Tokyo Blog

I’m watching TV on my mobile phone right now – just because I can. I can’t do this in the UK, and so it’s a big novelty for me! It kills my battery though. My new phone is a Sony Ericsson and so it uses Sony’s Bravia screen technology, but I can’t see how it makes much difference on the small screen and with 1seg bandwidth being what it is. It comes in handy if you’re out of the house and there’s something on the TV you don’t want to miss which is rare for me in Japan (although the World Baseball Classic has been sucking me in recently).

OK, I finally got my new DSi in black. I checked out the white one, but it soon looks dirty due to the fact that it’s a handheld and you’re constantly toting it around in your bag, pocket, etc. I was really amazed by it. I can really appreciate the hours that have gone into the UI and interaction design. The graphics will never be as good as on the PSP, but I bought this to help me study on the train. I’m using Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun (lit: Correct Chinese Characters Little Writing Bird), which is designed for school kids to use to brush-up their Kanji. It’s therefore about the right level for me, so I use it on the train on the way to work. You use the pen device to draw Kanji on the touchscreen and it has a built-in recognition system that enables it to gauge the quality of your Kanji writing. It also has meaning and reading practice. The next game I buy will be Devil Survivor.

There’s a special place in my heart for the old Macs – I used to use Apple computers throughout university, back in 1996, and the boxes were still beige and the logo multi-coloured even then. Well, Macs have come a long way since, but the retro Apple look is ever popular – so one enthusiast (or team of enthusiasts, I’m not sure) has created this! It looks antiquated but it’s running Mac OS X Tiger! That must have been tricky.

When I was in England over Christmas, I saw some old photographs that reminded me of a computer my parents bought me when I was younger. It was the mid to late 80′s and I was probably around 9 or 10 years old when I got my first computer, this Oric 1 you can see above the text. Compared to all the breeze-block fashioned personal computers of the time, I think this was a design icon. Smaller and thinner than its counterparts and packing the same sound card as the one found in the Atari ST.

The computer used to be kept on a drawer that slid out from the video cabinet beneath the TV. In order to use it you had to squat or kneel in front of it. I used to play Hunchback or Zorgon’s Revenge when no-one was using the TV, or try to program it by guessing at the syntax. Zorgon’s Revenge used to give me the creeps in much the same way as Quo Vadis and Jet Set Willy. The games themselves were very surreal, and when you mixed this with the garish graphics and garbled, contorted sound there was something disturbing about it. A bit like the old Vectrex at my nan’s house.

I experimented with many of the early personal computers during the 80′s. My friends all had a different one: an Acorn Electron, a VIC 20, an Acorn BBC, a Dragon 64, an Amstrad, Commodore 64. They all sucked, but without them I probably wouldn’t be where I am now, so I have a right to be sentimental.

Have a look at this crazy cybertronic vegetable picking exoskeleton in this video newscast from Japan. Is there really a market for this suit in the farming fraternity here? it seems unlikely to me, but it does demonstrate well just how much more comfortable the Japanese are with the union between technology and the human body than any other culture in the world.

I was holding off upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard (v10.5) because I thought some versions of my installed software would cease to function in the new operating system, namely: Cinema 4D and my aging copy of After Effects. I had some time over Christmas, so I finally got it installed and, suprisingly, everything continued working! I upgraded After Effects anyway as this also needed doing, and cleaned up my files and folders. It feels so much better with my machine cleaned down and up-to-date. Better put it to use I suppose. Leopard is incredible by the way, and I advise everyone using an older version of OS X to bite the bullet. It’s not as dangerous as you might think.

Some bad news for children of the 80′s: The VHS format has finally officially died. There were loads of VHS tapes in my house when I was growing up, most of them had stuff recorded off TV. The ones that got the most rotation were Watership Down, Wind in the Willows, Ghostbusters and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. These were not allowed to be recorded over. The little tab had been broken using a bic biro to copy protect them! The fondest memory I have of VHS is the Manga range of UK released Japanese Anime features. I remember Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, Fist of the North Star and Ninja Scroll with the bad dub and garish colours adding to the VHS tape feel of blurry images and white line interference. Wonky sound was also hilariously lo-fi. VHS died on Christmas Eve, 24th December 2008.

The Motoman SDA10 is a Japanese robot manufactured by Yaskawa Electric’s robotics division. It seems to be really versatile, as it can handle a number of different tasks without any problems – even fiddly jobs like putting a disposable camera back together out of lots of tiny individual parts! It’s amazing how fast it moves from position to position during the assembly process, and I can totally see robots taking over the world in the next 100 years. Taken from Fuji TV’s The Best House 1-2-3, a popular Japanese TV show.

Big thanks to the team at Cerego for offering the services of their amazing social learning platform, iKnow. Everything is totally free, and the site blew me away! I’ve only tried one lesson, so I haven’t properly explored all the features of the site, but I have an account set up, and it’s monitoring my learning progress! The lesson I tried was delivered in the form of an interactive Flash movie. You can tell that a huge amount of work has gone into this project, especially the approach to teaching, which is designed by some boffins in-house.

Basically, if you’re learning Japanese, or some other foreign language I recommend it. It’s far-and-away the best thing available of its kind. Disclaimer: I don’t know what other languages are available at present. It does seem to be aimed mostly at people learning Japanese right now…

UPDATE: If you check my account, you will notice I took a lesson for dummies. For anyone thinking I should be a lot more accomplished at Japanese considering the amount of time I’ve been over here, I am. I was just testing it out. I’m super busy with an interactive project of my own right now, but will be doing a proper lesson on iKnow pretty soon. If you join, look me up!

Recently I’ve been noticing a few different ways in which the internet has been important. Last week, I went to Tachikawa in the Western suburbs of Tokyo. In order to find my way from the station to where I was going, I checked the place out beforehand on Google Maps. Furthermore, I opened Street View and ‘walked’ from the station and around the surrounding streets to get a feel for what the area looked like and any landmarks. When I stepped out of the station a few days later it was weird, because I recognised the location. Which makes perfect sense, because I already spent some time exploring a virtual version, albeit paused at last winter.

If your localisation of Google hasn’t got Street View yet, I’m sure it’s coming. Tokyo was one of the first to get it, and the amount of data that is required must be enormous. It’s really useful for navigating.

The other thing I noticed in a recent news story was the prevalence of the internet in a shocking child murder case in the UK. The case of Baby P involved the baby’s mother, his step father and a lodger. The three of whom have been repremanded over their likely involvement in the boy’s death. What happened though, is that underground news sites and unofficial sources leaked the names and addresses of the three on the internet, which eventually found their way onto popular social networking site facebook. An angry mob soon assembled in cyberspace ready to lynch the individuals responsible for the child’s death (which was horrific). The saddest thing for me is that the child’s death could have been prevented if it wasn’t for the negligence of the UK authorities.

The internet played a big part in exposing the identities and, as it so often does, put the power (of knowledge) back in the hands of the people – good or bad.

There’s a couple of reasons why I want to post about something as seemingly mundane as this, the first one being the price: Only ¥6700 for this Canon printer (£47, $69), which I thought was super cheap. The second point is the wrapping and prepping service I received at Yodobashi, Ueno. I had to wait several minutes for my printer to be ready, but I watched in amazement as the guy got busy getting my printer ready for transportation. You can see from the picture above that a lot of love went into it. One thing you won’t notice is that the entire box has been hand-wrapped in clear plastic and secured with sellotape. After that, the other things you can easily see from the photograph. For exmple, there’s a Yodobashi Camera branded sheet of paper attached to the top of the box to prevent damage from the hard plastic handle that you can just make out in the picture. After that, the box is wrapped in both directions with strapping which is stretched around the box and heat sealed using a special machine at the end of the counter in the store. The handle they use has a groove along the top, the perfect size for the strap to fit into. Once the final strap is tightened and sealed, the handle is extremely solid. But it doesn’t stop there. In order to prevent any discomfort from the handle or strap cutting into my fingers, a piece of bubblewrap is wrapped around the handle and taped. Finally, the guy doesn’t pass me the finished product over the counter. Instead, he walks around until he is on my side of the counter and hands me the box, bowing deeply. I propel myself down and out of the shop via the escalator, having been put in a better mood by the outstanding customer service in Japan (it was a dark, rainy day that day, hence the clear plastic wrap on the box).

I have to admit, I don’t understand everything (anything) on the Japanese Television News. I also don’t find many of the stories very relevant. When it comes to keeping abreast of developments in science, technology and the media I always get it on my desktop. Due to the existence of the internet, I find buying newspapers a bit wasteful, both in terms of money and trees. So, when I want to read up on Apple, or recent developments on the web, I open up msnbc.com’s Spectra Visual Newsreader. I’m no fan of the msnbc network, but I can’t help liking the Spectra Newsreader. It looks beautiful, feels futuristic, and is fun to interact with, and you learn stuff to boot. It’s now the first thing I do in the morning when I switch on my laptop.

FireFox 3.0 has been released, but the mozilla site has been inundated and is now down (as of the morning of Tue 1st July 2008). You can still get it from various mirrors though. I got mine from Mac Update. Get yours today, it’s well worth it. Gone now are all the things that used to irritate me about older versions. Mainly the UI and the awful form controls (buttons, radios, checkboxes, etc.). The new UI is a little twee in my opinion, but a major improvement on the old one, and the new features make it my new browser of choice over Safari. It loads pages really quickly, and the Netscape legacy image loading placeholders are finally done away with.

By 2009 the powers that govern the internet will put in place a new system for dealing with domain names (web addresses). Companies and organisations having the money to do so, will be able to create their own custom suffixes. Instead of .com and .net, you will start to see a new range like .sport and .news, etc. This comes at the right time, because most of the current top level domains like .com and .net are already taken. This will create more possibilities for new combinations of words and suffixes used in urls. The first of these should start to appear towards the end of 2009.

Of a night time, I’ve been watching old episodes of BBC’s Horizon programme on YouTube. I’ve been getting a bit of a thing for outer space recently, so I was checking out the one on super-massive black holes, and I also saw the one about computer advancement, where the progress of computers was forecasted as was the mapping of the human brain. This was pretty scary in itself, because one of the possible scenarios was that we create a neural network capable of learning that supersedes humanity and then destroys it!

Actually, that was nothing compared to the stuff I saw on the Large Hadron Collider, the huge 27km round ring buried deep under the Franco Swiss border near Geneva. It’s the largest collider in the world, and also the most energetic. It will reenact the conditions found a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This is what’s so new about this collider. Normally fast moving particles are fired at stationary target particles and create a safer kind of phenomenon, but the Large Hadron Collider sends two beams of particles the opposite way around the enormous ring until they are travelling at the speed of light. Then, they align the beams and…

Well, that’s the problem. Scientists have estimated what might happen at the moment they recreate the beginning of the universe, but there is still much uncertainty. Scientists independent from CERN (the authority heading up the experiment), warn that one of several ‘doomsday scenarios’ could occur. What is almost certain is that the process will create micro black holes. Lots of them. These are expected to be short lived, based on the theory of Hawking Radiation – but this theory hasn’t been proven. What could happen when a MBH is created at a slow speed, is that it gets trapped by Earth’s field of gravity and (since it can pass through matter, and is incredibly small) will come to rest at the very center of the Earth. It is conceivable, therefore, that several of these could end up there. The immense heat, pressure and gravitational force at this location would start the black hole feeding. One scientist estimated that it would take less than 50 months for the black hole to accrete the entire earth. The other fear is that a ‘strangelet’ is produced that turns everything it touches to ‘strange matter’ in a chain reaction-type fashion, or that a ‘monopole’ causes a similar chain reaction catastrophe. More far fetched suggestions include a possible tear in space time that would result in either time distortions or a time loop local to the occurance of the experiment, the creation of a fully-fledged wormhole at the surface of Earth (not good), or even the creation of a new Universe at the expense of our own!

Either way, it sounds a bit risky to me. The thing that worried me most, is why do so few people know about it? It’s the biggest, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. It was actually due to go online this month, but it’s real start-up date is a bit of a mystery now. A law suit filed in the US may have set it back to 2009, but that is unconfirmed. All that is known, is that it’s finished and is being prepared (the chambers have to be cooled to 2k before it reaches it’s operating temperature). Please Google this for yourself.