The feijoa season has arrived in Japan. This is the (first) bag we received from a farm near Osaka.

I was back in my old Kichijoji / Mitaka neighborhood and noticed there is a new vending machine offering gyoza, steamed buns, sesame balls, and more.

We do an evening around #LoRa devices and #Meshtastic on Friday. - What are Lora, how does Lora relate to WiFi - What's Meshtastic, will bring in some devices - I'll explain this BBS use case idea, how it works Location: Nov 21st, 7pm, Meeting room 202 at Jiyugaoka juku Center, Tokyo

It is November, and that means "Butt Sumo" (尻つみ祭り) time again at the local shrine here in Ito, #Japan. Contestants stand back-to-back on a raised dais and, at the signal, attempt to bump their opponent off. The winners are sometimes surprising.

Halloween 🎃 is appearing more and more in Japan.

Yesterday's silliness involved replacing the garish LENOVO BIOS logo on my old ThinkPad with the Tokyo Linux User Group emblem.

School kids have been practicing their drumming for the past two weeks for their ride in the float. Our community's dashi was hit by an elderly driver while making the rounds on Saturday, putting one neighbor in the hospital with broken ribs. We sat out most of Sunday's festivities.

It was festival weekend in Ito. More than a dozen illuminated floats with musicians are pulled and pushed around the neighborhood.

For the past 3 years, I've been using the Open Source SilverBullet PKMS to organize my notes in Markdown files. Its major feature is how programmable it is (first in JavaScript, now in Lua). SilverBullet's author is publishing a series of tutorials on YouTube.

The Tokyo Maker Faire 2025 is being held this weekend (04~05 October) at Tokyo Big Sight.

Wow, it's been years since I encountered a "you can only use this site with MSIE" alert... except now it is Safari or Chrome.

Congratulations to the San Jose Giants for sweeping the playoffs and taking home the California League championship! Now a two-month gap until the ABL season kicks off.

JG1GPY showed off a clever, compact multi-band antenna at the SOTA JP booth at the Japan Ham Fair this weekend. A switch allows selection of direct feed (for 1/4 wave on 40m, with trailing counterpoise) or through a 49:1 transformer for end-fed on higher bands.

This weekend is the Japan Ham Fair 2025 at Ariake GYM-EX (the 2020 Olympics Gymnastics venue). A chance for the big commercial vendors to show off previews of their new equipment and a flea market to allow users to recycle older gear. onjapan.net/2025/hamfair/

My SatNOGS station disappeared a few days ago. I get the RPi down from the pole, plug it in to the LAN and it is fine. It turned out the 2.4GHz radio had stopped on the crucial access point. (Everything else was on 5GHz, so I never noticed.)

I'm pleased that someone at Helsinki Airport was willing to have fun with their airport code.

PyCon JP is in Hiroshima, September 26 & 27 (Friday & Saturday): "Pieces of Python, Coming Together." The CfP is open for proposals in Japanese and English. pyconjp.blogspot.com/2025/05/pyco...

Tokyo Python is being reborn with a night of lightning talks on May 22nd in Roppongi. www.meetup.com/tokyopython/...

The Oregon State Open Source Lab (OSL) is desperately seeking funding. They provide hosting for many projects and build infrastructure for multiple architectures. Please consider donating: osuosl.org/blog/osl-fut...

Continuing my series of unusual post boxes, this penguin awaits your letters between the Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium and the Antarctic Museum/Research Ship Fuji.

NZART (The New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters) is the only amateur radio organization I am a member of that still insists on publishing its magazine on paper. The March issue has just arrived. It still punches above its weight for a small organization, but I wish it were digital.

Ito is hosting a ramen festival for the next four weekends. Within a five-minute walk, I can try 28 different kinds of ramen from around Japan.

I managed to get my @washingtonpost.com Keyword score back under 7. (It is harder to work on the average time statistic, since this is a "second screen" game.)

A group of New Zealand ham radio operators has a VoIP interface to some of their digital voice reflectors. I have built a webapp that shows real-time Asterisk extension status using Go and SSE. github.com/DigitalVoice...

I updated my old ex-lease Lenovo X1 Thinkpad to Fedora Silverblue 42 without issue. Thanks to everyone that is making this so seamless.

The REAL baseball season starts tomorrow (technically, Friday night in the US). I am looking forward to another San Jose Giants winning season. www.milb.com/san-jose

A (modern) programmer may own the parking lot around the corner since it is 0-indexed.

It was a lovely but cool day for the vernal equinox at Jogasaki-Kaigan Station in Ito.

My Atari Portfolio hard disk adapter prototype. The only problem was that the hard disk's power consumption was higher than the computer's, but it was fun to play with.

My colleagues and our broadcasts, devoted to telling America’s story to the world — honestly, fairly and with an unwavering commitment to the truth​, are being silenced this weekend. open.substack.com/pub/newsguy/...

The JARL Ham Fair 2025 will return to Ariake GYM-EX (an Olympic venue repurposed into an exhibition hall) on August 23rd and 24th. www.jarl.org/Japanese/1_T...

Old rail car at Daiyuzan Station with a plaque celebrating Valentine's Day. The line will be 100 years old in October.

I enjoyed the food and folk dance at the Soga Plum Festival in Odawara, but the cold snap has delayed the blossoms so most areas still looked barren.

The Tokyo Linux User Group technical meeting this Saturday (2025-02-08 14:00)). Edmund Edgar will be giving a talk about ATProto, the protocol behind the Bluesky social network, and also a bit on how other open social networks (Fediverse, Nostr, Farcaster) are designed. tlug.jp/wiki/Meeting...

The finals of the Australian Baseball League (ABL) season start tonight. You can watch the free stream as the Canberra Cavalry take on the Perth Heat at 11:00UTC. plus.baseball.com.au/en-int/lives...

I enjoyed a percussive lunch today at the festival here in Ito: first, the local steel drum band, followed by a taiko ensemble.

Happy New Year from Ito, Shizuoka

It is that special time of year when New Zealand closes for a couple of weeks of summer, allowing the crazies to take over the ordinarily staid RNZ afternoons to introduce us to music(?) we are unlikely to have heard. rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

Modifying my keyboard layout with QMK or kanata seems the perfect holiday yak shaving. I note from the commit messages that it has been a year since I last indulged in this pastime.

#VimConf 2024 keynote speeches here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=bopb... www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u60... #vim

I am starting to doubt my choice of amateur radio and retro computers as hobbies. Dr. Kazuo Moribe, a ship's doctor, traveled the world and ate 1.2 tons of chocolate to build this wrapper collection on display at the ROYCE' Chocolate Museum.

I saw my first wild Japanese fox yesterday. Wild might be overstating it, though, because he was standing at the intersection of two prefectural roads. When I pulled over to get a closer look, he trotted over to the driver's side and seemed disappointed I didn't offer any food.

Walking through Akihabara yesterday, I noticed one of the amateur radio shops has halved in size, with half now devoted to selling collectible trading cards.

VimConf 2024, an international conference dedicated to the one true text editor, is this Saturday, 2024-11-23, in Akihabara, Tokyo. vimconf.org/2024/

Today, I replaced my desktop's rarely used Kubuntu partition with a Fedora Silverblue installation. It has been working well on my laptop, so consistency won out. (There is still a Ubuntu installation if things don't work out.)

Opening week of the baseball season is here! Down under that is. Games are streamed free online. theabl.com.au

Tonight, I rebased #fedoraatomic #Silverblue from 40 to 41 quickly and smoothly. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to make this so straightforward.

Most people aren't as eager to visit the dentist as this cat.

Sault Ste. Marie Bridge silhouetted against a brilliant sunset.