Month Notes for May 2026
It's been two months since I left my job. What have I been up to? A lot of have asked me privately. Here's a dump of what's been happening.
I went on a short road trip with Patricia in my beloved Honda-E, driving from Tokyo to Matsumoto to Gifu to Fukui and back. We didn't even manage to get to Gifu. Our slow travelling style and continuous charging up my car was a little like the popular TV show 充電させてもらいませんか (May I please charge my battery).
We spent half days hanging out in towns and cities along the way, booking hotels in the afternoon once we knew how far we could reach that day.
It was such a wonderful roadtrip, I found my rhythm with driving this Honda-E for long distances, charging every 1.5 to 2 hours, stretching our legs, pausing to find our next drstination, knowing how to find last minute hotels to stay at. I can't wait to do it again shortly.
We hosted many visiting friends and showed them around. Without the obligations of a job, I could spend the whole day with them without guilt. It was wonderful to see our old friends.
We also made trips down to Kamakura to visit friends, which I'd normally not do because of the three hour round trip, but now that I'm unemployed, time doesn't mean anything to me any more. I loved my time down in Kamakura visiting old friends and new!
I spent time hosting two meetups, the Geo Tokyo and Vibe Coders Tokyo meetup. Every time I host these, the worrying about logistics, speakers, etc makes me swear to never do it again. Yet, every time after we do it, we get such good feedback about it that encourages me to plan the next one.
A lot of post-quitting unemployment logistics were needed. I had to re-enroll my health insurance, re-enroll in to the national pension (apparently I still have to continue to pay even though I am not working), sort out my residence/local tax obligations (which is a lot of money!) Those bits of paperwork have taken an non-trivial amount of time.
Sorting out my project list has been fun and absorbing, I've put down every idea I've had for the last 10 years into a folder in my Obsidian Vault and created a system to track what I'm going to work on now, what is coming next. I've already knocked several them out but there still is over 100 of these things. Everything from building my Lego McLaren F1, to home improvement work, to software projects to try, to snowboards and robots to build.
I've been reorganizing my notes in Obsidian too, creating notes for people that I know, places I loved, and linking together in a Wiki. Like a bit of a wikipedia for only things that i care about.
I finished Cyberpunk 2077 from start to finish (and finished it several times for the different endings), Planet of Lana and started replaying Super Mario Galaxy. Super Mario Galaxy is a bit challenging on a Switch controller without the WiiMote, I forgot how much the pointing at stuff to get things is such a useful mechanism.
Experimenting with Hermes Agent and OpenClaw. As of right now, I'm enjoying Hermes Agent a lot -- it's running on a VM inside my HomeLab. This little agent has the personality of Dr Zoidberg from Futurama, and reads me Techmeme in a carefree lobster voice:
Oura Ring 5: Even Tinier!
- 40% smaller than Ring 4, starts at just 2 grams (that's like... three feathers?).
- $399 (ouch), sleep apnea detection, hypertension detection, AI health coach.
- Ships June 4. I'd wear one, but my claws are too big! sniffle
It is also able to control my home blinds, lights, temperature all through Home Assistant and even is able to take notes for me into Obsidian directly from Telegram.
Currently I'm running it using Deepseek v4 Flash, but I've also tried using MiniMax and Qwen. Deepseek just seemed to most economical compared to Claude or Gemini since I'm paying by token and these agents and get pretty token hungry with all their inference time thinking.
The free time available has also allowed me to fully throw myself at vibe coding, picking up older projects that I never finished, redesigning my whole publishing system so I can publish directly from Obsidian to my blog, to some on going work to make a 3D home control center.
I've also had the space to try all different coding agent harnesses, local LLMs, Chinese LLMs, open source LLMs and many different things in between. My set up seems to be continually changing, and right now is a combination of Claude Code (CLI, Desktop and Mobile) with Zed as the editor, and occasionally using Pi with Deepseek v4 or Qwen.
I've had the space to indulge in many obsessions. Like my new found love for Daft Punk. Many people have stumbled across the Fred Again with Thomas Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk and have been pointing me to it. But the re-ignition of my obsession has come from the Dissect Podcast Season on Daft Punk (h/t kottke.org). The technical and creative level of the early Daft Punk albums were incredible and inspiring. I listened to 9 episodes, and they're still not done!