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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 It has clients for all platforms but it’s previously excellent native app has been replaced by a resource-guzzling Electron-based monster that uses 500MB of RAM. 500 megabytes!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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
