Month Notes for August 2026
A very late August Month Note this month. I had come back from a month-long trip on Aug 11, and then flurry of non-work work organizing meetups, catching up with friends and then disappeared off to Hokkaido just before the month ended.
The trip in Sydney was a like one long continuous hangout with friends and family. Honestly, the family bit was quite stressful. But it was so wonderful to see all these friends in Sydney, from old friends I hadn't seen for 20 years since my university days, to friends I hadn't seen since Europe, to friends who moved from Tokyo to Sydney and more.
With PP joining for the last 10 days of the trip, we fell back into our usual travel groove of coffee, books and architecture. We managed to go to several book stores, Kinokuniya (yeah, the Japanese one!), Dymocks (I used to come here all the time when I was a kid), Gleebooks, Better Read than Dead, Constant Reader, Books Ever After, Elizabeth's Bookshop and Modern Times.
It's refreshing to be able to go browse English books in a bookstore. One of my hobbies is on maps, especially different styles of maps. I managed to find a lot of maps related books at Better Read than Dead and Constant Reader. I haven't really dug into the books yet, but I'm most excited about "Maps, Annotated" and "The Library of Lost Maps" where the author documents these maps found in the University College London's Maps Vault.
One of the cars I hired on this trip was a Tesla 3. It is an older model, with no self driving. It feels like driving a computer. Which is not a bad thing, but also not really a good thing. One funny thing that happened was a software update appeared in the morning when we turned on the car, and it was an annoying alert. I dismissed it and it asked me if I wanted to set a time in the evening for it to do it. I just reflexively chose 10pm and forgot about it.
Later that night, we were having a long chat at a friends house, left to get the car at 10:30 and I couldn't get into the car. The NFC card wouldn't let me into the car! Panic! After trying several times over a few minutes, it finally let me in. We sat inside and I couldn't turn on the car. I looked at the screen, and it said "Software Update in progress, 20 mins to go." So the car was completely immobile during the software update. We were stuck.
Begrudgingly we walked back to our friends place, and luckily they were happy for us to hang out with them for another half hour while we laughed at a software update for a car.
On our way back, it was forecasted that a typhoon would reach Tokyo just as we were landing. I had been checking the forecasts days leading up to our flight, considering changing our flights back. We didn't change our flights, took the risk. Our reward was a fight that was 2/3 empty. The flight during the day was wonderful, the landing was a little bumpy but we did arrive into a very wet Tokyo. We forgot to pack an umbrella, and when we arrived in Kichijoji, the taxi stands were full. A wheel fell off one of our suitcases during the flight, so without the taxi it would be a pretty miserable and wet journey to walk that final 7 minutes home.
I rushed home in the rain, got the car keys and drove over to pick up the bags and Patricia from Inokashira Park Station. On my way, I realized that I don't know by heart all the roads that lead up to the station, so it took a good 10 minutes to drive to the station since I didn't put on the Google Maps Nav.
Returned home to see nearly half our moss in the garden had disappeared. I knew something was up when I left, but didn't realize in a month, something killed and ate half the moss. At first, Google searches pointed at Reddit threads where they claimed pillbugs ate the moss, but then I talked to AI about it and multiple LLMs pointed out that pill bugs only eat dead things, not moss that is alive. So something killed the moss first before they ate it.
After several days of observing and chatting with AI, we've concluded that the type of moss we had in the garden is not good under shade, and they need direct sunlight, so all the ones that did die were in shade most of the time. This is counter-intuitive to my understanding of moss, but this particular species of moss does thrive in the sun because my front yard is completely fine, and it has very little tree cover.
Compared notes on hyper-personal financial software, Fine Financial, with a friend, this is very fun because we could discuss our usage and see how each other tackled similar problems. While I made AI design UI that allowed me to resolve conflicts/double-entries, my friend's solution is to hook up Claude Code and just let it go fix it straight in the database.
I think regularly doing a show-and-tell of things you build for yourself is an interesting angle. I'm very interested in these hyper-personal apps that people are starting to build, I wonder if this could be an offshoot from the Vibe Coders Tokyo, or maybe morphing Vibe Coders Tokyo into just demos of hyper personal vibe-coded apps, with discussion.
I finally added a 3d map to my home control interface (Home Front) that allows you to visualize the current status of the house in 3D. I've made it deliberately schematic and abstract, but has the general layout of the house which I've explained has been three overlapping squares. Each square ends up logically as a room in the house (though the room is rarely actually square, usually an odd shape.)
Patricia had a lot of design feedback for me, which even after a decade of experience receiving design feedback, I still suck at it and get defensive. But all the points she made were really good, and after applying them by basically rephrasing it to AI, it's really easy to try new things out.
The main feedback was to reduce the amount of color, which I thought would be terrible at first, but now that we have reduced it to just blue, yellow, white, the interface is way more calm and pleasant to look at.
After umming and aahhing for multiple months, I finally pulled the trigger to buy a NAS enclosure. I have a lot of projects that I want to do which involve having a lot of storage at home, including storing lots of raw recorded footage, media related to Snowline.
I ended up buying this enclosure from Aoostar WTR Pro which is a no-OS 4-bay drive enclosure with an AMD Ryzen chipset inside. It was super easy to set up and I've had decent performance from it. Also bought 2 x 4GB drives, hard drives are so expensive at the moment, together with RAM, but my thoughts are that it's not really going to get cheaper soon. In fact, it could get even more expensive.
One thing I have really wanted to be able to do was to trigger rebuilds of my internal apps when I commit to GitHub. For a while I hadn't figured out how to do this, but I've finally managed to make this work by creating a self-hosted GitHub runner on my local server and then having a github workflow that is triggered on main-branch push. I didn't know that the self-hosted GitHub runner maintains a permanent connection to Github so you don't need a tunnel into the local network through a webhook.
The whole proposed setup was done through Claude. I have a project folder in Claude (Cowork) where all my HomeLab sysadmin questions go, and it's quite useful for it to know all the other conversations that have happened, I drop in all the docs I have in the context so that when it proposes ideas, it has context about my current setup, and can refer to previous decisions I have done.
Claude is now my home sysadmin for the most part. I still have to do the typing in of the commands, but it is only a small step until it actually can type the commands in by itself. I don't think we've gotten to that level of trust yet though.
I attended the first(?) Claude Meetup in Tokyo. It was held on a Thursday at 2pm, which is a bit of an odd time. There were 6 lightning talks, all in Japanese.
One talk stood out, it was a woman who runs a accomodation rental business, managing over 180 locations. The main work she does is managing the logistics, like marketing, customer support (check-ins, check-outs, questions), cleaning schedule, maintenance schedule, etc. She was not technical but realized that AI may be able to help with managing some of these things, and just learnt how to vibe-code with Claude, learned how to use Github and could even read code now and understand what is going on.
It is pretty inspiring to see someone (a) use AI for real life problems, (b) able to build custom solutions and (c) do it without a lot of technical knowledge.
We visited a DIY craft activity at a shop called OFS Cafe (Our Favorite Shop) organized by D. Bros, where you buy a pack of paper and there are 100s of designer stamps that you can use to create your own custom designs on different types of paper, like letter heads, bookmarks, stickers, envelopes, business cards. It was a lot of fun, they give you 90 minutes, which seemed a lot but we totally needed another hour more.
