Avatar 3D

Last week Emily and I went to see Avatar in 3D at the local cinema here. The movie was pretty good and in 3D it was awesome! If you are going to see it and you can, definately see it in 3D.
The story was better than I thought and might even be good for church groups as there are plenty of themes that could be drawn out, even if it is a bit animistic overall. The feeling of a utopian world over a broken sinful one, the idea of living in communion with God rather than trying to glorify ourselves for our own greedy pleasure, the renewal of body and mind that Jake went through entering into the eutopia through the god-like “Eiwa” (excuse the spelling, just took a guess!)
Plus the action was great and it was good fun to watch.

The 3D was especially interesting to me though as I studied stereoscopic technology when I was at uni for my final year degree project.
The technology the cinema we went to was the same shutter glasses tech that we used at uni, it means wearing a bigger set of glasses, but it’s an easy install for the cinema as there is no need to polarise the on screen image, as long as their projector is up to it. If 3D takes off the way some people think it will this will probably be the most common way to retro fit prebuilt cinemas to display it… If you understand what I mean you’re doing well

But yeah, the sensation was just as it was when I was at university, and it was pretty good there. The drawback still comes for me in focus, in 2D my eyes can tell how far away the screen is and know how to focus(ish) to watch, plus I’ve had plenty of practice. But in 3D the image looks closer or further and my eyes want to focus that way, but the screen is the same distance and so focus doesn’t change, I think this is what tires my eyes. It was a bit of a talking point when I we studying 5 years ago and still seems to be.
But actually as I relaxed into the movie and forgot to take special notice of the 3D it became easier, though my eyes were still tired by the end, but that might be because it was a late show that went on to almost 1am!
Emily enjoyed it, but the glasses were a little awkward over her regular glasses and she felt a bit motion sick during the longer action scene in the middle…

But definately see it in 3D if you can!
I hear it’s doing well at the box office too, perhaps on it’s way to becoming a record breaker!

Microsoft SeaDragon

I’ve just been playing a little bit with Microsoft Seadragon…  It’s pretty cool!

Click more to see one I made of a panorama from our holidays in the summertime!

iPhone…

A little while ago Emily and I were shocked at how much we pay for our mobile phones here in Japan.  She had a mobile on the AU network with a bunch of plans and stuff so she could call her parents and me without worrying about the costs sky rocketing, but the plans themselves weren’t cheap.  Then my own phone was the basic model on the Softbank network, which allows calls and mobile mail within the network for free, but the cross network calls and mails to Emiri added a bit to the monthly costs.  So we decided to get Emiri a new softbank phone and drop her AU down to the basic, cheapest plan.  Softbank would also allow her parents to call her for free on their broadband phone.

Now recently Softbank have had a deal on the iPhone, the basic plan, so called flat rate data, plus iPhone 3G actually works out at the same price as a regular phone, maybe even a little cheaper.  However Emily didn’t really want an iPhone, she would rather have a phone that was more like the one she already had…  So I thought I could take the chance I had missed before and get me a nice shiny iPhone.

The iPhone has many advantages to life in Japan, first up it has a nice English interface, not the afterthought most Japanese phones have.  This is particularly good in regards to input, Japanese phones usually don’t have the predictive text and even the regular input method takes way too many button presses to use English.  But then they aren’t designed for english users.  The iPhone can switch easily from Japanese to English and a multitude of other languages if the fancy takes.  Not to mention the apps, the music etc etc etc

But the rub with the iPhone in Japan comes with data.  In other places it is a completely flat rate deal, but Softbank’s “flat rate” data service isn’t really flat rate.  But rather it is cheap if you don’t use it, but if you do it rises, and then hits a ceiling after a little while.  But the ceiling isn’t overly low, it’s not outrageously expensive either, but its a good bit higher than I would pay for the same service in the UK, and it would take a big chunk out of the savings we were hoping to make by getting Emily a Softbank phone.  Now this is ok, I can be careful etc and try to use Wifi as much as possible, I have it at home and at school after all.  But this is harder on an iPhone than you might think.  And it might also mean me taking a step down in terms of convenience…  Let me explain…

I have a lovely 1st generation 32Gb iPod Touch that the lovely folk at GCD Tech gave me when I left working with them to come to Japan.  And I would carry both it and my mobile all the time when I was out and about.  It is/was my Japanese dictionary, notepad, calendar, iPod (duh) and more.  It syncs automatically with my Gmail, contacts and Google calendar.  I could spend a trip on the train writing short emails or catching up with things I hadn’t read yet…

Now all of this is iPhone territory right?  It can do all of this, and more!  And it will do it over wifi just like the iPod!  But the issue is that it doesn’t [i]just[/i] do it over wifi…  It does it over 3G as well.  If I have everything automatically updating on the iPod, it could only do it with wifi, so while I was at home or school it would update away, go on the road and it would sit there, not updating.  But the iPhone won’t do that, inder wifi it’s fine, but go on the road it it will use 3G to do it’s updating.  Fine if it’s a prepaid limit, but with Softbank costs rise… 
So lets try and keep it low.  Contacts is easy now as I can sync with Google contacts through iTunes.  But email and calendar won’t sync without Outlook, and I don’t have Outlook, I use thunderbird…  So I have to sync the calendar and mail over the air, but trying to control it and keep it to wifi.  So I can go into settings and set them to manual sync.  That should do it right?  Manual sync on the iPhone doesn’t mean you push a sync button.  Rather it means when you open the calendar or email, it will then sync to keep it up to date.  That sounds ok, but it means if I am out and about and need to check to see if I am free on Friday evening or Monday afternoon or something, the calendar will sync via 3G as soon as I open it up to look.
Email is even a step more irritating.  If I set up Gmail as an email account on the phone set to manual, and the Softbank email account as well.  Now if someone sends an email to my Softbank account, I get a bleep and it says “You’ve got a mail” (it says this even if there are a lot of them) and I can open it up and see what the mail says.  But when I open the mail app to see the email, it downloads whatever Gmail is waiting for me on the server along with it, the opening of the app being the trigger for a “manual” sync.
I have also lost the ability to write emails on the train to be sent when I get home, I have to download any emails that are waiting in order to have the opportunity to reply to old ones or even write a new one from scratch…  And I have to remember to open the mail app when under wifi to make sure they get sent and new ones downloaded…

So I feel like getting an iPhone has downgraded my flexibility, unless someone knows a way to get it to sync some things only over wifi and still let me make phone calls and get mobile mail…  It seems either I take the convenience hit, or I take the financial hit….  Any thoughts?  Another option is to carry both iPod and iPhone….  And another is to give Emily the iPhone and go back to my keitai/iPod combo, she won’t really use the internet, sync or anything, but I do like the ease of English!

Squirty McGoo’s Inkjet Adventures

Squirty McGoo

A few months ago I got a printer, so that I could print my own documents without having to go all the way to the Hokkaido Centre or somewhere to print. Back at home in NI we’ve had a whole range of printers, mostly from Epson and HP, but lately we got a Canon multifunction and have had no problems with it at all. So I went for a Canon this time around and got a multifunction so I can scan and copy and so on as well…

A month ago then I got a CISS for it (Continuous Ink Supply System) from Rihac systems in Australia (also in UK). It cost a bit, but it’s bunged full of ink, something like a bazillion cartridges (maybe 60…) worth of ink or something ridiculous, so the overall price is a bargain! Also when the time comes to refill I don’t have to pay for more cartridges, just for the ink. But, as I still had ink left over in the cartridges I had before, I didn’t fit it right on it’s arrival. Rather this Wednesday night saw me run out of ink in my black cartridge and so I thought I would go for it!

Taking care to lay out some paper and get a box of tissues to address any spillages or unexpected events, I opened the box and got the gear out. There was a tank full of ink, a bunch of tubes and bits and pieces, a syringe and a couple of frightening needles! I had to prime the system as it had been flown and couldn’t be sent primed, presumably it would burst open in a mid-air inking frenzy and turn everyones baggage cyan, magenta and yellow… I managed to prime the system with minimal spillage and only peripheral blackening to my hands and clothes, an older, dark coloured jumper chosen for the occasion. I then managed to put the thing into the printer without spilling anything and follwed the instructions to thread the tubing through the printer, add little blocks to stop the lid crimping it and measuring out the right lengths so it could move back and forth easily… Then I put the cartridges in, reprimed a couple of bits that had collected more air in the pipes in the process, and turned it on.

Now at this point it is worth saying that Canon only wants people to buy Canon ink for it’s printers. Printers aren’t expensive these days, every one wants you to buy their printer, and the reason is so they can sell you ink. printer ink and cartridges are extortionate to say the least, which is a big part of getting one of these ink systems. It used to be that cartridges would be made a certain shape or with certain patented parts, so that only that company could make them, but that started to lose it’s control and so now, to ensure you get only the “correct” ink, they put a little chip on the cartridge. This little chip’s job, of course, is not to stop you using other cartridges, nono, it is to keep an eye on how much ink is in the cartridge so the printer can tell you when to buy more. But as an aside it just so happens that if a cartridge doesn’t have the right chip, it won’t work with the printer. And that chip is made by Canon. So to put in this ink system, the fakey cartridges on the end of the tubes have to have these chips, and Rihac provide instructions for removing chips from real cartridges and sticking them onto theirs so that they appear to be real cartridges (then we disable the ink level monitor). But they also offer, for a small fee, some chips pre-fitted to the cartridges. Now sometimes I like to fiddle with these things, but the last thing I wanted was to buy this whole thing then mess it up trying to put these tiny chips on. So I got the prefitted ones.

So yes, I had put everything into the printer and turned it on and the printer told me it couldn’t recognise the cartridges. This was a bit of a disappointment to say the least. I emailed Rihac and, as it was past my bedtime, I went to bed.
Rihac replied on Thursday morning and suggested I call their customer support line in Australia. I decided against that, I figured they would probably just tell me the chips have some kind of problem, or maybe Australian chips don’t work in Japanese printers so the ink markets can be independant or something annoying like that. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and, following the instructions I mentioned before, I set about taking the authentic chips from the canon cartridges and replacing the supplied chips with them. Now it is worth pointing out that before I did this, I closed up the valves on the ink tank so that it wouldn’t get air in the tubes again and I wouldn’t have to re-prime it after moving around. I finished up changing the chips and put it all back in and the printer recognised the cartridges! Success! But wait, it still didn’t seem to be happy. It was moving things and whirring for much longer than normal and eventually it displayed an uninformative error message saying “Turn me off and on again!” on it’s little screen and stopped working. So I did. Still nothing! At this point I noticed air had got into the tubes… so I removed the stoppers I had put back in and used the syringe to push the ink through to the cartridge like the last time to re-prime the system… But I forgot I had closed the valve on the back of the tank… When I took the syringe out the pressure I had built sent a spurt of black ink splattering up the lovely, nice, clean, white, rented apartment wall! Tissue upon tissue went to mopping up the ink, trying to soak as much out of the white wall paper as possible. But it was immediately apparent that no amount of tissuing was going to clean up this mess. And the time had passed, I had Japanese classes to go to and a prayer meeting that evening! Fortunately I had recently used some bleach based bathroom cleaner that had amused me by turning the blue rag I was cleaning with white as I cleaned. So, that evening, a careful application soon removed the inky mess, and gave the room that “just been swimming” smell!

I had left my printer in a non-printing state, it was just giving me error messages when I left it to go to class. But when I returned in the evening and turned it on, it sat there ready to print as though there had never been a problem. I still don’t know what happened to change the situation, but after a few test pages the ink was flowing freely and it has been printing brilliantly.

So now each page works out even cheaper than the ￥10 I would have to spend at the Hokkaido Centre for copying, so I can print and copy at home, in colour, and save money! I also feel I should name my printer as it has displayed a level of intelligence and emotional trickery that normal appliances don’t seem to hold… Squirty McGoo*

I am not sure if I would recommend the system or not, I’ve only been using it a few days! But certainly anyone who isn’t adventurous, would panic when faced with possibly indelible ink on their walls, or doesn’t like having their emotions and sanity toyed with by an inanimate piece of imaging technology probably shouldn’t get it…

 

*unless someone can come up with a better one? My only criteria is it needs to be fun and also be recognisable as a printer when put in the sentence “I’ll just run a off a copy on old Squirty McGoo”

Some useful bits and bobs…

A more IT oriented update this time, recently I came across some utilities that are extremely useful… Especially if you like the idea of cloud computing and need to share documents and files with people. I came across them through Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast network.

The first is called SkyDrive Explorer and is a Windows Explorer extension that allows access to SkyDrive (Microsofts free online storage provider) directly from Explorer. SkyDrive is extremely useful if you ever need to share files that are too large to email or can’t be sure if the recipients email providor is up to the task of a larger attachment. You can upload the file and share it with Windows Live! users privately, or open it up so no password is required for people without Windows Live! accounts. I recently used it to pass two audio recordings to our language advisor at OMFs Japanese Language Centre as they might have been too large to email.
I have used SkyDrive for a while for this kind of thing, it has bags of storage space (25GB for free!) and it’s drag and drop upload has often allowed large uploads. It also (recently) allows the download of an entire folder as a zip file, which is handy for downloading too.
SkyDrive Explorer is in development and currently is a beta, so whether there will be a charge for it in the future I don’t know. Depending on how it’s features develop, it could also make SkyDrive a viable target for online backup of essential docs and files…

The next one is Offisync, a plugin for Microsoft Office (2003 and 2007 only I am afraid).  This appears as a toolbar in compatible applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) and allows direct interaction with Google Docs.  Now Microsoft have their own service for sharing docs and so on (Office Live Workspace), but it doesn’t have online applications (yet…although apparently coming…) and I am not sure if it is as widely used as Google Docs.  But this ability to directly open and save Google Docs via Office on my desktop is great, it might mean I begin to use Google Docs more.  The only drawback is that it doesn’t facilitate allowing others to see the document without signing in.  It allows for collaboration, but others must have a Google Docs account in order to sign in and view, to open it up for public viewing means going to Google Docs itself and sharing it out.  Office Live Workspace is actually a little better in this regard.  Perhaps when Office goes online it might be a real competitor to Google here.

Both potentially very useful little apps, both still in beta and free for now.  I will be using them and if they are rubbish you’ll find out soon!

Quick update to prove I’m not dead yet…

With all the fake online reports of celebrities deaths following the series of famous bucket-kickers recently (too insensitive?) I thought I better pop up here and dispel any rumours that might have started that I am dead! I’m not dead! I’m not even famous!

Anyways… I just have been quite busy with study, church, life in Japan, and so my blog here has fell into a little bit of a lag!

Something at the more geeky end of things, I have recently reformatted my computer. Since coming to Japan I have done a fair bit of installing and uninstalling to try things and test things that might have proven useful but maybe didn’t etc and that ended up clogging my system up a little bit, not a great deal, but a little bit. So I thought I’d clean up and start fresh!
Now Sony put Windows, drivers, etc on a seperate partition then you make the discs from that and can recover the space if you like, which I did, well rather installed Win 7 beta, then the release candidate, on it.
So self-made recovery discs in hand, backups safely made and verified and mentally prepared for a few hours of offline life as my computer is rebuilt I set about reinstalling. So I went ahead and booted on the recovery discs, formatted the drive and began the Vista install sequence. Everything was going well until I got to disc 2 of the 3 recovery discs and after a lot of whirring it stopped reading and the install was aborted! The disc came out of the drive and under close inspection it had a bit of a scratch on the surface that was causing the problem!
What to do? Clean hard disk, no recovery partition, dud recovery dvds and no second computer to fiddle with things through… I did the only thing I could, I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as my main operating system! (for those who don’t know, Win7 RC is the pre-release, final check over of Windows 7 before it is officially released in October, just to make sure it works and catch any major last minute bugs).
So thats the end of it really, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate on my Sony effectively… Its running exceptionally well, certainly as well as Vista had become after legions of patches and updates, and much leaner. The interface changes are welcome, making the taskbar a bit more docky (but in a good way, leaving out the irritating bits of OSX’s dock and keeping the useful bits of the Windows taskbar…)
So yeah, Sony said I’d have to pay 50-odd Euro to get some new UK recovery discs sent to me (well sent to NI, then more to ship here…) So with the offer on Windows 7 for $50 in the US, £50 seems likely in the UK, I might just go on ahead and go for Win 7 instead of worrying about Vista… I still have my Vista key and can easily get my hands on a DVD to get the upgrade. Failing that I might just get my hands on the DVD and use my vista key to go back to vista. I mean really Sony can’t get away with charging me for software I already own can they?!

So there it is, I’m still alive and running Windows 7…

Massage Robbery!

Last week I read a blog from a guy travelling in China who had gone for a massage and while on the table his stuff had been stolen and was held to ransom…  Here is a Japanese version of that story!

On Saturday I went to the bank to withdraw some money…  I put my card into the machine, keyed in my PIN and waited as it spat my card back out.  After multiple attempts confirmed I hadn’t mistaken my PIN number, the ATM wasn’t closed (ATMs close in Japan!  No really, they do!!) and checking my balance with my passbook to be sure that my account had money in it and hadn’t been victim to some kind of fraud or something I went to another bank and tried again, then another…  But it wouldn’t work…  The machine briefly displayed a message before spitting my card out, so I tried a few more times to get some time to read it.  It simply said, “Please go to the bank counter when the bank is open.”

I resorted to using my British bank card to get some money from a Post Office machine, which worked ok, and got some shopping and went home.  On the way home I was running through all the possible things I could think of in my mind.  Why didn’t the card work?  My Japanese bank card is a little different from my British one, it uses an IC chip when it is put into the ATM, exactly like this one (Japanese).  My British one has a chip, but that is used for Chip and Pin verification when using it as a debit card…  ATMs still use it’s magnetic strip.  So my mind settled on the chip, had it had some kind of a problem?  As soon as the thought entered my head I remembered my two Sony Pocket Bit memory sticks (also Japanese).  I keep them in my wallet and on Thursday I had lent them to Tre (a short term missionary) to transfer a file, after the first one failed to work on his computer, we tried the other, both failed…  I tried recovering them on Friday, but they were beyond salvage…  I thought I must have sat on them badly or something, but they had survived for a long time and I had used both of them on Tuesday night…

I began to think perhaps the same thing had caused the IC in my card and the two memory sticks to fail…  What had happened between Tuesday and Thursday night that might do that?  On Tuesday I went to Oasa Church and helped with English Open House…  Did I stand in the wrong place on the train and a magnetic field from the electric motors damage the sensitive chips?  On Thursday I had classes in the morning, went home for some lunch and to do my homework before returning to JLC for “work day” and prayer meeting, during prayer meeting I was on creche duty…  Had I done something during work day, wet my wallet or something?  Or falled on it while looking after (…playing with…) the kids in the park?  On Wednesday I had had classes in the morning, met with Mr Yagita in the afternoon (and won a game of shogi (English this time)!  Mr Yagita was heavily handicapped though), Emiri, not having many classes on Wednesday, came during the time with Mr Yagita and met him and we went to a Cafe afterwards near my apartment.  When we sat down the table had an announcement saying there were sofas and comfortable chairs upstairs.  So we went upstairs and drank our coffee and ate our ice cream…  Then…  then….

Then… we noticed there was a massage chair.  As everyone knows, when you see a massage chair the only action that is possible is to sit in it and press all of the buttons to see what they do.  And that is exactly what I did.  As I sat in the chair, with my wallet in my back pocket, the electric motors with their heavy magnets and large electromagnetic fields massaged my back, my legs and with a push of the most surprising of the many buttons on the controller, my rear end…  along with my back pocketed wallet… 

As I thought I realised, this is where it all went wrong…  The magnets in the motors of the slightly aging massage chair must have destroyed the chip in my card and those in my memory sticks…

I don’t really like the bank in Japan, it is extremely cumbersome, time consuming and unneccessarily inconvenient…  But today I had to go in as the machine had instructed and filled in some forms and a new card will be arriving in my letter box sometime in the next two weeks (See?  Two weeks!)

Thankfully my British card relies on it’s magnetic strip and I can still use it.  I  can only hope it’s chip has more of a stiff upper lip and has survived the ordeal, although I expect if I phoned Abbey (or their Indian call centre) they would make me a new card and have it sent to Antrim and it could be forwarded on by my ever helpful mum and still arrive before the Japanese one gets here…  I am also a bit concerned about my spiffy new Japanese driver’s licence as it also has a chip in it and the last thing I want is to come down on the wrong side of the traffic police and then my licence to not be up to scratch!

So there you have it,the story of how I was robbed by a massage chair in Japan.  Not exactly robbery I guess, just a bit inconvenient…

WereJohn

Some of you may have heard of Wolfram|Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine” that can be found at www.wolframalpha.com.
It is an interesting concept and, while I don’t necessarily agree with the precepts on which is was conceived, I think it could do some interesting things! For example, it has already told me I was born under a full moon… No wonder I’m so hairy… It is hard not to think of it as a search engine however, it is a strong habit when faced with a little white box to type in a bunch of search terms!

Go and try it out, see if you come across anything suprising or astounding!

Flat3d.org New Additions!

There are a couple of new additions to flat3d.org.

I have switched to using FeedBurner to track the feeds from the site.  To be honest this is more just to see what is possible with FeedBurner than any real interest in keeping track of numbers or anything!  The site should make a smooth transition from the previous feeds to the new feedburner ones, so if you use feeds there shouldn’t be an issue…  I think!  If there are you can simply resubscribe, but please let me know if you had any issues!

The other addition is a new blog!  http://emily.flat3d.org/ is Emiri’s new blog.  She hasn’t started using it yet so it will probably change substantially… Oh, and it will be in Japanese, so it probably won’t be of much interest to many reading this!

I might make more changes as time goes on…  Having my own domain and space makes for a bit more freedom in messing around and having fun!

Let me know if you have any probs with the new feeds…  big brother will be watching you…  well at least counting you…

Mozy on there…

Just a quick post about something that has come to my attention recently, probably a bit old hat, but still worth a mention perhaps…

I’m giving Mozy‘s free home user service a go and seeing how it goes.  I am very aware however that Mozy have a disclaimer on the free 2GB that states they can change or withdraw the service at any time they like, so I might not be able to use it forever, but for the time being it is looking like a neat little service for backing up documents, spreadsheets, contacts, mail, etc automatically and in the background.  Not for photos I reckon, they are more suited to archiving than continnual backing up, and not a replacement for a proper regular backup, but certainly an extra layer of protection for the bare essentials, and probably (definately..) a more regular backup than my lazy self will do with an external drive!