I have now been in Japan for 9 years. Japan is far from a perfect country and there are plenty of bits that cause irritation at times, but overall I feel like my normal day to day is pretty good. This past year definitely had some ups and downs and I have quite a lot to consider moving into 2024.

Rust has been on my list of things to learn for quite a while, and recently I have started to actually start learning it. I started with the Rust Book online, working through a chapter at a time, mostly during my weekly MokuMokuKai . After finishing the first I/O project I also went through the rust cli book to further check some of my understanding before moving on.

Right now I’m taking a short break from the book to experiment with a few small CLI applications in Rust to check my understanding. I use mqtt for many of my other projects, so one of my first small project is a set of mqtt tools to tail a server or send simple payloads. I am also reworking my worklog script and rewriting it from Swift into Rust to continue practicing. While I like Swift as a language, and there are libraries to help write a CLI, it feels like Rust might be better for the specific wrapper tools I want to write. Perhaps this will also lead towards me replacing Hugo with something else that is a bit easier to work with. Something like Zola could work if I want to keep it a static site, but I’m also thinking about going with a Django site this time.

I would not be the first engineer to joke that those working in devops have become yaml engineers. In small amounts, yaml is not terrible, and provides a human readable way to handle simple configuration. At some point we jumped the shark and now it’s yaml all the way down .

(I have seen a few projects use something like jsonnet for configuration which quickly goes from turtles all the way down to Cthulhu)

I have plenty of bias, but one of the biggest offenders in my opinion is Kubernetes, and it’s one of several reasons I have trouble bring myself to adopt it. It is nearly impossible to escape yaml and even tools like Salt (which I still use) and Ansible are also programmed in yaml.

Like many, when bored I tend to pick up my phone and start fiddling with it or I pull up things on my ipad. Both devices are useful at times, but I should also reduce the amount of passive time on them.

A while back, I recall reading about someone who enabled grayscale mode on their phones to help make things more boring. I decided to do my own similar experiment. Since most of my devices are Apple, the process is similar.

I often have all kinds of ideas flying around my head but have no idea when I might even try to prioritize it. Sometimes I want to keep track of some high level todos somewhere and a page here is probably sufficient. Listing here makes no claims about when I will actually prioritize it.

• Build my own CalDav server to manage todos. I have some strong opinions on how a todo app should work for me, and I naively think I still want something built on open protocols like caldav. I have a prototype that works, but also trying to get it to work properly with Apple’s CalDav implementations (via EventKit) has a lot of quirks and some missing features.
• Own blogging engine. I do not enjoy using Hugo, but I do like the workflow of being able to write posts in Markdown on almost any editor. I have some wild ideas on how to combine the two but have not actually sat down to plan it out. I think I would also like to add ActivityPub as a way of handling comments but this is probably just asking for extra complexity.
• Learn Rust. Some parts of rust look messy from a syntax perspective, but it’s a language that many people seem excited about. I think I should start by learning some basic rust, and writing some simple CLI tools in it.
• Home Automation. I’m only using HomeAssistant in very minimal ways, but I like the idea of putting some sensors around my apartment to let me know the status of things. I’ve added some temperature/humidity/co2 sensors to a few rooms, but there are probably more things I could improve on.
• Create a game. After graduating university, I started coding a small 2D game in .NET as a way to learn the language. As soon as I got a job, I stopped working on it (and now probably could not even get it to build) but I’ve often wanted to create something. I still think I want to do something in 2D, in the style of a mini rogue like mixed with something like Yoda Stories (an older game I have fond memories of). I think it would be fun messing with the code to randomize small maps that could be completed in 15~30 minutes or so.
• Alto Saxophone When I was in middle school, I was forced by my parents to take part in band and at the time I greatly disliked it. I very briefly tried to pick it up a bit around univeristy but never practiced to any extent. Every once in a while, I think I would like to pick it up again, but my saxophone is at my parents’ house and there’s not an easy way to get it here.

I have been experimenting with various habit tracking and home automation prototypes for quite a while. While I like the idea of having smart buttons around my house, they are a bit expensive for what I want to do with them, and I have not yet had luck getting an IKEA Tradfri button working. A few weeks ago, I recalled the NFC tag support in Home Assistant and wondered if I could use that.

I nearly did not notice the day, but it has now been one year since I moved into my new apartment.

For the first year I was in Fukuoka, I was in an apartment provided via a contract with my Japanese school. After my school year was up, I needed to find new accommodations. A classmate was moving out around the same time and recommend their old place which worked out great since it was the same management company as my initial apartment which made all the paperwork easy.

One of the things that has been nice about the recent interest in Mastodon, is the idea that each account has a built in RSS feed. RSS is great for subscribing to one type of information, but what about more software adding more calendar feeds?

My day typically involves too much context switching, but being able to put various bits of information in my calendar helps when I attempt to make a plan for the day.