hiroaki

I built "Yakubun" (訳文, Japanese for "translated text"), an iPhone app that lets you read English articles in Safari with a Japanese translation right alongside the original, and released it for free on the App Store.

Most web page translators send the text of the page you are viewing to an external server. Reports of browser extensions quietly sending browsing data elsewhere have also become common, and I was uneasy about handing over even what I was reading.

Yakubun translates entirely on the iPhone, so the text of the article you are reading is never sent anywhere.

Please note that the app is available only on the Japanese App Store, its interface is in Japanese, and it translates from English to Japanese only.

When I got ready to ship an iOS app, I had to decide how to enroll in the Apple Developer Program. If you enroll as an individual, your real name appears as the seller on the App Store. At the same time, my business is nowhere near big enough to justify setting up a company.

So I enrolled as an organization under my trade name as a sole proprietor, "HKDocs". I settled on the plan on September 18, 2026, and the membership became active as an organization on October 27. Along the way the enrollment stopped once with the error "Your organization is not listed as a legal entity", and contacting Apple Support got it moving again.

Apple's official pages say that sole proprietors should enroll as individuals and that trade names are not accepted for organization enrollment, so what I did falls outside that rule. Earlier articles on the same topic helped me a lot, so as an updated version of them, this article records the actual steps I took in September and October 2026, the costs, and where I got stuck and what I did about it.

I've added a network check to "cafe-wifi-okawari", the Mac tool that automatically reconnects you when your free café Wi‑Fi session times out.

Staying connected is convenient, but most free café Wi‑Fi is not encrypted. If someone on the same Wi‑Fi pretends to be the router, or your Mac's settings leave it open to others on the network, you normally have no way of noticing. So the tool now looks at the Wi‑Fi you're connected to and your Mac's settings every 10 seconds, and lets you know in the menu bar only when there are warning signs.

When you work at a café, the internet often stops after about an hour and the Wi‑Fi login page pops up again. Your free Wi‑Fi session has timed out, and you have to open the page and press "Accept" all over again.

Having this happen in the middle of research or a focused writing session was a small but constant source of stress. So I built "cafe-wifi-okawari", a Mac tool that reconnects you automatically when the session times out, and released it for free. Accept the terms yourself once at the shop, and the tool keeps topping up your connection, just like a coffee refill (okawari in Japanese).

Please note that the tool is built for the free Wi‑Fi at café chains in Japan, and does not work with networks outside Japan.

I use Obsidian, so posts about Obsidian × Claude Code / Codex catch my eye when they come across my timeline. And since the start of this year they have gone viral again and again, every few months. No single new app is at the center of it, yet the same theme keeps taking off.

I wanted to try it in my own Vault, but each post says something slightly different. Some are only about folder structure, some tell you to install the official skills, and some bring in MCP. Reading them piecemeal, I could not tell what to start with, or even whether these were competing approaches at all.

So before starting, I read straight through the posts that took off between January and September 2026 and put them back in chronological order. The conclusion: they are not competing. The core idea has not changed once since January. What changes is only which layer is put in front — the compilation rules, the official skills, Codex, MCP, the CLI. What follows is that map.

I run small paid campaigns on X (formerly Twitter) for a service I operate on my own, and I had been copying the numbers out of the Ads Manager UI by hand every time. Looking into pulling them via API instead, I found that the X Ads API is a separate, approval-gated program from the regular X API, and using it requires an application. I had assumed API keys were enough, so this caught me off guard.

The form is behind a login, and you cannot tell what it asks for ahead of time. Here is the screen as of September 2026, along with what I put in each field.

Run a SQL query, and you get an answer.

How much revenue did we make?
Which campaign performed best?
How many customers are still active?
Where are users dropping off?

But looking at the number on the screen tells you nothing about why that number is correct.

Which data made it into the aggregate?
What was excluded, and by which condition?
Did a join duplicate rows along the way?
Does the unit of calculation match the metric you actually wanted?

SQL gives you an answer.

To understand how that answer was produced, you have to look beyond the result, at everything that happens on the way there.

Data is no longer something only a handful of specialists touch.

As business operations have become more digital and more data-driven, it is not just engineers and data analysts who are expected to make decisions grounded in data every day. Marketers, product planners, sales teams, and people driving operational improvements are, too.

And behind much of that, out of sight, sits SQL.

SQL Quiz Book is a problem set for understanding how SQL processes data, by mapping each part of a query to the way the table changes.

On July 14, 2026, while delegating a large-scale English localization task for content within a development project, Codex started a local Ollama server. There is no evidence that inference or translation was actually performed by Ollama, but the process advanced as far as server startup, GPU detection, and retrieval of the list of locally available models. This post documents what happened and the design considerations worth keeping in mind when delegating long-running, large-scale tasks to a coding agent.

When I introduced Claude Code into a personal OSS repository I develop and maintain on my own, a requirement emerged: I wanted to keep the AI-related settings and documentation out of the public repository and operate them locally only. In this post, I focus on the two topics I spent the most time considering — the use cases for exclusion settings, and the design of history management, which tends to become scattered in AI-assisted workflows.

Following the previously released browser-based darts score calculator apps for "01" and "Cricket", we have newly added a "Count-Up" score calculator tool.

While 01 and Cricket are highly strategic and fun games, Count-Up is the best choice for basic darts practice or when playing with beginners who have just learned the rules, as it simply competes for total points. As always, no app installation or account registration is required. You can start using it immediately just by opening your browser.