Updates from Michael Camilleri : Weeknotes

Weeknotes #338

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:29:00 +0900

On Sunday, I took Rowan (and John) to get a haircut. I was really impressed with how Rowan handled it. I do still have to stand beside him and help him stay still but fortunately the barber is comfortable with me doing this. Have I written about Cut House Bright (Google Map) before? I’m always worried it’s about to go out of business. It’s on the second floor in a dingy building, the decor is… rustic might be the kindest thing I can say and it doesn’t seem to have many customers. I started going there because it was very close to our old apartment and I was impressed with how quickly the barber cut my hair. When it was time to start taking John and Rowan to get haircuts, I thought the barber’s speed, together with the fact he didn’t seem awash in customers, might make him amenable to two boys who sometimes need some help to sit still. While I’m not sure he’s completely fine with me standing next to Rowan as he cuts his hair (John’s fine on his own), we seem to have come to an unspoken understanding that I’m not sure I could replicate with anyone else.
Of course, as is tradition, after the haircut we then went to Asobono. For the first time, Rowan wasn’t especially interested in the Plarail toys (Wikipedia). This might be because we now have some in the house. Yes, after years of resisting, we were gifted a small amount of track by a nearby biracial family who moved to the UK this week. Speaking of which, in a cruel bit of timing, Eri made friends with the mother of a nearby biracial family just before they moved to the UK this week. Alas.
The oppressive summer heat is here. I ordered a thermal curtain that I hope might improve the heat flow in our living room. Probably the aspect of our house I dislike the most is the fact that the living room is on (what as an Australian I want to call the first floor but in sane counting systems is) the second storey. By itself, that’s not a problem. What makes it terrible is that the stairs that lead up to the room have no door or barrier at all. As a result, all the heat from downstairs rises up and all the cold air leaks down and the room is often a couple of degrees warmer than downstairs. I’m not sure the thermal curtain will do that much but you’ve got to be in it to win it. I think that’s how that phrase goes.
Speaking of oppressive summer heat, I finally pulled the trigger and booked our flights to Australia for Christmas (I kid, Sydney summers are not oppressive at all compared to Tokyo). The ticket prices weren’t as bad as I had feared but they were still expensive and so I made sure to check not just ANA’s prices (our preferred airline) but also JAL and Qantas. Well, turns out Qantas was significantly cheaper and so after a decade or so since I swore never to fly with them again, we are flying with them again.
I submitted Crossmate to the App Store for App Review. As of this writing, it has not yet entered review. I hope there aren’t any problems.
I made a brief mention last week to the 1990 album, the Simpsons Sing the Blues and Brandon sent me an iMessage saying he’d had that album, too. That prompted a short discussion of what an odd piece of Simpsons merchandise it is. You can read more on the Wikipedia page or put it on for a spin (Apple Music). It’s… pretty weird.

Weeknotes #337

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:58:00 +0900

Rowan woke up on Saturday morning complaining about pain in his ear. Eri and I decided that I should take him to the ENT clinic that’s close to our house. I forgot you could book online (and so skip most of the waiting part) and so, as a result, Rowan and I ended up having to sit in the waiting room for almost two hours. This would have been difficult enough but after about 90 minutes, Rowan started complaining that his stomach hurt. Sure enough, he then proceeded to vomit. I managed to stop this from going all over the floor and, somehow, over most of our clothes. There was a mad dash to the bathroom and an emergency visit by Emma with clean shirts and, after waiting about half an hour more or so, we were able to see the doctor. I’m still not sure what he had. He took Monday and Tuesday off school but nobody else fell ill.
Unsure if Emma or John would feel sick, we didn’t venture further away than a trip to the library. That’s not especially notable except that this was the first time John went there on his bicycle. Well, sort of. I did have to push him along each time he came to a stop (he’s not able to push off from a standing start yet). Still, that’s the farthest cycling trip he’s gone on so far.
One benefit of staying close to home was that I was able to rush to the computer when I noticed that, a few days prior, I had inadvertently pasted my PGP key’s passphrase into the source code for Crossmate. I’m not hosting Crossmate’s repository on GitHub but even still, I quickly rotated to a new PGP key and uploaded the public key to all the locations where I was using the old key to verify my identity. I hope I never have to live those 15 minutes again.
I finally finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth to the boys. I understand why everyone raves about this Jules Verne guy. Definitely put him on your ‘one to watch’ list.
I randomly watched an episode of the X-Files. I stopped watching the show around the time of Season 6 or 7 and this was ‘Invocation’ from Season 8 so it was all new to me (Wikipedia). I don’t know how well the older episodes would hold up but I found the entire thing a bit of a tough watch. Why was I watching this in the first place? It was all because I was reading Billie Eilish’s Wikipedia page and was surprised to see that her mother, Maggie Baird, was an actress. It mentioned she was in an episode of the X-Files and that got me curious.
Pseudonymous YouTube 12tone has a video about the 90s classic, ‘Two Princes’ by Spin Doctors. I want to say that this was the first single I ever bought but I now don’t remember how I acquired it. I remember that it was on a cassette tape but my recollection is that it was one of those compilations that were so popular in that 90s (it wasn’t a ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ compilation but very much in that vein). The thing is that I don’t think I would have enough money to have bought it by myself so perhaps I cajoled Mum or Dad into getting it for me. Except I believe the only times I ever did this were for the Simpsons Sing the Blues (Wikipedia) and the theme song to 1996’s Mission: Impossible.
Oh, and 12tone makes the interesting observation that the two new types of rock groups in the early 90s were grunge bands and jam bands. I hadn’t thought of ‘Two Princes’ (Apple Music) as a jam band song but, after his dissection, I absolutely see it now.

Weeknotes #336

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:35:00 +0900

Apple dramatically increased their prices (John Gruber has a nice table). There haven’t been increases yet on iPhones but given new Pro models are set to be announced in September, you’d have to assume they’ll be price increases then, too. I was still debating internally whether I would upgrade to the new models or wait for a refurbished orange iPhone 17 Pro in February of next year. Depending on that price hike (and assuming it doesn’t apply to refurbished models), February is looking increasingly likely.

…and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
On Tuesday evening I played basketball for the first time in… look, it’s literally been so long that I no longer remember. I have a vague recollection of going once or twice to somewhere in Kita-ku after we moved to Tokyo. I think it would have been while we were still living in Bunkyō-ku so let’s say that it’s been at least 10 years. I am pleased to report that, despite my fears, I did not tear any muscles or otherwise noticeably damage anything. There was a bit of soreness a day or two later but honestly, less than I was expecting. No steals but I did make a turn around fadeaway so that was nice.
Basketball was on Tuesday and in true me fashion, on Monday, I realised that I had neglected to buy any basketball shoes (I used to have a pair but, well, that was 10 years ago, right?). Not knowing at this point whether I would be down one working Achilles tendon within the next 24 hours, I purchased a pair of Nike Court Vision Mid Next Nature thinking that, if nothing else, I could at least wear them as normal shoes. ChatGPT was correct that the reason these are not recommended for playing actual basketball is that they lack the padding you would expect.
JD Vance is so easy to dislike that I’m not sure how good this really is but I appreciated the New Yorker’s review of his memoir, Communion.
Of course there was more work on Crossmate. The largest user-facing features this week were tips banners and a synced playing time clock but I also made changes to preserve formatting and keep titles when importing puzzles, encrypt push notifications end-to-end, speed up joining shared puzzles and increase the palette of assignable colours. I swear this is getting close to a final release.
I’ve been wondering what’s going on with the spate of big budget movies that went straight to streaming (the one that I was most tempted by was Apple’s Fountain of Youth). Patrick Willems explains it all in a 57-minute video essay. TLDW: Movie studios who (mostly) know box office bombs when they see them left these for the streamers and the streamers were just excited to have blockbusters that sound good on paper and feature big name stars.
Olivia Rodrigo released You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love two weeks ago. On first listen, nothing grabbed me like some of the stand-outs on Sour or Guts but over the course of this week I did find myself coming back numerous times to ‘U + Me = <3’ (Apple Music). Is that because Rodrigo shamelessly mines the music of my youth? I mean, what do you think? (How shameless? She literally has Robert Smith sing on one of the tracks.)

Weeknotes #335

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:09:00 +0900

The United States and Iran officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Wednesday that maybe ended the war (ABC News). It sounds like a terrible ‘deal’ for the United States, the people of Iran and most of the rest of us who have been strapped in for the ride. I don’t know if this is truly going to be Trump’s Katrina—indeed whether he is capable of even having that kind of moment—but I suppose what else can us non-Americans do at this point but cross our fingers?
In more positive news, John turned nine this week. We gave him Super Mario Odyssey, one of the One Block mods available from the Minecraft Marketplace and The Village: An Official Minecraft Novel (the conclusion of Max Brooks’ trilogy). The latter John hasn’t quite got yet; I promised once I finish reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth to him and Rowan, I’ll move onto it.
This is the part in the update where I talk again about Crossmate so feel free to skip over this. There was quite a bit of work this week so it’s a rare child list:
- I mentioned last week that I was preparing for a public beta and I haven’t quite got to that point but I have created a second beta testing group and sent the link to it to a handful of people I don’t know personally. Incredibly, the second person (Jose, a friend of Brandon’s) happened to select as his first puzzle a New York Times puzzle that broke the parser. I’m sorry for the rough first game experience, Jose, but I’m extremely grateful you found it.
- Feeling a bit indebted to Jose, at his request I increased the maximum player cap to three and he, Brandon and I played the first game of Crossmate with more than two people. It was a huge relief that it didn’t completely fall over.
- Jose also requested Crossmate natively support turn-by-turn mode. Obviously you can do this right now with a friend if you manage it yourself but I see the appeal of having it be something support by the game. I’m a bit worried about scope creep keeping this in a beta forever (I am very tempted to work on a Mac version) and so think it might be something I wait for 1.1 or 1.2 to do.
- I invited Brendan Quigley (a crossword maker) and Jason Snell (an Apple pundit) to check out the app but did not hear back from either. I can’t actually see the identities of people who join the TestFlight through the public links I sent them so perhaps one of them did join to check it out and it wasn’t for them (there are five people in the ‘public’ TestFlight but I do not know who one of them is). I’m still wondering if I should try to send it to anyone else or instead release it publicly and post a link to Hacker News and Lobsters.
I realise I’ve been so wrapped up in my own things that I neglected to mention that Apple held WWDC two weeks ago. As I’ve done in prior years, I’m slowly working my way through the videos that look the most relevant to me. In years past, this has felt a bit silly—less so this year! I’m extremely excited by what Apple showed of macOS Golden Gate. The revisions to Liquid Glass all look welcome and I’m excited at the possibility of what might be possible with a local coding agent (YouTube). This is possible now of course but I know I’ll feel more comfortable doing it using a model from Apple.
It seems unlikely that Fitz and the Tantrums will ever release something bigger than ‘HandClap’. Still, I started listening seriously to last year’s release, Man on The Moon, and it’s been growing on me. ‘Withdrawls’ is the song I’ve listened to the most (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #334

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:03:00 +0900

Rowan turned five. I have no memories I can consciously recall before that age and so the first four years have always felt special to me in a way that the rest of childhood won’t because of the (quite probably wrong) sense that I am the exclusive keeper of these memories. That also makes me sad because I am so terrible at that job. I went back and looked at the weeknote when John turned five and I cannot remember John ever asking for Edward and Henry. I guess it’s a good thing I started writing these weeknotes.
The birthday day itself went well. I finally cracked and after constant pleading bought my first Pura-Rail trains. I held out on buying any track but I have put batteries in them and they’ve been zooming across the floors since he opened them. Pura-Rail trains fit on Brio tracks but don’t grip the wood as well as I think they grip the official—and truly, truly ugly—blue plastic ones. For future reference (since there’s an extremely good chance I’ll forget this), it was an ALFA-X and a Doctor Yellow.
Here we are in June and I have yet to write my annual spring list of podcasts I have on rotation. Now it’s true that I often do this in summer (see last year’s) but this is the first year I’m seriously considering not writing a post. The truth is that since I started using coding agents, the amount of time I’m spending on podcasts has completely plummeted. I finally accepted reality this week and deleted almost all the episodes in my backlog because short of another multi-month hospital admission, there was no way that I would get through them. I haven’t turned off the subscriptions yet but that might come next. These posts are the ones that I get the most feedback about by far so I’m reluctant to stop completely but that is the conclusion I feel like I’m barrelling towards.
So of course I spent more time on Crossmate as I ready it for a ‘public beta’ (read: the randos I can solicit to give it a shot). Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and it was fortuitous timing because one of its strengths is meant to be security vulnerability detection. It dutifully identified a couple of question decisions regarding my Cloudflare Workers and we got those fixed (I think).
Or perhaps I should say I hope because as I write this, the Fable model has become unavailable in response to the United States directing Anthropic to stop making it available to foreign nationals (Anthropic’s statement). On a purely selfish level, this is disappointing because in my completely unscientific testing, I did find Fable 5 an improvement over Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. It was going away on 22 June (for subscriptions like mine) but hopefully I’ll have a chance to use it again soon.
I also put up a marketing site for Crossmate so if you’re wondering what it looks like, there is a screenshot there. If you know how to install apps through TestFlight and want to check it out, drop me a line. The e-mail address is on the marketing page.
There was a post on Bluesky about the most 80s song you could think of. My friend sogaiu linked me to the music video for Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘Power of Love’ (YouTube) and just wow. Speaking of being five, this particular song is one of the earliest that I can remember but I don’t think I’d ever seen the music video for it. It is quite a trip.
I’ll make that the musical selection for the week (Apple Music) but know that in actuality it was another week of a lot of ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’.

Weeknotes #333

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:28:00 +0900

It’s now June and we still don’t have a deal between the United States and Iran. I am hoping that these people know what they’re doing but being extremely dubious of this potential. (Related.)
A couple of weeks ago, I took Rowan over to Yokohama to ride a Keikyu train and while we were over there we went to a large electronics retailer. They had a commensurately large toy section where I was finally able to pick up some toy catalogues. Rowan’s birthday is coming up next week and I’ve been delighted that he’s been picking out the toys he wants from the catalogue. I’m sure relatively speaking, I spent very little time as a child reading toy catalogues but I can assure everyone that my memory has flipped that right around. I am pleased that, for the moment at least, that’s the case for Rowan as well.
I don’t want to jinx things but I think Crossmate is close to being finished. The last major feature I wanted to add was game replays. I realise that might sound absurd for a crossword solving application. However, since Crossmate is designed to be played asynchronously, I thought that players may enjoy seeing how the puzzle was solved, particularly during the times when they weren’t watching the puzzle. There were a few kinks but I think it’s working well so far. Each device keeps an append-only journal of the moves it takes (this also allows me to offer undo/redo). After a game is completed, each participating device saves its journal to iCloud. These sync down to the other clients and then, once it’s available, you can ‘watch’ a replay of all of the moves in the game.
I am one of those people who, whenever there’s uncontrolled adulation for the visionary nature of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, bring up his full-throated hype around the metaverse (or as Huang cringily referred to it as, the ‘omniverse’). It will not be a surprise to hear that I greatly enjoyed this exploration of the metaverse fever dream by Nick Heer. Indeed my only complaint about it is that it doesn’t spend any time on Nvidia.
Stephen Colbert was effectively fired by the gutless wonders over at CBS. After his final show, he went on the public access television show Only in Monroe (YouTube). Fans might remember that Colbert went on this show back in 2015, just before he became the host of the Late Show (YouTube). Surreal Colbert is the best Colbert.
I finally watched some more of the NBA play-offs. Just in time to see the San Antonio Spurs dispatch the Oklahoma City Thunder to become Western Conference winners and then, unfortunately, lose their first game of the NBA Finals (at home) to the New York Knicks.
While I take some pride in the fact that I remember both watching the music video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on ABC TV’s Rage and thinking the song was cool, the truth is that Oasis were the first band that I ever really felt were ‘mine’. Obviously things went off the rails after Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? but I’ve always loved ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’ (Apple Music) from 1997’s Be Here Now. I know it’s derivative and repetitive but isn’t that the essence of Oasis?

Weeknotes #332

Fri, 29 May 2026 23:43:00 +0900

Saturday was Emma and John’s undōkai. As an Australian, my natural inclination is to refer to them as athletics carnivals but they’re not really. When I was at primary school, an athletics carnival was more akin to the track and field events in the Olympics. You had running, jumping and throwing events. That’s not how it works in Japan (or at least not these days). Instead, each year does two events: one is a dance and the other is a 50m race. The dance is a choreographed routine that the children practise in the weeks leading up to the event while the race is a pure one-time sprint against four or five competitors. There’s no final and no prizes (which I always find a bit disappointing). It’s fine as it goes—and I’m sure much less stress for the less athletically gifted children—but as a person who enjoys watching any kind of competition, it always saddens me a little.
I see that I forgot to write about last year’s event. I’m pleased to report that John was a more engaged participant this year than last year so I consider that a success.
Speaking of the kids, I don’t think I wrote about how we decided a few weeks ago (maybe it was months? Who can keep track?) that we were going to limit YouTube watching to Wednesdays and Fridays. I worry this is creating a pathology around YouTube videos that will have adverse consequences later in their life but I was getting exhausted by the constant requests and/or constant disputes about whose turn it was. One of the lesson I feel I’ve learned as a parent is that while an arbitrary rule (YouTube on Wednesdays/Fridays only) may seem more objectionable (and the kids do object), the thing that creates real arguments is arbitrary application. You’re better off as the parent imposing a simple rule, even if it has no virtue other than its own simplicity, than trying to come up with a complex rule that has a clear, rational basis.
Have I gone three bullet points and not mentioned Crossmate? Incredible. But it’s not because I don’t have anything to report. This week I finally caved and implemented a ‘server’. Two servers in fact! Incredible. The catch is that they’re not servers in the conventional sense but rather Cloudflare Workers. One worker is the proxy that shuttles push notifications from devices running Crossmate to Apple’s push notification servers. The other worker is an ‘engagement host’ that hosts rooms for multiplayer puzzles. Players that are simultaneously in a puzzle send their updates to the engagement host and that hosts fans the updates out to connected devices over WebSockets. I’ve tried out these ‘engagements’ with Eugenia and the difference in sync speed is dramatic.
With all my focus on Crossmate, I neglected to mention a couple of weeks back that Scott Yoshinaga is using Listless! I do know Scott but I didn’t ask him to use it so I think this counts as a real user! The most delightful aspect of our exchange was hearing that the things he likes about it are the things I wanted it to offer.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find the Onion article that was about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being despondent when a leopard eats her face. I couldn’t find it and it turns out it’s because it’s not an Onion article. It’s a tweet from 2015.
While the kids and I were walking past Tokyo Dome on Sunday they seemed to be playing OneRepublic’s ‘I Ain’t Worried’ on loop. I’ve linked to it before so how about something completely different? Thom Yorke’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #331

Fri, 22 May 2026 23:21:00 +0900

John can ride a bicycle! (Sort of.) I mentioned last week that John was gliding and we continued to do that until on Sunday I said to see how far he could go with his feet on the pedals. I ran along beside him for a bit as he pedalled and then let gave him a gentle push. Much to our mutual surprise, he was able to maintain his balance for a few beats before things steadied enough for him to make it a metre or so. Success! Unfortunately, I was in the office for the first half of the week and then the weather was sour over the second half but it does feel as if it’s all downhill from here (pun, of course, very much intended).
I meant to mention this last week but I underwent my annual medical examination on (what is now, last) Friday. In 2025 I was flattered when the examiner commented positively on my weight going down to 65. This year… not so much positivity. Nothing terrible but the examiner did ask if anything had changed in my diet. I’m hoping that ends up being motivation to get out of my current rut.
My iPhone complained that I was out of space. At first, I wondered if it had something to do with Crossmate. I don’t think it does—or at least not directly. Indirectly, though, all the time I’ve been spending on Crossmate has caused things like podcasts and RSS feeds to back up to an extraordinary level (I had over 100 episodes in my queue). Podcasts aren’t the only problem but the iPhone Storage section of Settings suggests it’s a significant contributor. What can I do in response? It’s tempting to throw money at the problem and just buy a iPhone 17 Pro Max now but I’d rather wait til the refurbished version comes out next February. I went through and made the difficult decision to unsubscribe from a bunch of shows and I’ll see if there are any more alerts.
I also declared RSS bankruptcy and marked all of my outstanding items as read. It had got up to over 200 and while I kept meaning to go and read them, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
I did make more progress with Crossmate. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reworked the sync architecture but it’s one more than it was last week. I’m still not completely happy with it, though, and I’m worried that it might be the case that trying to do this with CloudKit is a fundamentally bad decision. This blog post was both reassuring (CloudKit is good because you don’t need to run your own server) and worrying (CloudKit is bad because you don’t get to run your own server). I remain resolutely opposed to running a server and so don’t have much choice but to keep trying to make it work.
Trash Theory has a great video (for Millennials) about Veruca Salt and the alternative classic ‘Seether’. I didn’t read music magazines when I was a teenager but I think I nevertheless had some sense that maybe Veruca Salt weren’t ‘real’.This video does a great job dispelling that false notion. They were absolutely real and the song absolutely kicks arse.
I mean what else could it be (Apple Music)?

Weeknotes #330

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:00:00 +0900

We are in mid-May and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The Japanese snack food giant, Calbee (maker of many of my favourite flavours of potato crisps), announced that they would switch to black-and-white packaging due to rising costs related to the Iran War (BBC).
I mentioned last week that I have started to teach John how to ride a bicycle. This did not go especially well. In a move that I hope will not be scarring, I decided to take away John’s video game privileges until he improved the amount of ‘gliding’ down the very slight incline where we’re practising. I was worried this was putting too much stress on him but as the week progressed, his willingness to practise improved noticeably and he did start to get better. By Wednesday he was gliding for a couple of seconds at time and I deemed that worthy of the reward of a play session of Princess Peach: Showtime!.
I will admit that one of the things that is making it difficult for John is that bicycle is too big. I worried about this at the time I bought it but deferred to the advice of the salesperson (who was obviously incentivised to tell me it was fine). I figured that even in the worst case where it was truly too big, John could grow into it. Still, as noted, we are making progress so that’s something.
Crossmate continues to progress. Development bogged down a bit as I rearchitected the way remote moves are synced between players. My initial design had a separate row for each move in a table that was associated with each game. This led to a rapidly growing table as a game progressed and made things especially painful when joining a game from another device that was logged into the same iCloud account. Instead, I switched to an approach where each player in a game has a ‘moves’ log. Each player saves each of their moves to their log, these logs are synced between players and then Crossmate uses a reconciliation process to convert the logs into the game’s current state. I imagine most collaborative games are two players playing on their phones so now we’ve reduced all those separate move records to just two. It is true that there could be a fair amount of churn but I debounce updates as a player fills out squares and this limits the number of server pushes required. As neat as that sounds, it was only by around Friday that it felt like things were finally in a good place.
I liked this video from Mark Brown on his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel about how Grand Theft Auto 3 was able to fit Liberty City into the paltry memory of the PlayStation 2. I don’t think this will be of interest to someone with no affinity for video games but Brown does an exceptional job explaining technical details in a way that I think almost anyone can understand (while still having enough detail for a more technically-minded viewer). I was impressed enough that when I saw he had a video about improving a UI element in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I sat John down in front of it and he watched the entire 24 minutes.
Speaking of technically-minded viewers (or, I guess, in this case readers), I enjoyed this post from Tyler Hillery about why there’s a ‘gap’ in between the lowercase and uppercase letters in the ASCII ordering system.
Miike Snow’s 2016 hit ‘Ghenghis Khan’ came into my AirPods via some playlist and my goodness it’s catchy (Apple Music).

Weeknotes #329

Fri, 08 May 2026 23:12:00 +0900

It was Golden Week.
- On Sunday (Constitution Day), I went for a ride with Emma over to Ōizumi Gakuen. It was a nice reminder of how something that can seem impossible (will Emma ever learn to ride a bicycle?) can become so mundane. It was also terrific weather. Really, almost all of Golden Week was great. The oppressive Japanese summer is undoubtedly on its way but right now, it’s fantastic.
- On Monday (Greenery Day), the fantastic weather continued and, in a juxtaposition so on the nose that you might suspect its veracity, I started teaching John to ride a bicycle. Does John even own a bicycle? He does as of last week! (I forgot to mention it in Weeknotes #328.) The impetus is the upcoming third-year bicycle safety class that John has coming up. I can confirm that, as with Emma, the entire enterprise feels impossible.
- On Tuesday (Children’s Day), we all went over to Ogikubo. Eri and I are considering sending Emma to Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School and Eri was curious to see the school (from the outside) in person. While she and Emma were doing that, the boys and I finally got over to Suginami Children’s Traffic Park (Japanese). The website doesn’t really do it justice—Google Maps gives you a better sense of it. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was almost time to turn around and meet back up with Eri and Emma for lunch.
Of course I also spent time working on Crossmate, my crossword app. I honestly would have spent more time on Crossmate but ran out of tokens for use with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex early on Saturday. While I was out of tokens for use the coding agents, I was able to chat with Claude and with its help, I set up a Tangled instance on my Linode. I had it up for about 15 minutes before I reconsidered. One opinion that I’ve been developing over the past six months is a view that there’s too much emphasis put on the social aspect of open source—issues, PRs—and not enough on the software part. Tangled has an emphasis on decentralisation that I like but thinking about the social expectations that come with making a repository generally available made me extremely uncomfortable and so I turned off the Tangled server and instead had ChatGPT help me get code.inqk.net more automated. I can now push my Crossmate repository and have a (admittedly bare bones) web version available for all to see. I don’t have any plans to move my other projects off GitHub just yet but it is something I’m considering.
I watched an NBA game! I complained last week that the post-broadcast games were not being edited down (removing commercials, game delays) but it turns out that’s not true. I don’t know how much more I’ll watch but I do intend to get a little bit more into the swing of things.
I was reading about Massive Attack’s Heligoland on Wikipedia after linking to it as my musical selection last week and there’s a quote in that article from Robert Del Naja about the previous album, 100th Window. I can see what Del Naja meant about merging the electronic and the organic but that’s part of what I love about that album. You get a taste of that in its opening track, ‘Future Proof’ (Apple Music).