June 2008
30 posts
Fooling cigarette machine face recognition with... →
Japan’s recently been getting serious about underage smoking, with the launch of the Taspo ID card for vending machines and experiments in Kansai using face-recognition technology. However, in addition to the predictable issues with people using others’ cards (including one enterprising operator who attached a card to his machine for people who hadn’t got one), it now transpires...
Aristophanes' fricassee and the Last Tsar →
Ended up reading the Wikipedia article on Tsar Nicholas II after reading the news that the last Romanov childrens’ remains have been identified. One tidbit I came across — evidence, I suppose, of the kind of thing people get up to if you give them absolute power — was his official title, which reads as follows:
“We, Nicholas the Second, by the grace of God, Emperor and...
ds music apps →
A list of some of the homebrew music applications out there for the Nintendo DS. Quite a roster.
Whale meat: For the table, not the lab →
Articles like this one from the Asahi bring into focus the contradictions about Japan’s “scientific” capture of whales. “Whale meat prices up for second straight year; catch falls short of target”, reads the headline. The article begins with an announcement by Japan’s whaling research institute that it is raising the price of whale meat by 6.1% because...
iPhone from DoCoMo?
While DoCoMo’s recently been doing some damage control after its president declared on a news program that the iPhone was “heavy” and that it didn’t really feel any urgency about adding more touchscreen phones to its lineup (apparently, his comments on weight related to the first-gen model), the official position remains that they’re adjusting pricing plans to counter...
What price an iPhone? Now we know →
Softbank just dropped the pricing plans for the iPhone. Upshot is that JPY23,000 gets you an 8GB model, while the 16GB version will be JPY34,560. This being Softbank, of course, things aren’t that simple, and there are installment payments and all sorts of stuff to factor in. But it looks like the upshot is:
8GB phone: With a two-year lock-in, it looks like you pay JPY960 a month for the...
SynthStar →
New vintage synth site with a decent search engine
WASP Injection Knife →
A thoroughly nasty piece of kit, reminiscent of the compressed air batons Peter Watts equips his rifters with. (Via William Gibson, who titles his post “I’d *way* rather be tazed, bro”)
Ohayo, iPhone →
God bloody damn it. There I was last week, idly speculating about when the 3G iPhone’d be out in Japan and moaning with friends about how Softbank’s network was a bit iffy but maybe get one as a second phone with a data package to try it out, and so on and so forth.
And then this morning I skim through the blogs of Jobs’ keynote and nanoseconds later find myself roving...
Attacker liveblogs Akihabara preparations →
Threats on BBSes, usually the notorious 2channel, are nothing new. But Tomohiro Kato, now in custody for killing seven and wounding ten on Sunday, went one better by liveblogging his progress via cellphone. He first writes at 5.21a.m. of his intention to kill people in Akihabara and follows it with ten updates on his journey from Shizuoka, including complaints about delays, road closures and the...
Japanese cellphones too complex →
I’ve been harping on this theme for a while. I think the iPhone, particularly once the app store is up and running, could be a viable alternative to the stuff-everything-in model the Japanese makers have. It does a few things well, and allows you to add functionality as you need or want to. That means you control the learning curve and start from a much simpler base.
The inclusion in the...
Akihabara attack →
I turned the TV on yesterday evening to this. The quotes about being “tired of life” and that “anyone will do” as a victim are becoming cliched in these attacks.
I wish these people could direct the anger somewhere else, even at themselves.
ThinkGeek :: PowerSquid Surge →
Keyboard Skins for Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut... →
The Moog Guitar's out →
and it costs US$6,500. Yowch.
Most of the rest is as previewed, but notable news includes the fact that the guitar contains a Moog filter. Look at the main page for video of Lou Reed, Vernon Reid and others going mental over it.
I’d love one of these, but it ain’t exactly an impulse-buy price.
Softbank gets the iPhone →
Another of the one-line press releases we’ve become used to:
“SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.”
Which means 3G, obviously, since no Japanese carrier has GSM or EDGE networks. (There still appears to be widespread confusion about that fact.)
Presumably DoCoMo and KDDI were too inflexible...
Today's definition of slightly depressing
is downloading a documentary on Steve Reich only to find out it’s in Dutch.
Bome's Midi Translator - Bome Software →
Taxis and the bleeding obvious →
Much rending of garments is going on about the fact that last year’s 7% hike in Japan’s taxi fares has resulted in five straight months of declines for income per vehicle. Admittedly, the generally sluggish economy is also a big contributor. Taxi companies also complain that delays to approval for the fare increase meant that its introduction coincided with the economic downturn. ...