jamesvandyne

At Octopus Energy, I think we’ve made negative prices available to retail customers (at least in the UK, not sure about the other countries we’re retailing in).

People getting paid to charge their cars because the grid has a surplus of (probably green) energy.

It's not a law enforcement issue, it's a city planning issue.

The practical solution is to reallocate usage of the street to prioritize all modes of transport. i.e. Take a car lane and replace it with proper 2-way concrete barriered bike lane.

They're on the sidewalks because they don't feel safe riding in the street, and who would with huge trucks blowing past you at high rates of speed. But if you give them some infrastructure and someplace safe to ride, they won't be forced to dive through pedestrians on the sidewalk.

It depends on the level of rain, but there are affordable solutions to cycling in the rain to prevent you from getting drenched. I use the Rover cycling poncho from Cleverhoods to keep dry. It's mostly a regular poncho, but it has thumb straps you can strap on your handlebars and your legs are covered.

My son, who rides in a seat on the back, has a rain cover that provides shade when it's not raining and that we can zip an enclosure onto when it is to keep him completely dry.

If it's a heavy rain and we can't wait it out we'll take the car. But we mostly use our e-bikes as it's easier/quicker/more fun.

That's the one. Thanks for the correction. Forgot my keyboard, which has a ctrl key in place of the caps, so I've stopped mapping it.

Cmd-a and Cmd-e work in most/all native controls, no? Really ergonomic once you've remapped caps to cmd as well.

Yes, it's called Vouch and it's documented well on the indieweb wiki. https://indieweb.org/Vouch

The Japanese country side isn't too different than the US. Sure there's trains, but not an extensive network ala Tokyo, and you drive everywhere.

The way they handle the issue is "daikou taxi", which is a service from the taxi providers. If you've been drinking, you call them, they send a taxi with 2 drivers. You get in the taxi, and the other driver drives your car home.

Introducing a service like this would help reduce DUIs, I think. Having stricter laws about also helps avoid people making the decision to drive somewhere, where they know they're going to drink, in the first place. Instead they may opt to take a cab, find a designated driver etc, drink closer to home etc..

Japan used to have a bad drunk driving problem until they changed the laws to be mostly zero tolerance. If your caught it's an automatic 90-day suspension of your license. Over 0.25mg and it could be up to 2 years. That's excluding potential fines and imprisonment. Oh, and any adults in the car and or the person who owns the car can also be held liable.

Technical monitoring is one solution. Making you calculate if driving is potentially worth, at a minimum 3-months of no driving, quickly makes you decide it's not worth the risk is another. That said, you'd think potentially running someone over would be enough risk for to avoid driving under the influence, but it's obviously not.

Blogs like the author is looking for still exist (I write one at https://jamesvandyne.com) and there's heaps more on https://micro.blog.

Blogs that aren't SEO fluff to get adsense money just don't appear in the search results. Discovery is the real issue. Finding these blogs independently or outside is nigh impossible.

I've been thinking it might be fun to make a GeoCities-esque neighborhood directory site that you could add your blog to help with discovery. But could you (I) change my habits to stumble upon sites in the neighborhoods instead of opening HN/Twitter?

You may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.

The indieweb is what got me back in to blogging and RSS again. Being able to be social on the net without FB/Twitter has made being on the 'net fun again. Adding your feed to micro.blog even gives you a full-social modern social-experience, except it's completely powered by blogs and RSS.

There's still a bit of faff required to get setup (even with Wordpress), so I've been building what I hope will be a faff-free blogging engine ( http://tanzawa.blog ). It's finally gotten feature-complete enough for me to move my own blog it last week ( https://jamesvandyne.com ).

Webmentions are a great way of getting back to a decentralized web. Being able to comment on someone else's site _from your own site_ feels like magic. It brings back memories of the web before social media took hold.

Implementation is pretty simple, too. I documented how I handled processing and display of webmentions on http://tanzawa.blog (a system I'm developing designed to make using the IndieWeb easier/less fiddly).

Off topic from the main thread, but Travel map looks really good. Reminds me of all the travel blogs I used to read when I was in high school / college dreaming about getting out and exploring the world. Great work!

Agree 100%. Integrate hosting via iCloud. Blogs and personal websites are our best hope for the web in a world dominated by social media.

I've not quit Twitter, but I've reduced my usage of it (and gained control of my data) by syndicating my posts/statuses from to Twitter and backfeeding any replies/likes as comments on my blog.

It's all simple enough to get setup using the IndieWeb Wordpress plugin.

While the UI UX in macOS has degraded a bit, minimizing windows you’re not using as the main way to manage a desktop is, I think, a Windows habit.

macOS works much better if you manage windows with hiding, rather than minimizing. Once you get the hang of it, with cmd-h (hide), cmd-tab (switch applications), and cmd-‘ (iterate windows of an application) I (almost) never leave the keyboard and can get right to the window I need quickly.

Rams is great. Bought it on Vimeo shortly after it came out. You won’t regret it.

When Rams speaks about design, it always makes me reflect on modern software and how we’ve regressed so much. Though I think’s mostly as a single widget does 20 different things, which isn’t a great idea in the first place.

If you’re looking for a remote job in Japan it’s worth checking out the remote in Japan repo on GitHub. Heaps of good companies that do remote (including the one I work for).

https://github.com/uiur/remote-in-japan/blob/master/README.e...

It really depends on the culture of the company. In my company (95% Japanese/non-gaishiki-kei) it’s the norm for people to take a couple months off when there’s a new addition to the family. I took 6 weeks when my son was born and nobody batted an eye. My friend, who also had a child around the same time me, couldn’t take parental leave, but said he’d be working remotely a lot instead.

I’m optimistic it will change, but probably not for another long while.

You can take them to the shop and repair / replace the heel and cork. Cost-wise I think my Bostons were $150 new and to fully replace the cork and sole was about $90. Much cheaper than a new pair. Just the sole wouldn't be nearly that much.

Yes it’s partially cultural, but it also depends on the company. I work for a company in Tokyo (about 35 - 40 people, 90%+ Japanese). We work 7.5 hour days, go home on time, and can work remotely. (If you speak Japanese and like Python, we’re hiring!)

While the majority of large companies have this old style thinking, I think it will continue to change as the younger people get into positions to effect change.

Thank you for the feedback.

Yes - more screenshots / a properly filled out marketing site are on the list of things to do. Good idea about an "About" section. Workshop is the name of our blog where we show / discuss Kwoosh as we build it.

Brilliant. Thank you for this response.

Did you view our marketing site at https://kwoosh.com/ ?

Good point though, we could update the footer on workshop to be a bit more specific.

author here. I agree with what you're saying in broad terms. And yes, you're right that handling sales tax perfectly at launch won't kill your product.

What's the killer is all of the work _surrounding_ that small task.

Actually charging sales tax didn't long. More or less

if address.region in TAXABLE_REGIONS: subscription.sync()

What took the longest was developing and deciding how the screens surrounding will work. Answering things like:

- Which fields do we want to capture for an address? - How do we want to store states (or provinces, or prefectures) in a standardized way? - Is there a library that will let me select countries and prefectures? (Answer yes, pycountry is pretty great) - How do I integrate this library into my backend / front end?

In my mind it's just fit and finish. Like making the motherboard and inside of the case as beautiful as the outside. If I try and half-ass it or skip it, I'm just going to have to double back and make it right.

I do appreciate your final sentence. I'll keep that in mind going forward. :-)

Spot on. That's something that's next on my roadmap: building out a help and documentation site/portal. There is so much more that goes into building and launching a SaaS app than just the app itself.

I'd to love to hear more about how you identified UX issues from pure logging data. Do y'all write anything up about this online anywhere?

author here. You’ve hit the nail on the head.

We actually have soft delete in Kwoosh. We’re using Django on the backend. The way we went about implementing it was with a flag on our core data-type (Apps, Screens, Discussions, Tasks etc... all share a common parent class). Then we used an custom Manager class (Django’s name for the bit that lets you set default filters for models) that sets the default filter to only show active items.

If we want to query all objects including archived items (like for viewing them as read-only) we just change our code from Task.objects.filter() to Task.all_objects.filter().

We also have another flag for controlling visibility directly. This makes it manageable to remove a parent task, hide the children tasks, and restore into the expected states.

I should write a more in depth post on this for workshop. Maybe someone would find it helpful.

They're not. They've been around longer than WiFi. It's a simple wired connection to the control panel in the tub that's installed as a single unit.

It let's you control things like temp, intercom to the kitchen and so forth. Automatic Bath one of my favorite things about living in Japan, even more so than the heated toilet seat.

They'll should still have plenty of time for taking photos. Astronauts usually work a regular 8-ish hour work day up in the ISS and have weekends etc...

2 of those working hours each day are blocked out for exercise, too, so this should be a real boon.