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"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1761657300.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #302",
"content_text": "Japan has its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi (ABC News). Her mentor was the late Shinzo Abe and she’s indicated that she wants to hew more closely to his policies.Saturday and Sunday were miserable weather-wise. This was especially a shame on Sunday because that the annual Shakujii Shōtengai Hallowe’en Parade. It was an especial shame because I think it’s not looking like there’s any trick or treating in the area where we live. There wasn’t much in our previous place but the little old lady at the end of our floor did have a sign out (for whatever reason) and so the kids had one place they could visit.I briefly lost my keys. I’m still not exactly sure how it happened but they must have fallen out of my pocket as I was walking home from the supermarket on Sunday. I realised they were gone as soon as I got home and then quickly went back out again to retrace my steps. I fortunately found them about halfway between the house and the supermarket.John was having trouble sleeping earlier in the week and I thought I would try reading to him. My initial plan was to buy the Kindle version of the Minecraft novelisation but it didn’t show up when I searched for it (it does exist) so I bought Minecraft: The Island instead (Amazon Japan). The cover prominently notes that the author, Max Brooks, is the author of World War Z. What I didn’t realise until looking him up on Wikipedia is that he’s the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft (Wikipedia).During a conversation earlier this week, I wanted to credit the aphorism that ‘news is what somebody does not want you to print; all the rest is advertising’ to George Orwell but hesitated, suspecting that this might be a misattribution. It turns out it is (Quote Investigator).Since we’re not going back to Australia this Christmas, I’ve started thinking about what we’ll do instead. Christmas Day is unfortunately the last day of the school year and for various reasons the kids need to be there so while I did wonder about a trip to Disneyland, that won’t be on the cards. The father of one of the families we are friends with is Canadian and I did think about having a Boxing Day Party on 26 December with the joke being that I’m only inviting people who know what that is.I sometimes despair at the level of acclaim awarded to Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film, The Departed. Not because I think it’s a bad film—honestly, I saw it once in the cinema and haven’t watched it again. My antipathy comes from the fact I loved the film it remakes, the 2002 Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs (Wikipedia). I was therefore exactly the target audience for a video essay comparing the two films on the YouTube channel, Just One More Thing. The essayist doesn’t dislike Scorsese’s adaptation but he does (to me correctly) point out some of the ways in which Infernal Affairs is superior.Eri and the children are quite fond of a song that’s sometimes played on NHK Education TV’s 0655 morning programme. The song, ‘Ta.Tsu.Ko.Ta.Tsu’ (Apple Music), is an extended pun about a dragon who sits at a kotatsu. Unfortunately, part of what makes the song so good is the minimalist animation that accompanies it and which NHK does not make available on a platform like YouTube. You can get a taste of it in an ad that was made to promote the picture book that the song spawned (YouTube).",
"content_html": "Japan has its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi (ABC News). Her mentor was the late Shinzo Abe and she’s indicated that she wants to hew more closely to his policies.
Saturday and Sunday were miserable weather-wise. This was especially a shame on Sunday because that the annual Shakujii Shōtengai Hallowe’en Parade. It was an especial shame because I think it’s not looking like there’s any trick or treating in the area where we live. There wasn’t much in our previous place but the little old lady at the end of our floor did have a sign out (for whatever reason) and so the kids had one place they could visit.
I briefly lost my keys. I’m still not exactly sure how it happened but they must have fallen out of my pocket as I was walking home from the supermarket on Sunday. I realised they were gone as soon as I got home and then quickly went back out again to retrace my steps. I fortunately found them about halfway between the house and the supermarket.
John was having trouble sleeping earlier in the week and I thought I would try reading to him. My initial plan was to buy the Kindle version of the Minecraft novelisation but it didn’t show up when I searched for it (it does exist) so I bought Minecraft: The Island instead (Amazon Japan). The cover prominently notes that the author, Max Brooks, is the author of World War Z. What I didn’t realise until looking him up on Wikipedia is that he’s the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft (Wikipedia).
During a conversation earlier this week, I wanted to credit the aphorism that ‘news is what somebody does not want you to print; all the rest is advertising’ to George Orwell but hesitated, suspecting that this might be a misattribution. It turns out it is (Quote Investigator).
Since we’re not going back to Australia this Christmas, I’ve started thinking about what we’ll do instead. Christmas Day is unfortunately the last day of the school year and for various reasons the kids need to be there so while I did wonder about a trip to Disneyland, that won’t be on the cards. The father of one of the families we are friends with is Canadian and I did think about having a Boxing Day Party on 26 December with the joke being that I’m only inviting people who know what that is.
I sometimes despair at the level of acclaim awarded to Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film, The Departed. Not because I think it’s a bad film—honestly, I saw it once in the cinema and haven’t watched it again. My antipathy comes from the fact I loved the film it remakes, the 2002 Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs (Wikipedia). I was therefore exactly the target audience for a video essay comparing the two films on the YouTube channel, Just One More Thing. The essayist doesn’t dislike Scorsese’s adaptation but he does (to me correctly) point out some of the ways in which Infernal Affairs is superior.
Eri and the children are quite fond of a song that’s sometimes played on NHK Education TV’s 0655 morning programme. The song, ‘Ta.Tsu.Ko.Ta.Tsu’ (Apple Music), is an extended pun about a dragon who sits at a kotatsu. Unfortunately, part of what makes the song so good is the minimalist animation that accompanies it and which NHK does not make available on a platform like YouTube. You can get a taste of it in an ad that was made to promote the picture book that the song spawned (YouTube).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1761657300.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-10-28T22:15:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-10-28T22:15:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1761056700.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #301",
"content_text": "I took the boys out on Saturday. My initial plan was to get around to Shinagawa where we’d be able to catch the Tokkaidō Shinkansen back to Tokyo Station. However, John complained about a stomach pain when as the train we were on was approaching Meiji Jingu-mae and I decided why not visit the station’s namesake (Wikipedia)? About 20 minutes later we were walking through a decently sized crowd of people through Yoyogi Park to the shrine itself. I feel this is the part where I’m supposed to note how many more foreign tourists there are in Tokyo these days but my recollection of previous visits to Meiji Shrine is that there are always a lot of people.A week or so ago, I noticed that one of the soles of my black leather shoes had a pretty serious hole that didn’t look like it could be repaired. I bought these shoes in November 2018 and while that’s a bit disappointing, I mostly blame myself for not getting them resoled more proactively. I’m a complete convert to Ecco’s waterproofed shoes and found a cheap(ish) pair of one of their older designs. It was ¥18,700 but that’s better than the ¥27,00 I paid back in 2018 and if I can keep the soles in decent condition, hopefully they’ll last longer this time around.A few months back I discovered a salad place, WithGreen, over near Yurakucho Station. The food is overpriced—¥1500 or so for a medium-sized bowl—but I was desperate enough for a decent salad that I walked over there on one of their days I was in the office. Oporto and decent salads are the two things that are easy to buy in Australia but non-existent in Japan. With that in mind, I recommend the Red Chilli Chicken Cob Salad if you can stomach the price (I am legally permitted to make these jokes).One of those websites that makes the world a better place is Quote Investigator. They had a great investigation into the saying ’We die twice: first, when we cease to be; second, when we are forgotten’. They credit the basic concept to Roman philosopher Boethius (Wikipedia) and the English phrasing to a character in the 1863 novel Barbara’s History by Amelia Edwards (Wikipedia).A few weeks back I linked to a video essay by YouTuber T1J (AKA The 1 Janitor) about Seinfeld’s Elaine. He has another one (this one 36 minutes in length) on the sitcom trope of having an episode that shows the same basic story across two or more alternate realities. The essay uses examples from Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle and Community. It’s very well done and highly recommended if you’re a fan of sitcoms.Rowan put an episode from season 3 of Floor is Lava (Netflix) on and I watched it properly for the first time. It’s pretty fun! I’m now disappointed that it doesn’t seem like Netflix is making any more episodes.I’ve spent a lot of time this week listening to ‘Promises’, the 2018 collaboration between Calvin Harris and Sam Smith (Apple Music). The song comes from the late 2010s when Harris released a string of non-album singles like ‘One Kiss’ and ‘Giant’. I find it a frustrating listen, with an ending that always feels sudden. But maybe that’s the genius of it? When it does abruptly come to a close, I find myself empty. Not unlike a fast food meal that leaves you hungry and eating more than you need.",
"content_html": "I took the boys out on Saturday. My initial plan was to get around to Shinagawa where we’d be able to catch the Tokkaidō Shinkansen back to Tokyo Station. However, John complained about a stomach pain when as the train we were on was approaching Meiji Jingu-mae and I decided why not visit the station’s namesake (Wikipedia)? About 20 minutes later we were walking through a decently sized crowd of people through Yoyogi Park to the shrine itself. I feel this is the part where I’m supposed to note how many more foreign tourists there are in Tokyo these days but my recollection of previous visits to Meiji Shrine is that there are always a lot of people.
A week or so ago, I noticed that one of the soles of my black leather shoes had a pretty serious hole that didn’t look like it could be repaired. I bought these shoes in November 2018 and while that’s a bit disappointing, I mostly blame myself for not getting them resoled more proactively. I’m a complete convert to Ecco’s waterproofed shoes and found a cheap(ish) pair of one of their older designs. It was ¥18,700 but that’s better than the ¥27,00 I paid back in 2018 and if I can keep the soles in decent condition, hopefully they’ll last longer this time around.
A few months back I discovered a salad place, WithGreen, over near Yurakucho Station. The food is overpriced—¥1500 or so for a medium-sized bowl—but I was desperate enough for a decent salad that I walked over there on one of their days I was in the office. Oporto and decent salads are the two things that are easy to buy in Australia but non-existent in Japan. With that in mind, I recommend the Red Chilli Chicken Cob Salad if you can stomach the price (I am legally permitted to make these jokes).
One of those websites that makes the world a better place is Quote Investigator. They had a great investigation into the saying ’We die twice: first, when we cease to be; second, when we are forgotten’. They credit the basic concept to Roman philosopher Boethius (Wikipedia) and the English phrasing to a character in the 1863 novel Barbara’s History by Amelia Edwards (Wikipedia).
A few weeks back I linked to a video essay by YouTuber T1J (AKA The 1 Janitor) about Seinfeld’s Elaine. He has another one (this one 36 minutes in length) on the sitcom trope of having an episode that shows the same basic story across two or more alternate realities. The essay uses examples from Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle and Community. It’s very well done and highly recommended if you’re a fan of sitcoms.
Rowan put an episode from season 3 of Floor is Lava (Netflix) on and I watched it properly for the first time. It’s pretty fun! I’m now disappointed that it doesn’t seem like Netflix is making any more episodes.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week listening to ‘Promises’, the 2018 collaboration between Calvin Harris and Sam Smith (Apple Music). The song comes from the late 2010s when Harris released a string of non-album singles like ‘One Kiss’ and ‘Giant’. I find it a frustrating listen, with an ending that always feels sudden. But maybe that’s the genius of it? When it does abruptly come to a close, I find myself empty. Not unlike a fast food meal that leaves you hungry and eating more than you need.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1761056700.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-10-21T23:25:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-10-21T23:25:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1760451180.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #300",
"content_text": "Issue #300!Monday was Sports Day, which is officially the スポーツの日 but which I insist on referring to in Japanese as 体育の日 (Wikipedia). That made it a three-day weekend and I did a separate thing on each day with each child:On Saturday, I went with Rowan to Asobono. We went relatively late in the afternoon and so basically had to turn around and come home as soon as we were finished there (much to Rowan’s regret).On Sunday, I took John bowling. I did not think this through properly and realised only after we got into the alley itself (which was after waiting 90 minutes) that all of the bowling balls were too heavy for John. They did have bumpers that at least allowed him to not constantly roll his ball into the gutter but it wasn’t quite the event I had hoped it would be. Fortunately, the bowling alley we attended had a small game arcade and John was able to play a couple of rounds of the arcade version of Minecraft Dungeons.On Monday, Emma and I went to see the Pretty Cure movie. Regular readers might remember that I had bought a ticket with Rowan back in mid-September but that the noise had been too much and so I’d had to exit early. What I’d seen in the first 10 minutes didn’t especially grab me and I had worried the 70-minute running time would feel more like infinity. Fortunately, that was not the case! Eri had told me she thought it was much better than she’d been expecting and I have to agree.I managed to fast for 42 hours across Saturday and Sunday. Yay!During the early months of the pandemic, I released a Janet library called Musty. Musty was an incomplete implementation of the Mustache templating language that uses Janet’s parser expression grammar (PEG) engine. I say ‘incomplete’ because Musty did not fully support the Mustache specification. I found it too difficult to get something working with PEGs that could also handle custom delimiters and partials. Five a bit years later I got a request to add support for partials. I took this as the impetus to rewrite the entire thing as a handwritten recursive descent parser that now passes the mandatory parts of the Musty spec. I haven’t implemented the optional parts; I guess that’s what I’ll do in another five years.I bought a colour laser printer. It’s the Brother HL-L3240CDW and I’m hoping it maintains its colours and tone for a decent amount of time.A few years ago, Brandon mentioned the musician Sigrid in the context of her 2022 album, How to Let Go. I remember listening to it then and not feeling much at first. But after hearing an acoustic version of ‘It Gets Dark’ on an Apple Music home session EP that Sigrid recorded during the pandemic, I became a fan. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of There’s Always More That I Could Say for the past couple of months. It’s scheduled for release on 24 October 2025 but three of the singles are available to stream. I’ve been listening to them all a lot but but the one that’s stuck the firmest in my head is ‘Fort Knox’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Sanae Takaichi unexpectedly (or at least unexpectedly to me) won the LDP leadership contest (ABC News). Not sure precisely what this portends. It sounds like a more dovish monetary policy that is probably good for my mortgage in the short term but bad for the price inflation that Japan has been experiencing over the past couple of years.
I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time investigating password manager alternatives after my beloved Minimalist announced it was shutting down. I looked at a range of options (including Strongbox and self-hosted Bitwarden) but narrowed it down to Secrets or 1Password. Neither option fills me with excitement.
Secrets is in fact almost what I want. It is Apple-centric and has excellent native clients for iPhone, iPad and the Mac. It has beautiful animation flourishes and a level of polish to it that characterises the work of the best Apple indie devs. Alas, it has two flaws. First, it supports an anaemic number of categories. I use my password manager to hold all all my sensitive information (my login, credit card, bank account, cryptographic key, licence and passport details) and I want to be able to categorise those in a beautiful way. Second, I want to customise record details. Secrets doesn’t support this. It instead gives you a notes field that supports a flavour of Markdown that’s, well, better than nothing but nowhere near as nice as the standard of the rest of the app. It is a one-time purchase.
1Password is what I used to use. It’s the formerly beloved indie app darling that took VC money and then transformed into the exact thing you fear will happen when your beloved indie app darling takes VC money. It has clients for all platforms but it’s previously excellent native app has been replaced by a resource-guzzling Electron-based monster that uses 500MB of RAM. 500 megabytes! Half a gigabyte! To display text fields! It’s sent me e-mails welcoming me on my 1Password ‘journey’. It’s suggested I install a Safari extension to ‘streamline’ my ‘web browsing experience’. It is an annual subscription. And yet. And yet it has categories and customisable records. And so I’m almost certainly going to continue with it when my trial ends. The world is turning darker.
I declared tab and RSS bankruptcy (which is to say I closed all the tabs in my ‘to read’ Safari tab group and marked ‘all read’ in NetNewsWire). I am sorry to the writers of the blog posts that I will never read but such is life.
The bankruptcy was driven of course by the time I’ve spent recently working on programming projects. I spent a bit of time fixing things in Predoc and a bit of time fixing things in Jeep and a bit of time ‘modernising’ a number of my other Janet-related projects. I should not be doing this but I also went back to Grapple, an mREPL server I was working on at the end of last year. It was relatively close to completion when I put it down and I’m feeling like I can probably get it to a useful state without too much additional effort.
I experimented with using Claude Code in Zed rather than paying for credits to use with its API. It was nice not to worry about the cost but Zed isn’t able to remember conversations that you have with external agents (as opposed to chats you have via an API) and that’s a key reason I was using Zed in the first place.
I was surprised to find a new video from Freddie Wong (AKA freddiew) on the Rocket Jump YouTube channel. It was a nice reminder of why I like him so much. This kind of performative arrogance isn’t for everyone, though, so go in maybe knowing that.
Oasis released a 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and I’ve been quite taken with the acoustic version of the title track (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1759847700.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-10-07T23:35:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-10-07T23:35:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1759238280.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #298",
"content_text": "Tuesday was the Autumnal Equinox Day (Wikipedia) and Eri and I took the kids to the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno. Ostensibly, I wanted to see the Picasso exhibition of human figures they have set up in a room of their ordinary collection but it also put us in a convenient location to catch the shinkansen to Tokyo. Neither of those things are of particular interest to Emma or John but Ueno Park does have a semi-permanent spot set up in front of the zoo for a couple of vendors to sell kakigōri (Wikipedia) and they were excited about that. It was also still quite hot out and so when we did make our way over there, it was quite refreshing.We then went on the aforementioned shinkansen and this time it was the E7. That was Eri’s first time to catch a Tohoku shinkansen, a memory I’m sure she’ll treasure forever.I’m still popping my head into the local My Basket to see if they’ve seen the error of their ways and are stocking my beloved meat pies again. Alas, no. They do still have the cheese meat pies that I don’t like, sitting there and laughing at me as I walk past their frosted prison.It wasn’t all bad news on the food front. I discovered that the local Inageya supermarket is selling Granny Smith apples from New Zealand. Granny Smiths (Wikipedia)! I wrote back in 2022 of my surprise at learning that this type of apple was originally cultivated in Australia but had then pretty much given up on ever finding them in Japan. Not sure if I’ll see them again as I can’t imagine they’re going to be very appealing to the Japanese palate but I’m nevertheless glad the New Zealanders are trying to make them happen.Over the past few months, I’ve developed a workflow where I will explore a particular software codebase using an LLM I access through the code editor, Zed. Basically, I’ll open the project and then start asking questions. Working together with an LLM is what gave me the confidence to make my fork of the IRC client catgirl (which I need to make public) and it was what helped me fix a non-deterministic bug that was affecting Janet’s Windows implementation. This weekend, I decided to see how an LLM would go at generating an implementation of the SHA-1 algorithm (Wikipedia) for my pure Janet cryptographic hashing library, Digestive. Crazy stalkers might remember me developing this library back in 2023 and it’s slowly gnawed at me for two years that I never implemented anything after MD5. Well, in one of those ‘blow your mind’ moments, I pointed Claude’s 4.1 Opus Thinking model at it on Sunday and asked it to write the SHA-1 implementation. It didn’t get it right the first time but that was due to a handful of mistakes that meant the code wouldn’t run at all. Once I fixed those, I had the hash for the empty string. I then asked it to do SHA-2 with a 256-bit output and that time it did it in one-shot. I subsequently discovered that there were some bugs in those implementations but even with that caveat, I came away deeply impressed (I also eventually got it to produce a working SHA-3 implementation but that was more difficult). I hope to write up a fuller post about the whole experience soon.A couple of weeks ago I watched the frustratingly spelled KPop Demon Hunters with the kids (Netflix). As with many movie musicals, I did not immediately take to the music but it has grown on me over time and a great deal of the programming this weekend was soundtracked by the movie version of ‘Takedown’ (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Tuesday was the Autumnal Equinox Day (Wikipedia) and Eri and I took the kids to the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno. Ostensibly, I wanted to see the Picasso exhibition of human figures they have set up in a room of their ordinary collection but it also put us in a convenient location to catch the shinkansen to Tokyo. Neither of those things are of particular interest to Emma or John but Ueno Park does have a semi-permanent spot set up in front of the zoo for a couple of vendors to sell kakigōri (Wikipedia) and they were excited about that. It was also still quite hot out and so when we did make our way over there, it was quite refreshing.
We then went on the aforementioned shinkansen and this time it was the E7. That was Eri’s first time to catch a Tohoku shinkansen, a memory I’m sure she’ll treasure forever.
I’m still popping my head into the local My Basket to see if they’ve seen the error of their ways and are stocking my beloved meat pies again. Alas, no. They do still have the cheese meat pies that I don’t like, sitting there and laughing at me as I walk past their frosted prison.
It wasn’t all bad news on the food front. I discovered that the local Inageya supermarket is selling Granny Smith apples from New Zealand. Granny Smiths (Wikipedia)! I wrote back in 2022 of my surprise at learning that this type of apple was originally cultivated in Australia but had then pretty much given up on ever finding them in Japan. Not sure if I’ll see them again as I can’t imagine they’re going to be very appealing to the Japanese palate but I’m nevertheless glad the New Zealanders are trying to make them happen.
Over the past few months, I’ve developed a workflow where I will explore a particular software codebase using an LLM I access through the code editor, Zed. Basically, I’ll open the project and then start asking questions. Working together with an LLM is what gave me the confidence to make my fork of the IRC client catgirl (which I need to make public) and it was what helped me fix a non-deterministic bug that was affecting Janet’s Windows implementation. This weekend, I decided to see how an LLM would go at generating an implementation of the SHA-1 algorithm (Wikipedia) for my pure Janet cryptographic hashing library, Digestive. Crazy stalkers might remember me developing this library back in 2023 and it’s slowly gnawed at me for two years that I never implemented anything after MD5. Well, in one of those ‘blow your mind’ moments, I pointed Claude’s 4.1 Opus Thinking model at it on Sunday and asked it to write the SHA-1 implementation. It didn’t get it right the first time but that was due to a handful of mistakes that meant the code wouldn’t run at all. Once I fixed those, I had the hash for the empty string. I then asked it to do SHA-2 with a 256-bit output and that time it did it in one-shot. I subsequently discovered that there were some bugs in those implementations but even with that caveat, I came away deeply impressed (I also eventually got it to produce a working SHA-3 implementation but that was more difficult). I hope to write up a fuller post about the whole experience soon.
A couple of weeks ago I watched the frustratingly spelled KPop Demon Hunters with the kids (Netflix). As with many movie musicals, I did not immediately take to the music but it has grown on me over time and a great deal of the programming this weekend was soundtracked by the movie version of ‘Takedown’ (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1759238280.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-09-30T22:18:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-09-30T22:18:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1758637860.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #297",
"content_text": "I turned 43. Since I consider the Mac Mini and the iPad Air to have been quasi-birthday presents, I didn’t try to get anything more (e.g. AirPods Pro 3). That said, as is tradition, I did get the current Sweets Collection from Ginza Cozy Corner. It’s a set of nine pastries inspired by Sanrio’s stable of characters (Hello Kitty, Pompompurin, etc).I mentioned last week that Eri took Emma and John to see the latest Pretty Cure movie and that even though Rowan wanted to go and there was supposedly a theatre set up for young children, we didn’t let him go, too. Unsurprisingly, Emma and John wanted to see the movie again so on Monday, we gave it a go. Rowan lasted a bit longer than he did the last time but after about 10 minutes told me he wanted to go. Maybe next year.I framed the decision not to buy the AirPods Pro 3 as an exercise in mature self-restraint but it was partly due to the fact I got a free replacement AirPod (singular) courtesy of Apple Care+. This was my first time using Apple Care+ which I don’t normally get after Apple purchases but which I purchased with the AirPods Pro 2 after a history of issues with the non-Pro AirPods. After a brief chat with ‘Royce’, a new right AirPod was couriered over to me. I’m not sure the left one doesn’t need replacing too but the warranty lasts until May of next year so there’s still plenty of time for that.I finished Jedi: Survivor. As with Jedi: Fallen Order, I couldn’t manage to get past four of the bosses without turning the difficulty down. I do feel like this one was a bit more drawn out but I’m sure players who aren’t middle-aged fathers of three instead see this as more value for their money. According to Wikipedia, there’s a further sequel planned so I’m looking forward to the further adventures of Cal Kestis. Not sure what I’ll play next; I’ll probably give the Alters a fair shake but it’s apparently a survival game and I’ve never been especially interested in those.A few years ago, I wrote the overly long-named command-line utility, Documentarian. It provides a way to generate an API document for Janet’s legacy bundles by using the docstrings in the bundle’s modules. I’ve wanted to make it work with Janet’s modern bundles for a while and it occurred to me to build that functionality into Jeep, the bundle manager I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. This week I added it as jeep api.Legacy bundle? Modern bundle? What am I even talking about? I wrote a blog post to explain those very things.I watched two video essays that helped clarify what it sets the essayists I watch regularly apart. Patrick Willems has an essay about digital deaging that’s not his absolute best but sets up and prosecutes an argument against the use of digital deaging. It runs for 50 minutes. In comparison, the channel From the Screen has a 15-minute essay about Inside Man. Despite being more than three times as short, there’s very little to it. It makes the observation that Inside Man takes advantage of the expectations that the audience brings to a heist movie but then mostly just repeats that ad nauseam.My Friends Mix playlist on Apple Music included a track from Amnesiac this week because Brandon had been listening to it. What a great album (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "I turned 43. Since I consider the Mac Mini and the iPad Air to have been quasi-birthday presents, I didn’t try to get anything more (e.g. AirPods Pro 3). That said, as is tradition, I did get the current Sweets Collection from Ginza Cozy Corner. It’s a set of nine pastries inspired by Sanrio’s stable of characters (Hello Kitty, Pompompurin, etc).
I mentioned last week that Eri took Emma and John to see the latest Pretty Cure movie and that even though Rowan wanted to go and there was supposedly a theatre set up for young children, we didn’t let him go, too. Unsurprisingly, Emma and John wanted to see the movie again so on Monday, we gave it a go. Rowan lasted a bit longer than he did the last time but after about 10 minutes told me he wanted to go. Maybe next year.
I framed the decision not to buy the AirPods Pro 3 as an exercise in mature self-restraint but it was partly due to the fact I got a free replacement AirPod (singular) courtesy of Apple Care+. This was my first time using Apple Care+ which I don’t normally get after Apple purchases but which I purchased with the AirPods Pro 2 after a history of issues with the non-Pro AirPods. After a brief chat with ‘Royce’, a new right AirPod was couriered over to me. I’m not sure the left one doesn’t need replacing too but the warranty lasts until May of next year so there’s still plenty of time for that.
I finished Jedi: Survivor. As with Jedi: Fallen Order, I couldn’t manage to get past four of the bosses without turning the difficulty down. I do feel like this one was a bit more drawn out but I’m sure players who aren’t middle-aged fathers of three instead see this as more value for their money. According to Wikipedia, there’s a further sequel planned so I’m looking forward to the further adventures of Cal Kestis. Not sure what I’ll play next; I’ll probably give the Alters a fair shake but it’s apparently a survival game and I’ve never been especially interested in those.
A few years ago, I wrote the overly long-named command-line utility, Documentarian. It provides a way to generate an API document for Janet’s legacy bundles by using the docstrings in the bundle’s modules. I’ve wanted to make it work with Janet’s modern bundles for a while and it occurred to me to build that functionality into Jeep, the bundle manager I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. This week I added it as jeep api.
Legacy bundle? Modern bundle? What am I even talking about? I wrote a blog post to explain those very things.
I watched two video essays that helped clarify what it sets the essayists I watch regularly apart. Patrick Willems has an essay about digital deaging that’s not his absolute best but sets up and prosecutes an argument against the use of digital deaging. It runs for 50 minutes. In comparison, the channel From the Screen has a 15-minute essay about Inside Man. Despite being more than three times as short, there’s very little to it. It makes the observation that Inside Man takes advantage of the expectations that the audience brings to a heist movie but then mostly just repeats that ad nauseam.
My Friends Mix playlist on Apple Music included a track from Amnesiac this week because Brandon had been listening to it. What a great album (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1758637860.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-09-23T23:31:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-09-23T23:31:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1758032220.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #296",
"content_text": "I realise I haven’t written much about major news events recently. I have to admit that’s partly because some of the news has been so depressing that I’ve taken to greatly reducing my engagement with it. But even with that condition, it was remiss of me not to mention in the previous update that Shigeru Ishiba, the current Japanese Prime Minister, announced on Sunday 7 September that he will resign, presumably in early October (ABC News).On Tuesday in the U.S. (early Wednesday morning here), Apple announced the new iPhones. This included the much-rumoured iPhone Air. Despite my protestations to the contrary in previous updates, I thought about trying to reserve a model. With my usage, I don’t need a battery that lasts forever and I suspect the lens on the Air would be sufficient for me. And it would be fun to have a phone with a ‘fresh’ design. In the end, though, I decided to stand pat. My iPhone 14 Pro Max is getting increasingly long in the tooth but it still works and I’m happier having spent money on the Mac Mini and the iPad Air earlier this year.Apple also announced the new AirPods Pro 3. I’m more torn about these. I use my AirPods Pro 2 every day and, while very expensive compared to the cheapest earphones you can buy, I would immediately go out and buy a new pair if my current set disappeared. Supposedly the new ones are even better than these and mine recently started having issues charging that in my experience presages the need for a replacement. The thing is that, because they’re so expensive and because I know I use my AirPods enough that the battery inevitably stops working reliably, I uncharacteristically purchased AppleCare+ when I got these and so I possibly can get new pair of AirPods Pro 2 for either free/a small fee. That seems like the more responsible option.The Pretty Cure movie for this year, You and Idol Pretty Cure the Movie: For You! Our Kirakilala Concert (Wikipedia), came out on Friday and Eri took Emma and John to see it on Saturday. Rowan wanted to go to and the cinema near us did have a screening in their ‘young children’ theatre but I worried that might be a sub-optimal experience for Emma and John so figured they should go by themselves. Instead, I took Rowan to Asobono and then to MOS Burger for lunch.Now that Predoc is ‘working’ (for some degree of working), I went back to Jeep. It now has nice man pages for all its commands and those all (mostly) work. There are a couple more commands that I’d like to add and then I think it’ll have the basic set of features I think are necessary.Talking to people about Jeep led to me wanting a glossary of terms that are relevant for Janet’s bundles. That doesn’t exist officially so I wrote my own. It’s not meant to be comprehensive but sets out some terms that I hope will be useful for the community.Proving to myself that I am extremely white, I discovered that the man in the ‘Eddie Murphy tapping his head’ meme (i.e. this one) is not, in fact, Eddie Murphy. It’s the British actor Kayode Ewumi. He’s playing a character called ‘Roll Safe’ in the BBC Three mockumentary, Hood Documentary. You can watch the series via this playlist on BBC Three’s YouTube channel.There’s this phenomenon now where I hear songs that I feel are new but which came out years ago and which I almost certainly have heard. The latest example of this is Halsey’s ‘Bad at Love’ from her 2017 album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (Apple Music). I all but had it on repeat for a good portion of this week.",
"content_html": "I realise I haven’t written much about major news events recently. I have to admit that’s partly because some of the news has been so depressing that I’ve taken to greatly reducing my engagement with it. But even with that condition, it was remiss of me not to mention in the previous update that Shigeru Ishiba, the current Japanese Prime Minister, announced on Sunday 7 September that he will resign, presumably in early October (ABC News).
On Tuesday in the U.S. (early Wednesday morning here), Apple announced the new iPhones. This included the much-rumoured iPhone Air. Despite my protestations to the contrary in previous updates, I thought about trying to reserve a model. With my usage, I don’t need a battery that lasts forever and I suspect the lens on the Air would be sufficient for me. And it would be fun to have a phone with a ‘fresh’ design. In the end, though, I decided to stand pat. My iPhone 14 Pro Max is getting increasingly long in the tooth but it still works and I’m happier having spent money on the Mac Mini and the iPad Air earlier this year.
Apple also announced the new AirPods Pro 3. I’m more torn about these. I use my AirPods Pro 2 every day and, while very expensive compared to the cheapest earphones you can buy, I would immediately go out and buy a new pair if my current set disappeared. Supposedly the new ones are even better than these and mine recently started having issues charging that in my experience presages the need for a replacement. The thing is that, because they’re so expensive and because I know I use my AirPods enough that the battery inevitably stops working reliably, I uncharacteristically purchased AppleCare+ when I got these and so I possibly can get new pair of AirPods Pro 2 for either free/a small fee. That seems like the more responsible option.
The Pretty Cure movie for this year, You and Idol Pretty Cure the Movie: For You! Our Kirakilala Concert (Wikipedia), came out on Friday and Eri took Emma and John to see it on Saturday. Rowan wanted to go to and the cinema near us did have a screening in their ‘young children’ theatre but I worried that might be a sub-optimal experience for Emma and John so figured they should go by themselves. Instead, I took Rowan to Asobono and then to MOS Burger for lunch.
Now that Predoc is ‘working’ (for some degree of working), I went back to Jeep. It now has nice man pages for all its commands and those all (mostly) work. There are a couple more commands that I’d like to add and then I think it’ll have the basic set of features I think are necessary.
Talking to people about Jeep led to me wanting a glossary of terms that are relevant for Janet’s bundles. That doesn’t exist officially so I wrote my own. It’s not meant to be comprehensive but sets out some terms that I hope will be useful for the community.
Proving to myself that I am extremely white, I discovered that the man in the ‘Eddie Murphy tapping his head’ meme (i.e. this one) is not, in fact, Eddie Murphy. It’s the British actor Kayode Ewumi. He’s playing a character called ‘Roll Safe’ in the BBC Three mockumentary, Hood Documentary. You can watch the series via this playlist on BBC Three’s YouTube channel.
There’s this phenomenon now where I hear songs that I feel are new but which came out years ago and which I almost certainly have heard. The latest example of this is Halsey’s ‘Bad at Love’ from her 2017 album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (Apple Music). I all but had it on repeat for a good portion of this week.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1758032220.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-09-16T23:17:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-09-16T23:17:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1757429880.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #295",
"content_text": "I feel like I can check another item of the bucket list: I have now successfully left a backpack on a shinkansen. On Saturday, I took Rowan around to Tokyo Station to catch a shinkansen to Ueno Station. Rowan wanted to ride an E3 Series but none were scheduled so we made do with an E8. That’s the latest one JR East has introduced so Rowan was still happy to take it but in the rush to get off at Ueno, I forgot I’d put the backpack up in the overhead rack. I realised almost immediately but almost immediately doesn’t quite cut it when you’re dealing with a shinkansen. The station staff were able to make contact relatively quickly with one of the crew aboard the train and the backpack was put aside to be safely taken to Yamagata Station. After a trip back on Sunday to the Lost & Found Office, JR was able to get it delivered (payment-on-delivery) to our place by Monday.Last week I mentioned that I’d pushed out the v0.1.0 release of Predoc. This week, I put together a fancy website for it. If you follow that link you’ll see it’s not actually that fancy. But it does have the code I wrote running as a WebAssembly module. No compilation to JavaScript or anything gross like that: the Janet code I wrote is running in a version of Janet compiled to Wasm. It’s pretty neat! This is my first time ever making a proper website with WebAssembly and I was pleasantly surprised I could get the entire Janet runtime down to about 500KB. I need another project like a hole in the head but I am tempted to work on something that could simplify the process for other Janet users.I found I was using ChatGPT enough in the development of Predoc that I signed up for ChatGPT Plus. That’s the $20/month plan that gives you extended access to the newer models. So far it’s… fine. It’s nice not being told repeatedly that I’ve exceeded my time with the more expensive version of ChatGPT and have to make do with its less capable self. I was hoping I could hook it up to Zed but they don’t have an integration at the moment so no can do.In other A.I.-related news, I let the kids talk to Gemini using its ‘voice chat’ feature for a couple of night last week. John and Rowan were especially excited to talk to it: John happy to have someone who’d try to answer every question he had about Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog and Rowan for, of course, trains. I’m not comfortable with any of the kids interacting without supervision and so I made it a rule that they could only do it while I was there. I had to work late a couple of times towards the end of the week and after pleading with me to talk to it after the first night, there’s been nary a peep since. I might let that sleeping dog lie.One of my favourite video essayists, Lindsay Ellis, returned to YouTube for a video about empathy. It’s over 2 hours long but the time flew by for me. She still makes essays over on Nebula and it was a reminder that I should perhaps sign up for that.As good as Ellis’ video is, the video essay I liked the most this week was The 1 Janitor’s one about Elaine becoming a villain over the course of Seinfeld. It’s a much more manageable 37 minutes so no excuses!Back in 2021, my musical selection was Muse’s ‘Sunburn’. I don’t think I noticed it at the time but Apple Music threw up its hands trying to work out how the version of the album that song is from, Showbiz, matched up with the version in its library. If you’ve had this happen to you before, you’ll know that what Apple Music does is just mash together the version of the songs you have and the version it has, typically resulting in multiple copies of the same song. The only solution I’ve found it to delete the entire album from your library and then wait 6-12 months before adding it back. Well, I added Showbiz this week and was reminded again how fantastic it is (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "I feel like I can check another item of the bucket list: I have now successfully left a backpack on a shinkansen. On Saturday, I took Rowan around to Tokyo Station to catch a shinkansen to Ueno Station. Rowan wanted to ride an E3 Series but none were scheduled so we made do with an E8. That’s the latest one JR East has introduced so Rowan was still happy to take it but in the rush to get off at Ueno, I forgot I’d put the backpack up in the overhead rack. I realised almost immediately but almost immediately doesn’t quite cut it when you’re dealing with a shinkansen. The station staff were able to make contact relatively quickly with one of the crew aboard the train and the backpack was put aside to be safely taken to Yamagata Station. After a trip back on Sunday to the Lost & Found Office, JR was able to get it delivered (payment-on-delivery) to our place by Monday.
Last week I mentioned that I’d pushed out the v0.1.0 release of Predoc. This week, I put together a fancy website for it. If you follow that link you’ll see it’s not actually that fancy. But it does have the code I wrote running as a WebAssembly module. No compilation to JavaScript or anything gross like that: the Janet code I wrote is running in a version of Janet compiled to Wasm. It’s pretty neat! This is my first time ever making a proper website with WebAssembly and I was pleasantly surprised I could get the entire Janet runtime down to about 500KB. I need another project like a hole in the head but I am tempted to work on something that could simplify the process for other Janet users.
I found I was using ChatGPT enough in the development of Predoc that I signed up for ChatGPT Plus. That’s the $20/month plan that gives you extended access to the newer models. So far it’s… fine. It’s nice not being told repeatedly that I’ve exceeded my time with the more expensive version of ChatGPT and have to make do with its less capable self. I was hoping I could hook it up to Zed but they don’t have an integration at the moment so no can do.
In other A.I.-related news, I let the kids talk to Gemini using its ‘voice chat’ feature for a couple of night last week. John and Rowan were especially excited to talk to it: John happy to have someone who’d try to answer every question he had about Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog and Rowan for, of course, trains. I’m not comfortable with any of the kids interacting without supervision and so I made it a rule that they could only do it while I was there. I had to work late a couple of times towards the end of the week and after pleading with me to talk to it after the first night, there’s been nary a peep since. I might let that sleeping dog lie.
One of my favourite video essayists, Lindsay Ellis, returned to YouTube for a video about empathy. It’s over 2 hours long but the time flew by for me. She still makes essays over on Nebula and it was a reminder that I should perhaps sign up for that.
As good as Ellis’ video is, the video essay I liked the most this week was The 1 Janitor’s one about Elaine becoming a villain over the course of Seinfeld. It’s a much more manageable 37 minutes so no excuses!
Back in 2021, my musical selection was Muse’s ‘Sunburn’. I don’t think I noticed it at the time but Apple Music threw up its hands trying to work out how the version of the album that song is from, Showbiz, matched up with the version in its library. If you’ve had this happen to you before, you’ll know that what Apple Music does is just mash together the version of the songs you have and the version it has, typically resulting in multiple copies of the same song. The only solution I’ve found it to delete the entire album from your library and then wait 6-12 months before adding it back. Well, I added Showbiz this week and was reminded again how fantastic it is (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1757429880.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-09-09T23:58:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-09-09T23:58:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1756822260.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #294",
"content_text": "Summer technically wrapped up over the weekend but the temperatures are still around 36 or 37 degrees during the day and it’s apparently going to be extremely hot this weekend.I switched mobile phone providers again. This time I’ve gone from povo (where I was using the au network) to Linemo (on the SoftBank network). Linemo is the MVNO backed by the messaging app LINE. It’s technically styled ‘LINEMO’ and that’s the way my phone displays it on the lock screen. Every time I see it, it feels like I’m being bellowed at. Still, while that’s a bit aggravating, I am pleased with the prices. povo offered 30-day plans that offer 1GB, 3GB or 20GB of data. I need something between 3GB and 20GB and Linemo offers a 10GB plan that I’m hoping will save me about ¥500 or so a month. The nice thing is that if you don’t use more than 3GB, they just charge you the price for that plan instead.While saving a bit of money is nice, the real reason I did it was because I was hoping it would ‘fix’ the inability of my phone to use both of its e-SIMs at the same time. In addition to my Japanese e-SIM, I have an Australian e-SIM I can (in theory) have active at the same time. Back in July, I noticed that if I had the Australian one active, it would cause the Japanese one not to work. I wondered if it was because the Australian one was using the SoftBank network whereas the Japanese one was using au. Having switched to Linemo, I can report that wasn’t the answer. Despite the network change, the issue persists.All of this is making me wonder if I should upgrade my iPhone 14 this year (the new iPhones will be announced next week). I had not intended to do this (and indeed that was the reason I justified to myself buying the Mac Mini and the 13” iPad Air) but there are a number of niggles now that this phone is about to enter its fourth year of service. In addition to the e-SIM problem, I discovered the other day that the Lightning port is completely shot. I can’t charge over it or use it for data (which means I can’t pair it with Xcode).I cut the first official release of Predoc: v0.1.0. My optimism on the project has cooled a bit from where it was at the beginning of August. Software projects feel a bit like restaurants: most never catch on and in all likelihood this will be Predoc’s fate, too. Which is to say, I don’t think this will really get much usage. That said, I am still glad I worked on it and I hope to write about some of what I’ve learnt in one or two blog posts that share that information with other people. In particular, I’m proud of the GitHub workflow I wrote for creating pre-built binaries for Predoc releases. The workflow compiles Janet from source, installs my Janet bundle manager Jeep and then uses that to produce ‘quickbin’ binary executables. It does this for Linux on both x86-64 and ARM64 architectures as well as macOS on ARM64 and FreeBSD on x86-64 and ARM64.Scott Alexander wrote a ‘book review’ of a series of blog posts about models of the self that I found fascinating. The posts were written by Steven Byrnes, a physicist who moonlights as an amateur neuroscientist. ‘Amateur neuroscientist’ isn’t the kind of descriptor that typically inspires much confidence but Alexander takes Byrnes’ ideas seriously and I found it a very interesting read (or, really, listen since I heard it on the Astral Codex Ten podcast).I have had Hot Chip’s ‘Flutes’ from 2012’s In Our Heads on heavy rotation this week (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "Summer technically wrapped up over the weekend but the temperatures are still around 36 or 37 degrees during the day and it’s apparently going to be extremely hot this weekend.
I switched mobile phone providers again. This time I’ve gone from povo (where I was using the au network) to Linemo (on the SoftBank network). Linemo is the MVNO backed by the messaging app LINE. It’s technically styled ‘LINEMO’ and that’s the way my phone displays it on the lock screen. Every time I see it, it feels like I’m being bellowed at. Still, while that’s a bit aggravating, I am pleased with the prices. povo offered 30-day plans that offer 1GB, 3GB or 20GB of data. I need something between 3GB and 20GB and Linemo offers a 10GB plan that I’m hoping will save me about ¥500 or so a month. The nice thing is that if you don’t use more than 3GB, they just charge you the price for that plan instead.
While saving a bit of money is nice, the real reason I did it was because I was hoping it would ‘fix’ the inability of my phone to use both of its e-SIMs at the same time. In addition to my Japanese e-SIM, I have an Australian e-SIM I can (in theory) have active at the same time. Back in July, I noticed that if I had the Australian one active, it would cause the Japanese one not to work. I wondered if it was because the Australian one was using the SoftBank network whereas the Japanese one was using au. Having switched to Linemo, I can report that wasn’t the answer. Despite the network change, the issue persists.
All of this is making me wonder if I should upgrade my iPhone 14 this year (the new iPhones will be announced next week). I had not intended to do this (and indeed that was the reason I justified to myself buying the Mac Mini and the 13” iPad Air) but there are a number of niggles now that this phone is about to enter its fourth year of service. In addition to the e-SIM problem, I discovered the other day that the Lightning port is completely shot. I can’t charge over it or use it for data (which means I can’t pair it with Xcode).
I cut the first official release of Predoc: v0.1.0. My optimism on the project has cooled a bit from where it was at the beginning of August. Software projects feel a bit like restaurants: most never catch on and in all likelihood this will be Predoc’s fate, too. Which is to say, I don’t think this will really get much usage. That said, I am still glad I worked on it and I hope to write about some of what I’ve learnt in one or two blog posts that share that information with other people. In particular, I’m proud of the GitHub workflow I wrote for creating pre-built binaries for Predoc releases. The workflow compiles Janet from source, installs my Janet bundle manager Jeep and then uses that to produce ‘quickbin’ binary executables. It does this for Linux on both x86-64 and ARM64 architectures as well as macOS on ARM64 and FreeBSD on x86-64 and ARM64.
Scott Alexander wrote a ‘book review’ of a series of blog posts about models of the self that I found fascinating. The posts were written by Steven Byrnes, a physicist who moonlights as an amateur neuroscientist. ‘Amateur neuroscientist’ isn’t the kind of descriptor that typically inspires much confidence but Alexander takes Byrnes’ ideas seriously and I found it a very interesting read (or, really, listen since I heard it on the Astral Codex Ten podcast).
I have had Hot Chip’s ‘Flutes’ from 2012’s In Our Heads on heavy rotation this week (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1756822260.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-09-02T23:11:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-09-02T23:11:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1756218540.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #293",
"content_text": "I start off this weeknote on a sombre note. It looks like my beloved meat pies are no longer being stocked by the local grocery. I was buying so many of these that I fear this doesn’t reflect a considered choice by the grocery’s ordering manager but instead means that the products themselves are no longer available (or at least no longer available from the same supplier). I suppose I had a good five-month or so run.On Saturday, Eri took Emma and John to a nearby planetarium to see a documentary there. (Loyal readers might recall that I did this last year.) While they were off doing that, I took Rowan to the Lego Discovery Centre over in Odaiba. The Discovery Centre isn’t the greatest attraction in Tokyo but I’d rate it above last weekend’s Sanrio Puroland. I was also really impressed by the monorail that we caught from Odaibakaihinkōen to Shimbashi. It was a handful of stops but gives passengers a pretty spectacular view of Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow Bridge.I kept working on Predoc, notably taking on the kind of bonkers challenge of converting the epic mdoc(7) manpage to Predoc. (mdoc is the modern language for writing manpages.) In theory, this weeknote is being published on Monday or Tuesday (it’s backdated to Tuesday) but in the ‘future’ where I am actually writing it, I can tell you that I succeeded. I think this initial implementation is close to ‘done’ and it’ll be time to announce it more broadly and see if the Internet at large cares at all about it.Perhaps as a result of spending more time working from home, my weight is almost back up to 70kg.John Gruber noted the death of movie poster designer, Joe Caroff, with a link to this post from Posteritati and what an incredible collection of posters to have produced. Caroff was responsible for designing the iconic 007 logo but he also produced some of the most famous movie posters of the 20th Century. Worth a scroll for anyone who loves advertising and graphic design.Speaking of James Bond, when I linked to Patrick Willems’ video essay on Daniel Craig’s Bond films, I neglected to mention my favourite part of the video. Willems references a crazy movie theory from the James Bonding podcast that posits that the Daniel Craig films are not a ‘reboot’ of continuity but in fact ‘wrap around’ the previous series of films. That is, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are Bond’s first two adventures. Then comes Dr No, From Russia with Love etc. Skyfall then comes after all of this. Obviously this isn’t true but I love a good crazy movie theory and it’s always bugged me how sharply Craig’s Bond jump from the neophyte secret agent in the first two films to the grizzled veteran in the third.I don’t think I’d previously come across Sigala’s ‘Give Me Your Love’ from 2016 (Apple Music). British singer John Newman is the vocalist and it’s reminiscent of other hits Newman has from this period like ‘Love Me Again’ and ‘Blame’. If, like me, you like those tracks but were unaware of this one, give it a spin.",
"content_html": "I start off this weeknote on a sombre note. It looks like my beloved meat pies are no longer being stocked by the local grocery. I was buying so many of these that I fear this doesn’t reflect a considered choice by the grocery’s ordering manager but instead means that the products themselves are no longer available (or at least no longer available from the same supplier). I suppose I had a good five-month or so run.
On Saturday, Eri took Emma and John to a nearby planetarium to see a documentary there. (Loyal readers might recall that I did this last year.) While they were off doing that, I took Rowan to the Lego Discovery Centre over in Odaiba. The Discovery Centre isn’t the greatest attraction in Tokyo but I’d rate it above last weekend’s Sanrio Puroland. I was also really impressed by the monorail that we caught from Odaibakaihinkōen to Shimbashi. It was a handful of stops but gives passengers a pretty spectacular view of Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow Bridge.
I kept working on Predoc, notably taking on the kind of bonkers challenge of converting the epic mdoc(7) manpage to Predoc. (mdoc is the modern language for writing manpages.) In theory, this weeknote is being published on Monday or Tuesday (it’s backdated to Tuesday) but in the ‘future’ where I am actually writing it, I can tell you that I succeeded. I think this initial implementation is close to ‘done’ and it’ll be time to announce it more broadly and see if the Internet at large cares at all about it.
Perhaps as a result of spending more time working from home, my weight is almost back up to 70kg.
John Gruber noted the death of movie poster designer, Joe Caroff, with a link to this post from Posteritati and what an incredible collection of posters to have produced. Caroff was responsible for designing the iconic 007 logo but he also produced some of the most famous movie posters of the 20th Century. Worth a scroll for anyone who loves advertising and graphic design.
Speaking of James Bond, when I linked to Patrick Willems’ video essay on Daniel Craig’s Bond films, I neglected to mention my favourite part of the video. Willems references a crazy movie theory from the James Bonding podcast that posits that the Daniel Craig films are not a ‘reboot’ of continuity but in fact ‘wrap around’ the previous series of films. That is, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are Bond’s first two adventures. Then comes Dr No, From Russia with Love etc. Skyfall then comes after all of this. Obviously this isn’t true but I love a good crazy movie theory and it’s always bugged me how sharply Craig’s Bond jump from the neophyte secret agent in the first two films to the grizzled veteran in the third.
I don’t think I’d previously come across Sigala’s ‘Give Me Your Love’ from 2016 (Apple Music). British singer John Newman is the vocalist and it’s reminiscent of other hits Newman has from this period like ‘Love Me Again’ and ‘Blame’. If, like me, you like those tracks but were unaware of this one, give it a spin.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1756218540.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-08-26T23:29:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-08-26T23:29:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1755613380.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #292",
"content_text": "On Sunday, we took the kids to Sanrio Puroland, an indoor amusement park in Tama. It’s less a collection of rides than it is a space for fans of Sanrio’s stable of character (e.g. Hello Kitty) to walk around in. Disneyland without the rides in other words. Well, Disneyland without almost all the rides. Puroland has two: the Sanrio Characters Boat Ride and Mymeroad Drive. Really, though, you’re going for things like the musical performances, the themed food and the ambience. (The Wikipedia article has more information for those who are curious.)As my tone suggests, I wasn’t especially impressed with Puroland. It is cheaper than Disneyland but it’s not exactly cheap and while it has a decent amount of detail in the world it creates, it simply doesn’t go to the extreme lengths that Disney does. That said, it does have one amazing feature: it is completely air-conditioned. We left the park to go home at around 4 and even then the heat from the sun was extremely intense. I assume there are people going to Tokyo Disneyland at the moment but it feels like that’s a real health hazard. To have spent a few hours walking around a large space with the kids in air-conditioned comfort was worth the price of admission.I spent more time developing Predoc. Most of this week was spent fixing bugs or adding features that I needed as I created example Predoc documents out of existing manpages (here’s one for the venerable ls). I don’t know that this will ever have wide adoption but I’m enjoying working on it nevertheless.I’ve also continued playing Jedi: Survivor. I did finally break down and reduce the difficulty from Jedi Knight (middle level of difficulty) to Jedi Padawan so that I could advance past two of the late-game bosses. I am a little disappointed in myself.With all the programming and gaming, I’ve done a poor job studying my Japanese. Is that a coincidence or do I simply lack the focus to persist studying in my middle age?I was talking to sogaiu about Gary Bernhardt, a relatively well-known programming educator in the world of Ruby and TypeScript after sogaiu sent me a link to Bernhardt’s Rubyconf 2012 talk ‘Boundaries’ (YouTube). I believe this is the talk where Bernhardt introduces the ‘imperative shell, functional core’ idea. I’ve been aware of Bernhardt from when he was active in the Ruby community and I’ve long wondered where he comes from. Unfortunately, despite both of us doing a bit of digging, we didn’t find much. Bernhardt briefly mentions his background in this episode of the podcast Ship It! but all he really says is that he has a computer science degree and that he began programming while he was still in school.Two weeks ago my musical selection was Lewky’s catchy novelty song ‘I Have One Daughter’. The extended version of the song features a vocal performance by sad alex (AKA Alexandra Grace Saad). I looked for more of her music and liked ‘i’m glad that you found someone’ (Apple Music). I just wish it had an extra verse.",
"content_html": "On Sunday, we took the kids to Sanrio Puroland, an indoor amusement park in Tama. It’s less a collection of rides than it is a space for fans of Sanrio’s stable of character (e.g. Hello Kitty) to walk around in. Disneyland without the rides in other words. Well, Disneyland without almost all the rides. Puroland has two: the Sanrio Characters Boat Ride and Mymeroad Drive. Really, though, you’re going for things like the musical performances, the themed food and the ambience. (The Wikipedia article has more information for those who are curious.)
As my tone suggests, I wasn’t especially impressed with Puroland. It is cheaper than Disneyland but it’s not exactly cheap and while it has a decent amount of detail in the world it creates, it simply doesn’t go to the extreme lengths that Disney does. That said, it does have one amazing feature: it is completely air-conditioned. We left the park to go home at around 4 and even then the heat from the sun was extremely intense. I assume there are people going to Tokyo Disneyland at the moment but it feels like that’s a real health hazard. To have spent a few hours walking around a large space with the kids in air-conditioned comfort was worth the price of admission.
I spent more time developing Predoc. Most of this week was spent fixing bugs or adding features that I needed as I created example Predoc documents out of existing manpages (here’s one for the venerable ls). I don’t know that this will ever have wide adoption but I’m enjoying working on it nevertheless.
I’ve also continued playing Jedi: Survivor. I did finally break down and reduce the difficulty from Jedi Knight (middle level of difficulty) to Jedi Padawan so that I could advance past two of the late-game bosses. I am a little disappointed in myself.
With all the programming and gaming, I’ve done a poor job studying my Japanese. Is that a coincidence or do I simply lack the focus to persist studying in my middle age?
I was talking to sogaiu about Gary Bernhardt, a relatively well-known programming educator in the world of Ruby and TypeScript after sogaiu sent me a link to Bernhardt’s Rubyconf 2012 talk ‘Boundaries’ (YouTube). I believe this is the talk where Bernhardt introduces the ‘imperative shell, functional core’ idea. I’ve been aware of Bernhardt from when he was active in the Ruby community and I’ve long wondered where he comes from. Unfortunately, despite both of us doing a bit of digging, we didn’t find much. Bernhardt briefly mentions his background in this episode of the podcast Ship It! but all he really says is that he has a computer science degree and that he began programming while he was still in school.
Two weeks ago my musical selection was Lewky’s catchy novelty song ‘I Have One Daughter’. The extended version of the song features a vocal performance by sad alex (AKA Alexandra Grace Saad). I looked for more of her music and liked ‘i’m glad that you found someone’ (Apple Music). I just wish it had an extra verse.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1755613380.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-08-19T23:23:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-08-19T23:23:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1755009900.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #291",
"content_text": "After last month’s forgetting-Marine-Day-was-a-public-holiday mishap, I was careful not to make the same mistake with August’s Mountain Day. I did not in fact get to any mountains but I did get through a mountain of work. Well, no, that’s not true either. What I did was finally put Emma’s bed together. We still need to get some curtains for her room but with any luck we’ll be able to move her in there this coming weekend.Emma read Roald Dahl’s Matilda (in Japanese). Matilda was my favourite book when I was about Emma’s age so I was pretty excited she was able to make it through the entire book. I’ve got her the BFG to read next.I mentioned last week that I sidetracked myself while working on an IRC client with a project that translates my own variant of Markdown into mdoc, a syntax that manpage readers like man can understand. Well, the IRC client is still on the backburner but I did make a public repo for the Markdown translator. It’s called Predoc and I’m pretty proud of it. I wish manpages were a bigger thing than they are and I think one of the things that limits their appeal (in terms of creation) is how unwelcoming languages like Groff and mdoc are to the average programmer. I’d be ecstatic if Predoc helped change that. At the time of writing, it shouldn’t really be used by other people but I’m continuing to polish it and hope I’ll be able to get a bit of interest in places like Hacker News and Lobsters.On the topic of manpages, I came really like the way that Mohamed Akram collates and displays the macOS manpages at manp.gs. Apple used to provide this documentation publicly on their website but they don’t any more so it’s great that someone like Akram has picked up the slack. Maybe when Apple has a market capitalisation of US$5 trillion, they’ll be able to spare a few people.It felt like it’d been a while since any of the video essayists I follow on YouTube had really hit one out of the park and then, wouldn’t you know it, two go and do it in the same week:The first is Patrick Willems’ hour-long video on the Daniel Craig run of James Bond films. This is Willems at his best: bringing more insight to mainstream cinema than it really deserves.The second is Big Joel’s 1.5 hour-long essay on the comedian, Bill Maher. This doesn’t quite reach the heights of Willems’ video but in some ways that’s because what Big Joel is trying is more difficult. If you enjoy media criticism, it’s great stuff.I continued playing Jedi: Survivor primarily on the iPad (using Xbox Cloud Gaming). I remembered I had a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller I don’t really use and I’ve been playing with it instead of the old PS4 Controller. One awkward aspect is that although the Pro Controller includes an ABXY array of buttons, their positions are vertically reversed from where they are on the Xbox Controller. The controls in the game are by default bound to the same letters so the most common actions are in the ‘wrong place’. Fortunately you can rebind your controls.When I linked to Hilltop Hoods’ single ‘Laced Up’ back in July, I wrote that it was ‘a solid entry in their catalogue of catchy hooks and clever wordplay’. I’m pleased to report that the recently released album, Fall From the Light is entirely like that (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "After last month’s forgetting-Marine-Day-was-a-public-holiday mishap, I was careful not to make the same mistake with August’s Mountain Day. I did not in fact get to any mountains but I did get through a mountain of work. Well, no, that’s not true either. What I did was finally put Emma’s bed together. We still need to get some curtains for her room but with any luck we’ll be able to move her in there this coming weekend.
Emma read Roald Dahl’s Matilda (in Japanese). Matilda was my favourite book when I was about Emma’s age so I was pretty excited she was able to make it through the entire book. I’ve got her the BFG to read next.
I mentioned last week that I sidetracked myself while working on an IRC client with a project that translates my own variant of Markdown into mdoc, a syntax that manpage readers like man can understand. Well, the IRC client is still on the backburner but I did make a public repo for the Markdown translator. It’s called Predoc and I’m pretty proud of it. I wish manpages were a bigger thing than they are and I think one of the things that limits their appeal (in terms of creation) is how unwelcoming languages like Groff and mdoc are to the average programmer. I’d be ecstatic if Predoc helped change that. At the time of writing, it shouldn’t really be used by other people but I’m continuing to polish it and hope I’ll be able to get a bit of interest in places like Hacker News and Lobsters.
On the topic of manpages, I came really like the way that Mohamed Akram collates and displays the macOS manpages at manp.gs. Apple used to provide this documentation publicly on their website but they don’t any more so it’s great that someone like Akram has picked up the slack. Maybe when Apple has a market capitalisation of US$5 trillion, they’ll be able to spare a few people.
It felt like it’d been a while since any of the video essayists I follow on YouTube had really hit one out of the park and then, wouldn’t you know it, two go and do it in the same week:
The first is Patrick Willems’ hour-long video on the Daniel Craig run of James Bond films. This is Willems at his best: bringing more insight to mainstream cinema than it really deserves.
The second is Big Joel’s 1.5 hour-long essay on the comedian, Bill Maher. This doesn’t quite reach the heights of Willems’ video but in some ways that’s because what Big Joel is trying is more difficult. If you enjoy media criticism, it’s great stuff.
I continued playing Jedi: Survivor primarily on the iPad (using Xbox Cloud Gaming). I remembered I had a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller I don’t really use and I’ve been playing with it instead of the old PS4 Controller. One awkward aspect is that although the Pro Controller includes an ABXY array of buttons, their positions are vertically reversed from where they are on the Xbox Controller. The controls in the game are by default bound to the same letters so the most common actions are in the ‘wrong place’. Fortunately you can rebind your controls.
When I linked to Hilltop Hoods’ single ‘Laced Up’ back in July, I wrote that it was ‘a solid entry in their catalogue of catchy hooks and clever wordplay’. I’m pleased to report that the recently released album, Fall From the Light is entirely like that (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1755009900.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-08-12T23:45:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-08-12T23:45:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1754405640.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #290",
"content_text": "It’s very hot. With the kids home for the school holidays, I’ve been working more from home and that’s allowed me avoid going out too much.The New York Times wrote about geoengineering as a way to protect the Great Barrier Reef. Last year, the Times wrote a similar story. As I said then, I’m of the opinion that this is the way we’re ultimately going to address climate change. I can see why that’s not the ideal solution—and I’m sympathetic to those who feel it’s cheating— but I believe at some point enough people are going to demand governments ‘do something’ to address elongated, and increasingly oppressive, summers.I wrote last week about using the IRC client, catgirl. I mentioned that it didn’t work quite how I wanted it to and that I was considering forking it. Well, dear reader, fork it I did. I haven’t put the code up anywhere yet but I have a version that uses different colours, adds a couple of shortcuts and supports Vim-like modal scrolling. I’d like to implement the ability to search through the channel history but I’m not sure how difficult that will be.I was preparing to put the project up on GitHub for all to see but got bogged down writing a manpage. Catgirl has great manpages—not a huge surprise given the primary author literally writes her blog in the manpage format, mdoc—and I thought it would be a shame to have forked the project and then deleted those great manpages. But while June McEnroe might write her blog in mdoc, I write mine in Markdown. It seemed impossible that there wasn’t a good tool for doing this but I wasn’t particularly satisfied with any of the solutions (e.g. Pandoc, lowdown or Ronn). So of course I’ve started making my own. Part of the issue is that I want something that uses the newer mdoc (Wikipedia) rather than the older roff format (Wikipedia). Over the past couple of days, I’ve put together a basic proof of concept of a Janet script that creates mdoc documents from text files written in a Markdown variant I’ve devised.I mentioned two weeks ago that I’d set up Xbox Cloud Gaming on my Steam Deck. It’s worked really well (and has contributed to me slowly getting through Jedi: Survivor). So well, in fact, that I wondered how it would be on my iPad. Turns out it’s great there, too!With all the gaming and programming, it’s perhaps not a surprise that my studying has suffered. I do want to keep on top of that because it felt like I was on a little bit of a roll.I showed the kids WALL-E and we were able to get through it in one setting. I don’t remember when we last tried to watch it but I do remember that we bailed before the end. Some of the shine has undoubtedly worn off Pixar as a result of their more recent work but this was a great reminder of how high those highs were.Eugenia sent me a YouTube link to the viral video Luke Holloway (AKA Lewky) made about a ridiculous Tinder conversation. This isn’t really my thing but the song is so catchy (Apple Music), I couldn’t help but fall in love with it.",
"content_html": "It’s very hot. With the kids home for the school holidays, I’ve been working more from home and that’s allowed me avoid going out too much.
The New York Times wrote about geoengineering as a way to protect the Great Barrier Reef. Last year, the Times wrote a similar story. As I said then, I’m of the opinion that this is the way we’re ultimately going to address climate change. I can see why that’s not the ideal solution—and I’m sympathetic to those who feel it’s cheating— but I believe at some point enough people are going to demand governments ‘do something’ to address elongated, and increasingly oppressive, summers.
I wrote last week about using the IRC client, catgirl. I mentioned that it didn’t work quite how I wanted it to and that I was considering forking it. Well, dear reader, fork it I did. I haven’t put the code up anywhere yet but I have a version that uses different colours, adds a couple of shortcuts and supports Vim-like modal scrolling. I’d like to implement the ability to search through the channel history but I’m not sure how difficult that will be.
I was preparing to put the project up on GitHub for all to see but got bogged down writing a manpage. Catgirl has great manpages—not a huge surprise given the primary author literally writes her blog in the manpage format, mdoc—and I thought it would be a shame to have forked the project and then deleted those great manpages. But while June McEnroe might write her blog in mdoc, I write mine in Markdown. It seemed impossible that there wasn’t a good tool for doing this but I wasn’t particularly satisfied with any of the solutions (e.g. Pandoc, lowdown or Ronn). So of course I’ve started making my own. Part of the issue is that I want something that uses the newer mdoc (Wikipedia) rather than the older roff format (Wikipedia). Over the past couple of days, I’ve put together a basic proof of concept of a Janet script that creates mdoc documents from text files written in a Markdown variant I’ve devised.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I’d set up Xbox Cloud Gaming on my Steam Deck. It’s worked really well (and has contributed to me slowly getting through Jedi: Survivor). So well, in fact, that I wondered how it would be on my iPad. Turns out it’s great there, too!
With all the gaming and programming, it’s perhaps not a surprise that my studying has suffered. I do want to keep on top of that because it felt like I was on a little bit of a roll.
I showed the kids WALL-E and we were able to get through it in one setting. I don’t remember when we last tried to watch it but I do remember that we bailed before the end. Some of the shine has undoubtedly worn off Pixar as a result of their more recent work but this was a great reminder of how high those highs were.
Eugenia sent me a YouTube link to the viral video Luke Holloway (AKA Lewky) made about a ridiculous Tinder conversation. This isn’t really my thing but the song is so catchy (Apple Music), I couldn’t help but fall in love with it.
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1754405640.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-08-05T23:54:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-08-05T23:54:00+09:00"
},
{
"id": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1753798500.html",
"title": "Weeknotes #289",
"content_text": "I neglected to mention last week that Japan held its House of Councillors (i.e. upper house) election on Sunday 20 July (Wikipedia). If you’ve heard about this election at all, it’s probably because of the performance of Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party that attracted attention for advocating for a ‘Japan First’ policy platform and criticising foreigners in Japan for certain practices. Japan’s Liberal-Democratic Party is a centre-right party that’s generally kept more conservative elements of Japan in check but they’re arguably at one of the weakest moments in their history and I feel some trepidation about the party splintering and more radical elements eventually wielding political power.On Saturday I took Rowan over to Yokohama. I’ve always wanted to go down to the Bay and so after catching a Shōnan-Shinjuku train down to Yokohama, we went to the end of the Minatomirai Line and over to Yamashita Park (Wikipedia). There’s a ship, the Hikawa Maru, that’s permanently berthed next to the park and while I thought about going aboard, it was extremely hot outside and Rowan was pretty eager to get back home. Something for another time.I’ve had another bout of ‘I should use IRC more’. The catalyst of all things was a random comment on the computing community website, Lobsters, about its IRC channel. I was a heavy IRC user throughout high school but when I tried to get back into IRC in the late 2010s, I wanted some of the affordances (mobile clients, push notifications, continuous connection) we’ve come to expect from group messaging apps. The best solution I could find was IRCCloud. It’s not bad but given how little I ever do end up using IRC, I couldn’t justify its price and finally cancelled it earlier this year. Cut to this weekend and I realised all I really need is a tmux session running on my Linode. After some struggles with the venerable client irssi, I stumbled across relative upstart catgirl. It doesn’t work exactly the way I want but it’s very close. I’m currently debating whether to fork the project and create my own version that would fix the one or two niggles I have. Viva la open source?There must be something in the air because now the YouTube channel Trash Theory has done an episode related to the alternative rock of the late 90s, this time focusing on the Offspring.Speaking of the music of the late 90s, a meme went around Bluesky the other day that involves posting the album covers of four ‘perfect’ albums from the year you turned 16. That’s 1998 for me which, as I attempted to assemble my list, really can’t hold a candle to 1997. I settled on Morcheeba’s Big Calm, Faithless’ Sunday 8PM, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.In putting my list together, I was looking up Triple J’s Hottest 100 from that year and noticed that at some point Apple Music added ‘curators’ (as opposed to ordinary users). This is a perfect categorisation for Triple J and gives them a fancy landing page on which to list things like their playlists, featured albums and video segments (Apple Music).",
"content_html": "I neglected to mention last week that Japan held its House of Councillors (i.e. upper house) election on Sunday 20 July (Wikipedia). If you’ve heard about this election at all, it’s probably because of the performance of Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party that attracted attention for advocating for a ‘Japan First’ policy platform and criticising foreigners in Japan for certain practices. Japan’s Liberal-Democratic Party is a centre-right party that’s generally kept more conservative elements of Japan in check but they’re arguably at one of the weakest moments in their history and I feel some trepidation about the party splintering and more radical elements eventually wielding political power.
On Saturday I took Rowan over to Yokohama. I’ve always wanted to go down to the Bay and so after catching a Shōnan-Shinjuku train down to Yokohama, we went to the end of the Minatomirai Line and over to Yamashita Park (Wikipedia). There’s a ship, the Hikawa Maru, that’s permanently berthed next to the park and while I thought about going aboard, it was extremely hot outside and Rowan was pretty eager to get back home. Something for another time.
I’ve had another bout of ‘I should use IRC more’. The catalyst of all things was a random comment on the computing community website, Lobsters, about its IRC channel. I was a heavy IRC user throughout high school but when I tried to get back into IRC in the late 2010s, I wanted some of the affordances (mobile clients, push notifications, continuous connection) we’ve come to expect from group messaging apps. The best solution I could find was IRCCloud. It’s not bad but given how little I ever do end up using IRC, I couldn’t justify its price and finally cancelled it earlier this year. Cut to this weekend and I realised all I really need is a tmux session running on my Linode. After some struggles with the venerable client irssi, I stumbled across relative upstart catgirl. It doesn’t work exactly the way I want but it’s very close. I’m currently debating whether to fork the project and create my own version that would fix the one or two niggles I have. Viva la open source?
There must be something in the air because now the YouTube channel Trash Theory has done an episode related to the alternative rock of the late 90s, this time focusing on the Offspring.
Speaking of the music of the late 90s, a meme went around Bluesky the other day that involves posting the album covers of four ‘perfect’ albums from the year you turned 16. That’s 1998 for me which, as I attempted to assemble my list, really can’t hold a candle to 1997. I settled on Morcheeba’s Big Calm, Faithless’ Sunday 8PM, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.
In putting my list together, I was looking up Triple J’s Hottest 100 from that year and noticed that at some point Apple Music added ‘curators’ (as opposed to ordinary users). This is a perfect categorisation for Triple J and gives them a fancy landing page on which to list things like their playlists, featured albums and video segments (Apple Music).
",
"url": "https://updates.inqk.net/post/1753798500.html",
"author": {
"name": "Michael Camilleri",
"url": "https://inqk.net",
"avatar": "/assets/images/avatar.jpg"
},
"date_published": "2025-07-29T23:15:00+09:00",
"date_modified": "2025-07-29T23:15:00+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}