Retro. The old brightblack

Gadgets Summary - February 2008 Here we are again - I’m still a techie kind of guy. I still live in Tokyo. Nothing changed there. If you stick those two things together it really does amounts to a person who used to live in fear when he gets his salary paid into his bank over whether the next weekend poring over disturbing amounts of readily available technology in the bowels of denki-ya, or the fearsome Akihabara. Though the latter seems to be swinging over to it’s alter-ego of otaku fetishist zone quite a lot of late. ...

All I can say is that these are all real - none of them are faked. In fact, if you’re (un)lucky you may be able to repeat them. They’re just run of the mill examples of the fact that maybe sometimes UI designers, programmers, and who knows who else, maybe want to throw us something a little different. 2008 iTunes Loses Files; Can’t talk about it. Like a lot of people, I’ve been bitten by a problem syncing my iPod to my Mac, in that I see the following error, and the sync stops wherever it was. ...

This is just a collection of micro-reviews of films I’ve seen. They’re likely not new films (but some may be), and most likely B Movies I found cheap in the DVD rental shop… March 2007 The Wicker Man (1973) A very tight and well made view of the clash of beliefs, and modern sexually charged paganism in a Christian society well played by Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. Rating: Worth looking for IMDB. ...

So it seems that I finally finished FEAR. That stands for “First Encounter Assault Recon” which I’ll be incorrectly reducing to ‘FEAR’ here, to save wear on my ‘.’ key. I don’t feel too bad about doing this, as the title is a bit of an oxymoron anyway. I bought it in October 2005, but looking at my saved games, it got about an hour of play a month until mid-August when I decided I should sit down and finish it. ...

My current Palm setup - Palm Zire 72 RAM - 32Mb as standard + my 512MB SD in the expansion slot; OS - Palm 5.2 Screen - 320*320 hi-res colour transflective LCD Sync - mini-USB cable or Bluetooth CPU - 312 MHz Intel® PXA270 processor Current software Space Trader 1.2.2, Plucker 1.8, STRIP 1.0,Documents To Go 6, AvantGo 5.7, BackupBuddy VFS 2.15, Filez 6.8.3, Metro 5.3.8, and of course of all those great built in apps. It’s a great model, great display, good camera for pictures and movies - it’s fast too - really fast. The sync via mini-USB was much faster than before, and even the Bluetooth Sync is pretty fast. It’s truly multimedia capable too, WMV and MP3 playback, and I can add a Wi-Fi adapter too if I like. As before, I’m still running a lot of the same apps, but as it’s a much faster, hi-res device, they’re even better - AvantGo and Plucker look great - much nicer to read, and Metro is amazingly fast. ...

The Background When I was in sixth form (16-18) back in England, I built up a cheap separates stereo system from working a lot of extra part time shifts. I loved that set up. I’m no audiophile, but I did like that set up. Rotel amp, Philips CD player, Aiwa tape deck and JPW speakers, mostly from Richer Sounds and from local dealers. I also had a cheap 15" TV and Memorex VHS VCR to go with it - hey, I was a student! ...

February 2004 I bought a couple of new pieces of software this month for my Palm, just to reinforce a couple of areas for a bit more functionality and safety. Firstly I bought a copy of BackupBuddyVFS, which as it’s name implies backs up the Palm. Where this is useful is that you can back your Palm up to the SD card, and if your Palm runs out of power, you can restore directly from there when you get it to the charger - much faster and cleaner than Palm’s backup. The other app I bought has been gathering in popularity for the last couple of years, but I think it’ll really take off now that Palm have announced that it’s effectively killing Mac support with Palm OS 6. Missing Link is a pretty cool app which enabled you to connect the Palm to the Mac; the reason I wanted it for were two fold: One I wanted to be able to mount my SD card on my desktop and move files to and from it directly, rather than the clumsy installer Palm forces you to use, and secondly, it comes with a license for SplashPhoto image viewing. ...

December 2004 “The Difference Engine” - William Gibson and Bruce Stirling ISBN 0-553-29461-X // USD 8 // 429pp. // 1991 Another re-read from over a decade ago, but this one is an underrated gem. It mixes steampunk with a who-dunnit in a world only Gibson and Stirling could produce. Some excellent characters in an alternative history of the 19th century - a fractured America, Japan dominant in Asia, and the British empire ruling through the power of it’s steam driven computers or “Engines”; a Britain run by meritocratic ‘Radical’ Lords like Babbage and Brunel. It really is a richly described world, and the tale they pull through it - of popular dissent, murder, an evil London summer, and ultimately, some engine punch cards which may or may not produce artificial life is excellent. The only downside is that it does jump about a bit, and the plot can get quite confusing, so you need focus on events. That said, it’s a great and generally easy read, well up there with both of it’s author’s best. If you ever wondered where Neuromancer could have it’s origins, it’s in this alternate history, and Stirling’s knowledge of the history of information technology shown in “The Hacker Crackdown”, undoubtedly helped here. It’s an often overlooked work, as many ‘co-authored’ books tend to be watered down versions of their contributors talents, but this one certainly plays to the best of both. ...

December 2003 Be afraid. Be very, very afraid - I finally got my drivers license converted to a Japanese one. As a Brit, it’s simply a case of going to the license centre, looking vaguely sober and sane, and filling in some forms, and giving them lots of proof you had your license for 90 days in your own country. It certainly beats spending all the time and money to get a Japanese license the other way - driving courses are really expensive. ...

For a few years now, I’ve been a big fan of snowboarding. Have ‘been meaning to do it’ for years, and with only one day on a dry run slope near Sheffield to show for my enthusiasm, I finally got my chance to do the real thing in early 2000 with a friend of mine, ZJ, who is a great boarder. I kicked of my career at Rusutsu in Hokkaido, but since then, I’ve been to so many places across Japan I can’t remember all the names - I also spent a few week’s on New Zealand’s south island doing some back country boarding in July 2000 which was just amazing. I’m not great, or even good - I can’t do tricks, I don’t even know what most of them are called, in fact the closest I get to that is on my PS2 playing SS3. I’m not much of a jumper either, but I do love mountain boarding and the peace and quiet of being in the mountains, and by Tokyo standards, the clean air. Of course mad tree runs in waist deep powder (at night) don’t make me feel bad either! ...