Marc’s Blog

2026: The year in (food) pictures

2026-06-04T03:44:00Z

I got the idea from Richard that it could be fun to sometimes do posts with mostly just pictures.

Browsing through my pictures of 2026, I wondered what I could post… Well, the majority of my pics are about food or going drinking so I might as well start with that.

January

We went drinking with colleagues, to a smaller bar around the corner from my commuting bus station. It’s the one restaurant I usually recommend all my friends who visit me in Hiroshima (although it’s not particularly Hiroshima related nor even Japan related, just very good food).

Next, I had a new year party with my students, going to some restaurant.

I went to some domestic conference in Osaka.

My wife also cooks very good.

Wait, this was just January? Maybe I should do this monthly…

February

Went out again, with the same colleagues from January. Different bar.

March (Okinawa → Tokushima)

I went to Okinawa (沖縄) mid March for a domestic conference.

First day Okinawa:

I’ve put captions for some images where I thought it might be good to explain what it is. If I don’t put captions, I expect you to guess (or, I might have just forgot what it is myself.)

Second day Okinawa:

Day four (I did a liver resting day for better or worse..)

I did a bit of sightseeing in Okinawa too but maybe I’ll leave those picture for another day (maybe another Esperanto language travel report :)).

Here’s the lunch I had during sightseeing though:

Next, another business trip to Tokushima (徳島):

Again, Tokushima sightseeing pics will be on another post.

Some more wife food (thank you! <3)

April

Local food in Hiroshima.

We basically go out Sushi twice a month.

And a “welcome party” for new students in my lab (which joined in April).

May

Let’s start May with food at home (I didn’t do much travelling)

Well, there was still occasional eating out.

I went to Nagoya (名古屋) end of May to visit my in-laws. I also used occasion to join graduate meetup from where I did my PhD.

Restaurant in Nagoya

Graduates meetup

Afterwards we went to a Fugu bar. Fugu, as in, pufferfish.

And more sushi, with the in-laws.

That has been my first half of 2026 (in food pictures.) Great, now I’m hungry.

More experimenting

2026-06-04T01:41:00Z

I tried one more new idea for this blog. I have (have had) another blog in Esperanto language where I blogged about traveling around Japan, basically me practicing my Esperanto writing skills. They are very photo-heavy as I’m much into photography.

I’ve kept my English blog and Esperanto blog on separate domains, but figured I might just merge them. Neither one is active enough to actually justify maintaining multiple blogs for it.

I’ll use tags per-language so you have a chance to subscribe to English-only posts.

(However, the Esperanto travel blogs are mostly written in a way that you might enjoy them even if you cannot read Esperanto, just looking at pictures from around Japan.)

BTW, speaking of, I switched this blog back to Pika. I think the presentation of photos and galleries on this platform is just lovely.

Switching away from Apple

2026-03-31T14:36:00Z

It almost hurts me a bit, as I’ve been deep in the Apple ecosystem since somewhere around 2010 when I started my Bachelor degree. I’ve been the guy who’s been using a Mac desktop, MacBook laptop, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, even an Apple TV. For symbiosis I guess.

And for the ecosystem. Heck, only for the ecosystem. With that I don’t even mean Apple apps, or cross-platform integration features made by Apple. They are certainly nice, but what really sold me the ecosystem and held me for a long time were the premium Apple platform only third party apps. Apps such as OmniFocus or DevonThink were long time my “I can never use another OS mainly due to these apps” kinda blockers.

But. I’ve since made the decision to fully switch away from it. Why? Software quality.

Both iOS 26 and macOS 26 were a disaster. I’m not even talking about Liquid Glass (the new design everybody hates), but in terms of software quality. There’s so many new bugs, so many new glitches and stuff not working. Even my Apple Watch sometimes got UI glitches. One might wonder if Apple’s OS division got fully replaced by AI and just became spaghetti code over the last year or two. It certainly feels like that.

But it’s not even the newest major release (i.e., iOS 26 or macOS 26). I noticed software quality gradually degrading over the last couple of years. Many small things: Hanging processes doing random indexing, some iCloud processes just randomly deciding to hog the CPU, iCloud Drive being completely unreliable, many I/O issues, UI glitches going beyond design changes, the Japanese IME sometimes just completely bugging out (For one year I paid for a third-party IME just because the Apple one was bugging out too much).

I could list another three paragraphs of tiny bugs; nothing really major, but dozens of paper cuts. In the end they became stress factors. All my Apple devices just became tedious and stressful to use. Apple’s “It just works” paradigm started to lose its appeal. If everything works like magic, I was perfectly tolerating that many software and also hardware of course costs more than other systems, that also many things are usually just much less customizable, and other quirks of the ecosystem. I mean, I had the advantage of it just working and not even needing to think about customizability or settings stuff up. But then, suddenly, it glitches and it bugs. I doesn’t “just work” anymore. And I wonder, on another system I might have more work with setup but in the end it might cause me less stress?

I contemplated switching away from Mac for a better part of a year; maybe even longer. For some reason I first considered Windows as an alternative. Surely I would need Microsoft Office suite for my work? But that OS has almost the same amount of issues, so I might as well stay on Mac.

Well, during my Winter vacations I had the sudden urge to try out Linux on my gaming desktop PC at home. Ironically it wasn’t even a Mac, it was my only Windows PC. But installing Linux on it felt so fresh. Everything is documented. The solution for “a process is hogging the CPU” isn’t “Well maybe try to logging out of iCloud once and log in again” but there’s usually some tangible solution or workaround which is findable through wikis, forums, or heck even AI.

Then I had a revelation. Maybe it could be the year for the Linux Desktop? Well, for myself anyway. What if? What if, I would maybe switch to Linux as a new platform for my work devices. Most work related stuff such as Slack, Zoom and others are available. Maybe LibreOffice would be enough for my needs of office. But what would I do about OmniFocus and DevonThink? My eco-system blockers. I started experimenting. (And to be frank, I still am.)

Then, I got fixated on this idea that switching could be an option; and all my Apple devices started to bother me more and more, all these bugs, glitches, more and more degrading software quality over the last years, less “it just works” and all the tiny paper cuts every time I use my devices.

Well, one thing let to another, I replaced all my Apple devices. I switched my Mac desktop in my office to a ThinkCentre, installing Gentoo Linux. My MacBook Air got replaced by a ThinkPad X1, also Gentoo Linux. I also replaced my other mobile devices: my iPhone got replaced by a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, my iPad got replaced by a Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, my Apple Watch got replaced by a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.

So, everything is Linux or Android now. It has been about two to three months actually since I switched most of them, so I got a bit of time since.

Do I have buyers remorse? Not at all. Actually I’m much happier. Sure, the initial setup was very convoluted compared to Mac, but now that I converged to a stable configuration, my daily work is just.. stress-free. There were paper cuts, but on Linux you can usually spend a morning with a coffee and will find the correct configuration file to fix it in the way you want it to be.

Do I miss something from Apple? Sure, mostly specific third party apps I’ve been using for decades. I still miss my beloved OmniFocus. I have been playing with lots of other task management apps. I currently mainly use Todoist, but also dabbling with Everdo. There’s stuff like Orgmode and TaskWarrior but not sure if I have the energy for all these rabbit holes ;-). For DevonThink, I used it mostly as a digital file carbinet, and I found that a proper filesystem hierarchy plus full text file indexing in e.g. KDE is close enough for my needs. I also used to use a note taking app called TheBrain which also isn’t available in Linux, only Mac or Windows (and somehow it doesn’t work at all in Wine). I replaced it with Obsidian and self-built some plugins to gap out the note visualization features I’m missing from TheBrain.

How about continuity/handoff features between devices? Sure, everything is a bit less integrated than on Apple. Then again, KDE Connect is surprisingly strong and supports features such as shared clipboards, sharing files, and so on between Linux and Android. To be fair, it has some initial manual setup involved and no “everything on your Apple account finds each other automatically” magic, but after being set up once I find it even more reliable overall. I also like to use Syncthing everywhere to sync folders between all devices including mobile (which is an option on Android but not so much on iOS).

Ironically, my Apple TV is my last remaining Apple device in use. Not sure if I should replace it. Android vs. tvOS probably wouldn’t make a difference for Netflix ;-).