happylife

My work place as a hideaway

I have set up my three old computers in the new room in Obihiro. The prepared Internet connection had a few problems and it took a few days for me to solve all of them. Now I can do anything I like in this hideaway. It reminds me of my dream in my childhood; I was fascinated in the secret base in sci-fi movies in which white hat people facing towards radar screens were fighting with the enemy. Anyway, my computers consist of VAIO, DELL and Mac mini which are all connected with each other by wireless and wired LAN. VAIO has two displays and is running Windows XP, DELL is running Fedora6 distribution of LINUX and Mac mini is running OS-X Tiger. You might think why I need so many computers. The reason is that VAIO is the main computer, DELL is working as a local server and Mac mini is necessary to check whether my programs work on Mac. It is also used as an iTunes music server. After coming to Obihiro, I have installed a great free software called "Synergy" into my three computers and I can now control three of them with only one keyboard and mouse; when I move the mouse cursor from left to right or right to left, it moves through the four displays seamlessly and I can type into the computer on which the mouse cursor is staying. It's very pleasant!

To unlock the iTune's DRM

More and more people including me seem to change the way to enjoy music. It has become more popular to download music instead of purchasing CDs. Actually I have not bought any music CDs for more than two years. The more people shift to this style, the less sales of CDs cannot be avoided.  I don't know whether it is good or bad, but I can say it is the trend. The combination of iTunes, iPod and its music store is the most successful service around music in the past several years. I was surprised to find that I have purchased more than 200 songs from the music store. One problem of this service is that the songs are all copy-protected and we can't copy them without limitations. I don't intend to make illegal copies but this limitation had been an unpleasant and stressful thing for me until I unlocked them yesterday. If you have some song files with DRM(Digital Rights Management) and you are feeling unpleasant, QTFairUse6 will let you happier. All I had to do was executing the unlocking program on the PC with iTunes and waiting for thirty or more minutes before all the protected files were converted into unlocked files.

Where am I?

What do you think this tiny box is? I bought it about two years ago in Vancouver and had been using it everyday. It has two telephone ports and one TCP/IP port on the back. Yes, it is an IP phone adapter which can hold up to two telephones on the Internet. IP phone itself is not a brand new technology and of course we have various similar services in Japan, but the great point of this adapter is that I can keep my Vancouver phone number starting from 604 with it. I've brought it from Vancouver to Tokyo and it is now plugged into my network in my room. It means that if you know my Vancouver number and call it, I can receive it. I can also call Vancouver local number as much as I like for free. It is sometimes interesting to make or receive a phone call and pretend as if I was in Vancouver. If there is a problem, it is that there is a time lag of 16 hours between Tokyo and Vancouver. If I forgot to turn off the adapter, I would be waked up in the midnight. The phone call received while I am sleeping is set to recorded into a WAV file and forwarded to my email so that I can check it after getting up in the next morning. It's very convenient.

Pandora closed

As I mentioned before in this blog, I was a fan of Pandora, the greatest music radio service on the Internet. As soon as I came back to Japan, I was shocked to know that the service was closed except for in the U.S. due to a license reason. Although Tim Westergren, the funder of Pandora says that he has an ultimate goal of being able to offer the service everywhere, it must be a hard way especially in Japan. We are living in the transient period from the old analog records to the new digital data distributions. The copyright law in most countries are behind the new technologies and and we sometimes encounter such unreasonable situations. I think that the transient cannot be stopped by anyone and sooner or later the happy world is to be realized where all the people can enjoy any music they like for free or almost free. I hope the old world people who are clinging to their established interest give up and the happy world for consumers or listeners comes as soon as possible.

Connected!

Since I came back to Japan a week ago, my daily life had been inconvenient because of no access to the high-speed Internet. It was more than one month ago when I applied for the fastest optical Internet service in Japan and finally the line was opened today. The optical cable is so delicate that the first cable work which was held last week was in failure and I had to wait for a few more days. The optical cable is made of a glass fiber which is thinner than human hair. It is less flexible than usual metal cable and it has to be looped instead of folded. Once it is folded, it can be easily broken and it is very difficult to reconnect it. Anyway, I'm very happy because the new Internet connection is very fast; almost ten times as fast as the high-speed cable service in Vancouver and it is supposed to be more stable than any ADSL or Cable service. I believe I can restart my work and this blog in this ideal Internet environment, but I'm worried how to reject the attractive movie service in the Internet.

FreshReader

"FreshReader is a web-based, server type RSS and Atom feed reader." You might feel somehow complicated to read this explanation if you are not familiar with the recent Internet trend, but this is one of the most influencing software for me in the past one year. How many favorite sites do you have or how many sites do you check on the Internet everyday? If you have less than ten, you can use the bookmark function of your browser software; you only have to open your bookmark one by one and check the update of each site. However, if you want to look around more sites everyday this method of using bookmark comes to grief. RSS or Atom is a protocol which was developed to solve this problem of bookmark and you can take advantage of it in the latest version of the Internet Explorer or Firefox, but they are not always useful because they are slow. This FreshReader, running on my server every hour, collects hundreds of RSS or Atom feeds and organize them so that I can read all the information on just one site. It's so useful and powerful that I can browse all the update information at one glance. You need to have your own server to use FreshReader, but I think it pays well.

Google Wifi

When I drove through Mountain View, which is the home town of Google, I parked my car and tried to connect to Google Wifi with my notebook PC. As you might know, Google Wifi is a free Internet access service provided by Google in the whole area of Mountain View. Every one who has a laptop PC with Wifi connection and Google account, which can be gotten for free, is supposed to connect to the Internet via Google Wifi. It is a great service showing us the idealistic environment in terms of the Internet in the near future. The day should come soon when we think it stupid to pay lots of money only to connect to the Internet. I hope and it should be that we can connect to the Internet for free or almost free just like tap water. Anyway, I had no map around the driving area in this trip because I knew I could connect to the Internet at least once a day and I could get the map using Google Maps. It was true but I had to purchase a paper map because I couldn't always keep in touch with the Internet. It must be a period of transition and the goal is within a reach.

Speed test

As I mentioned before, I was annoyed with frequent troubles of my Internet provider several months ago, but they seem to have been settled and I am now satisfied with the quality of the Internet connection environment except for its cost. I sometimes use "speedtest.net" which measures the download and upload speed of the line between your server and any other site all over the world with a cool graphical interface. In terms of the download speed, it has been improved since a few months ago and the figure almost reaches 10Mbps, which is the average level in Japan. As you might know, the most important factor of line speed is money. The provider which has more customer can afford faster lines. Comparing the population in Vancouver with the one in Tokyo, Vancouver is at a disadvantage and I have to admit that my provider is doing well. Anyway, I'm thinking about switching into faster optical link from ADSL after going back to Tokyo next month. I'm looking forward to it very much because I can do a lot of things by setting up a new personal server in my home with the fast line 10 times faster than the present.

eBay

"eBay" is the most successful Internet auction site all over the world except for in Japan where Yahoo Auction drove it away several years ago. I would often use Yahoo Auction in Japan both as a buyer and a seller. It was very useful to get some products which are in shortage of stock in shops or to make some money from unnecessary gadgets. I have once sold my used motorcycle in Yahoo Auction for the price six times as expensive as the dealer estimated value. Since I came to Vancouver, I have become stingier and have used less money for gadgets, therefore I have not used Internet auction service so often, but now that I have decided to leave Vancouver, I have started making good use of it again. I have put some items on display including a digital camera and a controller for a flight simulator. It was my first experience to sell something on eBay and I'm now looking forward to them to be bid at a good price. In my impression, the system of eBay is a little bit confusing for me after taking the language problem into account: The procedures for linking eBay account and PayPal account was so difficult to understand that I had to ask the help counter, why we have to wait for a few hours after putting our items before they appear in the searching list, and why the freight charge cannot be calculated automatically?

A trap of movie sites

My daily life was kaput last month. The reason is clear; I have wasted quite a few hours watching Japanese TV programs on the Internet. The speed of the Internet has dramatically increased in these past few years and accordingly we have become able to enjoy movie contents on the net. I think TV broadcasting has come to a turning point. More and more of my friends have actually given up their TV set and are spending their time in watching the Internet contents. Movie contents are very different from any other contents such as text, images, voice and music. That is to say, we can't do any other things while watching movie contents. We have to pay 100 percents of our attention while watching movie contents. The time flows in the pace of the content itself, and therefore, I couldn't work as I had expected last month. I really think I have to shut them off, but it looks almost impossible because both my working environment and the addictive entertainment environment are in the same PC. It is just like doing work in a movie theater.