Weeknotes #294

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).