Checking in – September 2025

I got into another programming rut and neglected to do anything again. Two other things of note have happened however.

Japan

I've been invited to join another trip to Japan again. My brother and his girlfriend wanted to visit Mt Fuji so I will have to go and plan around that. It's somewhat annoying to me that I was given this request basically immediately after paying for an examination that would have happened at about the same time, but it's otherwise alright I guess.

As of me writing this (3 Oct) I am still yet to finalise the plan, but this might not be the case because my dad has to renew his passport and the passport office is dragging its feet and being particularly dim about the various irregularities of life. Should really get to it somehow.

Health

The inflammation numbers have gone back up a little and the doctors are basically saying that maybe the advanced medicine is necessary. But otherwise nothing particular happened.

Programming

It seems like I have, without myself noticing, fallen into Twitter again. I had to once again consciously detach myself from the app, which I did with some, but not total, success. The recent political event that happened in the United States which I dare not name has once again made the place intolerable enough that I have to disconnect from it.

The mental energy freed up from this has been spent mostly on adding more features to my automatic wordle clone collector. It now saves things to an SQLite database and recognises games copied into the clipboard using a data-driven approach. The new database setup becomes the primary store of these game results. To my surprise, there are eleven thousand individual entries. Apparently I played a lot of these games.

There's more to do, too, mostly to make sure that I can easily port the program to another computer, perhaps also change the GUI to use a new framework, and also view past statistics (this is currently handled by using an SQLite viewer, which is actually good enough for most purposes, but would be nice if I can do it in my own program) and a few GUI conveniences as well such as adding the ability to visit the game by double clicking on the game entry or skip a game by shift-clicking. And so on.

Over this period I have gained experience that I have never thought I would. I am finally able to correctly apply the principles of writing tests for programs. It's not the test-driven development that I was taught in training – I still think it's a bit too much of a friction between getting an idea and getting things written – but it does help with keeping development fast as, by its very design, I interact with the program at most once daily. I also learnt how to make coverage reports and found their utilities, and of course learnt a bit more about Python packaging. I also learnt how to manage new features in Gitea, so lots of work with pull requests and issues and all that stuff.

One downside to doing this is that my git history is now a big mess. But I guess that's mostly fine.

Typhoon

There was a typhoon a week or two ago. It was wild. As always, although it is quite a big frightening one, a brief stroke of luck means that we managed to avoid the worst of it, though hurricane-strength winds still blew through.

This would normally not be worth noting but it is the first time I lost something because of a typhoon: somehow, the wind managed to scoop up the pluviometer that I left outside – you know, to measure the rain – right out of the flowerbed and down about seventy metres. Needless to say, it did not survive the fall.

I was surprised for two reasons. First, it survived a typhoon of similar strength (Wipha) without issue. Second, it was positioned in such a way that it has to be blown upwards by at least its own height before it can cross the top of the wall and fall. I chose to do this at the cost of compromising the collection rate because it was already compromised by putting it in the flowerbed to begin with – that's the only place I can put it. Well, regardless, it is cheap, so I bought a replacement. Right now that means I have a spare display and a thermometer, which I did have the foresight to bring inside before it got blown away.

Well, this recap turned out to be more than I thought I had.