Blog posts
How to buy Japanese books (from Kobo)
May 16, 2024
I've found it very hard to buy Japanese language media from outside Japan, and ebooks in particular are hard to find in other ways. I have an eReader I like reading on, which means I don't want to use the bookseller's mobile app to read a book, which cuts out most of the options. My eReader is made by Kobo, which is owned by Rakuten, which is a Japanese company. This should be easy! Continue
The case of the missing 32-bit Ruby package
August 3, 2023
On a 32-bit Arch server I recently started getting a LoadError from Ruby when importing date_core, even though the package was installed. Where did it go and why is this happening? Continue
Photo rights & Terms of Service
June 20, 2020
I take a lot of bird photos, and while I enjoy uploading them to eBird for inclusion in their scientific collection, I also like showing them off to friends. However, I also know social media sites are infamous for their aggressive rights grabs on user content, so I read several Terms of Service trying to figure out which was least-bad for uploading photos to, including Dreamwidth, Flickr, Twitter & Facebook. Continue
Can I Use That Code? Software licences as a user
November 26, 2017
I gave a talk on software licences at PyCon Canada. Software licences are fantastic complicated and important, enabling the whole open source community. Also, just because code is on the internet doesn't mean you can use it! Continue
邪魔 and cats
October 29, 2017
The other day I came across 邪魔 and googled it to find out the meaning and came across... pictures of cats on keyboards? Continue
TIL: SASS & locale-gen
October 22, 2017
I decided to switch this site from a handful of HTML & CSS pages to a static site generator, Jekyll. When deploying it to my webserver, I ran into some locale problems with SASS generation and thought someone else can learn from my pain. Continue