Love this essay from Ploum about use of chatbots during exams! 🍷

Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.

We had an old vacuum cleaner battery, and several old mobile phones and portable recharger batteries, which you cannot simply throw out in the trash. I took them to Totsuka ward office 9th floor and deposited them in the recycling receptacle.

Cloudflare is in the process of merging Pages into Workers, so I am migrating a bunch of apps now. 🏔️

If you like design and thinking about design, User Friendly by Cliff Kuang is a home run of a book. Just fantastic. You could follow its threads to study further, for a year. 📚

We at eSolia are leveraging Sveltekit for a platform of dynamic sites and a client site, and it works really well. See what's new on the Svelte blog. 💻

The web runs on a fundamental bargain: creators publish content, readers consume it, and somewhere in between, value flows back—through advertising, subscriptions, or traffic that converts to business opportunities. AI has upended this equation in ways we're only beginning to understand.

This week brought a crystallizing and sobering moment: Tailwind CSS laid off 75% of its engineering team despite being more popular than ever. The framewor…

Beginner devs it goes without saying, because even a seasoned pro software dev will benefit from roadmap.sh. It's stunning how much knowledge they've packed in their website.

The latest version of Rogue Ameba's Audio Hijack is fantastic. You can really do a lot more with it, but I am using it to make recordings for podcasts, with a chain of processing automation. Good stuff!

Cloudflare eating their own dogfood at their 600-odd data centers globally.

Physical data center maintenance is risky on a global network. We built a maintenance scheduler on Workers to safely plan disruptive operations, while solving scaling challenges by viewing the state of our infrastructure through a graph interface on top of multiple data sources and metrics pipelines.

Via The Cloudflare Blog

My staff made a blog about a point I got confused when I first started using M365. See our post on the Tech It Easy Blog.

A Bowl of Renewal: Nanakusa-gayu on January 7th

Today marks Jinjitsu no Sekku (人日の節句)—the Festival of Humanity, one of the five sacred seasonal festivals in Japan. And with it comes one of the gentlest traditions in the Japanese calendar: nanakusa-gayu, the seven herbs rice porridge.

There's something almost paradoxical about this dish. After the richness of osechi-ryori, the toas…

Cloudflare's RADAR is a great service that is just chock full of info. Read their 6th annual year in review for the latest global trends, patterns, disruptions, advances and metrics.

The morning of January 1st, 2026, I turned 60 — a milestone that in Japan carries a significance far beyond the usual birthday fanfare. I celebrated my kanreki (還暦), one of the most meaningful longevity celebrations in Japanese culture.

What is Kanreki?

The word itself tells the story: kan (還) means "return" and reki (暦) means "calendar." At 60, you've completed a full cycle of the traditional East Asian zodiac ca…

Do you know how much money to give when you pray at a shrine in Japan? Read on to find out the standard good-luck and bad-luck amounts! ⛩️

Visiting a shrine on the first days of the year is the 初詣 “hatsumode” tradition in Japan, but how much money should you toss in the coin box? The amounts (お賽銭 osaisen) you should and should not donate are steeped in goroawase word-play, where Yen or 円 “en” as we s…

Just updated the design and functionality of my long-form "now" page at rick.cogley.jp, check it out! It's part of a larger effort to build a personal publishing stack using sveltekit on cloudflare.!

Another daughter will leave the nest soon. Feeling pretty sad.

In line at the Osaka World Expo 2025. Yesterday was a typhoon but today is a scorcher.

Heading to the Osaka Expo and no typhoon will stop us!

Wrasslin’ Lume to get it to handle multilingual.

Recovered from a persistent cold

Renewed Japan driver license

Eating lunch at a high end fish place in Senkyaku Banrai in Toyosu

Happy new year 2025

Leanin' heavy on curl to get the job done

Wrasslin’ Deno fetch

Marvelling at polypane.app; wow, what a fantastic tool. It will really help site development.

Stepping through , shaking off what feels like years of counterproductive knowledge.

Subscribed to and am now kicking the tires on "CleanShot X". It's really fantastic screenshot software for Mac.

Enjoyed an evening celebrating our dog Maru the Shiba's 4th birthday. Happy birthday, little buddy!

Spent the evening working on making my GitHub profile dynamic using Lume SSG.

Netflix's The Diplomat is good stuff; loving the acting and banter. Twistiness makes you go back to watch earlier scenes.

Kicking the Bluesky tires.

Testing lume CMS on a few sites, now on a vps so we get the benefit of live preview.

We arranged for my MIL to live in a care home, and we all have mixed feelings, but she needs that kind of help.

Daughter getting out of hospital today which I’m grateful for!

Adjusting to work after obon and a break to see family in the US. Feeling completely fogged.

Trying to stay out of the heat.

Still setting up the new mac, lol

Setting up a new Mac

Getting able to jog a little farther these days

Planning a trip home

Jogged 7km really slowly

Celebrating our youngest’s engagement and Father’s Day

Working to reduce risk on a project

Stretching my legs and working out the kinks every day using a rumble roller.

Started up jogging after a long hiatus. I am the source of the earthquakes.

What a nice reset this cottage was. Feeling so refreshed.

Resting for a couple days in Izu

I'm less stressed now that our big move project is complete and the client is happy with our work.

Watching "Dark Matter" on Apple TV. Intriguing.

Trying to rest after having to work during GW.

Final push for a client office move go-live!

Obon's over. Back to work！

Well recovered from last weekend's hike to Mt Myojo in Hakone. Check out the blog on it:

Recovering from yesterday's hike up Mts Sengen and Takanosu in Hakone. Chisuji Falls was the highlight! 🥾 Check out the blog about it:

Recovering from last weekend's hike up Mt Kintoki in Hakone. Here's a blog post about the trip:

Setting off for Mt Kintoki trailhead from Odawara on the bus. Some idiot is wearing a LOT of perfume. Hope he likes bees.

Continuing to explore the hiking trails around Kamakura, this time one of the "kirodoshi" mountain passes.

Doing civic duty this AM on the can trash separation brigade.

Blogged about my 12km trek yesterday on the Kamakura Ten'en Hiking Trail. Check it out!

Recovering from 12km hike from Kounandai to Kamakura

Researching anti-black-fly (Japan "buyo") strategies. They leave a nasty bite mark!

Cleaned up some old Victorinox Pocket Knives today.

Coming off an exhausted state from finishing a big web authoring project. My brain is fuzzed.

Wrote a little blog post on our trip to Mt. Akagi on 3rd June. Check it out! 🌋

Still recovering from Mt. Akagi in Gunma; trek was 90 min up a steep rocky trail to a windy/cold summit. Beautiful weather and views, and the guide Ms. Okubo was a true pro.

Using "nushell" as my login shell lately. Pretty nifty.

Heading up Mt Akagi today in Gunma. Expecting slippery mud.

Project push, getting those pages built!

Updating fathom analytics script from the custom one to the generic one, per their instructions.

Heavy rain today; really makes walking the dog a pain.

Created a simple script in nushell to add words to the dictionary file my password generator uses

For password security, size matters. Go longer, not more complex.

Building internal request system for my co.

Organized info for internal audit of ISO 27001 and joined Technofer

Made screencast about MS Planner Gantt via PowerApp

Simplifying by decommissioning various systems

Feeling grateful to Kovid Goyal for his KiTTY terminal app. Great software.

Came to agreement about internal audit for my co.

Wrote a little nushell script to post statuses from CLI

Testing via API

Bought a new lightweight wind shell, since my old one's 10 years old and getting rotten.

Testing nushell scripting with graphql api.

Scheduled the hospital visits for getting followup tetanus shots for the dog bite.

Finished a long meeting with an ISO consultant, and I'm pleased to say it appears we're on the right track.

Experimenting with

Paring down monthly or annual subscriptions.

Got bit by a friend’s dog (my fault for trying to pet). Ok but at the ER waiting on a tetanus shot.

Wranglin' Exchange transport rules

Finished cleaning up years of detritus in AWS.

Improved security for some getJSON statements that pull from a REST i/f.

Migrated most of our sites to Deno Deploy.

Getting close to getting our AWS tidied up. If you host a site and its logs on AWS S3, be sure to make a lifecycle rule on the log bucket, to delete old log objects. Otherwise, wow, BAJILLIONS of logs!

Currently awaiting deletion of nearly 40000 AWS S3 glacier archives using aws glacier delete-archive. Scripted of course.

Finally nailed a weird problem. Got my Planner plan to show up inside the app in Teams. You just have to add it to a Teams channel.

Set up Viva Goals today

Setup SharePoint folder as a source for Viva Learning.

Struggling with my Japan tax forms. It's great that you can pull all the medical expense data from your mynumber portal, but it's less clear how you enter the insurance rebate.

Writing out our change management standard and procedure, based on a long standing flow diagram.

Consolidated our ISO 27001 project Sharepoint, into the one we're using in production for our ISMS. Simpler and less maintenance.

Working on Sharepoint list for our ISO 27001 statement of applicability.

Tidying all the things in Teams & Sharepoint

Finished big status meeting on our ISO ISMS implementation.

Finished the draft for our ISO ISMS manual, the regulations on how we’ll run it.

Reading about CMMI maturity models. I get the concept, but it seems maybe over-complicated for a small company.

Manually backed up Sharepoint list view and form customizations to json files in a git repo.

Stewarding a planned power outage this weekend.

Struggled to get SharePoint Content Types working, but finally succeeded.

Requested listing of my now page on nownownow and it's already live: Thanks Derek Sivers. :)

Enabled Google Advanced Protection Program for my personal account, linking 2 Yubikeys.

Starting to use and learning about , initially in one project.

Added an M365 sensitivity label for commercial papers.

Looking into decentraleyes important browser extension.

Building out eSolia's help site in Lume SSG. Works well.

Learning about creating with Adobe Leonardo. Nifty.

Getting closer to launching our SharePoint site built to be our ISO 27001 ISMS. It's just the skeleton, still got a long way to go.

Reading up on and its implications for data transfer.

Created a MS Teams team to hold group quizzes and questionnaires made in Forms.

Checking out the Deno-based SSG "Lume", considering for a couple doc sites.

Sussing the ins and outs of Word mail merge

Set a typescript wrapper as the entry point for my Hugo sites on Deno Deploy, so that I can set security headers.

Successfully deployed a Hugo site to Deno Deploy.

Today's about SharePoint Content Types.

Really getting into the guts of SharePoint document library settings, how check-in, check-out, versioning and other details work and impact each other.

Learning SharePoint document library settings while designing our workflow for formal documents.

Enabled the FIDO2 hardware key authentication method in M365 Entra admin, so users can add their yubikeys for login.

Designed a very simple Power Automate flow to track peoples' acknowledgements of policies.

Migrated uptime monitor from Apex Ping to Upptime because I need something fast.

Migrating apex up to Deno Deploy because of up's unceremonious closedown.

Redeploying static sites to Deno Deploy - so fast.

Mulled this a long time, and decided to put my photos in OneDrive. A reasonable yearly price for all 5 family members to get Office apps and 1T storage.

Setting up M365 Purview "sensitivity labels", for info classification like "internal only" or "confidential".

Published our statement of executive support for ISO 27001 ISMS and our high level security policy.

Trying Windows 365, pretty slick deployment.

Well on our way implementing our ISO 27001 ISMS in Sharepoint.

Celebrating being mostly migrated to MS 365!

Full blast migrating all the things from Google to MS365.

Bulk downloaded Google Groups email in mbox format for later import

Used PowerAutomate to connect MS Forms to a Sharepoint List.

Reviewing ISO 27001 implementation requirements vs options.

Used PowerShell to set up central shared libraries in MS365 for images and templates. Per user app settings begone!

Sorting out client job folder sharing SOP from OneDrive.

Cleaning out years of file detritus as I migrate to MS 365.

Implemented client codes list in the MS365 Terms Store and labeled all our list items, then removed folders.

Migrated lots of my firm’s work tasks to Sharepoint Lists.

Struggled with this: you need to be following a Sharepoint site from its Home, to have its Lists available for copying. Urgh.

Worked out how we'll use Sharepoint Lists for our team tasks, without compromising security or increasing admin burden.

Worked on Teams task list defaults, exposing groups to Outlook with Powershell commands.

Enhanced the e-sign capability of our ERP, by using "/documents/combined?certificate=true" when pulling down the signed document via the Docusign API. This attaches the manifest to the signed PDF.

Reports and invoicing

Working on CSV uploader script security tightening and testing.

Blogged about my MS365 Trial Trials

Finally managed to extract our production domain out of an un-managed MS365 tenant, which got put there because someone made a trial. We could not add the domain to our main tenant, until we removed it from the test one. I need a drink.

Struggling to be able to publish MS365 group calendars

Working on Power Automate flow to alert assignee in Sharepoint list, on assignment.

Working on ISO 27001 prep and migration to MS 365

Troubleshooting a CSV loader script into an ERP order system.

Examining MS Teams and Sharepoint features, planning migration and considering ISMS in sharepoint.

Testing status.lol cross-posting

Testing Microsoft Lists task tracking

Testing out a system for managing an ISO 27001 ISMS.

Keeping busy hiking and walking with our dog Maru the Shiba.