For a while, I have been suffering from some kind of burnout from work. While I had many things I wanted to work on, at the end of the day I lacked the energy. I would sometimes make a little progress during my weekly mokumokukai , but always felt the progress was too slow.

Even then, I would often crave some kind of feeling of achievement. Since I was not able to feel a since of achievement from work, I turned to some Artificial Achievements via games.

I have a wiki of sorts where I collect all my random, half-baked ideas: https://ideas.paultraylor.dev/ . Instead of having a lot of random ideas floating in my head, sometimes it feels nice to dump them somewhere. Many of these ideas will likely never go beyond the braindump stage. In some ways, I guess it’s my own version of something like the lazyweb-requests .

If I’m at my PC, then it is fairly simple for me to open up the repo and quickly jot down a few ideas. Though if I’m on my iPad, it is more awkward, so I have settled on using a Shortcut to quickly open a new memo with the current date so I can sketch an idea. Other times I might jot something into todoist or Noteplan or Obsidian but I have not quite found a single app to standardize on. Creating that app to standardize on might be one of my next half-baked ideas :p.

While I do not think of myself as particularly smart, I was one of the lucky kids that had a reasonably easy time in school. For many subjects, especially science, math, and history I do not recall having to spend enormous amounts of time studying. There were a few subjects I struggled with a bit (particularly spelling) but I could usually brute force a bit, cram and be done with it. However there was a point where I hit somewhat of a wall and suddenly, many subjects became more challenging but I did not have the study skills to deal with it.

Django comes with support for MIDDLEWARE and provides several useful ones by default. I usually try to make my projects as useable as possible, and some debug middleware is only useful when development.

Example Middleware

Since the order and layering often matter, I’ll usually configure all my optional middleware in the correct spot like bellow, with a short comment.

MIDDLEWARE = [
    "debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware",  # Only enabled for debug
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",  # Used primarily for docker
    "django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware",
    "django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware",
    "django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware",
    "django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware",
]

Then I’ll use other conditional checks to see if this list (or other variables) need to be modified.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• Arthur C. Clarke

In many ways, programming is very much like a kind of Magic. We even call people that are good at computers, a Computer Wiz(ard). When I volunteered at an English school I would often have a bit of fun and jokingly call myself パソコンの魔法使い or Computer magician when describing my job. Writing code can even look like writing in an ancient arcane grimoire.

While I already use VSCode for most things, like many developers I am often curious to see what else is out there. Even though I like some of the ideas behind the Zed editor, and will follow its progress, advertising built in AI is a fairly immediate turn off. The idea of a high performance editor though is still very appealing, and it seems like there are many rust based contenders (not that my rust abilities are anywhere near the level to contribute anything).

As I have tried to reduce my dependence on social media, I have picked up more and more blogs into my feed reader. With as much as I read, I have often felt like I should be writing more as well but I am very skilled at distractions and excuses to avoid writing.

I am often reminded about the seinfield calendar which introduced a strategy for improving at something with continuous practice. Even if the story itself is apocryphal, that idea of continuous practice shows up in many places. In fact, one of my favorite Japanese words is 改善(kaizen) or the idea of continuous improvement.

When one thinks of radiation, what kinds of thoughts first come to mind? For many, radiation gives the image of something scary. Often places like Fukushima and Chernobyl come to mind. For me, I’ll often immediately wonder “how much are we talking about”. There are two examples that often come to mind.

User Information / Data

Like radiation being useful for X-Rays and microwaving food, there are times where you need to handle user information and data. Though also like radiation, if you create too much of it for poor reasons, it becomes a much larger problem.

I’ve been using alfred on my macs for quite a number of years. I don’t remember how I first found out about it, but it’s nearly always the first thing I install on new machines. Should I move to Linux, I am certainly going to need to find an equivalent and onagre looks like it might be one potential replacement. Inspired by a random comment on mastodon, I thought it would be interesting to write about my most commonly used workflows.

I recently learned a new word, シンデレラフィット (Cinderella Fit) which amused me. It seems to be a term applied a lot when talking about various storage items from places like muji and ikea and refers to items that fit perfectly. I’m often reminded of it when I see videos on things like gridfinity where one tries to make a container that fits perfectly for each individual item. There’s a part of me that loves seeing things like BaseLynx , a customizable charging system that has a dock for each one of your devices. I think part of the appeal of having a 3D printer, is the idea that you can make a container to hold just about everything perfectly. There’s also a number of times I’ve wanted a cable of a very specific length. With more things using USB C, maybe that’s something obtainable, but there are still plenty of household objects that all have their own transformer block with weird sizes and such that I then want to hide away.