Want to buy an iPod nano, but you're worried about the 4Gb not being enough to store your 200 gigabytes of ilegally downloaded music? Don't worry anymore! Now you can upgrade your iPod nano to 200Gb on a very low budget!

But what is really interesting is the fact that this upgrade uses an MSX ATA-IDE board made by Sunrise.

See the upgrade instructions here.

I know that many of you won't find this funny, but I did:


September 11th Memorial Jenga:

http://www.manse.cx/nine11_jenga/

This is incredible. Let's say that you work in a city far from home and the bus is expensive. Then let's say that you join with some friends who work in the same place and share a car to go to work.

And you get sued by the bus company.

Original article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1525590,00.html

Bus firm takes car sharers to court

Kim Willsher in Paris
Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution.

Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".

The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated.

Two years ago a business tribunal threw out the company's case. It is now pursuing the women in a higher court, claiming that their action has cost it €2m (£1.4m).

The women explained that for many years cleaners used the TSE line for the 40-minute ride across the border, which cost them €110 (£76) a month.

"Using our cars is quicker and at least twice as cheap. And on the bus we didn't have the right to eat or even to speak," said Martine Bourguignon. Odette Friedmann added: "In the evening instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you'd get a mouthful of abuse."

"It's absurd and ridiculous," said the women's lawyer, Cécile Klein-Schmitt. "I don't see how any magistrate can find any legal basis for this case."

TSE is also suing the women's employer, Onet-Luxembourg. "They've basically accused us of inciting the car-sharing scheme when we have nothing to do with the method of transport used by our staff," said director Frédéric Sirerol.

The court case will be heard in January next year.

At work we have several mailing lists related to our products. I'm the admin/moderator on some of these and have to deal with the spammers who post to the members-only lists. I found this one quite fun while I was going through today's messages:

Two cute Hello Kitty fans for your enjoyment. Quite literally:



I saw these yesterday in Yodobashi Kamera when I was looking around.

Some weeks ago I downloaded a trial version of Keyhole LT. This software lets you see satellite data of most of the world, with a very good level of detail for many, many cities. This, this and this are photos of where I live, for example. I liked the program, so I registered it.

Keyhole was bought by Google on October last year.

Today, when I checked my GMail account, I found a message from Google about a new beta program: Google's Earth. It was to be expected.

Google Earth's is basically Keyhole, with an slightly improved interface. Looks like the beta is offered only to Keyhole subscribers (needs a working Keyhole license key installed). Performance seems to have improved a bit too, though it's still a bit unstable. Sometimes weird things happen when switching from full screen view to window mode.

In my opinion, the biggest addition it the possibility to view buildings in 3D. This feature is available only in a few cities, but the result is stunning. Look at the two screenshots in this article to see the result. With this feature enabled rendering is much slower (obviously), and terrain download times are also much longer. That is of course to be expected. This new program lets you also do searches on the map, trace routes, etc etc etc

What is really stunning is the amount of data now stored in Google's databases. One thing is to store big chunks of satellite images, and another to store the shapes and locations of each and one of the buildings in a city.

The release notes are available here.

Laurens passed me this chainmail a few days ago... I don't usually pay much attention to these, but this one was interesting:

Total volume of music files on my computer

Classified and imported into my iTunes library:

octospider:/disk2$ du -ks iTunes/

7050676 iTunes/

Not classified/ID3 tags missing/whatever:

octospider:/disk2$ du -ks mp3*

5891672 mp3

3067552 mp3-2

Total: around 16Gbytes.

Last CD I bought

21st Century Boys (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), if I recall correctly. That was at least three years ago...

Song playing right now

I'm not listening to anything right now. But I was listening to Digitally Imported's vocal trance stream just a while ago...

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

Computer Love (Kraftwerk)

Moonlight Shadow (Mike Oldfield)

Animal (Front 242)

Boing Boom Tschak (Kraftwerk)

Sometimes (Erasure)

Five people to pass it on to…

Just one for now...

fr3nd

I've just been talking with a member of the MSX Association now, and he has told me that the 1-chip-MSX is NOT being sold today. It looks like the source who told me yesterday that was not well informed.

I removed the photos from the previous article, as they should not be shown before the magazine is released. The rest of information is still there, because it was already known before.

Also, he told me that on May 8th there will be a very big MSX event in Akihabara, MSX-Denyu Land style. I will be there taking photos and finding out more.

Note: the information in this post is NOT accurate. See the next post.

I've been told by a non-official source that sales of the long-awaited 1-chip-MSX start today. I have not confirmed this yet with the MSX Association, so don't jump for your credit card right away. It looks like the board is sold naked (no plastic cover), but I might be mistaken. I'll confirm this later today.

Update: Indeed, the information was not accurate. The 1-chip-MSX sales do not start today. The release date has not been decided yet.

Anyway, there's a 9-page article on MSX Magazine #3 (to be released on April 28th) that explains the technical details of this board. I haven't read it all, but here are the basics:

The heart is an Altera Cyclone EP1C12 chip containing 12060 logic elements.

There's a configuration ROM from which the FPGA code is loaded when switched on.

32Mbytes of SDRAM

2 x MSX cartridge slots

2 x MSX joystick connectors

1 x SD Memory card slot

2 x USB connectors

1 x PS/2 keyboard connector

A/V connectors: S-VHS, composite video (RCA), audio (2 x RCA), VGA

The FPGA chip comes loaded with an MSX(1) configuration: Z80A emulation, 32Kb ROM (ROM images can be loaded from the SD Memory slot), 64Kb RAM, 16Kb VRAM, TMS9918A emulation (VDP), AY-3-8910 (PSG), SCC and YM2413 (FM-PAC) emulations. Looks like the SD Memory card can be used as a disk drive.

It doesn't have a network connector, so you should start ordering your ObsoNET while they last. Yes, the ObsoNET has been successfully tested on the 1-chip-MSX. See for yourself here.

The FPGA chip can be reprogrammed by the user using a PC software from Altera called Quartus II Web Edition, which seems to be free. An especial cable to link the PC with the 1-chip-MSX board is required too. The article explicitly mentions that is is possible to upgrade the board to MSX2 by just updating the microcode in the FPGA, when that code is available. As a curiosity, the article compares the source code sizes for the MSXPLAYer emulator and the 1-chip-MSX VHDL code. MSXPLAYer's C source code weights 526Kb, while this board's VHDL code is 472Kbytes long (when implementing an MSX1).

I'll post more info here as soon as I find out more.

Today after work I went to Shinjuku and saw that there are already a few UMD releases available for the Sony PSP.

Among the UMD Video available there were Biohazard II and Spiderman 2, and there were also several UMD Audio disks for sale, all of them from Japanese artists. Looks like these UMD Audio releases include not only the audio tracks, but also video clips.

If you can read Japanese, you'll see that under the films there's a sign saying "itsudemo dokodemo mu-bi-" ("Films at any time, anywhere"). They should probably add "not today, not here", because the films were already sold out wasn't able to buy one. There was still stock of all the UMD Audio titles.

Tomorrow after work I'll go again and try to buy one of the films. If they don't have stock I'll buy one of the UMD Audio titles. I'll post another comment here explaining my impressions: sound/video quality, how they compare to DVDs, battery life, etc.

Since I don't have any preferences about either the films or the video clips, I'll let you choose. Just post a comment here telling me which one you'd like me to buy, and I'll get the most voted one. Look at the photos and choose one from there.

This photo has been hiding on my hard disk for more than three years. I think I took it the second time I came to Japan.

And before you ask: no, I didn't buy it.

Enjoy. :-)

My birthday was yesterday. :-)

As every year, the Japanese sakura (cherry blossoms) are already starting to bloom. Some early varieties are already full of small white or pink flowers, but most of the trees will be flaunting their flowers in just a few more days.

I took these two photos this morning while coming to work. The first one is a tree already in blossom near home. In the second one you can see the buds already starting to bloom on this tree just in front of the station.

I took these photos two years ago. Maybe this weekend I'll go take some more.

These days it is usual to see along with weather reports, the current location of the sakura senzen. As the temperatures get warmer, sakura trees start blooming from south to north of the country. The sakura senzen is the front line of blooming along the country.

I thought of calling this post Terri's right to die, Let her die, or something along those lines. But I think this is a better title:

Fucking hypocrites.

I'm talking, of course, about those mindless drones at the doors of the hospital, asking for her feeding tube to be reinserted, calling her husband names. I'm talking about those stupid columnists who think they can decide what her fate should be.

Fucking morons

I'm of the opinion that Terri's husband is who must decide for her. But of course, what I think is completely irrelevant. So are the opinions of all those religious nuts who are sending death threats to her husband because he decided to remove the feeding tube.

Let me quote a few sentences taken from the Terri Schiavo Wikipedia article:

- Since 1991 the Schiavos' personal physicians and six different court-appointed physicians have concluded that Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state (PVS)

- Schiavo's parents claim that their daughter does not meet the definition of a persistent vegetative state.

- The lack of oxygen to the brain suffered after Schiavo's heart attack in 1990 caused catastrophic brain damage. Schiavo's cerebral cortex has been completely destroyed and replaced by cerebrospinal fluid. The upper brain is about 80 percent destroyed, and there is also damage to the lower brain. The only part of the brain that remains intact is the brain stem, which controls functions such as breathing and heartbeat—allowing Schiavo to survive (with a feeding tube) even though she no longer has any cognitive function.

- Under Florida law, Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, is her legal guardian. Schiavo says his wife would not have wanted to live as a "vegetable" and that he is fighting for her right to die.

- On March 11, 2005, media tycoon Robert Herring [...] offered $1 million to Michael Schiavo if he agreed to waive his guardianship to his wife's parents. The offer was rejected, Schiavo having reportedly found it "offensive."

Anyone with at least a two-digit I.Q. should be able to see that, whatever it is what we think about this matter, we do not have the right to take a decision on Terr's life. Michael, her husband, does. Luckily, there are reporters who are professional enough to know that.

Yet the christian morons keep trying to push their views on other people's lifes. Quoting the Wikipedia article again:

Judge Greer is under protection from U.S. Marshals due to death threats for having ruled against restoring Schiavo's feeding tube, and at least two murder attempts against Michael Schiavo have been foiled. The judge, who is Southern Baptist, has also been asked to leave his congregation, Calvary Baptist Church, in Clearwater.

Luckily, these people are a minority:

However, numerous polls show that a majority of Americans believe that Michael Schiavo should have the authority to make decisions on behalf of his wife and that the United States Congress overstepped its bounds with its intervention in the case.

According to an ABC News poll from March 21, 70 percent of Americans believe that Terri Schiavo's death should not be a federal matter, and are opposed to the legislation transferring the case to federal court. In the same poll, a 63 percent majority said that they support the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube. A 67 percent majority agreed with the statement that "elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved."

Well, it's comforting to see that at least 67% of the people who took the poll can see what this fuss is all about.

I understand Terri's parents. If I was in their position, probably I would do the same they're doing. I understand Terri's husband. Again, I would probably do the same if I was in his position. But I'm not. Neither are any of those hypocrites who are trying to kill Michael (or threatening to do so) because he's doing what he thinks her wife would have desired him to do.

To all these morons: I hope that what happened to Terri happens to you too. But unlike Terri, you should keep a minimum of consciousness, in order to allow you to suffer for the rest of your (hopefully long) lifes.