Recently there is quite a lot of back and forth regarding ActivityPub based projects and Bluesky.

Drinking more water.

Similar to a friend figuring out water this is how I get myself to drink more water.

1. A while back, I bought several 500 ml bottles from Daiso for about ￥ 100. At the beginning of the day I fill each of them up and put them in the fridge.
2. Keep one at my desk. If I have a bottle next to me, I will reflexively drink sips while working.
3. Any time I empty a bottle, I scan an nfc tag on my desk to record it, and then get a new bottle from the fridge.

As a bonus, this also means short forced breaks throughout the day to empty water.

3D Printing is still somewhat magical. Several years ago, a friend gave me a ender3 that they were not using, and I have been using that for a few small projects, but it is an old printer so it is not always reliable.

Recently I have been considering 3D printing some more, and would really like to get a newer one. Not unexpectedly, my recent youtube recommendations and now subscriptions have included quite a lot of 3D Printing, such as channels like Print Farm Academy or Macy Makes talking about creating 3D printing businesses or Hands on Katie showing all kinds of things that she makes with 3D printing.

I am not particularly fond of Kubernetes and have tried to avoid it as much as possible, but at times it feels somewhat inevitable. In order to have a little more familiarity with how it works, I decided to go through Kubernetes the Hard Way and setup a cluster.

Note: If I was really going to use Kubernetes, I would likely use some project that managed it in a better way. Going through this excercise is the same reason I went through Linux from Scratch years ago to better understand how things were assembled together.

Read More →

One advantage of having my own personal api is that I can put various useful scripts under a single repo and have them run. I have been using raindrop for several years, to collect bookmarks to read later. Often, while researching things, it would be useful to automatically group things into collections, so I wrote some celery tasks to help with this.

While USB-C mostly defines just the physical connector, the increase in Power Delivery options makes it a more appealing option for all kinds of devices. In some ways, I am lucky as an American than lives in Japan, most devices use the same plugs, and I do not do so much traveling as to need all kinds of adapters. That said, it is still somewhat annoying (first world problems) to have many different power bricks and large plugs on my desk. Is it yet feasible to move more small devices to USB-C and ditch all these power bricks ?

I have long been inspired by Aaron Pareki and his pk3 tool for his website. With some searching, one can find other kinds of personal management systems on GitHub or other developers writing about their own personal api with links to other examples. As a developer myself, I have my own personal API that I am able to add to as wanted.

In the interest of choosing boring technology my personal api is powered primarily by django and celery .

Previously, I would subscribe to many projects on GitHub to watch for releases. Over time, it gets difficult to check all your subscriptions as GitHub does not seem to have an easy way to request this list from the API. It can also increase some noise in your inbox from time to time. Recently as part of my slow migration off of GitHub, I have been switching to following the release feed in RSS.

Among developers, there is a well known platform rant comparing Google and Amazon that is often referenced in terms of Amazon’s Service Oriented Architecture.

All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

If I was to ever become CTO of a company (unlikely) I think I would have my own mandate regarding communication within the company.

1. Any kind of announcement or update, should be on an internal blog that supports RSS/Atom feeds. Any tool written by the team, should have a link back to this blog.
2. Anything that has a time period or a deadline, should be on an internal calendar that people can subscribe to. Any tool written by the team, should have a link back to this calendar.
3. Each team should have a support window and questions should be tracked in a public-by-default bug tracking system. Any tool written by the team should have a link to this support window.
4. Things can be sent via Email or Slack or any other communication but must always link back to the original source on the blog or calendar. cool uris ensure that the information can be referenced again or passed around to others.

As a developer, if I’m using some kind of open source project, I can usually find it on GitHub and either subscribe to different types of notifications from the UI or I can subscribe to an RSS feed.

Over time, I’ve been slowly refining how I automatically deploy things to my development environment. This is an improvement to my previous deploy from github