Tag: english

Just a casual idea

February 20, 2023
valeblog
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I haven’t read the manga of En-en no Shouboutai, only enjoyed some of the anime, but here’s one idea. In episode 10 there’s a scene of the sun setting… except we know with maps that the camera is located in Tokyo.

Now give it a thought. A sunset from Tokyo with Tanzawa in that direction (a point of view familiar to anyone who’s driven out on the Chuo highway) means that there should be Mt Fuji in front of the sun there. Except there isn’t. Maybe it’s a cloudy day? Doesn’t look so bad really.

So then… If there’s no Mt Fuji, where did it go? In a world of “fire everywhere” I wonder where a volcano could possibly go. Maybe a small little eruption? Marginally cataclysmic?

Discovery weekly

February 2, 2023
valeblog
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I appreciate Spotify’s regularly changing playlists. I have trouble keeping my daily playlists in any shape (they tend to converge on way too similar music), but I like the Discovery Weekly and the Release Radar a lot.

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Norlan

January 29, 2023
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A few years back, when I think it was still only being crowdfunded, I got myself a pair of the Norlan whisky glasses. I cracked one sometime later and lost the other one to a fall from the countertop last week. By sheer coincidence though, last fall I clicked on their email about their steel tumbler, which is about the same shape as the glass glasses were, except steel. Meaning hopefully I won’t be able to break it. It also arrived just in time (literally the day after I broke the second glass). Cheers.

Casually back climbing

January 25, 2023
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Nowadays I mostly go indoor climbing to a gym in Ogikubo. It’s about 20 minutes by bicycle, which is usually not a problem, except today the promised cold weather hit with subzero temperatures. So that I don’t freeze on my ride, I put on the headband head warmer thing I got when I had dreds (so it hadn’t had much of a role in the past decade) and some fuzzy gloves.

The climbing itself went about as well as expected. I managed to send a new 5Q, and as one of the walls were rebuilt just today, I also managed to snatch the first send on some of the easier routes. I didn’t have enough strength left in me to clear the last two 6Qs, so instead I was doing rounds on easier routes I’d sent before. As a result I managed to shred both my pinky fingers (that hasn’t happened in a good while), but some tape solves that.

A year of things not working out

December 31, 2022
valeblog
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Including working out. If only I was joking.

a foggy forest with trees on a hill
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Supercharged OAuth scopes with reitit

December 21, 2022
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You might be familiar with OAuth scopes from for example the Github dialog for creating a new access token. You get to choose what the token is authorized to do: can the user manage repos? Leave reviews? Push commits? There are a ton of options. Similarly Mastodon has scopes such as “see favorites” or “post on your behalf.”

padlock on black metal fence
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Redis sorted sets are cool

December 20, 2022
valeblog
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I first saw Redis sorted sets in action reading Mastodon’s source code. Sorted sets are used to store feeds (ignore that ZREVRANGEBYSCORE is deprecated). In a use-case such as Mastodon feeds (timelines), sorted sets come handy because you can “just” add new elements and Redis will take care of the sorting.

variety of fruits displayed on wooden shelf
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Configuring MPV

December 19, 2022
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I used VLC for a very long time. No longer. The other day I was watching something and I noticed how dull the colors were. It did fit the theme of the video though so I just assumed that it was a thing, except then I ran into a very colorful screenshot from the same video. What gives? In 2011, when fansubbing was huge, 10bit was the “new big thing.” It encodes colors into 10 bits into the standard 8, which results in much better colors. At least it should, as it seems VLC wasn’t able to handle that.

Example of 10bit difference
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Frontend/backend shared routing with reitit

December 17, 2022
valeblog
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Commonly frontend and backend are separate beasts. Backend written in Ruby using Rails for example, its routing written in its own DSL. Frontend written in TypeScript using Vue.js for example, its routing written in its own DSL. Of course the frontend will call some backend endpoints, so it should definitely know about those backend endpoints too, while there may be some frontend “paths” that don’t correspond to any single API endpoint, yet you might want to generate absolute URLs for those pages on the backend. This results in a nasty mess and duplication of routing and adjacent logic.

asphalt road between trees
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Elasticsearch aggregation to find most popular tags over time

shallow focus photography of pineapple
December 16, 2022
valeblog
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Finding popular keywords or tags is what twitter’s trends are (other than a means to manipulate public opinion and introduce artificial trends by paying good cash). While I think having a “trends” feature tends to introduce more problems than the value it provides for discovery, I wanted to figure out how I’d do it before deciding not to.

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