Archive for December, 2005

More iTunes: How does this work?

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

If you burn a CD with itunes, the next time you stick that CD in, the name of the CD shows up as the name of the playlist that it was burned from. Fine. The name of the tracks, however, are also present. How does it do this? Is it cd text? Is it some […]

The ultimate dried mango

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

If you live in San Francisco and haven’t heard of Rainbow, definitely check it out (unless you can’t stand hippie vegeterian grocery co-ops).
Within you will find the legendary dried mango’s (go towards the back, right before the vegetables, there will be a small fridge section with all types of dried fruits. These are in bin […]

Fun with iTunes

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

I’m sure a lot of people know about this one already, but I noticed that if you right click on a song in iTunes, it gives you an option that says “Convert selection to …” where “…” is whatever you have your current import encoding settings (in preferences->advanced on a mac) set to.
It makes things […]

More details

Monday, December 26th, 2005

So what’s the best way to buy music in Japan? at 3,000 yen per CD (about 25 bucks), buying CD’s is surely not the way. So the natural alternative: rent CD’s. Yep. Go to the local media rental shop (which has CD’s DVD’s and the like) and a rent a few. Bring it back and […]

Saavy Businessmen? I don’t see any around here..

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

There’s that stereotype that the Japanese are business saavy, are great at spotting good long term investments and such. While that may be true for a small number of business leaders, it certainly seems not true for the rest of the population, particularly older folk.
Case and point: once a month, a representative from the local […]

It’s amazing…

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

… that we all used to use this ass product call Windows 98. My grandparents’ PC (a slim compaq presario which we paid roughly 1500 for a good 5 years ago) has good ol’ windows 98 SE. Amazingly, it hasn’t crashed yet, but it can’t really even deal with the sound device too well (skype […]

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Saturday, December 24th, 2005

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Holy smokes

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

Well it turns out that Tokyo already has digital high definition signals going everywhere through the airwaves. It also turns out that the 30 inch LCD that my grandparents recently bought can recieve and display these signals just fine. Watching the news in HD is pretty ridiculous. Foreign shows allow you to switch audio streams […]

Cash money (and more attention to small detail)

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Japan is a land of cash. Or well, at least Tokyo is a city of cash. People carrying around the equivalent of 1G all the time no problem. In such places, going to the ATM can be quite an affair. What if you need to do some hairy math to figure out how much to […]

It’s all the random small things

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

It’s all the attention to the small details that impresses me about Japan. Sometimes its just solving some kind of problem that only really exists in Japan. Other times its just pure ingenuity.
For example, the subway ticketing system. When the subway and train systems started really to acheive critical mass, they introduced automated ticket checkers […]