Тук през 2008-а в гарата в Шибуя беше поставено огромно пано на Таро Окамото – известен японски художник – с тема жертвите на атомна война (рисувано в края на 60-тте), което изглежда така:

В края на май 2011, японски художници от групата чимпом “добавиха” към образите на жертвите и тези на пострадалите от аварии в атомни централи :

Понеже от снимката не се вижда особено добре, вместо да “досътворят” платното по нашенски с малко блажна боя, чимпомците си дали зор да изберат подходяща, неоцветена част от стената, да нарисуват допълнението на отделна дъска и да я прикрепят към паното така, че хем да изглежда добре и да се впише в стила на оригинала, хем да не нанесе щети. Посланието беше отразено из медиите, след което “допълнението” беше премахнато (и преместено в галерия).

Неизвестните “художници”, нацапали безобразната кичавина върху грозния комунистически кютук има на какво да се научат от чимпом – и от посланието, и от начина на изразяването му.

А най-добре щеше да е, ако между държавните жени и мъже се бяха намерили неколцина хем с малко гръбнак, хем с малко чувство за естетика, които да решат и двата проблема по добрия начин още преди години.

Кичавите и грозни соц. кютуци (петоуйника пред НДК, съвецката армия, “брацката могила” и т.н.) отдавна трябваше да се извозят в някой исторически парк на комунизма и да се оставят там за радост на електората, изповядващ соц-митологията, както и на желащите да получат малко усещане за ония времена. За мераклиите да мажат боя по бездруго мръсния център на окаяната ни столица отдавна трябваше да има някой, който да им търси отговорност за безобразното цапане.

Но София не случайно изглежда така, както изглежда.

Източници на снимките:

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/jyu_gorou/

http://www.asahi.com/

Последният напън от серията надминава по смехотворност и снизхождение към клиента дори типичния за въпросното фирме стил и си заслужава да се постне за назидание:

Нежният глас на девойката зад кадър обяснява: перката на обикновения вентилатор накъсва вятъра на парчета. Нашият “въздушен умножител” няма перка и затова прави гладък и по-хладен вятър.

Ай наздраве на всички, чиято работа е да се напъват ежедневно, за да ни радват с такива идиотщини.

While I’ll be the last person to downplay the seriousness of the accident, and the criminal lack of response by both Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government lead by Mr. Kan, who is  “very strong in the nuclear matters”, please, please remember that there are sill 450,000 people out there in the cold, without roof, food, medicine, clean water. A large number of them are within 150 or 200km of the Fukushima plant. Many are disabled and getting sicker.

Consider what you can do to help. They can’t go indoors, as they have no homes. They have little access to medicine. And while the ordinary Japanese seem to be doing what they can, the response of the government has, so far, been less than underwhelming. Please help them.

I have never seen people crowd in the huge station hall. To my huge surprise there was also a thick, long line outside the station as well.

I hope the service recovers sooner, and people don’t need to wait for hours to board a train in the coming days.

Причината за проблема е, че заради земетресението са спрели няколко централи на север и изток, а възможността за подаване на ток от югозападните райони е малка, заради разликата в честотите на тока (в Канто и нагоре мрежата е 50 херцова, на юг – 60).

Земетресението хвърли Япония в посока България от 1986. Дано се разминем със събитията от късния април.

Update: понеже ме питат от няколко места за херцовете, причината е, че на запад производството на енергия е започнало в края на 19 век с американско оборудване на 60 херца от General Electric, а на изток – с европейско от 50 от AEG. Към момента, в който двете мрежи са се съединили е имало твърде много съществуваща инфраструктура, за да се уеднаквяват и херцовете. Между двете мрежи има възможност за подаване на енргия, но тя не е достатъчна да покрие разликата от спрелите реактори.

A call to the AU customer support center revealed that AU apparently pushes the firmware update to the phone, but then allegedly asks the customer and waits for a “final authorization”. Except, in cases like mine, where they just went on with the update, and then ruined the phone without that extra authorization step. (Information was involuntarily volunteered by someone Mr. Morikawa Morikami from the Customer Support center, who, when pressed, admitted they push software to the phone without authorization, but then promptly retracted his words, just in case). AU then refused to provide information, investigate further the alleged phone fault, or to take steps to mitigate the situation beyond servicing the phone at my expense and (in)convenience.

I wonder what other data does AU access on the the phone — and why do they need to bother — they have, after all, all the packet data and the voice going through their networks anyway. At any rate, after today’s conversation with the AU customer support, I’ll be switching the phone company, although I doubt it will make that much of a difference. Having a phone with a backdoor isn’t on my list of must-have items.

Left with really weird taste after this experience.

It was kind of faraway, so no biking this time, we took the train instead. This was a “professional” flea market, which means the places are paid, and the people who sell stuff are making their living doing this. However, being “professional” means it is seriously not fun, because everyone seems to sell the same things and no one bargains about the price.

Anyways, some pics follow over the map:

I’m going to a real flea market tomorrow.

Alternative view of the gallery

[Slideshow]

Click on the pictures for details and zoom.

както знаем от малки, всяка хапка трябва да се предъвква към 30 пъти за оптимална преработка по-натам из червата. както също знаем оттогава, броенето по време на дъвкане е досадна работа.

японският инженерен гений предлага решение – джвакомер. закачате си го на ченето, отхапвате и дъвчете докато свирне. и после пак.

било помагало и за контрол на теглото

устройството:

един от начините за ползване:

за подробно описание на далаверата цък тук (копи-пейст) :

http://www.nittokagaku.com/kamikami/use.html

• xorg.conf.stamina
• xorg.conf.speed
• /proc/config.gz (for gentoo-sources 2.6.24-r9), as I gave up on ubuntu

Not working:

• Thumbnail reader (sony uses proprietary key in the hardware)
• Felica card
• Adjusting monitor brightness
• Hard disk active protection

Have issues:

• Camera quality is way inferior to the quality available with the windows software
• iwl3945 fails randomly
• on ubuntu kernels, there is bug 177895, which makes cpu drain power fast. with gentoo-sources everything is normal.

Everything else works fine.

I had to switch notebooks because of the regular stinkpad hardware failure. With one motherboard, one LCD panel, one hard disk controller, two power adapters and a hard drive replaced in less than two years, I can only wish Lenovo good-bye and good luck. The stinkpads are not what they used to be.

Unfortunately, I did not have much time to look or shop around, so I ended up with the first machine that looked like it will do what I need, and was available in the shop at the moment. As it happens, it is a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ55B. Some years ago I had upgrade problems Sony hardware and decided to stay away from them for a while. I was surprised to find out this notebook uses pretty standard components. Seems Sony have learned a lesson or two.

Update: Added a picture of the notebook running some random Linux distro with a cool desktop background picture of the M101 galaxy, stolen shamelessly from the awesome NASA apod site.

Allright, now back to the notebook.

Things I don’t like:

• Heavy (2 kg with battery). The adapter is heavy too.
• Useless battery life (only 3.5 hours in low-performance mode)
• Has some built-in hardware I don’t need (interface to Felica, an e-payment system in Japan).
• Only has 2 USB ports and no DVI or HDMI.
• The motion eye built-in camera (which I remember fondly from the first “subnote” I had back in the 20th century, a Sony PCG-1) doesn’t rotate.
• Glossy monitor (so I can see my face on the camera, and then again reflected in the monitor).
• Uselessly sensitive touch pad.
• The DVD drive can’t be removed. Actually, I found that having a DVD is most welcome when travelling abroad and taking pictures.
• Bluetooth and wireless lan are turned on/off with the same switch (sometimes I use bt _instead of_ wi-fi).
• Microsoft tax, in the form of office personal 2007, which I totally don’t need, and Vista Home Premium, for which I can still find a use or two. [update] I removed the windows partition to free some disk space.
• Duplicate hardware, most obvious being
  • the separate holes for Sony’s memory stick and SD media (and the SD media slot supports the stick too);
  • the two video adapters – Intel x3100 (for low power consumption) and Nvidia 8400M. Actually, I got used to the dual adapter.

Things that are okay:

• 3GB RAM upgrade included in the price; more RAM never hurts.
• Has bluetooth, which, until recently was rare on Japanese notebooks.
• Sony finally supports media other than the useless memory stick.
• The high-performance (to me, anyway) video. I hope Duke Nukem Forever plays fine. [update: it does, I used the eduke32 clone]
  • Actually, some useful software — the Stellarium planetarium software and Celestia — look very good with the Nvidia video card.
• 160GB disk
• Integrated web camera.
• The touchpad driver for X has a ton of useful options, including sensitivity tuning
• Every interface I need at the moment.
• Actually, the monitor isn’t bad at all
• The sony-laptop kernel modules allows for various hardware items to be switched off independently of each other. That includes the BT, wifi and the DVD drive.

Misc.

• Haven’t really tested the battery yet, but I’d expect the performance will be far off the 5.5 hours on the specs. I hope I’m wrong. Update: I wasn’t
• I don’t like the ton of stickers on the notebook. All these “Vista ready”, “Intel outside” and what not — stick them on the box, please.
• The chrome-plated logo on the back of the monitor is way too shiny.
• I really wanted a notebook with OLED backlight, unfortunately such was not available in stock. Biccamera is too careful about overstocking.

The Windows ™ Vista ™ Home Premium ™ ™ ‘xperience

Windows booted normally, and worked more or less okay on the first try. Didn’t experience any of the horror Vista stories I’ve read about. The Aero interface performed equally well on both adapters, but I was underwhelmed. It isn’t a big deal, beryl was much scarier visually a full year and a half ago, and it ran on a i915 chipset, too.

I had a note attached, which asked me to perform a Sony Update ASAP. I tried, and it failed multiple times. So I’m giving up on the Sony update service for now.

Installing Linux

What is working:

I didn’t have time to install Gentoo this time around, so I went with Ubuntu instead. Back to Gentoo now. Networking, bluetooth, video, audio (still with a glitch, see below) and the rest of the standard hardware (usb, firewire, dvd, flash storage ports) were discovered by the installer properly. That even included the Sony special keys.

I had to do one simple tweak to get the dual video working — basically I wrote a small 3-line shell script to detect the active adapter (by greping lspci) and switch the X gl libraries (symlinking the correct libraries) via eselect.

The motion eye camera turned out to be Ricoh web camera. A driver is available, and I almost have it working, using the development version and just following the build instructions on the website verbatim. Playback seems to work with the v4l2 interface only; the old v4l interface produces garbage output or errors.

Update: the linux uvc video driver (official in 2.6.26) supports the camera better, and compiles all the time, unlike the r5u870. So, use that instead.

What is not working yet:

I have yet to setup the thumbprint reader. Also, to my huge annoyance, inserting a headphone plug does not do anything useful. I can’t hear sound in the headphones, and the speakers keep on working. Headphone fix: newest alsa + add the model=vaio option to the snd-hda-intel module.

Backlight control fix:

• For the nvidia, nvidia-settings
• For the intel video – xrandr with the  –set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native|legacy option