Jan 15, 2007
It has been about a year and a half since I bought this powerbook and made the change to using a mac. From a design point of view Apple have done a wonderful job and overall I think OS X is an excellent operating system. Coming from a linux background I am used to using open source software and tools, and that is probably the biggest limitation to using Apple computers.
One of the main tools that is missing is a free ftp client. I grew up using gFTP, which is about as solid as a piece of 2 by 4. The most popular FTP clients for OS X are Fetch (off topic, but in Japanese that means fetish), and Transmit - both have 15 day trial policies, after that you have to pay to use them.
I did a bit of a search around last year for an open source ftp client and couldn’t find much of a solution. The answer came when I updated firefox. Now I know a lot of Mac users are reticent to use anything other than safari, but if you install a firefox plugin called FireFTP then you have an FTP client.
FireFTP doesn’t support some things like sFTP or SSH or unicode character filenames. But I haven’t had any problems with using it. When it installs it takes you to a page asking for donations for orphans in the Balkans which is a nice idea - you don’ have to pay.
If you need a copy of firefox you can download one here,
and the FireFTP client can be downloaded from the FireFTP site.
Jan 14, 2007
WiFi is up and running! If you are looking for an access point in the village formerly known as Niihari and now part of the great lakeside town of Tsuchiura we have one. Happy war driving.
A bit of a mission, and it seems to cut out intermittently but I am sure we will get that sorted out over the next few days. We ended up going with a NEC wireless broadband router (ATerm WR6650S) over a couple of Buffalo routers, as the support is better. Took a bit of thinking to realise we had to connect to the router via 192.168.0.1 and set up our connection through that. The whole thing is quite complex, with the ADSL line through NTT and then Plala as the provider.
The joys of deregulation. Getting the internet hooked up was a whole lot easier in China, despite the guy who set it up never having seen a Powerbook before, let alone one in English.
Jan 13, 2007
Well the move is over and we are in the final stages of getting sorted in our new house. We are now living in the city of Tsuchiura in the province of Ibaraki about 60 kilometers north of Tokyo and 40 kilometers from Narita airport.
Got the internet connected yesterday, so still catching up with email. 2 weeks without the internet was a nice little break, quite rare in this day and age. One of my friends commented that he had a similar experience when he moved within Tokyo - it seems that despite being the second largest economy in the world Japanese businesses, NTT in this case are still safely floating somewhere around 1960. Switching on a phone line these days is all done via computer, so why it would need 2 weeks I have no idea. But it is done!
Now we are heading out to hunt down a wifi kit. Bang!
Dec 22, 2006
I don’t normally write about computer games or video games for that matter. I am not really much of a games player. I used to enjoy UltimaIV on my Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and networked games of Red Alert when I was at University, but since I came to Japan I haven’t played much apart from a bit of Pokemon on a cute little yellow game boy a friend of mine gave me. I am not into anime either unlike a lot of Westerners living in Japan.
However, a friend of mine from New Zealand has been working on a game called GripShift for the PS3. And they just released the game for testing by Sony so I thought I would give it a plug here. The graphics look pretty cool, cartoonish and fun. For me a good game is like a good book. When you play, if the game is good enough you “suspend your disbelief”, that is, you forget that you are involved in the act of reading or playing. Hopefully next year I will get a chance to see if this is true for GripShift. You can read bitshifter’s post on the release of GripShift or go directly to the GripShift site.
May 29, 2005
http://www.technorati.com
According to our ranking at Technorati we are number 1,148,236 in the world of blogs! My other blog is number 689,092 which considering the other blog is for poetry and other dilettante scribbles makes the results kind of amusing:)
It will be interesting to follow this as we keep adding stuff to this site. Making the top 100 would be nice. But slowly slowly.
What is Technorati? From their site:
About Technorati
Technorati is the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.
What is a weblog? A weblog, or blog, is a personal journal on the web. Weblogs express as many different subjects and opinions as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership while others are primarily intended for a close circle of family and friends.
The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a ‘conversation’ than to a library — which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.
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