Life on Tom Guernier's Blog

Kitbashing a QR Code Alarm in Android Tasker and val.town

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:56:24 +0000

Recently I built my own bespoke sleep tracking system using Beeminder and Tasker. At the time I wrote my first post on the system, it was working but it had a few awkward elements to it. For one thing, all the maths was done in Tasker’s extremely awkward XML-based scripting system, meaning that any modifications to the formula would involve either editing it on the phone itself¹. Also, the alarm app I was using started showing me ads. So, not my ideal system by any means.

Moving soon!

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:17:00 +0000

A short one today. I’ve had a busy last couple weeks, but I’ve been thinking of what to do next with this little blog and now that I’ve been posting here for over 6 months I feel it’s gotten to the point where it can graduate from its current host¹ and move to its own domain next to all the other things I have scattered all over the internet. So, coming soon is:

Taste, Scarcity and Curation

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 04:51:23 +0000

Whenever I’m sitting at home looking for something to read, or watch, or browse; these thoughts tend to pop into my mind: I could read / watch / listen / browse something I’m already familiar with, or look for something totally new. If I find something new that I deeply enjoy, this will bring a lot of happiness to me and could potentially improve my life over a long period. However, most (but not all!) stuff isn’t worth the time to consume it, and there’s an effectively infinite flow of stuff of dubious quality that either makes no difference or may actively reduce my happiness out there.

My Beeminder Sleep Tracking System

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:40:16 +0000

Lately I’ve been having to get up earlier than I am used to (around 6:30am to 7am) for work reasons. I’m usually fine with getting up early, but the problem is I like sleeping in too much, so over the weekend I stay in bed a couple hours later (even past 10am sometimes) and completely mess up my sleep schedule for the oncoming week.

I could just set a flat wake up time that I stick to every day, but the thing with sleep ins is that I genuinely enjoy them, and so I don’t want to give them up completely¹. Luckily, I have a convenient system that can track any values I want into it and binds me (with real money!) to sticking to whatever goal I want to track. But then I need a way to reliably track the time I wake up. I could just enter in data points manually each time I wake up, but…

Notes on Okinawa, Hong Kong and China

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:03:00 +0000

A spooky looking empty street in Chikan, China

I was recently travelling around Okinawa (with family), Hong Kong (by myself) and Guangdong Province in China (with a Mandarin-speaking friend). Here are some thoughts and observations I had during that trip.

The airport in Taipei (which I connected through to get to Okinawa) is incredibly nice and certainly the best airport I’ve ever been to. Pretty much all the stuff discussed in Dan Frank’s (very good) post on Taiwan applies in microcosm to the airport: everything was extremely clean, pristine looking and logically laid out; all the convenience stuff you want when you’re waiting around but are totally lacking and/or hard to find in other airports (like charging points, water refill stations) were plentiful (and working!); and most importantly, you get an uninterrupted view of the planes from pretty much every gate.
- Also, there’s a library area (in an airport!) near gate D8 which has a book on circa-2000 Japanese web design with pictures, which might make going through the airport worth it on its own.
The food in all the places was good to excellent in all the places I visiting, but I would say the best food was mostly in Okinawa. Which kind of breaks my theory on why food in Japanese is so much better than in most Western countries, which is that in most places its easy to get around on your feet or by train / bus, so restaurants have more competition and thus more incentive to cook good food. But Okinawa uses cars way more and has a much more skeletal public transportation system, and the food is just as good as on the mainland. This might be just because me or my family is better at picking out good restaurants in Japan, but we were pretty much eating at random restaurants we came across around our neighbourhood or in shopping malls. Also, Okinawan cuisine might just be to my tastes (I managed to get quite a taste for bitter melon, which shows up in a lot of Okinawan dishes, in my time there).
Overall, Okinawa didn’t feel all that much different from mainland Japan (though we stuck to mostly tourist areas and shopping malls, which would obviously be more homogenised), though the landscape looks a lot different, with no rice fields and buildings mostly made out of rather weathered looking concrete. The US military bases were very noticeable, but mostly were just annoying and time consuming to have to drive around to get anywhere.
Hong Kong doesn’t feel particularly British anymore, apart from vestigial bits of street furniture and infrastructure like the double decker buses and the tram, and the occasional old colonial building (which aren’t even that unique in Mainland China). But it still felt quite different from the mainland, and that’s mainly because it feels a lot more Japanese. There are plenty of familiar (to me) Japanese chain stores and restaurants, you can buy a vast selection of Japanese goods from Don Don Donki, and Japanese pop culture is especially prominent, even stuff that doesn’t really get exported to the west like Crayon Shin-chan.
The (mainland) Chinese infrastructure was as impressive in scale and operation as I expected it to be. The metro system in Guangzhou has 19 lines and enough frequency of trains that you never have to look up a timetable as a train shows up within a minute or two of arriving. The high-speed rail was perfectly on time always, and the stations are like airports in scale. Things seem to get rougher when you go beyond the ‘official’ physical infrastructure though. The Chinese apps were noticeably clunkier and slower than western ones, and the map apps really don’t tell you much about what there is in a particular area. In the nicely done up areas of Shenzhen and Guangzhou with lots of glassy skyscrapers its fairly easy to walk around, but in more mundane areas the footpaths are filled with all kinds of random obstacles: bins, cars and mopeds parked all over forcing you to squeeze between them, mud and debris from construction sites etc. Even in Guangdong, which is one of the (or possibly the most) developed provinces in China by whatever metric you choose, a lot of places have a distinctly ‘half-done’ feel to them.
Relating to the above, the strangest experience I had on this trip (and maybe across all the travel I’ve done) was in China. I’m going to provide my account of that evening with as little commentary as possible, as I’m honestly still not sure what to make of it:

I was with my Mandarin speaking friend in our guesthouse after having a pleasant day looking around the Diaolou of Kaiping (a town about a 1 hour train ride from Guangzhou). We looked around on the map and found a cluster of restaurants in a historic town called Chikan a couple of kilometres away. We decided to take the bus there. Due to being confused by the map app, we ended up getting off one stop early and having to walk some distance to get to the actual restaurant area. We walked through, seeing some of China’s infamous 99% completed but totally empty apartment complexes and a mysterious distant theme park looking thing along the way.

My 100 Day Journaling Anniversary

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 04:49:04 +0000

As of yesterday it’s my 100 day anniversary of my daily journal goal. Through that and the word count goal I started slightly earlier, I have written over 26,000 over the last 4 or so months, much more than I have written before then. Some of that writing has made it here onto this blog, some needs some more marinating time, but overall I think all this writing has helped improve my thinking (and my writing as well) and let me note down a lot more of my thoughts that otherwise would have slipped out of my memory forever.

Speaking Practise

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:03:00 +0000

What has been going on in my life lately? Well, I’ve been attending various Japanese conversation meetups in Auckland¹. These sessions have been very fun and have allowed me to meet many new and interesting people (not just Japanese!) who have helped out not just my Japanese skills but my general world knowledge as well.

However, it has forced me to grapple with one awkward thing - my near total lack of practise speaking in Japanese.

End of Year Media Roundup Review Thing

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:50:00 +0000

Port Waikato beach, New Zealand. The rainclouds weren’t looming over us the whole time, thankfully.

It’s the last day of the summer break for me, and I’ve been actually doing appropriately New Zealand-ish summer stuff! (a.k.a. going to the beach and drinking alcohol). This has somewhat impinged on my blogging time, so this is why the blog post is a little later this week. If you want to see when my next post will be you can check my about page.

End Of Year Thoughts

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:02:00 +0000

Last blog post for the year! Merry Christmas, happy New Year etc. Here are some reflective end of year thoughts, some jolly, some less so:

1.

It seems for me that this year, especially the latter half of it, has been the year of agency. On the one hand it has definitely allowed me to do more in the whole ‘You Can Just Do Things’ spirit, not necessarily crazy out there stuff which I would’ve never thought of myself doing, but more so things I could imagine myself doing but at some unspecified future point which never seemed to solidify into any real action. For instance: actually writing my thoughts down and starting a blog, reading actual physical books in Japanese and actually getting through my thousands of unread emails and getting a clean and spam-free inbox. Not to harp on about Beeminder any more than I already have on here, but it helps a lot and neatly avoids having to rely on the slippery and unreliable concept of ‘willpower’.

Miscellaneous blogging #1

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 01:14:00 +0000

Somewhere along the road between Wyuna Bay and Coromandel town, New Zealand. Photo by myself.

A busy week this week: a lot of things done, but not as much time to get my thoughts in order. So this may end up being a list of things more than a single post with a single cohesive topic. Though that might not be a bad thing?

I’m back from my trip to Thames and the Coromandel peninsula, looking at pretty trees and old gold mining history. Not much to say about it, except that it is a very beautiful part of the country and small town museums are quite a bit more interesting than you might think.

The power's out in the heart of man

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 08:54:00 +0000

Beeminder says this post isn’t due until tomorrow evening, but the power went out and there’s not much else I can do, so I’m writing this post by torchlight. How romantic.

Interesting piece in Asterisk this week about the percieved decline in culture since the start of the 21st century, and the inarguable decline in published, professional reviews and essays, and therefore of criticism as a vocation. Of course, ‘critics’ (complainers, nitpickers, haters etc.) aren’t hard to find, but deep analysis, or even the brief but neatly crystalised reviews of someone like Robert Christgau seem harder to come by. Not impossible to find, of course, but almost always tucked away on niche sites and individual blogs and never surfaced by any algorithmic process or ranking by like count. Perhaps the writing from these disparite sources has a greater breadth than what you would find in a print magazine back in the day, but I feel like miss the era where finding good culture writing was more like hunting for diamonds in a few neatly formed piles rather than a massive, desolate field with rubbish dumped on it by the ton.

Might add some more thoughts later. Turns out writing stuff out longhand in the dark and then tapping it out on my phone is a lot more tiring than doing it on the computer. I guess I can count mains electricity as an uncomplicatedly good technological advance for the production of writing, at least.