What it's like to code for Roblox

Our son is heavily into two things on the computer right now: Minecraft and Roblox. Of these I only knew about Minecraft before, w ...

What I've been doing lately

Candy Japan has been paused for a while because of the COVID situation, so what have I been doing instead? Swift Before running th ...

Satisfactory way of thinking

I've spent hundreds of hours in the factory building game Factorio, and more recently Satisfactory. In both of these games you are ...

Favorite quotes from 2020 so far

Last year I had just one post for all my collected quotes of the year, as I didn't have too many of them. This year the list is st ...

My latest sideproject: Craft QR

Since I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately as my son is really into it, I wanted to create something related to it. Some ki ...

My favorite quotes from 2019

I've gradually started reading more, and like to collect interesting quotes I come across. Here are some of my favorite ones from ...

How to find good books

I didn't use to read all that much, but gradually as I realized that I had already seen most of the great movies and after reflect ...

What I’m doing now

This is a now page. I'm still living in Tokushima, Japan. Currently basically just doing a lot of self-directed studying. The rest ...

Reading books like reading blogs

I used to spend at least an hour each day reading various blogs, usually ones I'd discovered through aggregators like Hacker News, ...

The three states of a project

When you have a project bringing in some income, it can be in three states. It could be growing, and you're happy expanding, sol ...

Sysop Chat

Back in mid-90s before anyone I knew had an Internet connection, a few of us had modems and would use them to call bulletin board ...

Abandoning projects is OK

Do you have a folder with many many abandoned projects in it? I have over 200 in mine. Some I've abandoned in a week, some even i ...

Japanese vocabulary from "Mean People Fail"

Vocabulary notes from the Japanese version of pg's "Mean People Fail" essay. Paragraph 1 「最近私は、自分が知る成功者の中には意地の悪い人がほとんどいないということに気がつ ...

Simplest lxml parsing example

Below is an xml document that is about as simple as one can get. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <cat> <na ...

Monkey Light M232 review

While browsing Amazon for something cool, I happened to notice an item for sale called "Monkey Light". It's a circuit board w ...

Launch press release

Congratulations! You did your first newsworthy thing by launching your product. If your concept is something unique, you may be ab ...

Startup School London trip report

TL;DR;By attending Startup School, you'll get infected by a burning desire to start something big. If you already have an idea wha ...

 Candy Japan crosses $10000 MRR

It's been a while since I blogged about Candy Japan (http://www.candyjapan.com). If you've been actively reading Hacker News for s ...

LASIK 6 months later 

Around half a year ago I made a detailed post about getting LASIK eye surgery. In short this is a surgery which enables nearsighte ...

Hack your motivation

Nothing is better than being truly motivated by an exciting project. But if you're stuck, here are some things to try out that can ...

JLPT test

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is the most recognized standard test for judging your Japanese language ability. It has sev ...

Intensive Japanese course @ ICU

I was on a two-year exchange program to ICU in Tokyo, Japan. This is a short description for those considering taking part in such ...

Oculus Rift first impressions

Want to be immersed in a virtual world that only exists inside a computer? Have your own holodeck and experience the virtual reali ...

Getting LASIK eye surgery

This is the story of how I decided to fix my eyes with LASIK, how the experience was and how the result is turning out, written fo ...

What it costs to live in Japan

Two years ago I moved to Japan, working from home and hacking full time on what I would have used to call side projects in Finland ...

2D skeletal animation

One of my various side-projects is getting some simple 2D skeletal animation working, since dealing with that would be a useful sk ...

Japanese study tools

Compared to languages like English or Spanish that use the familiar latin alphabet, for learning Japanese many more software tools ...

Bemmu Sepponen

This is the blog of Bemmu Sepponen, an expat living in Tokushima, Japan.I run Candy Japan, a Japanese candy subscription ...

PayPal payments standard

I've had to refuse money from people, because my system simply isn't up to the task yet. It's kind of amazing how many small deta ...

First year of Candy Japan

Last July I posted on Hacker News about an experiment to start a Japanese candy subscription service. I live in Jap ...

I heard you like A/B testing

While doing split testing for Candy Japan I started thinking if there could be a better way to decide which page variation to ...

I just gave advertising a try.

As you might already know, I run a service called Candy Japan which mails subscribers Japanese sweets twice a month. It has been m ...

A world without advertising

Most people would agree that cold calling, unsolicited email and advertising are annoying things that the world would be better of ...

The Antiviral Effect

I am the author of "Coolest Friends", a viral (and at times antiviral) MySpace application about ranking your coolest friends. Pat ...