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The number of new detections continued to rise in Tokyo. For the past four days there have been more than 200 cases detected per day and on Friday there were more detections (243) than at the height of the first wave. The discussion I’ve seen on Twitter seems to agree that these cases are largely mild and hospitals aren’t running out of emergency capacity but it’s been incredibly frustrating to watch. I don’t know if things would have been different if the government had moved to close down nightlife establishments but it’s difficult to understand the reluctance to do so. I can see why you’d want to avoid a broad economic shutdown again but how critical are these businesses?
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Governor Koike easily won her reelection bid last weekend. Last week I wondered why things were looking so easy for her and while it’s not its focus, I really enjoyed this article on the election by Rob Fahey.
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I’m one of those ‘quantified self’ people. I’ll readily admit that I haven’t seen much benefit from all the measuring I do but this week I added one more dimension of measurement: nutrition. After hearing Casey Liss recommend the app FoodNoms on a recent episode of Accidental Tech Podcast, I installed it and started a two-week trial. It looks great from a privacy perspective (and as a native app) but after five days or so I’m starting to feel the strain of looking up dietary information on the foods I’m eating.
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One thing it does that I like is allow you to assign a confidence rating to your log entries. So if you do pick something from their database that you don’t think is completely correct, you can mark it as accurate, an approximate or an estimate.
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Rob shared this a capella version of the Inception trailer (YouTube). I love it.
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I started teaching myself iOS development. I finished reading the GNU C Reference Manual a couple of days ago and that caused me to consider what it is that I wanted to make next. Recently Janet has been my jam—as the kids (maybe?) say—but I don’t actually have anything I want to use Janet for at the moment. And so I thought, why not an iPhone app? I don’t have a shortage of ideas. The first one I’ve been wanting for ages is a simple app that will take text and wrap it intelligently at 80 characters (for writing commit messages in GitHub, a pretty niche use case to be sure).
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The new desk and monitor probably contributed, too. A 13” display is pretty cramped for Xcode whereas a 24” screen lets things breathe a lot more. It also makes it easier to have a ‘book’ open on the screen. In my case, that book is Apple’s Develop in Swift Fundamentals textbook (Apple Books). The book appears to be aimed at school-aged students and while that means it’s taking a lot longer to get going than your average guide, it’s teaching me things that less comprehensive tutorials just skip completely. If nothing else, after more than 20 years of programming, I’ve finally learnt how to use breakpoints (!).
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Did I mention that these weeknotes have inspired Brandon to start writing his own? (He delightfully calls them ‘weeklies’.) I think this makes me a thought leader.
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I feel I should like nerdcore (Wikipedia) more than I should—which is barely at all. The one song I do love is ‘Mr. Raven’ by MC Lars (Apple Music). It’s not on the same level as that but ‘Revenge of the Nerds II’ (also Apple Music) at least made it into my library. No surprise that the verse by MC Lars is my favourite (he quotes π to 25 decimal places!).
