My Japanese residence card expired in June, and with my company we decided not to renew it, instead I became a Vietnam-based foreign contractor. Not much change in practice, but I am not allowed to work in Japan anymore, which means I will visit less in the future. As I don’t want to forget my hard-learned Japanese, I decided to try and read more Japanese books. But I lack the time to commit to proper novels so ChatGPT recommended Shōsetsuka ni Narō (lit. “let’s become an author”), a website where amateur writers post their web novels. Long story short, I made Dokusha ni natta (lit. “I became a reader”), a simple app that exports an ebook (epub or azw3 format) from a given novel code.
I vibed it in a day while looking after the kids, entirely with GLM-5.2 and Opencode ~ no plans to opensource it as I didn’t touch the code myself and most importantly, perhaps surprisingly, I feel that the code has value since I paid for the tokens myself! Contrary to traditional open source where you pay with your time, I didn’t put any meaningful time into the app but it consumed around half of my monthly Opencode Go subscription, so about $5. So yep, it has value (to me) ! Though the UI is a mess, the result works well enough for my use, with the ability to download only the first few chapters of a book to give it a try.
I really dig this direction of software development where I can quickly make some tools to my own taste. It’s the second one after Podpocket that I actually use myself pretty much on a daily basis, and more importantly I have actually been reading some amateur novels on my Kindle (none I like enough to recommend so far, the overall quality of the writing is pretty bad I must say).
Moving on, 18 months after Google killed my Pixel 4a, I finally installed GrapheneOS! Pretty uneventful install and setup, though I had to use the CLI installation because the Sunfish images for Pixel 4a are not hosted by GrapheneOS anymore, but ChatGPT helpfully found some archive link for an older version. I’m so happy to be able to use it again, it’s the last phone that had such a nice small form factor.
It’s funny to look back at this post, where I mention I don’t plan on canceling my Google One subscription. A few months later, in July, they did me another dirty restarting my YouTube subscription without any notice and that was the last straw. Since then I continued my de-googling and happily migrated to Immich for my photos, Backblaze for my storage, Proton for email and, now, GrapheneOS for my phone (I don’t plan to ever buy a Pixel phone again, but luckily it looks like we will get GrapheneOS supported Motorola device soon!).
Enoshima surfing with Fujisan in the back