bulknews.typepad.com:

iKnow widgets

iKnow�is a great e-Learning system that works with flash and cellphone app,�for Japanese people wanting to learn English (I heard they're preparing the opposite as well) with social networking feature. So wonderful idea.

Nov 29, 2007 11:02:41 AM

Daft Punk -Robot Rock Around The World

Live in Japan 2006. So freaking awesome

Nov 29, 2007 12:17:12 AM

Eye-Fi feature requests

1 week of playing with Eye-Fi card. So far, so great. It totally reduces the pain of uploading photos to Flickr and also to my computer. So here are few requests if someone from Eye-fi read this :)

1. Hardware switch to disable Wi-Fi completely

The Eye-fi wireless locator tries to find the wireless even if I'm out of places that I registeres SSID hotspots with, and that consumes a lot of battery. Also, I think technically I can't use any digital camera with this SD card inserted on any airplane. I know this needs a hardware upgrade so if you release Eye-Fi next generation, it'd be great if you keep this in consideration.

2. Open API to subscribe to photo uploads events

When I take photos in wireless areas but my laptop is turned off, I don't know if/when the photo uploads are done. I know the Eye-Fi manager site was built by SitePen using Dojo and probably cometd, so there should be a Comet based PubSub API to receive events programatically. I'm ready to reverse engineer the dojo code or packet dump the Eye-Fi agent's transport, but opening the API so we can make our own event poller would be nice. That way we can write a custom app that runs on Windows/OSX to do things like "update my twitter when photos are uploaded from Eye-Fi" or "send me SMS so I know I can turn the camera off".

3. Automatic geotagging using WiFi accesspoint to geo database

I just thought it'd be nice if Eye-Fi can automatically add geo EXIF data to the photo (and probably add geo machine tags when uploading to photo site like Flickr) by looking up WiFi accesspoint to location database like PlaceEngine, Navizon or Windows Live Maps or even ip address to geo like hostip. There might be privacy issues with this and it probably should be turned off by default, but I'd love that feature!

Nov 26, 2007 12:01:21 AM

Fast 10 fingers

fastfingers on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I'm not sure how fast this is but here's my result of fast fingers speed test. Because I'm emacs addicted I don't really have a "home position" but seems it works...

Emacs のせいで左手の薬指がCtrl (Ctrl<->Caps入れ替え済み), 小指が Shift に割り振られてるのでかなりホームポジションは変。というか左の人差し指活躍しすぎ・・・なんですが割りとはやいほうみたいですね。

Nov 21, 2007 9:15:42 PM

Tokyo beats Paris/NY in terms of good restaurants

The Canadian Press: Michelin crowns Tokyo world's new culinary capital replacing Paris

https://canadianpr...

Tokyo has unseated Paris as the world's culinary capital.

Yay! Dedicated to my French co-workers in the office :P

Seriously though, it just reflects the fact Tokyo has more restaurants (good or bad) based on the population and its density. And most of the star-rated restaurants we don't even consider going since they're still expensive.

The beauty of Tokyo life is that I can get a decent food anywhere, anytime (even 2am in the midnight) in Tokyo with the half-price of that in San Francisco.

Nov 20, 2007 1:44:59 PM

Puffy Amiyumi at The Slim's San Francisco

Ami and Yumi
Originally uploaded by brucedene

I just came back from Puffy amiyumi's show in The Slim's, San Francisco. It was a great show!

(The picture is not taken by me but someone in Seattle a few days ago. I had a camera but they requested "absolutely no photos during the show" so I followed that :p)

They appeared with Hi-Standard's "I can't help falling in love" the cover of Elvis (I wonder why?) and played lots of new and old songs, including "Tokyo I'm on My Way", "渚にまつわるエトセトラ", "Hi Hi", "Team Titans" and "Basket Case (Green Day)".

The ended the main show with their great hit "アジアの純真" and the encore was "サーキットの狼". I enjoyed their performance and some lovely chats (they looked at the English note they wrote down). The drummer was Kawanishi from Jet-ki and he was a drummer in UNICORN, which is the band I loved a lot when I was a high-school kid. So I was quite excited about that as well.

Anyway, loved the show. Thanks to Garth for going with me and the ride!

Nov 15, 2007 11:51:58 PM

Eye-Fi card

So I got this tiny magic SD card Eye-Fi from Amazon. It's $99 with 2G storage and not a bad deal itself, but more than that, it has a wireless support.

The way it works is this: It ships with the SD card and a tiny USB stick. For the initial setup, you insert the SD card to the USB stick and connect to your PC/Mac's USB. It'll automatically install the "Eye-Fi manager" software and guides you to the management site manager.eye.fi.

With the site you can configure your username/password things to the photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facbook and of course our own Vox and TypePad (I'm proud Six Apart is the only company that has 2 services in the list!)

Also you can configure the Wi-Fi setup of the SD card and the document folder you'd like to syncronize your photos to, in your computer.

Now the setup is done, and you don't need the USB stick anymore unless you re-configure your SD card to add an extra Wireless network etc.

You can just take as many photos as you'd like and as you take, the photos are uploaded to your favorite photo sharing site automatically. Actually, as far as I can tell, the photo is first uploaded to manager.eye.fi site with its authentication and from there their application sends the photos to the external photo sharing site. This makes it easy for them to add other photo sharing site without updating SD card firmware etc. Clever.

For sites like Flickr and Vox, you can configure the privcacy setting (You only, Friends, Family, Public) and also auto-add the tag 'Eye-Fi', which is so cool. The manager site (manager.eye.fi) is built by SitePen using Dojo and comet, so it's great as soon as your camera starts uploading something, you'll see the upload status realtime on manager dashboard. Pretty well done!

Also if you enable the option to synchronize the photos to your computer, if your camera and the computer is on the same network, the photos are sent to the computer wirelessly. (UPDATE: I tested this on my office network, having my camera on free-wifi and my laptop on secured wi-fi, and it was actually syncronized. So I guess the Eye-fi manager software running on PC is downloading photos from the manager site)

So even if you don't need/want an automatic uploads to the photo sharing site, the Eye-Fi card is still useful because you don't need to pull out and connect the card to the laptop, or use the bulky USB cable to syncronize photos. It looks like it only allows you to copy the files to the same folder (unlike the folder name with dates etc... UPDATE: it actually has an option to auto-add photo creation date (or upload date) as a sub folder. Cool) but I guess it actually plays well if you enable "Folder Action" on Mac or equivalent on windows, like "if jpeg files are added to this folder, resize it and send them to Flickr" kind of thing.

Yes, there are some problems: if you don't have a computer but your camera is on Wireless, there's no way for you to know when the uploads are complete (It's not a big issue since whenever you turn on your camera it'll auto-resume the upload it seems like). You can't select which photos to upload: all photos are just uploaded without any prompts. Also, it consumes a lot of battery.

But overall this is a good buy for $99. Available on Amazon.

Nov 15, 2007 11:30:58 PM

Earth rising

The high-def view of "earth rising" from the moon is awesome, but the video on the site is not actually truely HD, and 1080p version was aired on NHK last night in Japan (NHK is almost equivalent to BBC in Japan) and of course the broadcast is DRM-ed and allowed to copy once. Shitty. I wonder why they are not distributing the original 1080p movie via BitTorrent.

Nov 14, 2007 9:58:44 AM

accent meme

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far)

Northeastern

This could either mean an r-less NYC or Providence accent or one from Jersey which doesn't sound the same. Just because you got this result doesn't mean you don't pronounce R's.(People in Jersey don't call their state "Joisey" in real life)

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

via Brad�etc. Do I speak like people from�New Jersey?

Nov 10, 2007 2:37:02 AM

Japan to start taking Fingerprints and Photographs of visitors

Immigration Bureau of Japan

https://www.immi-m...

Japanese immigration will start scanning fingerprints and taking photographs of foreign visitors like USA does, as a part of anti-terrorists law updates. This law seems to become effective next week.

Well, they decide/update laws like this while we're all not aware of (-- and they do a lot. Everytime we have elections the theme is some bullshit stuff like "Making Postal Office a private company" or "How to compensate lost pension notes")

Anyway, having FP scanned and face photo taken is one of the most gross and annoying experience at airports. When I come back to USA and go through the security process, I always feel that I'm not welcomed. Already feeling sorry for what all travelers feel in Narita.

Nov 8, 2007 3:48:26 PM