The COVID-19 pandemic continued this year.

Since it’s unclear when it will end, I want to continue being careful not to get infected.

App Research

I completed the 2020 portion at the end of June, having installed about 13,000 apps.

When the number of installed apps exceeded 8,000, a bug occurred that prevented the iPhone from booting. Although I was taking daily backups, it seems they weren’t designed for such a large number of apps, and even after restoration, the power would turn off after a few seconds, making it impossible to boot. Since I had also taken backups for each app, I was able to avoid disaster, but if I had neglected countermeasures even a little more, the research would have ended in failure. Testing restoration from backups is important indeed.

From the 2020 research, I compiled the frameworks used by each app and presented at two study groups. The Flutter study group gave a response far beyond what I expected, which surprised me. I never thought I would receive words of gratitude, and I felt extremely honored.

The aggregated results are published in the following repository: https://github.com/hyshu/AppStoreStats

The 2021 portion is progressing smoothly. I’ve come to understand that apps from the same developer sometimes don’t need to be launched, so I expect to achieve reasonable optimization. It’s taken three years since starting in 2019, but from next year, I should finally be able to conduct stable research.

Honorific Language Business

The honorific translation service has grown from 3,800 words at the end of last year to 100,000 words.

When first released, I aimed to eventually convert text to honorific language in a form similar to multilingual machine translation services (probably Seq2seq). However, in reality, there are very few cases that require significant context changes, and most users were using it to check if their honorific writing had errors or to find suitable honorific expressions. Therefore, I decided to continue with the current replacement method and use deep learning for things like subject inference. That said, using Seq2seq has advantages such as faster operation, so I’d like to proceed with that as well.

Shinjuku Gyoen

This year, I was able to visit from late November to early December when the number of infected people was temporarily low.

While Shinjuku Gyoen is popular for cherry blossoms, the autumn foliage is also wonderful. The peak viewing time varies by year, but so far it’s often been in early December. However, this year the leaves didn’t turn beautifully red, and when I asked the bonsai class teacher, they said it was because the lingering summer heat lasted long and the temperature didn’t drop quickly enough. I hope to see beautiful autumn foliage next year.

Books

• Complete Manual for Cult Leaders / Kyosuke Kakagami
• Reading Elvish in [The Lord of the Rings] / Tsukusu Ito

“Reading Elvish” could only be roughly understood on the first read, so I need to reread it many times.

Classical Music

• Handel / Messiah

Movies

• Under the Open Sky

The performance by lead actor Koji Yakusho was tremendous.

Although based on a true story, the protagonist has such an unrealistic personality that one wrong step could easily make the atmosphere feel clichéd, but I didn’t feel that at all.

Replacing My MacBook

I replaced my MacBook for the first time in almost 8 years.

My previous MacBook Pro was the 15-inch model released in November 2013. The battery still lasts 2 hours if not doing heavy processing, and performance-wise, it sometimes finishes processing faster than the Apple M1 Mac Mini I bought early last year for app development, so it was still very much active.

However, I was definitely feeling its limited lifespan. So while using it thinking that one day the display or SSD would suddenly break… unexpectedly, the keyboard broke.

First E stopped working, then D, T, R, S in that order, and while V could be pressed normally, Command+V stopped responding. I coped by assigning alternatives to F1-F6 keys, but I was forced into an inconvenient life comparable to the ability in Yu Yu Hakusho where words become unusable in Japanese alphabetical order. “De,” “te,” “re,” and “se” were particularly difficult. Once F and W stopped working, I finally switched to an external keyboard.

When I looked into it, repairs were apparently necessary, and the price was about the same as buying a used replacement, so I persevered until the new MacBook Pro came out.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro I purchased is wonderfully convenient.