded viewer). I was impressed enough that when I saw he had a video about improving a UI element in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I sat John down in front of it and he watched the entire 24 minutes.Speaking of technically-minded viewers (or, I guess, in this case readers), I enjoyed this post from Tyler Hillery about why there’s a ‘gap’ in between the lowercase and uppercase letters in the ASCII ordering system.Miike Snow’s 2016 hit ‘Ghenghis Khan’ came into my AirPods via some playlist and my goodness it’s catchy (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "We are in mid-May and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The Japanese snack food giant, Calbee (maker of many of my favourite flavours of potato crisps), announced that they would switch to black-and-white packaging due to rising costs related to the Iran War (BBC).
I mentioned last week that I have started to teach John how to ride a bicycle. This did not go especially well. In a move that I hope will not be scarring, I decided to take away John’s video game privileges until he improved the amount of ‘gliding’ down the very slight incline where we’re practising. I was worried this was putting too much stress on him but as the week progressed, his willingness to practise improved noticeably and he did start to get better. By Wednesday he was gliding for a couple of seconds at time and I deemed that worthy of the reward of a play session of Princess Peach: Showtime!.
I will admit that one of the things that is making it difficult for John is that bicycle is too big. I worried about this at the time I bought it but deferred to the advice of the salesperson (who was obviously incentivised to tell me it was fine). I figured that even in the worst case where it was truly too big, John could grow into it. Still, as noted, we are making progress so that’s something.
Crossmate continues to progress. Development bogged down a bit as I rearchitected the way remote moves are synced between players. My initial design had a separate row for each move in a table that was associated with each game. This led to a rapidly growing table as a game progressed and made things especially painful when joining a game from another device that was logged into the same iCloud account. Instead, I switched to an approach where each player in a game has a ‘moves’ log. Each player saves each of their moves to their log, these logs are synced between players and then Crossmate uses a reconciliation process to convert the logs into the game’s current state. I imagine most collaborative games are two players playing on their phones so now we’ve reduced all those separate move records to just two. It is true that there could be a fair amount of churn but I debounce updates as a player fills out squares and this limits the number of server pushes required. As neat as that sounds, it was only by around Friday that it felt like things were finally in a good place.
I liked this video from Mark Brown on his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel about how Grand Theft Auto 3 was able to fit Liberty City into the paltry memory of the PlayStation 2. I don’t think this will be of interest to someone with no affinity for video games but Brown does an exceptional job explaining technical details in a way that I think almost anyone can understand (while still having enough detail for a more technically-minded viewer). I was impressed enough that when I saw he had a video about improving a UI element in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I sat John down in front of it and he watched the entire 24 minutes.
Speaking of technically-minded viewers (or, I guess, in this case readers), I enjoyed this post from Tyler Hillery about why there’s a ‘gap’ in between the lowercase and uppercase letters in the ASCII ordering system.
Miike Snow’s 2016 hit ‘Ghenghis Khan’ came into my AirPods via some playlist and my goodness it’s catchy (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778850000.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-05-15T22:00:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-05-15T22:00:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1778249520.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #329",
"content_text": "It was Golden Week.On Sunday (Constitution Day), I went for a ride with Emma over to Ōizumi Gakuen. It was a nice reminder of how something that can seem impossible (will Emma ever learn to ride a bicycle?) can become so mundane. It was also terrific weather. Really, almost all of Golden Week was great. The oppressive Japanese summer is undoubtedly on its way but right now, it’s fantastic.On Monday (Greenery Day), the fantastic weather continued and, in a juxtaposition so on the nose that you might suspect its veracity, I started teaching John to ride a bicycle. Does John even own a bicycle? He does as of last week! (I forgot to mention it in Weeknotes #328.) The impetus is the upcoming third-year bicycle safety class that John has coming up. I can confirm that, as with Emma, the entire enterprise feels impossible.On Tuesday (Children’s Day), we all went over to Ogikubo. Eri and I are considering sending Emma to Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School and Eri was curious to see the school (from the outside) in person. While she and Emma were doing that, the boys and I finally got over to Suginami Children’s Traffic Park (Japanese). The website doesn’t really do it justice—Google Maps gives you a better sense of it. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was almost time to turn around and meet back up with Eri and Emma for lunch.Of course I also spent time working on Crossmate, my crossword app. I honestly would have spent more time on Crossmate but ran out of tokens for use with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex early on Saturday. While I was out of tokens for use the coding agents, I was able to chat with Claude and with its help, I set up a Tangled instance on my Linode. I had it up for about 15 minutes before I reconsidered. One opinion that I’ve been developing over the past six months is a view that there’s too much emphasis put on the social aspect of open source—issues, PRs—and not enough on the software part. Tangled has an emphasis on decentralisation that I like but thinking about the social expectations that come with making a repository generally available made me extremely uncomfortable and so I turned off the Tangled server and instead had ChatGPT help me get code.inqk.net more automated. I can now push my Crossmate repository and have a (admittedly bare bones) web version available for all to see. I don’t have any plans to move my other projects off GitHub just yet but it is something I’m considering.I watched an NBA game! I complained last week that the post-broadcast games were not being edited down (removing commercials, game delays) but it turns out that’s not true. I don’t know how much more I’ll watch but I do intend to get a little bit more into the swing of things.I was reading about Massive Attack’s Heligoland on Wikipedia after linking to it as my musical selection last week and there’s a quote in that article from Robert Del Naja about the previous album, 100th Window. I can see what Del Naja meant about merging the electronic and the organic but that’s part of what I love about that album. You get a taste of that in its opening track, ‘Future Proof’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "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!).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777644420.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-05-01T23:07:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-05-01T23:07:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777039560.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #327",
"content_text": "I finally made Listless available in the App Store. I don’t expect it to be used by anyone other than me but it’s a free app so you don’t really have much to lose if you do decide to check it out. If you’re curious why I even wanted to build a to-do list app, I also wrote a blog post. It goes into a bit of detail about the rationale for Listless as well as my experience using LLM-based coding agents to make it.I mentioned two weeks ago that I had immediately started work on a second app. This one is a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been meaning to create for ages. I love doing crosswords but I find simple ones too easy and the more complex ones too frustrating. One thing I discovered during the pandemic is that if I work on a crossword together with another person, that drastically increases the ones I can complete. Since then I’ve been wishing for some kind of app that would support that kind of solving. I had originally thought I might create a web app but I could not work out how I could do it without using a server (there are peer-to-peer technologies like WebRTC but these still require a server to at the very least establish the communication). A native iOS app can get around these problems by using iCloud (or at least that’s my working assumption).A couple of weeks back, John started attending a programming class every second Saturday. People with freakish memories might remember that I tried enrolling John (and Emma) in a programming school back in 2024. I wasn’t especially happy with that program; mostly because I didn’t feel it was worth the price. In all honesty, I’m not sure this one is better but it is entirely built around Minecraft so John is of course intensely interested in going each time. The main reason I thought it might be a good idea was actually as a way to meet children his age with similar interests. For that reason, I haven’t roped Emma yet (she’s got plenty of friends from school).I started intermittent fasting again and while I haven’t been as disciplined as I have been in the past, there has been a reduction in my weight (which is nice). I’ve done my best to pair that with exercise on the treadmill I mentioned two weeks ago. So far I haven’t done any actual running yet but have instead stuck to walking. I think it’s going well. Whenever I spend money on something for exercise I often have a burst of interest that quickly burns out. It’s too early to tell whether that pattern will repeat all the way through but the burst of interest part is definitely holding true.Patrick Willems has an amazing video essay about music videos. It’s part history lesson, part 90s eulogy and part silly sketch as he delivers the essay in sections that each recreate a classic music video. Oh, and my Bluesky post about it got reposted by Willems which was nice.Australian electronic dance act, Pnau, has a new single called ‘Tu Corazón’ (Apple Music) that I’ve been listening to intensely. If the name ‘Pnau’ doesn’t mean anything to you, Wikipedia tells me they produce music in the genres of ‘electronic’ (OK) and ‘wonky pop’ (wat?).",
"content_html": "I finally made Listless available in the App Store. I don’t expect it to be used by anyone other than me but it’s a free app so you don’t really have much to lose if you do decide to check it out. If you’re curious why I even wanted to build a to-do list app, I also wrote a blog post. It goes into a bit of detail about the rationale for Listless as well as my experience using LLM-based coding agents to make it.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I had immediately started work on a second app. This one is a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been meaning to create for ages. I love doing crosswords but I find simple ones too easy and the more complex ones too frustrating. One thing I discovered during the pandemic is that if I work on a crossword together with another person, that drastically increases the ones I can complete. Since then I’ve been wishing for some kind of app that would support that kind of solving. I had originally thought I might create a web app but I could not work out how I could do it without using a server (there are peer-to-peer technologies like WebRTC but these still require a server to at the very least establish the communication). A native iOS app can get around these problems by using iCloud (or at least that’s my working assumption).
A couple of weeks back, John started attending a programming class every second Saturday. People with freakish memories might remember that I tried enrolling John (and Emma) in a programming school back in 2024. I wasn’t especially happy with that program; mostly because I didn’t feel it was worth the price. In all honesty, I’m not sure this one is better but it is entirely built around Minecraft so John is of course intensely interested in going each time. The main reason I thought it might be a good idea was actually as a way to meet children his age with similar interests. For that reason, I haven’t roped Emma yet (she’s got plenty of friends from school).
I started intermittent fasting again and while I haven’t been as disciplined as I have been in the past, there has been a reduction in my weight (which is nice). I’ve done my best to pair that with exercise on the treadmill I mentioned two weeks ago. So far I haven’t done any actual running yet but have instead stuck to walking. I think it’s going well. Whenever I spend money on something for exercise I often have a burst of interest that quickly burns out. It’s too early to tell whether that pattern will repeat all the way through but the burst of interest part is definitely holding true.
Patrick Willems has an amazing video essay about music videos. It’s part history lesson, part 90s eulogy and part silly sketch as he delivers the essay in sections that each recreate a classic music video. Oh, and my Bluesky post about it got reposted by Willems which was nice.
Australian electronic dance act, Pnau, has a new single called ‘Tu Corazón’ (Apple Music) that I’ve been listening to intensely. If the name ‘Pnau’ doesn’t mean anything to you, Wikipedia tells me they produce music in the genres of ‘electronic’ (OK) and ‘wonky pop’ (wat?).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1777039560.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-04-24T23:06:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-04-24T23:06:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776436080.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #326",
"content_text": "The weather in Tokyo is pretty fantastic at the moment. The sun is often out and it’s pleasantly warm without being disgustingly humid. And so it was that on Saturday we took the kids to Shakujii Pond to finally go out on the pedal-powered boats they have for rent over there. A fun time overall but my God, am I out of shape. Pedalling the two boys around was absolutely exhausting.After that I took Rowan to Omiya on the E5 shinkansen and then came back to Tokyo on the E7. It was my first time using my IC card to walk through the shinkansen ticket gate and it was great.Speaking of bullet trains, a few weeks back Rowan started watching Netflix’s 2025 Bullet Train Explosion (新幹線大爆破) on quasi-repeat. I finally sat down to watch it with him and was surprised how good it is. And not just ‘good for a Netflix film’ but genuinely good. It’s technically a sequel to the 1975 film The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破) but it doesn’t require any knowledge of that film to enjoy. For a Western audience, the train-will-explode-if-it-slows-down plot will seem like a rip-off of Speed but that’s because the 1975 film did that concept first.I was extremely perturbed in March when I discovered one night that Emma was having a ‘conversation’ with Google’s AI Mode. After confirming that there’s no real way to disable this (AI Mode can be disabled for a child’s account but then the child can just log out of their account to regain access), I blocked Google entirely. That wasn’t much of a solution, though, since most search engines now offer the option to convert your search query into a chat with an LLM-based chatbot. I asked a friend with a daughter that’s the same age as Emma what he was doing and he admitted he didn’t have a good solution. He got back to me a few days later, though, to ask whether I had thought of using Kagi. Kagi is the paid search engine that requires a login to use. I imagine that makes it a tough sell to new customers but it’s perfect in my case because it means I could whitelist it as a site on Emma’s iPad and then ensure Kagi’s chatbot is disabled for Emma’s account. This does mean paying around US$200 a year for the family plan which isn’t exactly cheap but ultimately worth it for me.Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month and this interview in Esquire was one of the better pieces that I read. I link to it, though, as an excuse to note the absurd amount of it took me to properly understand the iconic ‘Yum’ iMac poster (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see this post on Matt Fuller’s blog). The image is of course an overhead shot of a circle of iMacs, shot from directly above. For years, however, I saw an image of visually distorted computers that were stretched vertically, evoking the classic scene from Day of the Tentacle where the characters are travelling through time in the Chron-a-Johns (YouTube).My all-time favourite run of albums is Björk’s sequence of studio albums that begins with 1993’s Debut and ends with 2001’s Vespertine. I remembered an interview in which Björk expressed frustration about the different way that credit is apportioned to male and female artists who work with producers. I had misremembered her as referring to Mark Bell (she actually referred to Matmos) and I suspect that’s because he is credited in the title to the version of ‘Immature’ that is on Homogenic—technically, ‘Immature (Mark Bell’s Version)’ (Apple Music). All of that is an absurdly long wind-up to mention that I wondered what else Mark Bell had done and was saddened to discover that he died at 43 in 2014 (Wikipedia). I am 43.",
"content_html": "The weather in Tokyo is pretty fantastic at the moment. The sun is often out and it’s pleasantly warm without being disgustingly humid. And so it was that on Saturday we took the kids to Shakujii Pond to finally go out on the pedal-powered boats they have for rent over there. A fun time overall but my God, am I out of shape. Pedalling the two boys around was absolutely exhausting.
After that I took Rowan to Omiya on the E5 shinkansen and then came back to Tokyo on the E7. It was my first time using my IC card to walk through the shinkansen ticket gate and it was great.
Speaking of bullet trains, a few weeks back Rowan started watching Netflix’s 2025 Bullet Train Explosion (新幹線大爆破) on quasi-repeat. I finally sat down to watch it with him and was surprised how good it is. And not just ‘good for a Netflix film’ but genuinely good. It’s technically a sequel to the 1975 film The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破) but it doesn’t require any knowledge of that film to enjoy. For a Western audience, the train-will-explode-if-it-slows-down plot will seem like a rip-off of Speed but that’s because the 1975 film did that concept first.
I was extremely perturbed in March when I discovered one night that Emma was having a ‘conversation’ with Google’s AI Mode. After confirming that there’s no real way to disable this (AI Mode can be disabled for a child’s account but then the child can just log out of their account to regain access), I blocked Google entirely. That wasn’t much of a solution, though, since most search engines now offer the option to convert your search query into a chat with an LLM-based chatbot. I asked a friend with a daughter that’s the same age as Emma what he was doing and he admitted he didn’t have a good solution. He got back to me a few days later, though, to ask whether I had thought of using Kagi. Kagi is the paid search engine that requires a login to use. I imagine that makes it a tough sell to new customers but it’s perfect in my case because it means I could whitelist it as a site on Emma’s iPad and then ensure Kagi’s chatbot is disabled for Emma’s account. This does mean paying around US$200 a year for the family plan which isn’t exactly cheap but ultimately worth it for me.
Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month and this interview in Esquire was one of the better pieces that I read. I link to it, though, as an excuse to note the absurd amount of it took me to properly understand the iconic ‘Yum’ iMac poster (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see this post on Matt Fuller’s blog). The image is of course an overhead shot of a circle of iMacs, shot from directly above. For years, however, I saw an image of visually distorted computers that were stretched vertically, evoking the classic scene from Day of the Tentacle where the characters are travelling through time in the Chron-a-Johns (YouTube).
My all-time favourite run of albums is Björk’s sequence of studio albums that begins with 1993’s Debut and ends with 2001’s Vespertine. I remembered an interview in which Björk expressed frustration about the different way that credit is apportioned to male and female artists who work with producers. I had misremembered her as referring to Mark Bell (she actually referred to Matmos) and I suspect that’s because he is credited in the title to the version of ‘Immature’ that is on Homogenic—technically, ‘Immature (Mark Bell’s Version)’ (Apple Music). All of that is an absurdly long wind-up to mention that I wondered what else Mark Bell had done and was saddened to discover that he died at 43 in 2014 (Wikipedia). I am 43.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1776436080.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-04-17T23:28:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-04-17T23:28:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775826960.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #325",
"content_text": "We celebrated (I use the term loosely) Easter Sunday by giving the kids far too much chocolate. As per tradition, there was one Lindt chocolate rabbit each but it was really Mum’s chocolate eggs that were the star.I had what I thought was supposed to be my last visit to the doctor on Tuesday. I say ‘supposed to be’ because although on my previous visit, the doctor had said that this Tuesday would be my last visit, at the end of the examination he asked me to come back again in two weeks. He said the fracture was healing well so I’m not sure why I really need to come again—he is quite old and might simply not remember what he said in the previous examination—but it actually suits me to do one more X-ray so I didn’t argue. The reason for this is that I’ve been waiting to start using the treadmill I purchased a week or so back and I’m a little concerned the impact that the, er, impacts of repeated footfalls will have on the fracture. Now I can exercise for a bit over week and then see how the bone is handling it.Going back to Easter for a second, Amanda Lehr’s classic 2022 piece for McSweeney’s, ‘Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ’, came across my radar and should prompt at least a chuckle if you have almost any familiarity with Christianity.Possibly also related to Easter, the Mac version of Listless sat in App Review purgatory for the week as I waited for it to get to the front of the queue. (Not coincidentally, I finally got back on top of my e-mail and once again attained Inbox Zero!) App Review did eventually clear it on Friday but I’ve been in two minds about whether I push out this initial release right away or submit a fix that addresses the rather embarrassing fact that the ‘Listless Help’ option in the Help menu on macOS merely causes an alert to appear that says ‘Help isn’t available for Listless.’While I am not in the same league as Brandon is when it comes to apps created by coding agents, I did start a new one while waiting for App Review. This one is meant to be a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been wishing existed for years. Hopefully I’ll have more details next week.I mentioned to my pseudonymous all-purpose sounding board sogaiu that I was working on a crossword app and he asked what format I was using to store the puzzles. Specifically, he wondered if I was going to use XD, a file format for crosswords created by Saul Pwanson. When I said that I hadn’t heard of XD, he pointed me to this brilliant talk from 2019’s csv,conf (side note: one of the greatest conference names of all time). It’s 20 minutes and I think is a fun watch even if you aren’t in the midst of making a crossword app for iOS.I’d forgotten what a killer album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia is (Apple Music). There’s only one hit song (well, maybe two if you want to include ‘Get Off’ together with ‘Bohemian Like You’) but I was listening to it this week and found every track still tickled my fancy. How much of that is 25-year nostalgia talking? Give it a spin and see for yourself!",
"content_html": "We celebrated (I use the term loosely) Easter Sunday by giving the kids far too much chocolate. As per tradition, there was one Lindt chocolate rabbit each but it was really Mum’s chocolate eggs that were the star.
I had what I thought was supposed to be my last visit to the doctor on Tuesday. I say ‘supposed to be’ because although on my previous visit, the doctor had said that this Tuesday would be my last visit, at the end of the examination he asked me to come back again in two weeks. He said the fracture was healing well so I’m not sure why I really need to come again—he is quite old and might simply not remember what he said in the previous examination—but it actually suits me to do one more X-ray so I didn’t argue. The reason for this is that I’ve been waiting to start using the treadmill I purchased a week or so back and I’m a little concerned the impact that the, er, impacts of repeated footfalls will have on the fracture. Now I can exercise for a bit over week and then see how the bone is handling it.
Going back to Easter for a second, Amanda Lehr’s classic 2022 piece for McSweeney’s, ‘Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ’, came across my radar and should prompt at least a chuckle if you have almost any familiarity with Christianity.
Possibly also related to Easter, the Mac version of Listless sat in App Review purgatory for the week as I waited for it to get to the front of the queue. (Not coincidentally, I finally got back on top of my e-mail and once again attained Inbox Zero!) App Review did eventually clear it on Friday but I’ve been in two minds about whether I push out this initial release right away or submit a fix that addresses the rather embarrassing fact that the ‘Listless Help’ option in the Help menu on macOS merely causes an alert to appear that says ‘Help isn’t available for Listless.’
While I am not in the same league as Brandon is when it comes to apps created by coding agents, I did start a new one while waiting for App Review. This one is meant to be a collaborative crossword app that I’ve been wishing existed for years. Hopefully I’ll have more details next week.
I mentioned to my pseudonymous all-purpose sounding board sogaiu that I was working on a crossword app and he asked what format I was using to store the puzzles. Specifically, he wondered if I was going to use XD, a file format for crosswords created by Saul Pwanson. When I said that I hadn’t heard of XD, he pointed me to this brilliant talk from 2019’s csv,conf (side note: one of the greatest conference names of all time). It’s 20 minutes and I think is a fun watch even if you aren’t in the midst of making a crossword app for iOS.
I’d forgotten what a killer album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia is (Apple Music). There’s only one hit song (well, maybe two if you want to include ‘Get Off’ together with ‘Bohemian Like You’) but I was listening to it this week and found every track still tickled my fancy. How much of that is 25-year nostalgia talking? Give it a spin and see for yourself!
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775826960.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-04-10T22:16:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-04-10T22:16:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775227020.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #324",
"content_text": "The Iran War continued. I feel helpless to do more than pray an ever-increasing number of Americans recognise the stupidity of this latest instance of military adventurism and fix their ire on the maniac they foisted upon the rest of us.In more positive news, the Artemis II mission lifted off successfully on Thursday Tokyo time (ABC News). That said, after reading Maciej Cegłowski’s post about the safety of the heat shield I hope this doesn’t become a more tragic story.On Sunday, Emma and I went to see Hoppers. I somehow made the mistake of thinking that the screening began at 3.30 pm when it in fact started at 3.10. Even with all the advertisements they play these days, the movie had begun by the time we got inside. Alas. The film itself was… fine. Nothing about it was awful but I thought the humour was forced in a few places and the simplicity of its politics wore on me as the film went on. I realise that a nuanced exploration of the complexity of balancing development and conservation isn’t what you expect in a film for children, but if any animation studio was going to pull that off, I’d have bet on Pixar.I had more fun watching Enola Holmes with John and Rowan over a few nights this week. Letterboxd tells me I watched it in November 2021 which sounds about right (although I am surprised that I didn’t write it about it at all in the weeknotes from that period). Back then, I remember being disappointed with it but this time I was content to enjoy the time the film spends with its characters, especially Millie Bobby Brown’s Enola. Letterboxd also tells me that I saw Enola Holmes 2 almost exactly a year later in November 2022 but I have no memory of seeing it at all (and once again didn’t write about it). I plan to have an update about it in next week’s update.I had hoped to be able to say that Listless was available in the App Store. Alas, that’s not the case. I submitted it for App Review and am now waiting with my fingers crossed.In a decision I fully expect to regret, I purchased a treadmill from Amazon that Eri and I can fold up and stash under our bed. The idea was that I can use it to go running in the evening, regardless of the weather conditions outside (which in summer get especially hideous). I’m keen to try it out but decided to wait until the doctor gives me the all clear given my fractured toe. So far, he’s been happy with how it’s healed and suggested that if it continues as it has for the past few weeks, next Tuesday will be the last time I need to see him.The Public Domain Review has a post about the caricatures that Claude Monet drew in his teenage years that I found fascinating.Jenny Nicholson put out a video essay on the worst (best?) Twilight knock-off. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes so probably not something I can recommend to a general audience. It’s not on quite the same level as her Evermore video or her Vampire Diaries video but those set an extremely high bar.I can’t remember exactly how I came across Olivia Dean’s ‘So Easy (To Fall in Love)’ (Apple Music) but I guarantee it’ll have you shimmying around the house in no time.",
"content_html": "The Iran War continued. I feel helpless to do more than pray an ever-increasing number of Americans recognise the stupidity of this latest instance of military adventurism and fix their ire on the maniac they foisted upon the rest of us.
In more positive news, the Artemis II mission lifted off successfully on Thursday Tokyo time (ABC News). That said, after reading Maciej Cegłowski’s post about the safety of the heat shield I hope this doesn’t become a more tragic story.
On Sunday, Emma and I went to see Hoppers. I somehow made the mistake of thinking that the screening began at 3.30 pm when it in fact started at 3.10. Even with all the advertisements they play these days, the movie had begun by the time we got inside. Alas. The film itself was… fine. Nothing about it was awful but I thought the humour was forced in a few places and the simplicity of its politics wore on me as the film went on. I realise that a nuanced exploration of the complexity of balancing development and conservation isn’t what you expect in a film for children, but if any animation studio was going to pull that off, I’d have bet on Pixar.
I had more fun watching Enola Holmes with John and Rowan over a few nights this week. Letterboxd tells me I watched it in November 2021 which sounds about right (although I am surprised that I didn’t write it about it at all in the weeknotes from that period). Back then, I remember being disappointed with it but this time I was content to enjoy the time the film spends with its characters, especially Millie Bobby Brown’s Enola. Letterboxd also tells me that I saw Enola Holmes 2 almost exactly a year later in November 2022 but I have no memory of seeing it at all (and once again didn’t write about it). I plan to have an update about it in next week’s update.
I had hoped to be able to say that Listless was available in the App Store. Alas, that’s not the case. I submitted it for App Review and am now waiting with my fingers crossed.
In a decision I fully expect to regret, I purchased a treadmill from Amazon that Eri and I can fold up and stash under our bed. The idea was that I can use it to go running in the evening, regardless of the weather conditions outside (which in summer get especially hideous). I’m keen to try it out but decided to wait until the doctor gives me the all clear given my fractured toe. So far, he’s been happy with how it’s healed and suggested that if it continues as it has for the past few weeks, next Tuesday will be the last time I need to see him.
The Public Domain Review has a post about the caricatures that Claude Monet drew in his teenage years that I found fascinating.
Jenny Nicholson put out a video essay on the worst (best?) Twilight knock-off. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes so probably not something I can recommend to a general audience. It’s not on quite the same level as her Evermore video or her Vampire Diaries video but those set an extremely high bar.
I can’t remember exactly how I came across Olivia Dean’s ‘So Easy (To Fall in Love)’ (Apple Music) but I guarantee it’ll have you shimmying around the house in no time.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1775227020.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-04-03T23:37:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-04-03T23:37:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774620300.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #323",
"content_text": "Australia played Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup Final on Saturday. It unfortunately wasn’t being broadcast on any free-to-air channels (I think it was possible to watch on the streaming service DAZN) but I was able to get the Apple TV app for the Australian broadcaster, Ten, to work and we watched it that way. It was a little bittersweet that Australia lost (ABC News) but the Japanese goal was so good and their defence at the end of the game so impressive that it was impossible not to recognise the better team won. I hope the disappointment doesn’t dent the enthusiasm girls in Australia have for soccer (and the broader viewing public for watching it).I updated my iOS devices to iOS 26 under protest. My friend sogaiu drew my attention to the DarkSword exploit (Google Cloud Blog) and I was frustrated to discover that my phone cannot be protected by upgrading to iOS 18.7.4 or higher. This is because Apple has gated iOS 18 releases after 18.7.3 so that they can only be installed on devices that cannot run iOS 26. In other words, if I were rocking an iPhone XS, I could install 18.7.7 but since I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, I can’t. With extreme reluctance, I put iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad and my personal customer satisfaction with Apple decreased further. I live in hope that JD Power reaches out to me so that this information can be aggregated into a metric to which Tim Cook might pay attention.Speaking of frustration with Apple, I ran into one of those iOS 26 bugs that developers have been complaining about since last June. After Eugenia expressed frustration that there wasn’t a way to delete all the items in Listless, I replaced the Settings button with an ‘overflow’ button that opens a pop-over menu. So what’s the problem? In iOS 26, buttons that open pop-over menus contain a morphing animation between the button and the menu. This works fine if you have the button located in a navigation toolbar. If you don’t do this (I don’t do this) then the morphing animation is broken. As the pop-over menu morphs back into the button, certain effects that have been applied to the button (e.g. a drop shadow) do not appear until a few frames after the morph has finished. After some searching around, I did discover a way to mitigate things but it was still surprising to discover that extremely noticeable visual glitches like this are still part of iOS 26. Fingers crossed for iOS 27, I guess.I mentioned sogaiu above and he also told me about a documentary from the studio Noclip about Rocket League that’s distributed freely on YouTube (part 1, part 2). I liked them but actually preferred the extended interview with Dave Hagewood, the founder and, at the time, CEO of Psyonix. It is a little disappointing that the documentary was made relatively recently after Rocket League’s release; I’d be curious for an update, particularly one that covers the acquisition of Psyonix by Epic Games.Did you realise that the 20th anniversary release of the soundtrack to the Bourne Identity is called the ‘Tumescent Edition’ (Apple Music)? Did you know that ‘tumescent’ means swollen or expanded? I assume this is the kind of stuff you all read this to learn.",
"content_html": "Australia played Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup Final on Saturday. It unfortunately wasn’t being broadcast on any free-to-air channels (I think it was possible to watch on the streaming service DAZN) but I was able to get the Apple TV app for the Australian broadcaster, Ten, to work and we watched it that way. It was a little bittersweet that Australia lost (ABC News) but the Japanese goal was so good and their defence at the end of the game so impressive that it was impossible not to recognise the better team won. I hope the disappointment doesn’t dent the enthusiasm girls in Australia have for soccer (and the broader viewing public for watching it).
I updated my iOS devices to iOS 26 under protest. My friend sogaiu drew my attention to the DarkSword exploit (Google Cloud Blog) and I was frustrated to discover that my phone cannot be protected by upgrading to iOS 18.7.4 or higher. This is because Apple has gated iOS 18 releases after 18.7.3 so that they can only be installed on devices that cannot run iOS 26. In other words, if I were rocking an iPhone XS, I could install 18.7.7 but since I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, I can’t. With extreme reluctance, I put iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad and my personal customer satisfaction with Apple decreased further. I live in hope that JD Power reaches out to me so that this information can be aggregated into a metric to which Tim Cook might pay attention.
Speaking of frustration with Apple, I ran into one of those iOS 26 bugs that developers have been complaining about since last June. After Eugenia expressed frustration that there wasn’t a way to delete all the items in Listless, I replaced the Settings button with an ‘overflow’ button that opens a pop-over menu. So what’s the problem? In iOS 26, buttons that open pop-over menus contain a morphing animation between the button and the menu. This works fine if you have the button located in a navigation toolbar. If you don’t do this (I don’t do this) then the morphing animation is broken. As the pop-over menu morphs back into the button, certain effects that have been applied to the button (e.g. a drop shadow) do not appear until a few frames after the morph has finished. After some searching around, I did discover a way to mitigate things but it was still surprising to discover that extremely noticeable visual glitches like this are still part of iOS 26. Fingers crossed for iOS 27, I guess.
I mentioned sogaiu above and he also told me about a documentary from the studio Noclip about Rocket League that’s distributed freely on YouTube (part 1, part 2). I liked them but actually preferred the extended interview with Dave Hagewood, the founder and, at the time, CEO of Psyonix. It is a little disappointing that the documentary was made relatively recently after Rocket League’s release; I’d be curious for an update, particularly one that covers the acquisition of Psyonix by Epic Games.
Did you realise that the 20th anniversary release of the soundtrack to the Bourne Identity is called the ‘Tumescent Edition’ (Apple Music)? Did you know that ‘tumescent’ means swollen or expanded? I assume this is the kind of stuff you all read this to learn.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774620300.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-03-27T23:05:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-03-27T23:05:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774015740.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #322",
"content_text": "The war between the United States and Iran continues to drag on. In a shocking twist, it seems victory might not be the fait accompli it was initially presented as being. President Trump attempted to bully several countries into providing maritime forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before then saying the U.S. didn’t need their help (ABC News). He remains a deep embarrassment to all Americans.It’s coming around to that time of year where I start trying to work out how to get the kids some Easter eggs. After confirming that Amazon once again has a paltry selection, I asked ChatGPT. It responded by asking whether I meant British-style hollow chocolate eggs. It hadn’t occurred to me that the large, hollow chocolate Easter eggs that seem universal to me are, in fact, culturally specific. Apparently, these kinds of eggs are the default form of Easter egg in Britain (and culturally similar countries like Australia) but not necessarily elsewhere (including in the U.S.). I asked ChatGPT for its sources and the webpages it referenced didn’t seem to me to say that quite so plainly but it would explain why large, hollow Easter eggs are virtually impossible to find in Japan (smaller eggs, hollow or solid, can be purchased relatively easily).For that reason, on Saturday, I went with John and Rowan to Azabu (which has a high concentration of western ex-pats) looking for decent Easter eggs. Alas, I didn’t find any. Mum did bring some over when she visited and I have purchased the trusty old Lindt bunnies so that’ll probably be enough chocolate anyway.Today (i.e. Friday 20 March) is Vernal Equinox Day public holiday in Japan (Wikipedia). Happy equinoxing to all who celebrate.Eugenia graciously agreed to beta test Listless. She immediately alerted me to the fact that scrolling (somewhat of an important activity in a list app) didn’t work on iOS 26. I had been testing solely on iOS 18 on development in the—as it turns out naïve belief—that if I had things (you know, like scrolling) working in iOS 18, they wouldn’t break in iOS 26. Joke was on me. I eventually got it fixed but it took a long amount of time and honestly had me questioning whether I shouldn’t just can the entire thing. In gratitude, I added a blue-to-green colour scheme for Eugenia who is a crazy person who doesn’t like purple.I watched Nerdwriter’s video on the use of jazz music in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the HBO spin-off series from Game of Thrones) and that got me interested in the show. Which, when it comes to Game of Thrones, means it’s time to watch Alt Shift X’s channel. His videos on the series are great.I think I have a pretty good handle on who actually reads these updates and so for some of you, this will be the first time anyone links you to Sam Henri Gold’s post about the MacBook Neo and for others it will be the umpteenth.The English Language & Usage StackExchange has you covered on the etymology of ‘umpteen’, by the way.Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is pretty tops (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "The war between the United States and Iran continues to drag on. In a shocking twist, it seems victory might not be the fait accompli it was initially presented as being. President Trump attempted to bully several countries into providing maritime forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before then saying the U.S. didn’t need their help (ABC News). He remains a deep embarrassment to all Americans.
It’s coming around to that time of year where I start trying to work out how to get the kids some Easter eggs. After confirming that Amazon once again has a paltry selection, I asked ChatGPT. It responded by asking whether I meant British-style hollow chocolate eggs. It hadn’t occurred to me that the large, hollow chocolate Easter eggs that seem universal to me are, in fact, culturally specific. Apparently, these kinds of eggs are the default form of Easter egg in Britain (and culturally similar countries like Australia) but not necessarily elsewhere (including in the U.S.). I asked ChatGPT for its sources and the webpages it referenced didn’t seem to me to say that quite so plainly but it would explain why large, hollow Easter eggs are virtually impossible to find in Japan (smaller eggs, hollow or solid, can be purchased relatively easily).
For that reason, on Saturday, I went with John and Rowan to Azabu (which has a high concentration of western ex-pats) looking for decent Easter eggs. Alas, I didn’t find any. Mum did bring some over when she visited and I have purchased the trusty old Lindt bunnies so that’ll probably be enough chocolate anyway.
Today (i.e. Friday 20 March) is Vernal Equinox Day public holiday in Japan (Wikipedia). Happy equinoxing to all who celebrate.
Eugenia graciously agreed to beta test Listless. She immediately alerted me to the fact that scrolling (somewhat of an important activity in a list app) didn’t work on iOS 26. I had been testing solely on iOS 18 on development in the—as it turns out naïve belief—that if I had things (you know, like scrolling) working in iOS 18, they wouldn’t break in iOS 26. Joke was on me. I eventually got it fixed but it took a long amount of time and honestly had me questioning whether I shouldn’t just can the entire thing. In gratitude, I added a blue-to-green colour scheme for Eugenia who is a crazy person who doesn’t like purple.
I watched Nerdwriter’s video on the use of jazz music in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the HBO spin-off series from Game of Thrones) and that got me interested in the show. Which, when it comes to Game of Thrones, means it’s time to watch Alt Shift X’s channel. His videos on the series are great.
I think I have a pretty good handle on who actually reads these updates and so for some of you, this will be the first time anyone links you to Sam Henri Gold’s post about the MacBook Neo and for others it will be the umpteenth.
The English Language & Usage StackExchange has you covered on the etymology of ‘umpteen’, by the way.
Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is pretty tops (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1774015740.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-03-20T23:09:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-03-20T23:09:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773409620.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #321",
"content_text": "I filed my tax return. That wouldn’t be that noteworthy except that this was the first year we did it after purchasing the house. The Japanese Government provides a mortgage deduction for the first 13 years or so of a mortgage and for all but the first year, it’s automatically calculated and deducted. But this was the first year so I had to lodge an income tax return together with the paperwork they need. I was a little disappointed to discover that our house wasn’t built to be at the highest levels of energy efficiency and so isn’t eligible for a larger deduction.Eri’s still recovering from a nasty case of the flu so I took Rowan to his preschool at the beginning of the week. I suspect my doctor would be a little concerned to hear that given the fracture in my little toe but hopefully the bicycle is relatively safe for fractured little toes. It doesn’t involve you repeatedly slamming your foot into the ground like walking or running do and surely that counts for something.I continued to make progress on Listless, albeit slowly. This week I learnt the hard way that one of the perils of reimplementing a standard list of items is that you don’t get the behaviour of a standard list of items that you might otherwise expect. This was extremely apparent one day when I tried to select multiple to-do list items and found that holding Shift as I pressed the Up key did nothing. It now does what you would expect but it’s made me concerned that there are no doubt dozens of these little UI behaviours that Listless’s custom list is not going to have. Well, maybe not dozens but at least a dozen.It’s been a while since I found the time to read one of Matt Lakeman’s travelogues. I read his recent one about Afghanistan and it was excellent.Speaking of reading, I didn’t finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth before we had to take it back to the library but I worried that it might have been a bit too dense for John and Rowan’s bedtime so I replaced it on my last library visit with Michael Bond’s original A Bear Called Paddington. I’m a big fan of the CG animated series The Adventures of Paddington that began in 2019 and it’s interesting to see how that retelling differs from the original.I finally watched the third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I enjoyed it more than Glass Onion and I appreciate that Rian Johnson is not content to just remake Knives Out. If anything, my main problem with the movie was that I thought Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud was too good. I realise others might be familiar with O’Connor from things like the Crown but this is the first I’d seen him in anything and I thought he easily stole the film. No small feat when you’re sharing the screen with Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and more.If you’ve seen the movie—and there are spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t—I would recommend Rian Johnson’s Notes on a Scene for Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel. It’s somewhat akin to a director’s commentary but rather than being the entire film just involves Johnson explaining a scene. Well worth the 23 minutes or so.I mentioned last week that I was delighted when Apple Music informed me that Gnarls Barkley had a new album out (called Atlanta). I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed much of a taste for it over the past week. I’ve instead spent a lot of time in my Heavy Rotation playlist. One of the songs in it is ‘She Said (Big Jet Plane)’ a cover by the French electronica producers known as Trinix of ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone (Apple Music). I’m not sure why it has a tweaked title. They’re French, I guess?",
"content_html": "I filed my tax return. That wouldn’t be that noteworthy except that this was the first year we did it after purchasing the house. The Japanese Government provides a mortgage deduction for the first 13 years or so of a mortgage and for all but the first year, it’s automatically calculated and deducted. But this was the first year so I had to lodge an income tax return together with the paperwork they need. I was a little disappointed to discover that our house wasn’t built to be at the highest levels of energy efficiency and so isn’t eligible for a larger deduction.
Eri’s still recovering from a nasty case of the flu so I took Rowan to his preschool at the beginning of the week. I suspect my doctor would be a little concerned to hear that given the fracture in my little toe but hopefully the bicycle is relatively safe for fractured little toes. It doesn’t involve you repeatedly slamming your foot into the ground like walking or running do and surely that counts for something.
I continued to make progress on Listless, albeit slowly. This week I learnt the hard way that one of the perils of reimplementing a standard list of items is that you don’t get the behaviour of a standard list of items that you might otherwise expect. This was extremely apparent one day when I tried to select multiple to-do list items and found that holding Shift as I pressed the Up key did nothing. It now does what you would expect but it’s made me concerned that there are no doubt dozens of these little UI behaviours that Listless’s custom list is not going to have. Well, maybe not dozens but at least a dozen.
It’s been a while since I found the time to read one of Matt Lakeman’s travelogues. I read his recent one about Afghanistan and it was excellent.
Speaking of reading, I didn’t finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth before we had to take it back to the library but I worried that it might have been a bit too dense for John and Rowan’s bedtime so I replaced it on my last library visit with Michael Bond’s original A Bear Called Paddington. I’m a big fan of the CG animated series The Adventures of Paddington that began in 2019 and it’s interesting to see how that retelling differs from the original.
I finally watched the third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I enjoyed it more than Glass Onion and I appreciate that Rian Johnson is not content to just remake Knives Out. If anything, my main problem with the movie was that I thought Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud was too good. I realise others might be familiar with O’Connor from things like the Crown but this is the first I’d seen him in anything and I thought he easily stole the film. No small feat when you’re sharing the screen with Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and more.
If you’ve seen the movie—and there are spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t—I would recommend Rian Johnson’s Notes on a Scene for Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel. It’s somewhat akin to a director’s commentary but rather than being the entire film just involves Johnson explaining a scene. Well worth the 23 minutes or so.
I mentioned last week that I was delighted when Apple Music informed me that Gnarls Barkley had a new album out (called Atlanta). I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed much of a taste for it over the past week. I’ve instead spent a lot of time in my Heavy Rotation playlist. One of the songs in it is ‘She Said (Big Jet Plane)’ a cover by the French electronica producers known as Trinix of ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone (Apple Music). I’m not sure why it has a tweaked title. They’re French, I guess?
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1773409620.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-03-13T22:47:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-03-13T22:47:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772808660.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #320",
"content_text": "On Saturday the United States and Israel attacked Iran in flagrant violation of international law (ABC News). Some people point to this as evidence that international law is not real. This is childish. National laws are broken all the time. This does not mean they cease to exist. The slightly more sophisticated version of this argument points out that without a global government with a monopoly on violence, we shouldn’t expect international law to be anything more than a fig leaf. I think this argument is wrong, too. All stable regimes, no matter how brutal, govern through submission. We can refuse to provide the submission that Donald Trump wants. The refusal does not need to be explicit; it can be demonstrated by public commitments that are antithetical to the thoughts of Trump. In this case, the principle of rule of law. I hope Australia and Japan maintain such a commitment and I hope one day that the United States joins us.On Tuesday, I went back to the doctor for another X-ray. The good news is that it’s unlikely that I will need surgery. However, the doctor recommended that I continue to be cautious and avoid physical activity that puts unnecessary weight on the foot. He’s still expecting it to take around two months to heal completely.While I continue to toil away on Listless, Brandon vibe-coded two projects! The first is Collagen. This is a cool little web app for creating collages of album covers. The second is Urban Jungle. I’m honestly a little embarrassed at what Brandon put together in such a short amount of time. I’m not sure why my progress with Listless has been comparatively slower. I am trying to do something relatively custom but if you look at what Brandon’s done, it’s hardly the case that these are clones of each other.I don’t have an app available in the App Store but that didn’t stop me putting together a marketing page. As anyone who looks at the marketing page for my previous app, Flext, will immediately recognise, I leaned pretty heavily on that. I am happy with how it turned out and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely proud of the tagline ‘Do more with less’.The app itself is mostly working. I’ve cleaned up most of the bugs affecting ordinary interactions. In my testing, it works reliably to create and record tasks to do.I remembered once again that 30-minute television shows are awesome and started watching Yes Minister again. It remains fantastic. Less fantastic was the brief glimpse I caught of the 2013 revival of Yes, Prime Minister on YouTube. Were you aware there had been a 2013 revival (Wikipedia)? I wish I wasn’t.A much more pleasant YouTube video is this video essay by the channel Scores Unstitched. In the video, Cait Frizzell (the creator of Scores Unstitched) entertainingly explains the use of vibrato in opera singing. Frizzell is charming and delightful and at 18 minutes, it never feels like homeworkApple Music finally told me about some new music that I care about! Gnarls Barkley, legendary duo from the 2000s, is back with a new (and apparently final) album (Apple Music)! I’ve only listened to it once and as much as I wanted to like it, nothing grabbed me on first listen. I’ll give it a bit of a go and see if my attitude changes.",
"content_html": "On Saturday the United States and Israel attacked Iran in flagrant violation of international law (ABC News). Some people point to this as evidence that international law is not real. This is childish. National laws are broken all the time. This does not mean they cease to exist. The slightly more sophisticated version of this argument points out that without a global government with a monopoly on violence, we shouldn’t expect international law to be anything more than a fig leaf. I think this argument is wrong, too. All stable regimes, no matter how brutal, govern through submission. We can refuse to provide the submission that Donald Trump wants. The refusal does not need to be explicit; it can be demonstrated by public commitments that are antithetical to the thoughts of Trump. In this case, the principle of rule of law. I hope Australia and Japan maintain such a commitment and I hope one day that the United States joins us.
On Tuesday, I went back to the doctor for another X-ray. The good news is that it’s unlikely that I will need surgery. However, the doctor recommended that I continue to be cautious and avoid physical activity that puts unnecessary weight on the foot. He’s still expecting it to take around two months to heal completely.
While I continue to toil away on Listless, Brandon vibe-coded two projects! The first is Collagen. This is a cool little web app for creating collages of album covers. The second is Urban Jungle. I’m honestly a little embarrassed at what Brandon put together in such a short amount of time. I’m not sure why my progress with Listless has been comparatively slower. I am trying to do something relatively custom but if you look at what Brandon’s done, it’s hardly the case that these are clones of each other.
I don’t have an app available in the App Store but that didn’t stop me putting together a marketing page. As anyone who looks at the marketing page for my previous app, Flext, will immediately recognise, I leaned pretty heavily on that. I am happy with how it turned out and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely proud of the tagline ‘Do more with less’.
The app itself is mostly working. I’ve cleaned up most of the bugs affecting ordinary interactions. In my testing, it works reliably to create and record tasks to do.
I remembered once again that 30-minute television shows are awesome and started watching Yes Minister again. It remains fantastic. Less fantastic was the brief glimpse I caught of the 2013 revival of Yes, Prime Minister on YouTube. Were you aware there had been a 2013 revival (Wikipedia)? I wish I wasn’t.
A much more pleasant YouTube video is this video essay by the channel Scores Unstitched. In the video, Cait Frizzell (the creator of Scores Unstitched) entertainingly explains the use of vibrato in opera singing. Frizzell is charming and delightful and at 18 minutes, it never feels like homework
Apple Music finally told me about some new music that I care about! Gnarls Barkley, legendary duo from the 2000s, is back with a new (and apparently final) album (Apple Music)! I’ve only listened to it once and as much as I wanted to like it, nothing grabbed me on first listen. I’ll give it a bit of a go and see if my attitude changes.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772808660.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-03-06T23:51:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-03-06T23:51:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772201880.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #319",
"content_text": "Last Saturday I kicked the sofa in our living room as I was walking past and, as it turns out, fractured the middle phalanx of the little toe on my right foot. It hurt of course immediately after impact but the pain subsided pretty quickly. I did notice that the toe was at a slightly odd angle and that a large amount of blood appeared to have pooled under the skin of some of the other toes. I might have put off going to the doctor altogether except that I remember reading in someone’s weeknotes (apologies because I have forgotten) about a similar situation and so I trundled over on Tuesday and, after an X-ray, learnt the bad news. I’ll go back to the same doctor for another consultation next week and hopefully it’s something that will be able to heal on its own.If it does require more treatment than that, I’ll always wonder how much was due to the decision to visit Chichibu on Monday. That was the Emperor’s Birthday holiday (Wikipedia) and with some slightly warmer weather, it seemed like a nice little day trip to go on with Mum, Dad and the kids. John had come with the flu and so was out of action but it meant an opportunity for Rowan to finally take the Seibu Laview train (Wikipedia) to the end of the line.Speaking of trains, I had reason to learn that the oil painting of the annoying guy talking to the young woman on the train that’s become something of a meme is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (The Annoying Gentleman) (Wikipedia). Woltze is also the artist who painted Der Brief (The Letter) (Wikipedia), another oil painting that’s become something of a meme. Once is luck but twice surely means he’s a time traveller, right?My to-do list app has a name: Listless. I still haven’t put the source up somewhere but that is on the cards. In the meantime, I was very happy to be able to get it onto my iPhone. It turns out that TestFlight can be used to distribute apps to members of a development team without requiring you to go through App Review. After a misstep with the initial app record I created, I have versions now on my iPhone and on my Mac that both support the interaction model I want and are (sort of) able to sync data via iCloud. The syncing wasn’t completely rock-solid in my initial testing (which isn’t a great sign) but hopefully it’s something I can get sorted out without too much fuss.I was finally able to get Dad to watch Knives Out and, with relatively little prompting, Glass Onion. As I thought might be the case, he had a hard time getting past Daniel Craig’s Louisiana accent. Still, he watched both. He took them in spurts which was nice as it meant we had an opportunity to discuss what he was thinking as he watched. I was very impressed by what he noticed that I’d missed on my first watch.I quite liked Secret Galaxy’s History of Darkwing Duck. I remember wondering as a kid how it was meant to integrate with Ducktales but it turns out that it wasn’t ever intended to be the same continuity.This song is from last summer but I’ve been belatedly enjoying sombr’s ‘12 to 12’ over the past week or so (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Last Saturday I kicked the sofa in our living room as I was walking past and, as it turns out, fractured the middle phalanx of the little toe on my right foot. It hurt of course immediately after impact but the pain subsided pretty quickly. I did notice that the toe was at a slightly odd angle and that a large amount of blood appeared to have pooled under the skin of some of the other toes. I might have put off going to the doctor altogether except that I remember reading in someone’s weeknotes (apologies because I have forgotten) about a similar situation and so I trundled over on Tuesday and, after an X-ray, learnt the bad news. I’ll go back to the same doctor for another consultation next week and hopefully it’s something that will be able to heal on its own.
If it does require more treatment than that, I’ll always wonder how much was due to the decision to visit Chichibu on Monday. That was the Emperor’s Birthday holiday (Wikipedia) and with some slightly warmer weather, it seemed like a nice little day trip to go on with Mum, Dad and the kids. John had come with the flu and so was out of action but it meant an opportunity for Rowan to finally take the Seibu Laview train (Wikipedia) to the end of the line.
Speaking of trains, I had reason to learn that the oil painting of the annoying guy talking to the young woman on the train that’s become something of a meme is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (The Annoying Gentleman) (Wikipedia). Woltze is also the artist who painted Der Brief (The Letter) (Wikipedia), another oil painting that’s become something of a meme. Once is luck but twice surely means he’s a time traveller, right?
My to-do list app has a name: Listless. I still haven’t put the source up somewhere but that is on the cards. In the meantime, I was very happy to be able to get it onto my iPhone. It turns out that TestFlight can be used to distribute apps to members of a development team without requiring you to go through App Review. After a misstep with the initial app record I created, I have versions now on my iPhone and on my Mac that both support the interaction model I want and are (sort of) able to sync data via iCloud. The syncing wasn’t completely rock-solid in my initial testing (which isn’t a great sign) but hopefully it’s something I can get sorted out without too much fuss.
I was finally able to get Dad to watch Knives Out and, with relatively little prompting, Glass Onion. As I thought might be the case, he had a hard time getting past Daniel Craig’s Louisiana accent. Still, he watched both. He took them in spurts which was nice as it meant we had an opportunity to discuss what he was thinking as he watched. I was very impressed by what he noticed that I’d missed on my first watch.
I quite liked Secret Galaxy’s History of Darkwing Duck. I remember wondering as a kid how it was meant to integrate with Ducktales but it turns out that it wasn’t ever intended to be the same continuity.
This song is from last summer but I’ve been belatedly enjoying sombr’s ‘12 to 12’ over the past week or so (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1772201880.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-02-27T23:18:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-02-27T23:18:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1771597920.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #318",
"content_text": "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.",
"content_html": "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.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1771597920.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-02-20T23:32:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-02-20T23:32:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1770994260.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #317",
"content_text": "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).",
"content_html": "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).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1770994260.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-02-13T23:51:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-02-13T23:51:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1770386940.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #316",
"content_text": "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.",
"content_html": "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.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1770386940.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-02-06T23:09:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-02-06T23:09:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1769780100.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #315",
"content_text": "I feel like I earned some kind of boy scout badge after receiving a letter from the bank saying that the interest rate of our home loan has been increased. It’s not very much—and certainly by Australian standards laughably low—but it was still a feeling I’m hoping I don’t need to experience too frequently.I loved John Gruber’s ‘The Names They Call Themselves’:Our goal should not be to make fascist or Nazi apply to Trump’s movement, no matter how well those rhetorical gloves fit his short-fingered disgustingly bruised hands. Don’t call Trump ‘Hitler’. Instead, work until ‘Trump’ becomes a new end state of Godwin’s Law.A week or so ago, OpenAI made their version of ChatGPT for tight-arses, AKA ChatGPT Go, available worldwide. I switched over to it but won’t see any changes until my current billing period ends. I’ll keep you all apprised.For some reason, Are Media, the publishers of the Australian Women’s Weekly started geoblocking certain users who try to access certain Australian Women’s Weekly websites (like their food site). I’m not sure why that is. Is it a rights issue? Does it substantially reduce the volume of attacks? Was it even intentional? I wrote to Are Media but haven’t heard back. We’ll add that to the apprising list.You might be wondering why I am even aware that Are Media is doing this. The answer is that a couple of weeks ago, somebody linked to the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. This is one of those moments that you can’t really have any more. I read and re-read that book an embarrassing number of times as a child. I have no interest in baking—or cooking at all really—but I loved looking at the birthday cakes and imagining which was the one I would ask Mum to make. I had no idea that anyone was doing it but me. On the one hand, it’s lovely to discover that it wasn’t just me. On the other… have we lost something by being so aware of the relative popularity of everything?I first started watching video essays on YouTube before I had moved from my using my Google Apps account to using my Google Account. As a result, YouTube occasionally suggests videos that I have seen but which it doesn’t realise I’ve seen. This week, it was Big Joel and his video about Moana. I agree 100%. Moana remains a film I always want to like more than I do and I think Big Joel gets at the reason why it leaves (some people) a bit cold.Speaking of Big Joel, in previous entries, I’ve identified him as ‘Henry Jackson’. I think that may very well have been incorrect. His first name does seem to be ‘Henry’ but I can’t find any reliable evidence that his surname is ‘Jackson’. My apologies.I finished Tomb Raider. The logical thing would be to now move to Rise of the Tomb Raider (especially since that’s the game I interrupted playing so that I could go back and replay TR). I’ve of course now gone back to Rocket League.Remember Macklemore? I spent quite a bit of time this week listening to ‘Can’t Hold Us’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "I feel like I earned some kind of boy scout badge after receiving a letter from the bank saying that the interest rate of our home loan has been increased. It’s not very much—and certainly by Australian standards laughably low—but it was still a feeling I’m hoping I don’t need to experience too frequently.
I loved John Gruber’s ‘The Names They Call Themselves’:
Our goal should not be to make fascist or Nazi apply to Trump’s movement, no matter how well those rhetorical gloves fit his short-fingered disgustingly bruised hands. Don’t call Trump ‘Hitler’. Instead, work until ‘Trump’ becomes a new end state of Godwin’s Law.
A week or so ago, OpenAI made their version of ChatGPT for tight-arses, AKA ChatGPT Go, available worldwide. I switched over to it but won’t see any changes until my current billing period ends. I’ll keep you all apprised.
For some reason, Are Media, the publishers of the Australian Women’s Weekly started geoblocking certain users who try to access certain Australian Women’s Weekly websites (like their food site). I’m not sure why that is. Is it a rights issue? Does it substantially reduce the volume of attacks? Was it even intentional? I wrote to Are Media but haven’t heard back. We’ll add that to the apprising list.
You might be wondering why I am even aware that Are Media is doing this. The answer is that a couple of weeks ago, somebody linked to the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. This is one of those moments that you can’t really have any more. I read and re-read that book an embarrassing number of times as a child. I have no interest in baking—or cooking at all really—but I loved looking at the birthday cakes and imagining which was the one I would ask Mum to make. I had no idea that anyone was doing it but me. On the one hand, it’s lovely to discover that it wasn’t just me. On the other… have we lost something by being so aware of the relative popularity of everything?
I first started watching video essays on YouTube before I had moved from my using my Google Apps account to using my Google Account. As a result, YouTube occasionally suggests videos that I have seen but which it doesn’t realise I’ve seen. This week, it was Big Joel and his video about Moana. I agree 100%. Moana remains a film I always want to like more than I do and I think Big Joel gets at the reason why it leaves (some people) a bit cold.
Speaking of Big Joel, in previous entries, I’ve identified him as ‘Henry Jackson’. I think that may very well have been incorrect. His first name does seem to be ‘Henry’ but I can’t find any reliable evidence that his surname is ‘Jackson’. My apologies.
I finished Tomb Raider. The logical thing would be to now move to Rise of the Tomb Raider (especially since that’s the game I interrupted playing so that I could go back and replay TR). I’ve of course now gone back to Rocket League.
Remember Macklemore? I spent quite a bit of time this week listening to ‘Can’t Hold Us’ (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1769780100.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-01-30T22:35:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-01-30T22:35:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1769147700.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #314",
"content_text": "Donald Trump made unhinged threats over Greenland to Denmark, an ostensibly allied country. This is grotesque and a repudiation of the world order that the world rightly respected America for setting up. I am intentionally not linking to stories about it because I believe that what Trump wants more than anything is attention and I don’t want to encourage that. Instead, I would direct you to Mark Carney’s speech at Davos (YouTube). Carney is calm, clear-eyed and courageous. I hope the middle powers (such as Japan and Australia) can join like-minded countries like Canada in resisting this brutality.I took Rowan to Asobono again. Like the dedicated father that I am, I might have fobbed him off but it was one of those fantastically crisp Tokyo winter days and I got it in my head that he and I could go up to the sky deck of the Bunkyō Civic Centre and look out on Mount Fuji (Japanese). Alas, much to my chagrin, it’s closed for renovations until December 2026.After that didn’t work out, I wanted to do something novel and so when Rowan and I walked past Bubba Gump Shrimp Tokyo and there was no queue, I decided to go there for lunch (Japanese). Bubba Gump? Like in the movie? Yes, like in the movie. Why is this a thing? Why is it a thing in Tokyo of all places? Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say is that I found it charming, albeit quite expensive. I’d be tempted to go back there with the whole family but I shudder at the cost.I’ve started playing games on Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck. I started with the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider which I did in fact own for the PS3. (I just looked up the receipt and am shocked to discover that I got it less than four months after it came out—I almost never play any recent games.) Why play that? Well, I started Rise of the Tomb Raider but realised I barely remembered any of the first game and so went back. The interface is unfortunately ‘stuck’ in Japanese but I can read well enough to understand most of the instructions (the dialogue is in English). I’ve taken to having the Steam Deck always display the frame rate and it’s basically locked at 60fps.Back in 2021 I idly wondered whether you could have ‘a good value’ (as opposed to `good value’)? This seems to be an Americanism, or perhaps a regional thing within the United States. The person I originally noticed saying it was Marco Arment of Accidental Tech Podcast fame but the other day Apple pundit John Gruber did it too:It’s a decent value for $130/year, a great value with the education discount, and it’s nice that Apple is still offering one-time purchasing, per app, for those who object to software subscriptions (or those who simply know they only want to use one or two of these apps).‘A decent value’? Not merely ‘decent value’?In late 2019 and early 2020, I listened to a lot of 5 Seconds of Summer’s ‘Teeth’. It never turned me into much of a fan of the band beyond that song (well, and 2018’s ‘Youngblood’) but for reasons I can’t explain I never even tried listening to much else. This week I checked out 2022’s 5SOS and while it hasn’t changed my overall impression, I did quite like ‘Me Myself & I’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Donald Trump made unhinged threats over Greenland to Denmark, an ostensibly allied country. This is grotesque and a repudiation of the world order that the world rightly respected America for setting up. I am intentionally not linking to stories about it because I believe that what Trump wants more than anything is attention and I don’t want to encourage that. Instead, I would direct you to Mark Carney’s speech at Davos (YouTube). Carney is calm, clear-eyed and courageous. I hope the middle powers (such as Japan and Australia) can join like-minded countries like Canada in resisting this brutality.
I took Rowan to Asobono again. Like the dedicated father that I am, I might have fobbed him off but it was one of those fantastically crisp Tokyo winter days and I got it in my head that he and I could go up to the sky deck of the Bunkyō Civic Centre and look out on Mount Fuji (Japanese). Alas, much to my chagrin, it’s closed for renovations until December 2026.
After that didn’t work out, I wanted to do something novel and so when Rowan and I walked past Bubba Gump Shrimp Tokyo and there was no queue, I decided to go there for lunch (Japanese). Bubba Gump? Like in the movie? Yes, like in the movie. Why is this a thing? Why is it a thing in Tokyo of all places? Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say is that I found it charming, albeit quite expensive. I’d be tempted to go back there with the whole family but I shudder at the cost.
I’ve started playing games on Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck. I started with the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider which I did in fact own for the PS3. (I just looked up the receipt and am shocked to discover that I got it less than four months after it came out—I almost never play any recent games.) Why play that? Well, I started Rise of the Tomb Raider but realised I barely remembered any of the first game and so went back. The interface is unfortunately ‘stuck’ in Japanese but I can read well enough to understand most of the instructions (the dialogue is in English). I’ve taken to having the Steam Deck always display the frame rate and it’s basically locked at 60fps.
Back in 2021 I idly wondered whether you could have ‘a good value’ (as opposed to `good value’)? This seems to be an Americanism, or perhaps a regional thing within the United States. The person I originally noticed saying it was Marco Arment of Accidental Tech Podcast fame but the other day Apple pundit John Gruber did it too:
It’s a decent value for $130/year, a great value with the education discount, and it’s nice that Apple is still offering one-time purchasing, per app, for those who object to software subscriptions (or those who simply know they only want to use one or two of these apps).
‘A decent value’? Not merely ‘decent value’?
In late 2019 and early 2020, I listened to a lot of 5 Seconds of Summer’s ‘Teeth’. It never turned me into much of a fan of the band beyond that song (well, and 2018’s ‘Youngblood’) but for reasons I can’t explain I never even tried listening to much else. This week I checked out 2022’s 5SOS and while it hasn’t changed my overall impression, I did quite like ‘Me Myself & I’ (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1769147700.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-01-23T14:55:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-01-23T14:55:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1768572540.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #313",
"content_text": "It’s been a pretty slow start to the year for us. I’m a little ashamed to admit that the Christmas tree is still up, for instance. Monday was Coming of Age Day (Wikipedia) but other than a bicycle ride with Emma, we stayed at home for almost the entire three days. The weather has been nice enough (for the middle of winter) but it is cold (it is the middle of winter) and none of us have had a burning desire to go anywhere. Well, other than Rowan. He’s always up for a train ride, of course.On Sunday night, we somehow came across the show Tōshōchū (which would transliterate into ‘In Pursuit’). The show is essentially a giant game of tag in which a number of contestants are placed in a large venue and given a period of time during which they must survive. In opposition to the players are a number of non-contestants called ‘Hunters’. The Hunters are dressed like the Agents from the Matrix films and stalk the venue looking for contestants. If a Hunter sees a contestant, they commence pursuit and if they catch the contestant, the contestant is out. Each contestant has three or so people following them around everywhere with a camera and it seems like there’s a rule that the Hunters aren’t allowed to ‘see’ the film crew when spotting a contestant. The whole thing goes for multiple hours with episodes split up over multiple weeks. The episode went a bit late but since Monday was a holiday, we let the kids stay up to watch it all. I think this might have been the first television show we’ve ever watched as an entire family.On Friday Netflix suddenly recommended that we might be interested in watching Tōshōchū (Netflix) (apparently, Netflix has been co-producing the show since 2022). It was definitely the kind of thing that makes people think giant tech companies are spying on you but the more rational explanation of course is that the airing of the show over the weekend reminded a lot of Japanese that it exists. Some number of those people then either remembered Netflix has episodes or found them by searching. That activity led to Netflix’s recommendation algorithm noticing the show and promoting it to more users which, if people followed the suggestion, would of course promote it to even more users.I’d been thinking about writing a blog post about my experience with Claude Code but then I came across Daniel Hooper’s write-up and he covers most of it. I don’t do anything as complicated as what Hooper does but the sentiment is very similar.One of the first projects I made when I came across the Janet programming was the testing library, Testament. The initial impetus for creating it was that I wanted the testing library to produce a side-by-side comparison between the expected output and the actual output. This is pretty trivial but for a long time now I’ve wished you could created a colour-coded ‘diff’ that showed the characters in the expected output that are missing and the characters in the actual output that are added. Well, with some assistance from Claude, it’s now there.On the topic of algorithmic recommendation, last week I linked to Ben Folds’ cover of the Postal Services’ ‘Such Great Heights’ for Triple J’s Like a Version and mentioned it was only on YouTube. After one of my replays of the video, YouTube recommended I might like the Like a Version cover RÜFÜS DU SOL did of Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ (YouTube). In this case, I am familiar with the cover but I see I haven’t linked it in a weeknote before so let’s rectify that (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "It’s been a pretty slow start to the year for us. I’m a little ashamed to admit that the Christmas tree is still up, for instance. Monday was Coming of Age Day (Wikipedia) but other than a bicycle ride with Emma, we stayed at home for almost the entire three days. The weather has been nice enough (for the middle of winter) but it is cold (it is the middle of winter) and none of us have had a burning desire to go anywhere. Well, other than Rowan. He’s always up for a train ride, of course.
On Sunday night, we somehow came across the show Tōshōchū (which would transliterate into ‘In Pursuit’). The show is essentially a giant game of tag in which a number of contestants are placed in a large venue and given a period of time during which they must survive. In opposition to the players are a number of non-contestants called ‘Hunters’. The Hunters are dressed like the Agents from the Matrix films and stalk the venue looking for contestants. If a Hunter sees a contestant, they commence pursuit and if they catch the contestant, the contestant is out. Each contestant has three or so people following them around everywhere with a camera and it seems like there’s a rule that the Hunters aren’t allowed to ‘see’ the film crew when spotting a contestant. The whole thing goes for multiple hours with episodes split up over multiple weeks. The episode went a bit late but since Monday was a holiday, we let the kids stay up to watch it all. I think this might have been the first television show we’ve ever watched as an entire family.
On Friday Netflix suddenly recommended that we might be interested in watching Tōshōchū (Netflix) (apparently, Netflix has been co-producing the show since 2022). It was definitely the kind of thing that makes people think giant tech companies are spying on you but the more rational explanation of course is that the airing of the show over the weekend reminded a lot of Japanese that it exists. Some number of those people then either remembered Netflix has episodes or found them by searching. That activity led to Netflix’s recommendation algorithm noticing the show and promoting it to more users which, if people followed the suggestion, would of course promote it to even more users.
I’d been thinking about writing a blog post about my experience with Claude Code but then I came across Daniel Hooper’s write-up and he covers most of it. I don’t do anything as complicated as what Hooper does but the sentiment is very similar.
One of the first projects I made when I came across the Janet programming was the testing library, Testament. The initial impetus for creating it was that I wanted the testing library to produce a side-by-side comparison between the expected output and the actual output. This is pretty trivial but for a long time now I’ve wished you could created a colour-coded ‘diff’ that showed the characters in the expected output that are missing and the characters in the actual output that are added. Well, with some assistance from Claude, it’s now there.
On the topic of algorithmic recommendation, last week I linked to Ben Folds’ cover of the Postal Services’ ‘Such Great Heights’ for Triple J’s Like a Version and mentioned it was only on YouTube. After one of my replays of the video, YouTube recommended I might like the Like a Version cover RÜFÜS DU SOL did of Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ (YouTube). In this case, I am familiar with the cover but I see I haven’t linked it in a weeknote before so let’s rectify that (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1768572540.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-01-16T23:09:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-01-16T23:09:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1767967980.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #312",
"content_text": "We made it to 2026. And what’s this? The date of this post isn’t a lie? Yes, I decided to start the new year off with an acceptance of reality: Friday has become the actual day I write these updates so I’m shifting the publishing date of my weeknotes from Monday/Tuesday to Friday. We’ll see how diligent I can be.Donald Trump, in flagrant violation of international and U.S. domestic law, ordered the abduction of Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro (Wikipedia). I know the U.S. has a long history of meddling in other countries but this is wrong and we should say that it’s wrong. Yes, Maduro is a dictator but a might-makes-right attitude is not to anyone’s benefit. I live in hope that the broader U.S. population will reject this madness before it it’s too late.At the risk of giving away the answer to a security question on some website I no longer frequent, my uncle’s name is Sam. And yet, as best as I can recal, it wasn’t until this week that it occurred to me that Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam are, you know, the same thing. At least lexically. I consider this an example of how the things that you grow up with are like water (in the David Foster Wallace sense).Emma remarked last week that we hadn’t visited Disneyland at all in 2025. I suggested we could try to squeeze in a visit on New Year’s Eve if the weather held up. It kept its end of the bargain, so I kept mine and we managed to get everyone out there via a couple of trains. Eri took Emma on Splash Mountain and the Haunted Mansion while I rode on Star Tours for the first time in 32 years. It was perhaps the combination of the 3D and the motion, but I actually started to feel nauseous towards the end of the ride but I’m still glad to have done it.We finally moved Rowan downstairs to the lower bunk bed. He’s only slept there the past three days and on two of those days, he woke up distressed to not be next to Eri or me.I continued to spend time working with Claude Code on various projects, primarily Grapple. This week I concentrated on trying to expose Janet’s built-in debugging functionality. I’m a long-time print debugger and while I still find that the tool I most readily reach for, I want to get better at using a proper debugger. I’ve not succeeded in building that ‘muscle’ but perhaps this will be the time when it finally sticks.My weight went back up over 71kg. As I write this, I’m about 24 hours in to a 42-hour fast and I’m hoping I get back into the regular rhythm of doing that.My favourite thing I watched this week was T1J’s video essay on Kevin Can Fuck Himself. The essay is an hour-long and spoils key parts of the two-season show but after watching it, I went out and got the episodes to watch myself anyway. That’s now been added to my ever-growing queue and—knowing me—may not be something I ever get around to but I genuinely hope that’s not the case. The concept alone is that good.I was disappointed to see that the version of ‘Such Great Heights’ that Ben Folds played for Triple J’s ‘Like a Version’ segment back in 2006 isn’t available on Apple Music. There is a version from 4-disc version of The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective (Apple Music) but it’s not as good. Fortunately, it is on YouTube and you can listen to it there.",
"content_html": "We made it to 2026. And what’s this? The date of this post isn’t a lie? Yes, I decided to start the new year off with an acceptance of reality: Friday has become the actual day I write these updates so I’m shifting the publishing date of my weeknotes from Monday/Tuesday to Friday. We’ll see how diligent I can be.
Donald Trump, in flagrant violation of international and U.S. domestic law, ordered the abduction of Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro (Wikipedia). I know the U.S. has a long history of meddling in other countries but this is wrong and we should say that it’s wrong. Yes, Maduro is a dictator but a might-makes-right attitude is not to anyone’s benefit. I live in hope that the broader U.S. population will reject this madness before it it’s too late.
At the risk of giving away the answer to a security question on some website I no longer frequent, my uncle’s name is Sam. And yet, as best as I can recal, it wasn’t until this week that it occurred to me that Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam are, you know, the same thing. At least lexically. I consider this an example of how the things that you grow up with are like water (in the David Foster Wallace sense).
Emma remarked last week that we hadn’t visited Disneyland at all in 2025. I suggested we could try to squeeze in a visit on New Year’s Eve if the weather held up. It kept its end of the bargain, so I kept mine and we managed to get everyone out there via a couple of trains. Eri took Emma on Splash Mountain and the Haunted Mansion while I rode on Star Tours for the first time in 32 years. It was perhaps the combination of the 3D and the motion, but I actually started to feel nauseous towards the end of the ride but I’m still glad to have done it.
We finally moved Rowan downstairs to the lower bunk bed. He’s only slept there the past three days and on two of those days, he woke up distressed to not be next to Eri or me.
I continued to spend time working with Claude Code on various projects, primarily Grapple. This week I concentrated on trying to expose Janet’s built-in debugging functionality. I’m a long-time print debugger and while I still find that the tool I most readily reach for, I want to get better at using a proper debugger. I’ve not succeeded in building that ‘muscle’ but perhaps this will be the time when it finally sticks.
My weight went back up over 71kg. As I write this, I’m about 24 hours in to a 42-hour fast and I’m hoping I get back into the regular rhythm of doing that.
My favourite thing I watched this week was T1J’s video essay on Kevin Can Fuck Himself. The essay is an hour-long and spoils key parts of the two-season show but after watching it, I went out and got the episodes to watch myself anyway. That’s now been added to my ever-growing queue and—knowing me—may not be something I ever get around to but I genuinely hope that’s not the case. The concept alone is that good.
I was disappointed to see that the version of ‘Such Great Heights’ that Ben Folds played for Triple J’s ‘Like a Version’ segment back in 2006 isn’t available on Apple Music. There is a version from 4-disc version of The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective (Apple Music) but it’s not as good. Fortunately, it is on YouTube and you can listen to it there.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1767967980.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2026-01-09T23:13:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2026-01-09T23:13:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1767101880.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #311",
"content_text": "We celebrated Christmas in Japan. One of the nice aspects of that is not needing to worry about choosing presents that we can ‘hide’ in our suitcases. We didn’t use that as an excuse to go crazy; more that it was nice not to need to stress about it. Emma got a Lego set I was honestly a bit surprised she wanted, John got a 3-pack of Minecraft games for the Nintendo Switch and Rowan got more Brio.The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (the sequel to 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie) comes out in 2026 and I assume as a tie-in to that Nintendo has Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 in a 2-pack that effectively makes the games half price. I decided that would be my ‘present’ and I realised playing it that this is my first proper 3-D Mario game (I played Super Mario 3D World but it’s more of a fixed camera 3-D game). I definitely see the appeal but it did all but confirm that these games aren’t really for me. Maybe if I had my own Switch, I’d find myself reaching for it rather than the Steam Deck.Mum sent over the Christmas stockings together with chocolate coins and other sweets and that helped contribute to it feeling like Christmas. The stockings are the same ones that my siblings and I used when we were little and it’s great we have them to use for our kids. The care package also included Woolworths’ sliced Christmas fruit cake. This doesn’t have the amount of icing I’d prefer but I was appreciative of it all the same.As one might expect if you’ve been reading these weeknotes recently, I continued mucking around with Claude. This time the focus was on getting Grapple, my remote REPL server, to ‘flow’ updates to bindings through a program. I’d originally helped work on a change to Janet itself that was aimed at making something like this better but after more experimentation with Grapple over the past week or so, it became clear that the behaviour isn’t quite what I want. Since Grapple has its own version of Janet’s evaluation function, I got to work with Claude on keeping a ‘dependency graph’ for all bindings in a session and then causing any update to a binding to trigger reevaluation of all dependent bindings. I don’t know how well that will work for more serious development but it improved my experience tinkering away on the Advent of Code puzzles I’ve been using to test things.In the mid-2000s, I somehow came across a talk by Jonathan Blow (‘Design Reboot’). I liked this talk so much I spent a few hours transcribing it for my blog (it not being on YouTube at the time). That hardly makes me a Jonathan Blow superfan but I am interested enough in his thoughts that I was surprised I had never watched the two talks Blow gave that led to the creation of his programming language, Jai. Those talks were fine but the first demo of Jai is what really blew me away. I don’t think this language is for me but I understand better why this language has had a certain amount of hype around it for the past couple of years.I came across Anastasia Kobekina’s Bach: Cello Suites (Apple Music) and have been enjoying them for the past few days.",
"content_html": "We celebrated Christmas in Japan. One of the nice aspects of that is not needing to worry about choosing presents that we can ‘hide’ in our suitcases. We didn’t use that as an excuse to go crazy; more that it was nice not to need to stress about it. Emma got a Lego set I was honestly a bit surprised she wanted, John got a 3-pack of Minecraft games for the Nintendo Switch and Rowan got more Brio.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (the sequel to 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie) comes out in 2026 and I assume as a tie-in to that Nintendo has Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 in a 2-pack that effectively makes the games half price. I decided that would be my ‘present’ and I realised playing it that this is my first proper 3-D Mario game (I played Super Mario 3D World but it’s more of a fixed camera 3-D game). I definitely see the appeal but it did all but confirm that these games aren’t really for me. Maybe if I had my own Switch, I’d find myself reaching for it rather than the Steam Deck.
Mum sent over the Christmas stockings together with chocolate coins and other sweets and that helped contribute to it feeling like Christmas. The stockings are the same ones that my siblings and I used when we were little and it’s great we have them to use for our kids. The care package also included Woolworths’ sliced Christmas fruit cake. This doesn’t have the amount of icing I’d prefer but I was appreciative of it all the same.
As one might expect if you’ve been reading these weeknotes recently, I continued mucking around with Claude. This time the focus was on getting Grapple, my remote REPL server, to ‘flow’ updates to bindings through a program. I’d originally helped work on a change to Janet itself that was aimed at making something like this better but after more experimentation with Grapple over the past week or so, it became clear that the behaviour isn’t quite what I want. Since Grapple has its own version of Janet’s evaluation function, I got to work with Claude on keeping a ‘dependency graph’ for all bindings in a session and then causing any update to a binding to trigger reevaluation of all dependent bindings. I don’t know how well that will work for more serious development but it improved my experience tinkering away on the Advent of Code puzzles I’ve been using to test things.
In the mid-2000s, I somehow came across a talk by Jonathan Blow (‘Design Reboot’). I liked this talk so much I spent a few hours transcribing it for my blog (it not being on YouTube at the time). That hardly makes me a Jonathan Blow superfan but I am interested enough in his thoughts that I was surprised I had never watched the two talks Blow gave that led to the creation of his programming language, Jai. Those talks were fine but the first demo of Jai is what really blew me away. I don’t think this language is for me but I understand better why this language has had a certain amount of hype around it for the past couple of years.
I came across Anastasia Kobekina’s Bach: Cello Suites (Apple Music) and have been enjoying them for the past few days.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1767101880.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-12-30T22:38:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-12-30T22:38:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1766499600.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #310",
"content_text": "Rowan came down with the flu on Friday and, like any diligent parent would, I rushed Emma and John off on Saturday morning to see Zootopia 2 before either of them fell ill. Just as well, too, because John started to develop symptoms by Saturday evening. We probably could have gone next week but I was worried that it might have become all but impractical to see it in English if we waited too long.I thought the movie itself was amazing. This is easily the best Disney film since Encanto and, if I were to extend it beyond that, I’d have to go back to the original Zootopia in 2016 (and I think Zootopia 2 might be better). It was everything I wished Frozen 2 had been: a reprisal of the original that developed the relationship at the core (in that case, Anna and Elsa; in this case, Judy and Nick).I realised on Sunday that, in an ordinary year, we would have been in Australia for Christmas by that point. I’m sad we couldn’t go back this year but it’s probably good for the kids not to always think of ‘holiday’ as a verb.As is no doubt evident with these belated weeknotes (I back date them but avid readers know they’ve almost a week late each time), I’ve been spending an increasing amount of my free time working on programming projects. That hasn’t just impacted these updates but the amount of time I’ve been spending on my phone generally. On Thursday that resulted in me completely neglecting to log an entry in Reporter. I didn’t export its data to double check but I think that might have been the first time I’ve missed a day in more than 10 years. It was also a reminder that I really need to get around to writing my own replacement. The app hasn’t seen an update in six years and I worry that at some point it simply won’t open.Speaking of which, this week I worked on another of those ‘forever projects’ that I never seem to get around to doing. In this case, it was Kris. Kris is really a wrapper around the Zig toolchain that uses it to cross-compile programs written in the Janet programming language. Honestly, it’s not that much of an achievement but I was glad to tick it off the list.Last week I mentioned I’d signed up for Nebula. As I suspect, I find the video player frustrating enough that I keep launching YouTube instead. The one creator I have been watching has been Lindsay Ellis. Her essay from 2023 on Jurassic Park (paywalled) was a reminder of how masterful she is at exploring a piece of media, both on its own terms and in the broader historical context in which it took place. If there is someone who will keep me subscribed, it’ll be her.The aforementioned Kris is, of course, a reference to the pioneering rap duo, Kris Kross. I know them from their ubiquitous hit ‘Jump’ (Apple Music) but Wikipedia does have a more fulsome history. I was listening to ‘Jump’ again and found myself legitimately impressed with the boys’ flow. I’d mentally catalogued it as one of those early ‘90s rap hits (‘Ice Ice Baby’, ‘U Can’t Touch This’, ‘Boom! Shake the Room’) which succeeded more as novelty records than anything else. I’m hardly an authority on hip-hop but to the extent I have any standing to opine, this is legitimately good rapping.",
"content_html": "Rowan came down with the flu on Friday and, like any diligent parent would, I rushed Emma and John off on Saturday morning to see Zootopia 2 before either of them fell ill. Just as well, too, because John started to develop symptoms by Saturday evening. We probably could have gone next week but I was worried that it might have become all but impractical to see it in English if we waited too long.
I thought the movie itself was amazing. This is easily the best Disney film since Encanto and, if I were to extend it beyond that, I’d have to go back to the original Zootopia in 2016 (and I think Zootopia 2 might be better). It was everything I wished Frozen 2 had been: a reprisal of the original that developed the relationship at the core (in that case, Anna and Elsa; in this case, Judy and Nick).
I realised on Sunday that, in an ordinary year, we would have been in Australia for Christmas by that point. I’m sad we couldn’t go back this year but it’s probably good for the kids not to always think of ‘holiday’ as a verb.
As is no doubt evident with these belated weeknotes (I back date them but avid readers know they’ve almost a week late each time), I’ve been spending an increasing amount of my free time working on programming projects. That hasn’t just impacted these updates but the amount of time I’ve been spending on my phone generally. On Thursday that resulted in me completely neglecting to log an entry in Reporter. I didn’t export its data to double check but I think that might have been the first time I’ve missed a day in more than 10 years. It was also a reminder that I really need to get around to writing my own replacement. The app hasn’t seen an update in six years and I worry that at some point it simply won’t open.
Speaking of which, this week I worked on another of those ‘forever projects’ that I never seem to get around to doing. In this case, it was Kris. Kris is really a wrapper around the Zig toolchain that uses it to cross-compile programs written in the Janet programming language. Honestly, it’s not that much of an achievement but I was glad to tick it off the list.
Last week I mentioned I’d signed up for Nebula. As I suspect, I find the video player frustrating enough that I keep launching YouTube instead. The one creator I have been watching has been Lindsay Ellis. Her essay from 2023 on Jurassic Park (paywalled) was a reminder of how masterful she is at exploring a piece of media, both on its own terms and in the broader historical context in which it took place. If there is someone who will keep me subscribed, it’ll be her.
The aforementioned Kris is, of course, a reference to the pioneering rap duo, Kris Kross. I know them from their ubiquitous hit ‘Jump’ (Apple Music) but Wikipedia does have a more fulsome history. I was listening to ‘Jump’ again and found myself legitimately impressed with the boys’ flow. I’d mentally catalogued it as one of those early ‘90s rap hits (‘Ice Ice Baby’, ‘U Can’t Touch This’, ‘Boom! Shake the Room’) which succeeded more as novelty records than anything else. I’m hardly an authority on hip-hop but to the extent I have any standing to opine, this is legitimately good rapping.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1766499600.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-12-23T23:20:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-12-23T23:20:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1765886460.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #309",
"content_text": "It was a little late but we put up the Christmas tree. I also bought a new Christmas wreath after accepting the reality that the old one had given up the ghost back in January.I mentioned last week that I don’t have plans to update to macOS 26. I should have said that was a broader objection to the UI design of new operating systems generally. Unfortunately, while I knew that my iPhone and iPad wouldn’t update automatically, I forgot that wasn’t true for Eri’s (quite old) iPhone 13 Mini and so she’s now running iOS 26.1. It runs with noticeably less smooth animations than iOS 18 and that’s made me fear what would happen if I did try to install it on my (also quite old) iPhone 14 Pro Max. So now I have another reason to hold out.I finally summoned the courage to ‘announce’ Sled to a broader audience and posted about it to the programming-oriented link aggregation website, Lobsters. It eventually got 5 votes which was not the resounding response for which I was hoping. I did of course knee-cap myself by waiting until after the annual enthusiasm for Advent of Code had dried up. There’s always next year of course.Speaking of ‘finally’, I signed up for a paid subscription to Nebula, the streaming service for independent creators. Ostensibly this was so that I could watch Patrick Willems’ The Dinner Plan (which I haven’t actually watched yet) but I’ve been thinking about doing it for ages and this was simply the nudge I needed. The majority of the video essayists I regularly watch post their videos there and I’ve wondered if I’d prefer watching the videos on Nebula given the versions of the essays I watch don’t include the paid sponsorship segments and can include content that is cut from the YouTube version to avoid (erroneous) copyright infringement detection.That all sounds great so why is there any hesitation? Two reasons. First, I worry that the YouTube algorithm will lose signal about the types of videos I like watching and my algorithmic suggestions will get worse. Second, and perhaps more importantly, their video player is worse. I think the excellence of YouTube’s video player in the iOS app isn’t remarked upon enough. It’s rock-solid, correctly handles rotation for full size playback (regardless of whether you have orientation lock on or not) and is just extremely responsive. Nebula’s isn’t awful but it feels noticeably less responsive and occasionally loses track of where I am when switching between devices.One of those video essayists is Henry Jackson (AKA Big Joel). Jackson’s latest is about the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas called ‘The Most Hated Children’s Book’. I haven’t read the book and don’t always agree with Jackson’s perspective on media but I always love following him into his argument. It is 43 minutes so consider yourself warned.The algorithm behind the personalised Heavy Rotation playlist that Apple makes for each user remains as inscrutable as ever. I’ve had the 2015 remix of Major Lazer’s ‘Light It Up’ (Apple Music) on (wait for it) heavy rotation for the past few days and Apple steadfastly refuses to add it to the playlist. Not a fan of dancehall, I guess.",
"content_html": "It was a little late but we put up the Christmas tree. I also bought a new Christmas wreath after accepting the reality that the old one had given up the ghost back in January.
I mentioned last week that I don’t have plans to update to macOS 26. I should have said that was a broader objection to the UI design of new operating systems generally. Unfortunately, while I knew that my iPhone and iPad wouldn’t update automatically, I forgot that wasn’t true for Eri’s (quite old) iPhone 13 Mini and so she’s now running iOS 26.1. It runs with noticeably less smooth animations than iOS 18 and that’s made me fear what would happen if I did try to install it on my (also quite old) iPhone 14 Pro Max. So now I have another reason to hold out.
I finally summoned the courage to ‘announce’ Sled to a broader audience and posted about it to the programming-oriented link aggregation website, Lobsters. It eventually got 5 votes which was not the resounding response for which I was hoping. I did of course knee-cap myself by waiting until after the annual enthusiasm for Advent of Code had dried up. There’s always next year of course.
Speaking of ‘finally’, I signed up for a paid subscription to Nebula, the streaming service for independent creators. Ostensibly this was so that I could watch Patrick Willems’ The Dinner Plan (which I haven’t actually watched yet) but I’ve been thinking about doing it for ages and this was simply the nudge I needed. The majority of the video essayists I regularly watch post their videos there and I’ve wondered if I’d prefer watching the videos on Nebula given the versions of the essays I watch don’t include the paid sponsorship segments and can include content that is cut from the YouTube version to avoid (erroneous) copyright infringement detection.
That all sounds great so why is there any hesitation? Two reasons. First, I worry that the YouTube algorithm will lose signal about the types of videos I like watching and my algorithmic suggestions will get worse. Second, and perhaps more importantly, their video player is worse. I think the excellence of YouTube’s video player in the iOS app isn’t remarked upon enough. It’s rock-solid, correctly handles rotation for full size playback (regardless of whether you have orientation lock on or not) and is just extremely responsive. Nebula’s isn’t awful but it feels noticeably less responsive and occasionally loses track of where I am when switching between devices.
One of those video essayists is Henry Jackson (AKA Big Joel). Jackson’s latest is about the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas called ‘The Most Hated Children’s Book’. I haven’t read the book and don’t always agree with Jackson’s perspective on media but I always love following him into his argument. It is 43 minutes so consider yourself warned.
The algorithm behind the personalised Heavy Rotation playlist that Apple makes for each user remains as inscrutable as ever. I’ve had the 2015 remix of Major Lazer’s ‘Light It Up’ (Apple Music) on (wait for it) heavy rotation for the past few days and Apple steadfastly refuses to add it to the playlist. Not a fan of dancehall, I guess.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1765886460.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-12-16T21:01:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-12-16T21:01:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1765291860.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #308",
"content_text": "I’m not sure if there’s a simple explanation but this year’s influenza virus has been playing havoc with Emma and John’s school. John was home from Tuesday to Thursday because his class was closed as a result of too many kids being out. I attended the annual concert on Saturday and half of Year 6 was absent for the same reason.The Apple world was rocked by the news that Alan Dye had resigned from the company (John Gruber had the definitive take at Daring Fireball). Dye had been Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design and has been a controversial figure for years. Many, including me, blame him for the slow deterioration in Apple’s UI design, especially on the Mac. It’s got so bad that macOS 26 is the first time since I got a Mac where I haven’t upgraded to the latest version of the operating system and indeed have no plans to do so. I don’t know if things will improve by next October but I have a little more hope than I did a couple of weeks ago.I was saddened to discover a few weeks ago that a Cantonese restaurant near work had closed down. That had been where I’d gone when I wanted some char kway teow (Wikipedia), a rice noodle dish that’s easy to get in Sydney but difficult to find in Japan. Technically, I don’t think what they served was char kway teow but it was close enough. Alas, with that avenue closed off, I hunted around and found a restaurant over in Jinbōchō (Google Maps) that, again, served a decent approximation. It was ¥1400 which feels like highway robbery for char kway teow but is probably around what you’d pay in Sydney, too.Quote Investigator has an interesting post about the proverb that there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs and the truth.I was explaining to sogaiu that I’m bizarrely picky, boring and mortified at being rude. His response was that I had basically described a Japanese person. Maybe I’m in the correct country after all.I saw a video on Youtube talking about this year being the 30th anniversary of GoldenEye and had two immediate thoughts. First (as you would expect), oh my God—how has it been 30 years? To put that into starker relife, Dr No came out in 1962 and so GoldenEye’s release is now almost halfway between then and now. This is objectively terrible. Second, I should watch GoldenEye again. Because it has been 30 years and I’m now middle-aged, it took me two sittings to make it through but I made it and am pleased to report that it still holds up well. I remember being very upset that John Gruber and Dan Benjamin gave it such short shrift when they were discussing the Bond films on The Talk Show podcast. With more distance, I can see why it wouldn’t hold the place in their memory that it does in mine. It was the first Bond film I saw in a cinema and I remember being riveted for the entire spectacle.Apple Music told me that Alice Sara Ott’s John Field: Complete Noctures was their most-stream classical album of 2025 (Apple Music). I wish I had something more eloquent to say than ‘I liked it’.",
"content_html": "I’m not sure if there’s a simple explanation but this year’s influenza virus has been playing havoc with Emma and John’s school. John was home from Tuesday to Thursday because his class was closed as a result of too many kids being out. I attended the annual concert on Saturday and half of Year 6 was absent for the same reason.
The Apple world was rocked by the news that Alan Dye had resigned from the company (John Gruber had the definitive take at Daring Fireball). Dye had been Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design and has been a controversial figure for years. Many, including me, blame him for the slow deterioration in Apple’s UI design, especially on the Mac. It’s got so bad that macOS 26 is the first time since I got a Mac where I haven’t upgraded to the latest version of the operating system and indeed have no plans to do so. I don’t know if things will improve by next October but I have a little more hope than I did a couple of weeks ago.
I was saddened to discover a few weeks ago that a Cantonese restaurant near work had closed down. That had been where I’d gone when I wanted some char kway teow (Wikipedia), a rice noodle dish that’s easy to get in Sydney but difficult to find in Japan. Technically, I don’t think what they served was char kway teow but it was close enough. Alas, with that avenue closed off, I hunted around and found a restaurant over in Jinbōchō (Google Maps) that, again, served a decent approximation. It was ¥1400 which feels like highway robbery for char kway teow but is probably around what you’d pay in Sydney, too.
Quote Investigator has an interesting post about the proverb that there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs and the truth.
I was explaining to sogaiu that I’m bizarrely picky, boring and mortified at being rude. His response was that I had basically described a Japanese person. Maybe I’m in the correct country after all.
I saw a video on Youtube talking about this year being the 30th anniversary of GoldenEye and had two immediate thoughts. First (as you would expect), oh my God—how has it been 30 years? To put that into starker relife, Dr No came out in 1962 and so GoldenEye’s release is now almost halfway between then and now. This is objectively terrible. Second, I should watch GoldenEye again. Because it has been 30 years and I’m now middle-aged, it took me two sittings to make it through but I made it and am pleased to report that it still holds up well. I remember being very upset that John Gruber and Dan Benjamin gave it such short shrift when they were discussing the Bond films on The Talk Show podcast. With more distance, I can see why it wouldn’t hold the place in their memory that it does in mine. It was the first Bond film I saw in a cinema and I remember being riveted for the entire spectacle.
Apple Music told me that Alice Sara Ott’s John Field: Complete Noctures was their most-stream classical album of 2025 (Apple Music). I wish I had something more eloquent to say than ‘I liked it’.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1765291860.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-12-09T23:51:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-12-09T23:51:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1764686520.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #307",
"content_text": "The Albanese Government in Australia passed a significant environmental law after compromising with the Australian Greens. I couldn’t help but compare this to the Rudd Government failing to reach a compromise with the Greens back in 2010. That failure concerned a bill that would have implemented a carbon tax. After failing to reach a compromise with the Greens or the centre-right Coalition, the Rudd Government withdraw that bill instead of using it as a trigger for a double dissolution election (Wikipedia). That’s a decision I view as being a complete betrayal of principle from a man who had called climate change the ‘greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’. The comparison is perhaps a bit unfair given the relative ambition of the two pieces of legislation (the bill in 2025 does not include a carbon tax, a policy the Labor Party eventually implemented and which the Coalition then dismantled) but I choose to see it as a reflection Anthony Albanese’s style of leadership. Don’t make grand promises that you then abandon, instead make boring progress.After taking Rowan for his second influenza shot on Saturday morning, we then went out to Chiba to ride on the Chiba Urban Monorail (Wikipedia). The Chiba monorail’s claim to fame is that it’s ‘upside down’ (i.e. suspended). After taking it to Chiba-Minato, we then went over to Chiba Port Tower (Wikipedia) which is one of the strangest structures I’ve ever seen. From the outside it looks like a solid building but its facade is merely that, a facade around a traditional tower structure.Speaking of Rowan, we finally bought a mattress for his bunk bed. We haven’t transitioned him to actually sleeping in it yet but this is the plan in the next couple of weeks.An Advent of Code command-line utility is one of the many side projects I’ve never accomplished. On Sunday evening, with less than 24 hours to go until the 2025 competition opened, I decided to give it a shot with the assistance of Claude Code. Lo and behold: Sled, the Seasonal Linear Enigma Device. This isn’t significant to anybody who isn’t me but I am absolutely delighted. I understand people who oppose the use of large language models for programming (or just in general) but I’ve found it extremely empowering.I’m probably not doing John any favours by giving him yet another way to play games but YouTube suggested a video about installing the retro game emulator RetroArch on the Apple TV and I’d been looking for a way to show him Aladdin on the Mega Drive. It works extremely well.The ‘steamed hams’ sketch of the Simpsons (YouTube) is one of the defining pieces of television in my life. That says more about the way it became a meme than anything else but that’s why I so greatly appreciated this video essay by J.J. McCullough. In it, McCullough spends 20 minutes explaining as much as he can about the sketch and it’s great.So somehow the Icelandic pop/jazz artist Laufey, who I raved about in 2023, put out a new album in August (Apple Music) that I didn’t know about until now.",
"content_html": "The Albanese Government in Australia passed a significant environmental law after compromising with the Australian Greens. I couldn’t help but compare this to the Rudd Government failing to reach a compromise with the Greens back in 2010. That failure concerned a bill that would have implemented a carbon tax. After failing to reach a compromise with the Greens or the centre-right Coalition, the Rudd Government withdraw that bill instead of using it as a trigger for a double dissolution election (Wikipedia). That’s a decision I view as being a complete betrayal of principle from a man who had called climate change the ‘greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’. The comparison is perhaps a bit unfair given the relative ambition of the two pieces of legislation (the bill in 2025 does not include a carbon tax, a policy the Labor Party eventually implemented and which the Coalition then dismantled) but I choose to see it as a reflection Anthony Albanese’s style of leadership. Don’t make grand promises that you then abandon, instead make boring progress.
After taking Rowan for his second influenza shot on Saturday morning, we then went out to Chiba to ride on the Chiba Urban Monorail (Wikipedia). The Chiba monorail’s claim to fame is that it’s ‘upside down’ (i.e. suspended). After taking it to Chiba-Minato, we then went over to Chiba Port Tower (Wikipedia) which is one of the strangest structures I’ve ever seen. From the outside it looks like a solid building but its facade is merely that, a facade around a traditional tower structure.
Speaking of Rowan, we finally bought a mattress for his bunk bed. We haven’t transitioned him to actually sleeping in it yet but this is the plan in the next couple of weeks.
An Advent of Code command-line utility is one of the many side projects I’ve never accomplished. On Sunday evening, with less than 24 hours to go until the 2025 competition opened, I decided to give it a shot with the assistance of Claude Code. Lo and behold: Sled, the Seasonal Linear Enigma Device. This isn’t significant to anybody who isn’t me but I am absolutely delighted. I understand people who oppose the use of large language models for programming (or just in general) but I’ve found it extremely empowering.
I’m probably not doing John any favours by giving him yet another way to play games but YouTube suggested a video about installing the retro game emulator RetroArch on the Apple TV and I’d been looking for a way to show him Aladdin on the Mega Drive. It works extremely well.
The ‘steamed hams’ sketch of the Simpsons (YouTube) is one of the defining pieces of television in my life. That says more about the way it became a meme than anything else but that’s why I so greatly appreciated this video essay by J.J. McCullough. In it, McCullough spends 20 minutes explaining as much as he can about the sketch and it’s great.
So somehow the Icelandic pop/jazz artist Laufey, who I raved about in 2023, put out a new album in August (Apple Music) that I didn’t know about until now.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1764686520.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-12-02T23:42:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-12-02T23:42:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1764079320.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #306",
"content_text": "On Sunday, I took John and Rowan to the Science Museum that’s located in Kitanomaru Park. There was a fair amount to see but the Japanese was difficult for me to understand (given it was pretty heavy on scientific terminology) so it was a little challenging to explain some of the exhibits to the boys. I’d like to go back again with Eri and Emma.Various news outlets in Japan (such as The Mainichi) reported that the Japanese Government plans to substantially raise the fees for visa applications next fiscal year (i.e. from April). I’ve been putting off getting permanent residency for years at this point but this might be the kick in the pants I finally need to get this done sometime in the next couple of months.I wish I could say I was bigger than this but I’ve been following the drama involving the journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza (if you want to catch up, The Ringer has an overview). Eugenia is the one person I know who understands the full context for this so she and I have been passing the proverbial popcorn back and forth.Jedi: Survivor was on sale and despite the fact it isn’t marked as being fully compatible with the Steam Deck (not to mention that I’ve finished the game on the Xbox), I picked it up. The game does run but the graphics aren’t as good as they are on the Xbox. Not a surprise of course but it did renew my disappointment that the Steam Deck’s manufacturer, Valve, didn’t announce a proper successor in their recent Steam hardware announcement (YouTube). It’s especially odd, I thought, given how many years ago the original Steam Deck was released. Then I looked it up (Wikipedia) and was extremely surprised to see it was 2022. I mean that’s not that recent but it’s much less than I thought it was.I continued to spend a decent amount of time using Claude to work on my programming projects. I don’t always find the code Claude generates to be what I need but I still enjoy using it. So often, merely having a tool I can use to ask questions about the codebase I’m working on has been extremely encouraging. This week, I finished adding the ‘enhance’ command I wrote about previously.My positive experience with Claude for coding has made me wonder if I should try using it as an aide to my Japanese study (which, er, is not going very well). The difficulty I have studying Japanese is not exactly the same as the difficulty I can have being motivated to write code but, if you squint, there are some similarities and maybe it would have similar results. Of course, there is the reliability problem. With software, you can create tests to make sure everything performs the way you expect it to; I’m not sure what the analogue would be (or even could be) for language learning.I watched Jumanji with the kids after finding the Japanese translation of the picture book in our local library. I looked it up on Letterboxd and I watched this back in 2022; Emma and John were alive then so maybe I watched it with them but neither remembered it when they started watching this time around. I stand by my review.I probably should link to something else from 2022 to cap this off but life isn’t so neat so forgive me for linking to the Wombats’ ‘Lemon to a Knife Fight’ from 2018 (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "On Sunday, I took John and Rowan to the Science Museum that’s located in Kitanomaru Park. There was a fair amount to see but the Japanese was difficult for me to understand (given it was pretty heavy on scientific terminology) so it was a little challenging to explain some of the exhibits to the boys. I’d like to go back again with Eri and Emma.
Various news outlets in Japan (such as The Mainichi) reported that the Japanese Government plans to substantially raise the fees for visa applications next fiscal year (i.e. from April). I’ve been putting off getting permanent residency for years at this point but this might be the kick in the pants I finally need to get this done sometime in the next couple of months.
I wish I could say I was bigger than this but I’ve been following the drama involving the journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza (if you want to catch up, The Ringer has an overview). Eugenia is the one person I know who understands the full context for this so she and I have been passing the proverbial popcorn back and forth.
Jedi: Survivor was on sale and despite the fact it isn’t marked as being fully compatible with the Steam Deck (not to mention that I’ve finished the game on the Xbox), I picked it up. The game does run but the graphics aren’t as good as they are on the Xbox. Not a surprise of course but it did renew my disappointment that the Steam Deck’s manufacturer, Valve, didn’t announce a proper successor in their recent Steam hardware announcement (YouTube). It’s especially odd, I thought, given how many years ago the original Steam Deck was released. Then I looked it up (Wikipedia) and was extremely surprised to see it was 2022. I mean that’s not that recent but it’s much less than I thought it was.
I continued to spend a decent amount of time using Claude to work on my programming projects. I don’t always find the code Claude generates to be what I need but I still enjoy using it. So often, merely having a tool I can use to ask questions about the codebase I’m working on has been extremely encouraging. This week, I finished adding the ‘enhance’ command I wrote about previously.
My positive experience with Claude for coding has made me wonder if I should try using it as an aide to my Japanese study (which, er, is not going very well). The difficulty I have studying Japanese is not exactly the same as the difficulty I can have being motivated to write code but, if you squint, there are some similarities and maybe it would have similar results. Of course, there is the reliability problem. With software, you can create tests to make sure everything performs the way you expect it to; I’m not sure what the analogue would be (or even could be) for language learning.
I watched Jumanji with the kids after finding the Japanese translation of the picture book in our local library. I looked it up on Letterboxd and I watched this back in 2022; Emma and John were alive then so maybe I watched it with them but neither remembered it when they started watching this time around. I stand by my review.
I probably should link to something else from 2022 to cap this off but life isn’t so neat so forgive me for linking to the Wombats’ ‘Lemon to a Knife Fight’ from 2018 (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1764079320.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-11-25T23:02:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-11-25T23:02:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1763476920.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #305",
"content_text": "Rowan wanted to go out somewhere on the weekend but I was tuckered out so I offered him a trip to the MOS Burger in Ōizumi-gakuen and he took it. We missed the bus and, since I hate waiting at bus stops, we ran three stops ‘up’ the road to our destination before I decided I’d tempted fate enough. I say ‘we ran’ but it was me running while Rowan sat on my shoulders. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do that.After much gnashing of teeth, I got Jeep’s test suite to run successfully on Windows. I tried for a while to avoid running the Windows virtual machine I have on the Mac but after a dozen or so failed runs of a GitHub Workflow, I finally gave in. I am pleased to report that I now have a pretty generic GitHub Workflow that runs all of the files in a project’s ./test directory across Linux, macOS and Windows.The Apple TV updated itself to tvOS 2026 so I guess I now have one device in the house running Liquid Glass.A couple of weeks ago I started showing the kids Futurama. It’s more risqué than I remembered and that was getting a bit awkward so I switched over to Mr Bean. I worried that the low-quality nature of videos would put them off but so far the biggest impediment has been their lack of familiarity with what life was like in the 1990s. In a sketch that revolved around Mr Bean trying to get decent reception on his television, for example, they were extremely confused at the problem confronting Bean. You’re meant to infer that he’s having difficulty watching television because you hear the sound of static as he sits down to watch the TV (which they only show you from behind) but they’ve never heard TV static before and so were completely lost as to what was going on. Once I explained it (by showing them a YouTube video of what static looked and sounded like) they understood it better.I watched Edge of Tomorrow with John and Rowan. I was a little worried about the level of violence but it’s not an especially gory movie and the fact Tom Cruise’s character ‘resets’ whenever he dies made it seem more acceptable. I feel like you could argue the opposite, though, and claim that I am desensitising my children to the gruesome nature of killing. Feel free to sound off in the comments and don’t forget to like and subscribe.Speaking of YouTube, Patrick Willems has a video essay about legacy sequels that I wish was shorter. There’s a great section where he compares the fourth movie in the Scream franchise (titled Scream 4) and the fifth movie (titled Scream). Willems’s contention is that Scream 4 is an example of what legacy sequels looked like before Hollywood understood how to make them. I thought this part was fantastic and wish it had been the bulk of the video so that I could recommend you watch a tight 15-minute video instead of a… well, it’s not bloated but it’s 57 minutes and who has that time? I mean, me obviously.Parov Stelar (Wikipedia) has a new album out that I should link to but as often seems to be the case, its existence prompted me to go back and listen to ‘Catgroove’ (Apple Music) from the Coco, Pt. 2 album. I was trying to remember how I came across this but came up short.",
"content_html": "Rowan wanted to go out somewhere on the weekend but I was tuckered out so I offered him a trip to the MOS Burger in Ōizumi-gakuen and he took it. We missed the bus and, since I hate waiting at bus stops, we ran three stops ‘up’ the road to our destination before I decided I’d tempted fate enough. I say ‘we ran’ but it was me running while Rowan sat on my shoulders. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do that.
After much gnashing of teeth, I got Jeep’s test suite to run successfully on Windows. I tried for a while to avoid running the Windows virtual machine I have on the Mac but after a dozen or so failed runs of a GitHub Workflow, I finally gave in. I am pleased to report that I now have a pretty generic GitHub Workflow that runs all of the files in a project’s ./test directory across Linux, macOS and Windows.
The Apple TV updated itself to tvOS 2026 so I guess I now have one device in the house running Liquid Glass.
A couple of weeks ago I started showing the kids Futurama. It’s more risqué than I remembered and that was getting a bit awkward so I switched over to Mr Bean. I worried that the low-quality nature of videos would put them off but so far the biggest impediment has been their lack of familiarity with what life was like in the 1990s. In a sketch that revolved around Mr Bean trying to get decent reception on his television, for example, they were extremely confused at the problem confronting Bean. You’re meant to infer that he’s having difficulty watching television because you hear the sound of static as he sits down to watch the TV (which they only show you from behind) but they’ve never heard TV static before and so were completely lost as to what was going on. Once I explained it (by showing them a YouTube video of what static looked and sounded like) they understood it better.
I watched Edge of Tomorrow with John and Rowan. I was a little worried about the level of violence but it’s not an especially gory movie and the fact Tom Cruise’s character ‘resets’ whenever he dies made it seem more acceptable. I feel like you could argue the opposite, though, and claim that I am desensitising my children to the gruesome nature of killing. Feel free to sound off in the comments and don’t forget to like and subscribe.
Speaking of YouTube, Patrick Willems has a video essay about legacy sequels that I wish was shorter. There’s a great section where he compares the fourth movie in the Scream franchise (titled Scream 4) and the fifth movie (titled Scream). Willems’s contention is that Scream 4 is an example of what legacy sequels looked like before Hollywood understood how to make them. I thought this part was fantastic and wish it had been the bulk of the video so that I could recommend you watch a tight 15-minute video instead of a… well, it’s not bloated but it’s 57 minutes and who has that time? I mean, me obviously.
Parov Stelar (Wikipedia) has a new album out that I should link to but as often seems to be the case, its existence prompted me to go back and listen to ‘Catgroove’ (Apple Music) from the Coco, Pt. 2 album. I was trying to remember how I came across this but came up short.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1763476920.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-11-18T23:42:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-11-18T23:42:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1762867080.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #304",
"content_text": "After meaning to do this for literally months, I finally went over to a hardware shop and picked up a set of ‘level difference slopes’ (three to be precise) that are commonly used in Japan to make a smooth incline from the road to the driveway in front of a house. We don’t have a car but we do have bicycles and without these kind of slopes, the bump as the bicycle leaps up from the road onto the driveway can be quite violent.I was thinking of doing something more exciting on the weekend but Rowan started complaining about a sore throat and so Eri spent a good deal of Saturday afternoon waiting at the nearby ENT clinic. He wasn’t complaining by Sunday so it might have been something else.Speaking of Rowan, he saw John playing Reading Eggs and expressed a desire to try it out. The main ‘course’ is meant for children from ages 3–7 so I set it up on his iPad and he’s spent the past week playing through the first ‘stage’. I’m surprised how well he’s been able to follow the instructions. He does ask for help pretty regularly but, if I’m being honest, I thought he would have quit almost immediately once he realised it was educational.I watched a terrific Law & Order episode: ‘Inherent Bias’ (Season 24, Episode 18). I wrote back in June about the show having got a lot better and, well, I wasn’t wrong. It’s a lot better. This one was the perfect blend of mystery, drama and legal issues. I don’t know if anyone else but me is watching it but I hope so as it feels like they’ve got this revised formula working incredibly well. You can’t honestly say it’s all because of Maura Tierney but you can’t not say it’s all because of Maura Tierney.I got Jeep, my bundle manager for the Janet programming language, to the point where it has all the subcommands I wrote down in my original plan for it. I had intended to stop there but my friend sogaiu mentioned that it would be good to have a subcommand that would convert the older style of bundle to the newer style. The obvious name for such a subcommand is ‘convert’ but I’ve been doing my best to have each subcommand begin with a different letter and there’s already a command that begins with C (clean). I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and among its suggestions was ‘enhance’. As a child who grew up the 80s and 90s, I don’t see how I can pass up the opportunity to add a command called ‘enhance’ to a computer program.Long time readers of these updates will know that I consider myself something of a connoisseur of acoustic cover versions of songs so I was shocked to discover Patti Smith has an incredible cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ that I’d somehow never heard before (Apple Music). It’s from her album Twelve. This information isn’t in the Wikipedia entry so take it with a graint of salt, I guess, but apparently the album was made at the behest of her record label as a means (at least from the label’s perspective) of cashing in on the attention Smith received in 2007 when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Great job, Columbia.",
"content_html": "After meaning to do this for literally months, I finally went over to a hardware shop and picked up a set of ‘level difference slopes’ (three to be precise) that are commonly used in Japan to make a smooth incline from the road to the driveway in front of a house. We don’t have a car but we do have bicycles and without these kind of slopes, the bump as the bicycle leaps up from the road onto the driveway can be quite violent.
I was thinking of doing something more exciting on the weekend but Rowan started complaining about a sore throat and so Eri spent a good deal of Saturday afternoon waiting at the nearby ENT clinic. He wasn’t complaining by Sunday so it might have been something else.
Speaking of Rowan, he saw John playing Reading Eggs and expressed a desire to try it out. The main ‘course’ is meant for children from ages 3–7 so I set it up on his iPad and he’s spent the past week playing through the first ‘stage’. I’m surprised how well he’s been able to follow the instructions. He does ask for help pretty regularly but, if I’m being honest, I thought he would have quit almost immediately once he realised it was educational.
I watched a terrific Law & Order episode: ‘Inherent Bias’ (Season 24, Episode 18). I wrote back in June about the show having got a lot better and, well, I wasn’t wrong. It’s a lot better. This one was the perfect blend of mystery, drama and legal issues. I don’t know if anyone else but me is watching it but I hope so as it feels like they’ve got this revised formula working incredibly well. You can’t honestly say it’s all because of Maura Tierney but you can’t not say it’s all because of Maura Tierney.
I got Jeep, my bundle manager for the Janet programming language, to the point where it has all the subcommands I wrote down in my original plan for it. I had intended to stop there but my friend sogaiu mentioned that it would be good to have a subcommand that would convert the older style of bundle to the newer style. The obvious name for such a subcommand is ‘convert’ but I’ve been doing my best to have each subcommand begin with a different letter and there’s already a command that begins with C (clean). I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and among its suggestions was ‘enhance’. As a child who grew up the 80s and 90s, I don’t see how I can pass up the opportunity to add a command called ‘enhance’ to a computer program.
Long time readers of these updates will know that I consider myself something of a connoisseur of acoustic cover versions of songs so I was shocked to discover Patti Smith has an incredible cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ that I’d somehow never heard before (Apple Music). It’s from her album Twelve. This information isn’t in the Wikipedia entry so take it with a graint of salt, I guess, but apparently the album was made at the behest of her record label as a means (at least from the label’s perspective) of cashing in on the attention Smith received in 2007 when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Great job, Columbia.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1762867080.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-11-11T22:18:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-11-11T22:18:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1762267200.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #303",
"content_text": "It was another long weekend; this one celebrating Culture Day (Wikipedia). We didn’t do anything particularly cultural this year, instead I took Rowan to the barber and then rewarded him being able to sit through it all by taking him to MOS Burger and then on the N700S (Wikipedia) to Shin-Yokohama. The shinkansen leg of the outing was surprisingly difficult. I knew that the Nozomi trains are a mixture of N700As and N700Ss but I didn’t appreciate how many more N700As there are until waiting especially to catch an N700S.I haven’t been doing a great job with the dieting for the past few months but things have progressed much better over the past week. I’m settling back into the 23/42 groove that Eugenia suggested to me. As of this morning, I’m down to 67.3kg after flirting with 70 a week or so ago.I was talking to a colleague about writing concise e-mails and how much longer they can take than ones where you just spill your proverbial guts. During the conversation, I referenced the famous ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’ quote and attributed it to Mark Twain. It sounds like something he would have said but in a fortunate coincidence, Apple blogger extraordinaire John Gruber happened to reference it the other day, correctly attributing it to Blaise Pascal of all people.As a person who opens LinkedIn from time to time, I very much appreciate Matt Ballantine’s LinkedIn Wisdom Generator (via).A month ago I declared bankruptcy on my unread RSS items and open tabs. I’m afraid to say that I may need to do the same for podcasts. I now have almost a hundred episodes of various shows backed up and the number keeps growing.I think I might finally be at the point where I’m ready to go back to do more work on Grapple. I put it to one side while I kept polishing Jeep and Predoc but it feels like those are closer to being ‘done’ (for now). Although as I write that I remember that Jeep doesn’t have a new command and that I did want to add that to it.This video from Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball about Victor Wembanyama did very nearly get me to sign up for NBA League Pass. Then I remembered I had almost a hundred podcast episodes not to mention Law & Order, Only Murders in the Building, Slow Horses, Poker Face, Matlock and Murderbot queued up to watch. Maybe when the play-offs roll around next year.John and I have been playing Minecraft: Dungeons together and it’s been fun. It wears its Diablo influence pretty plainly (if a bit pixelated) on its sleeve but with all the rough edges of the 90s buffed to the kind of sheen you’d expect in 2025. John, of course, has no idea of this lineage and so is slightly dumfounded why I’m so comfortable playing the game when I clearly know so little about Minecraft.I was whinging to Brandon about Gracie Abrams (I was overly proud of the epithet ‘Diet Taylor’) but then of course I listened to more of her music and ‘That’s So True’ (Apple Music) lodged itself firmly in my brain.",
"content_html": "It was another long weekend; this one celebrating Culture Day (Wikipedia). We didn’t do anything particularly cultural this year, instead I took Rowan to the barber and then rewarded him being able to sit through it all by taking him to MOS Burger and then on the N700S (Wikipedia) to Shin-Yokohama. The shinkansen leg of the outing was surprisingly difficult. I knew that the Nozomi trains are a mixture of N700As and N700Ss but I didn’t appreciate how many more N700As there are until waiting especially to catch an N700S.
I haven’t been doing a great job with the dieting for the past few months but things have progressed much better over the past week. I’m settling back into the 23/42 groove that Eugenia suggested to me. As of this morning, I’m down to 67.3kg after flirting with 70 a week or so ago.
I was talking to a colleague about writing concise e-mails and how much longer they can take than ones where you just spill your proverbial guts. During the conversation, I referenced the famous ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’ quote and attributed it to Mark Twain. It sounds like something he would have said but in a fortunate coincidence, Apple blogger extraordinaire John Gruber happened to reference it the other day, correctly attributing it to Blaise Pascal of all people.
As a person who opens LinkedIn from time to time, I very much appreciate Matt Ballantine’s LinkedIn Wisdom Generator (via).
A month ago I declared bankruptcy on my unread RSS items and open tabs. I’m afraid to say that I may need to do the same for podcasts. I now have almost a hundred episodes of various shows backed up and the number keeps growing.
I think I might finally be at the point where I’m ready to go back to do more work on Grapple. I put it to one side while I kept polishing Jeep and Predoc but it feels like those are closer to being ‘done’ (for now). Although as I write that I remember that Jeep doesn’t have a new command and that I did want to add that to it.
This video from Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball about Victor Wembanyama did very nearly get me to sign up for NBA League Pass. Then I remembered I had almost a hundred podcast episodes not to mention Law & Order, Only Murders in the Building, Slow Horses, Poker Face, Matlock and Murderbot queued up to watch. Maybe when the play-offs roll around next year.
John and I have been playing Minecraft: Dungeons together and it’s been fun. It wears its Diablo influence pretty plainly (if a bit pixelated) on its sleeve but with all the rough edges of the 90s buffed to the kind of sheen you’d expect in 2025. John, of course, has no idea of this lineage and so is slightly dumfounded why I’m so comfortable playing the game when I clearly know so little about Minecraft.
I was whinging to Brandon about Gracie Abrams (I was overly proud of the epithet ‘Diet Taylor’) but then of course I listened to more of her music and ‘That’s So True’ (Apple Music) lodged itself firmly in my brain.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1762267200.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-11-04T23:40:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-11-04T23:40:00+09:00"
}]
}
![Wikipedia](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Woltze#/media/File:Berthold_Woltze_-_Der_l%C3%A4stige_Kavalier.jpg\"){kind=link}
![Wikipedia](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Woltze#/media/File:Berthold_Woltze_-_Der_Brief.jpg\"){kind=link}