Hangman Cheat is quite a clever website which can pretty accurately guess the word you are thinking of. Simply tell it how many letters the word has and start playing.
I tried the word “japan” first and it found it very quickly. When I tried “blizzardboy” it didn’t have so much luck – probably because blizzardboy isn’t a dictionary word.
If you like games such as babble I think you will enjoy this.
Put this one down in the “I don’t really believe that someone made this” category – a lament about mobile phones.
It starts off as follows:
“I have had my mobile phone for 2 years,
But recently it has stopped ringing,
Therefore my mobile makes me sad,
Instead of a phone, now it’s just a clock.”
Very 2channel. The song kind of reminds me of Yoshi Ikuzo’s Inaka no Presley.
All good fun…
Very pretty shot of a lenticular cloud formation in the Taurarua’s (North Island, New Zealand). I remember hearing of an American painter who came to New Zealand just to paint clouds – globally New Zealand offers some of the widest variations in clouds.
The picture comes from NASA: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090121.html and you can click on the link to see a larger copy of this photo.
From the Nasa page:
A Lenticular Cloud Over New Zealand
Credit & Copyright: Chris Picking (Starry Night Skies Photography)Explanation: What’s happening above those mountains? Several clouds are stacked up into one striking lenticular cloud. Normally, air moves much more horizontally than it does vertically. Sometimes, however, such as when wind comes off of a mountain or a hill, relatively strong vertical oscillations take place as the air stabilizes. The dry air at the top of an oscillation may be quite stratified in moisture content, and hence forms clouds at each layer where the air saturates with moisture. The result can be a lenticular cloud with a strongly layered appearance. The above picture was taken in 2002 looking southwest over the Tarurua Range mountains from North Island, New Zealand.
It is a Japanese manga. Pink Tentacle posted it. Therefore it must be good.
It says:
GIRL: Are they really going to do it?
BOY: I’m telling you, they’ll do it. Watch.
Therefore it must be good. Or did it just say that?
Welcome to the Fifth Dimension by Tatsuya Tanaka.
I found this interesting Weapons Generator at http://genzu.net/buki/. The generator is only in Japanese, but is pretty easy to use even if one can’t read Japanese. Scroll down the page to the box with the enter button beside it. Enter your name in the box and hit enter. It will render your name into the weapon that represents you. I entered “Simon” and this is what it produced:
Quite a nice piece of rendering. The final weapon that came out was some sort of dual-pronged sword.
The site also gives your name and weapon a rank out of a 100. Mine got 62 – according to the page, 25 is normal. Guess Simon is a strong name!
Found this amusing video posted on gizmodo: The Physics Behind the Insanely Dangerous Japanese Water Jetpack. Making pet bottle rockets is a rite of passage that every junior high school student in Japan goes through. And this video certainly takes the whole process to the next level!
Walking down to the gym the other night when I came across this gem of a sign:
Tamachi is a station on the Yamanote loop line in Tokyo. There are a lot of offices in the area – including the head office of NEC so there are a correspondingly large number of restaurants and bars in the area.
At the top the sign says “Motsu Dining and Global Restaurant” – with motsu being Japanese for offal. Being a global restaurant I wonder if they sell haggis?
And the real question – if they relocated, could you call that a “bowel movement”?
posted about an asterisk system in my old prefecture:http://www.denphone.com/en/Asterisk-in-Akita-Odate-City-Launches-500-Phone-System
I picked up an Averatec netbook the other day – in Japan at the moment there are some great deals for netbooks if one signs up at the same time for a mobile broadband plan. If you get the broadband plan there are cancellation penalty fees, but these work out to be less than the savings on the netbook, making the process worthwhile from a financial perspective even if it is rather time consuming (much the same as getting a regular mobile phone in Japan).
I was planning just to return the mobile broadband device to Docomo yesterday, but we have a phone system install to do in a rural part of Japan over the weekend, and I found out that there wont be internet access on site while we are doing the install. As we are working with offshore vendors on this, not having the internet would be a hindrance, so I decided to keep the foma connection for a few days.
Thing is, I am not a big fan of Windows, so I wanted to be able to use the A2505 with linux. There isn’t much information around for setting this up (of course NTT don’t support Linux, and aren’t likely to until somewhere around 2030 – they are a little backward). There is a bit of information for setting up emobile clients on linux (here is a good article: http://nlweb.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~iwase/tips/fc6emobile.html ).
After a fair bit of playing around (not least since the screen on the averatec 1000 is so small, but that is another story), we got it working on the netbook which is running Fedora 10.
To start off, from the command line, check dmesg to see if it recognizes the A2505 as a device.
Then from the command line type:
sudo modprobe vendor=0x16d5 product=0x6202
This will set tell linux what the device is.
If you want to, and you probably will, automate this (ie. so you don’t have to do it every time you reboot), create a file
sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/50-anydata-a2502.rules
and add the following:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="6202", SYSFS{idVendor}=="16d5", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe usbserial vendor=0x16d5 product=0x6202"
The next step to get it up and running is to go to System -> Administration -> Network
This will ask for your root password, then after you enter that it brings up the Network Configuration GUI.
Click on New -> Modem Connection -> Select Provider.
Add *99**4# in the space for Phone Number, and mopera in the login name and password fields. Add a provider name, but that can be anything. Hit forward and it brings up the dhcp settings - you shouldn't have to change anything. Keep clicking until you finish with the wizard. Hit the Activate button. And your connection should be working.
The connection with the foma a2505 seems quite fast. But if you have a choice you should probably go with the emobile offering - it wins on price and ease of installation.
Thanks to Hiwada-san for his help, and to the author of http://mizupc8.bio.mie-u.ac.jp/pukiwiki/?FOMA%2FA2502.
