Month Notes for June 2026
I'm not sure what I'm doing with these notes, are they blog posts or social media posts? I dunno. But they are here.
I get an incredible buzz when I get to draw pixels on to small screens. A long standing obsession of mine for more than 20 years. This obsession led me to hack on Palm Pilots back in the day, Nokia phones, iPhones and even watches. I just found out that there's a cool thing called M5StickS3 which features a super bright 1.14 inch display in a shape that looks like a miniature phone.
There's a few ways you can program a ESP32 controller, like using Arduino and other libraries I've not heard of.
Matt Webb wrote about a project of his that created a hot-loading prototyping system for ESP32 devices like the M5Stick called resident. After a few tries, I was able to get this working, and it's quite cool to vibe-code Lua code that gets hot-loaded via a websocket on to an embedded device like this.
I have some designs on making a funky remote for home assistant with this, but for now, it's a portable gradient I can keep in my pocket.
After listening & reading Craig Mod about vibe-coding and building his own finance app, it inspired me to try my hand at consolidating all my fragmented financial documents into a single dashboard that's better than bunch of spreadsheet tabs.
Initially thinking it would be a good 10 days of Claude Coding, but this ballooned to 20 days of 8 hours in front of a computer and upgrading to a Claude Max ($100) plan. This resulted in a weirdo-finance app of my dreams, designed for two people in the world, managing 8 years of financial data across 3 countries, 20 accounts and 15K scanned receipts.
The app collates my transactions from CSV/PDF files from my credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, funds, years of scanned paper receipts, together with crawling my Gmail for digital purchase receipts, cross correlating these using LLMs to extract individual line items, merchant names, guessing the category of purchases. It tracks my home loans, using Claude Code's understanding of Japanese Home Loan repayment schedules and charting it in my own vocabulary. It brings all my investments across continents into a single dashboard, updates exchange rates and stock prices daily.
The app is not something I'm planning to release, as it's like the bare-minimum feature set for myself, with all the quirks that only make sense for me. The benefit of having all my financial information in one place which means I'm constantly discovering new mental models of how to think about my spending and my assets. For example, I can easily compare how much I'm eating out, or realize how much my spending on electronic gadgets or snow trips get amortized over the year.
I did not expect the process of building this to be so much fun, much of my tokens were spent on the UX of the app, which I'm pretty happy with, but also with certain parts which I really wouldn't be able to do because I didn't have the accounting knowledge.
More detailed write ups about the process, the learnings and the app, Fine, to come.
World Cup is ON!
Being retired now, I suddenly realized I can watch as many games as I can. So far, I've managed to at least watch full matches every day, sometimes nearly all the matches (4 or 6) per day!
Go Japan, Australia, Netherlands, England, Scotland!
Because games are happening early morning in Japan, I watch them on a time delay, but don't want to be spoiled by the results. But I do want to know when a game is on, or what the schedule is. Unfortunately all the schedules I found online spoil the games as soon as they're finished.
Someone built an open source FIFA World Cup dashboard that crawls all the match data, so I managed to fork it and create my own no-spoiler mode (source) which blurs the game scores unless I tell it to show it.
The official broadcaster of the games is DAZN which is an online sports streaming channel here in Japan. There are games that are streamed on terrestial TV on NHK, but only a portion of the games. Japanese commentary is very stats driven, always talking about how tall someone is or how old they are.
My favorite thing about this world cup is the existence of Trevor Noah's Watch Party live streams on YouTube that are synced to the game. I don't need all this commentary on who's passing to who, but a bunch of funny people chatting about the game. To their credit, DAZN also has a Japanese watch party stream too on their platform.
After signing up for the Claude Max ($100) plan, I've finally contracted the token anxiety that many others have felt. I now understand why people lose sleep over whether the agents are doing anything. If Isn't there something Claude Code can be churning on right now while I'm idling and watching the game? cooking dinner? showering?
On a whim I decided to print my business cards that I designed two months ago. I saw the cards on Figma but I didn't know how all the designs would look physically. So I found a random business card printer (Lion Print) and printed it on their standard plan. The paper was not that great, and the print quality was a bit blurry, but it helped me get an idea of how they feel.
The cards look OK, except I messed up their templates and ended up with 50% blank cards. One complication of the whole print was having to produce PDF files using Adobe Illustrator. I found that Affinity is a pretty good substitute for Adobe Illustrator and produced fine PDFs, for free.
Continuing on last months' obsession with Daft Punk, the feeling has only gotten more intense, more content that I've consumed. I feel a whole separate post about my feelings about the music, the themes and the story arc of the 22 year run of Daft Punk.
One coolest piece of work that has come out after the group split has been an unreleased song where their video director got together a bunch of animators to create a looping music video for.
Daft Punk - Infinity Repeating (2013 Demo) (feat. Julian Casablancas+The Voidz) - YouTube
The behind the scenes is really worth watching, you can see how some of the animation loops are made and rendered in Blender. The whole behind the scenes is really good, documenting the different artists and studios that made the video equivalent of a looping digital track.
Daft Punk - The Making of Infinity Repeating - Part 1 - YouTube