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Japan resources

Japan resources

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It’s no secret that I have enjoyed both sabbatical trips I made to Japan. Here’s some good links.

Here’s a good link on how to use Suica cards to get to/from the airport and some general guides. Great if you have 12-48 hours in Tokyo and want to see as much as you can in a short time.
https://gojourny.com/stories/journy-concierge-106/journy-s-must-read-guide-to-tokyo-japan?utm_source=01101898

Tokyo’s Piss Alley

Every time I go to Tokyo, I end up eating at Piss Alley as often as I can get over there.

While there, I always try to drop into this place that serves amazing eel skewers. The old man appears to have more or less retired, but his daughter is there now running the show and was great to talk with.

Owl Cafe – I went to Owl Village and had a great time. They seemed to genuinely want to take care of their Owls and treat them well. Still, I can’t say as I would ever do it again.

Kyoto

While in Kyoto, don’t get scammed by overpriced tourist kimono places. Also, it’s very hard for men to find yukata and kimono. Turns out, however, there are some amazing resources. Here’s some links that discuss places to pick up quality and used kimono for men and women.

Here’s some of the suggested places:

  • Nishijin Textile Center – great place to pick up quality men/women’s kimono at very reasonable prices. Men selection was a little limited.
  • Takashimaya  – upper-end department stores like Takashimaya have dedicated kimono floors (It’s the fifth floor in the Kyoto Takashimaya)
  • Shinkyogoku Street and Teramachi Street.
    • Chicago – 1st floor is vintage clothes, 2nd floor is used Kimono
    • Ofuku- Kimono World
    • Yukata Shop Sakura

Sources:

http://www.travel-kyoto-maiko.com/traveltips/where-to-buy-kimono-and-yukata-in-kyoto-including-mens/

Hakone

Hakone is known for its hotsprings and as a favorite getaway for Tokyo city residents. It’s a bit of a resort trap in my opinion, but worth the trip as it’s good quality and affordable prices. Bonus points for riding the crazy boats across Lake Ashi, seeing an Edo period taxation and border control station, and taking the Hakone Ropeway cablecar over an actively smoking volcanic Mt Hakone.

At the border control station, there are lots of wooden puzzle boxes. I bought a Karakuri Creation Group NS-2-2 (New Secret Box Ⅱ) box and have enjoyed its wonderful high quality construction.

Finally, there’s the hot springs themselves. Mingled among the hundreds of hotels, ryokans, and resort spots, there are some amazing experiences.

Yunessun bathing at Hakone

How about bathing green tea, sake, in a wine bath? Yeah – I did those, and they’re 100% real:

Or coffee?

Or the Doctor Fish which are tiny fish nibble at your toes:

Osaka and Yakiniku/Wagyu and Kobe Beef

Here’s a really good guide on how to cook/eat and enjoy Wagyu and Kobe beef. Trust me, there is a difference between good Wagyu/Kobe beef and the low grade stuff most Americans get. Do not hit any of the tourist-trap looking places. Do some research and get a recommendation for high quality places that locals go to. If you’re not paying around $100 for a meal of about a 6-12 pieces, you’re probably not getting the real stuff. Once you do, you’ll never have realized how beef can taste. Meat that literally melts on your mouth is a real thing and worth having once in your life.

Miscellaneous

Hard-off, Home-off, and their affiliates are great places to get Playstations and other Japanese electronics at rock-bottom prices. Way better than the astronomical tourist prices in Akihabara.

If you ever watch GameCenter CX, then you are familiar with Arino’s attempts to beat old video games. One of the things he uses are cooling pads. Last time I was in Japan, I bought some. Here’s what they are.

If you are further south, check out the Memorial Cathedral for World Peace at Hiroshima. I went to mass here and prayed that we never see nuclear weapons used in war again.

In the spring, the Wisteria bloom along with the Sakura. Check out the most famous Wisteria tunnels at Kawachi Fuji gardens

Fologram and building what was previously difficult

Fologram and building what was previously difficult

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Nothing is going to be the same – not even the most menial jobs. The pace of change of what is coming, and what is happening today, is beyond even our wildest dreams. Not even construction jobs will be the same. Such as this example of building a complex wave-like wall structure in less than a day with perfect placement of each brick. Fologram Talks: Holographic Brickwork from Fologram on Vimeo. Fologram combines computer-aided design with the holographic capabilities of Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to help in assembling even complex objects. The hologram can overlay exactly where each piece of the build should go, as well as an outline of the finished product.
Autonomous tractors, harvestors, and even weeding robots – the end of farming as we know it?

Autonomous tractors, harvestors, and even weeding robots – the end of farming as we know it?

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While autonomous cars are getting all the press, there is an even more disruptive side to this technology that is likely far easier and will likely come sooner. Fully autonomous farming.

What about a robot that can patrol fields and kill weeds with pinpoint precision. This would use massively less herbicides. Alternative forms could be developed that fertilize or analyze individual plants or patches of a field for particular problems.

But the really big guns come out below. What if you could replace field work completely and do it all from the comfort of your air conditioned office chair at home?

These are almost certainly going to become realities – probably in our lifetime.

Update 6/14:

The above video was broken, but 1:39 shows the AI vision guided laser/spray weeding.

Backdoor Roth IRA

Backdoor Roth IRA

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Getting your backdoor Roth IRA right is very tricky. If done incorrectly, you can find yourself owing a ton of money and more than negating the value of contributions.

Here’s the best/most correct covering of the topic:

How to Do a Backdoor Roth IRA

Here is a higher-level discussion:
https://www.dadsdollarsdebts.com/2016/11/22/roth-401k/

Also look here for much more in-depth information:

https://www.kitces.com/blog/how-to-do-a-backdoor-roth-ira-contribution-while-avoiding-the-ira-aggregation-rule-and-the-step-transaction-doctrine/

Kubrick’s inspiration for 2001

Kubrick’s inspiration for 2001

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Kubrick is hailed as a genius, but as Isaac Newton said in 1675, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

In 1960, the National Film Board of Canada produced a film that followed the work of Ontario astronomer Donald MacRae. Universe introduced us to the planets and neighboring heavenly bodies as understood even before John Glenn’s first orbital flight.

Kubrick saw the film and was inspired to do a space movie, which became 2001: A Space Odyssey. He even used the narrator of the documentary, Douglas Rain, as the voice of HAL 9000. 

Give it a watch and see almost shot-for-shot where Kubrick got his camera ideas, pacing, and tone.

Augmented driving – Wayray

Augmented driving – Wayray

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At CES, Wayray demonstrated a car mockup loaded with an augmented reality display.
It’s funny, I have a memo to myself from 2014 for almost exactly this idea. Guess I should have jumped on the idea. 🙂

Sentry mode – your car is always watching

Sentry mode – your car is always watching

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The end of scuff-n-run parking lot door dings? Car prowling a thing of the past?

Elon Musk says Tesla is working on a “sentry mode” security feature that could let owners record damage and break-ins. The announcement came in response to a customer’s tweet complaining of a dent to his Model 3 and suggesting a “360 dash cam feature while parked.” 

Tesla introduced 360-degree surround camera views for cars with Hardware 2.5 as part of its October software update. The feature lets owners capture dash cam recordings from the car’s front-facing camera, which can be saved to a flash drive that plugs into the vehicle’s USB port. Pressing an icon saves a 10 minute clip, while holding it down pauses recording. The update also taps in to all eight cameras on every Model S, X and 3 to create a surround view of nearby cars

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/23/elon-musk-tesla-sentry-mode/

It also raises the probability of unintented side effects. Cars, in our lifetime, will almost certainly become fully autonomous, always wirelessly connected to national networks, and have 360 cameras/sensor packages/etc.

This has really interesting implications for privacy, crime, and social contracts. It’s highly probable that when any kind of crime or incident occurs, there will now be a whole host of cars that will have recorded what happened from every angle. By using this footage, it would be possible to re-trace suspect paths back for possibly hours if not days/weeks.

For example, the Boston bombers could have easily been identified by watching feeds back until they planted the bomb in the trash bin. Then it might be trivial to follow them back, block by block, looking at the footage of every car they passed until they arrive at their home. You might even be able to follow them back for the weeks leading up to the crime – identifyng every store and person they met with. A complete, airtight case might be created – all without a detective leaving his office seat. Spousal cheaters would be turned in by their car. Lawyers might subpeona cloud services for video proof of a suspect/client’s whereabouts during events. Don’t even get me started about surveillance by fully autonomous cars that can follow you wherever you go and trade off every few blocks with other cars so you don’t even know they’re following you.

It also means everything you do next to a street will likely be recorded from many sources – including ones that pass you by and then are gone. All of which likely is immediately uploaded to the cloud and has only the security of those systems to prevent anyone from using that information for whatever purposes they choose. With data breaches becoming a regular occurrence, it’s something that should make us all give pause.

Historically rendered 3D maps by Scott Reinhard

Historically rendered 3D maps by Scott Reinhard

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I absolutely love maps and visualizations. I’m always on the lookout for cool new creations.

Scott Reinhard combines contemporary land elevations with historic maps to create three-dimensional environments of a specific region, city, or state. To produce the digital maps, he pulls elevation data from the United States Geological Survey, which he then embeds with location information and merges with the original design of the old maps.

Reinhard was introduced to the methods he uses in his digital maps through Daniel Huffman’s website Something About Maps. You can see more of Reinhard’s digital works on Instagram and buy select high-quality prints, on his website. Check out his Shaded Relief in Blender tutorial (thanks to Dunstan Orchard and Anton van Tetering) or DesignBoom.

Grand Tetons 1899
1903 Acadia
1904 Glacier

Attaching 5.25″ floppy drives via USB

Attaching 5.25″ floppy drives via USB

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Floppy disks are a relic of the past these days. You can still see the odd 3.5″ floppy – and there are even still companies making 3.5″ USB drives you can plug into your system today. But 5.25″ floppy drives (360k and 1.2 meg variety) are much more scarce. So scarce, in fact, that you’re likely not to find any outside of an old vintage computer. Most modern PC’s since the Pentium don’t even have connectors, interfaces that support them, and I know of no vendors that make USB 5.25″ drives. Even worse, it appears starting in Windows 10, the floppy drivers were removed from the OS.

So what is one to do if they have old 5.25″ floppies they need to read? Turns out others have had the same problem – so you’re not alone.

Here’s some options:

  1. Find a service that will convert them – Usually for a fee around $5-$25 per disk.
  2. Buy an vintage computer from eBay that has a working 5.25″ drive.
    For PC’s, this means a 486 or lower computer. Almost all plug-in floppy controllers require a PC who’s motherboard has an ISA interface (not PCI). You must be careful because older 8-bit ISA floppy controllers (from the XT/AT era) often will NOT work in faster 386/486/Pentium ISA interfaces (even though they are supposed too and early 486 motherboards let you slow down the ISA interface clocks in BIOS). Vintage Apple, Commodore 64, and other computers can be found on local sales forums, ebay, garage sales, and swap meets. You can then potentially copy the data off and transfer to a modern computer using a network or a serial port transfer cable.
  3. Use a flux-style reader. These allow you to attach a 5.25″ drive to a controller board which then connects to your USB port. The big limitation is that you cannot interact with the disks via DOS or command line options. Instead, you need to read/write whole disk images or operate at the sector level. These readers do this by reading flux data. While this is more complicated, it is the method that archivists are using to backup disks. Reading flux data gives you the ability to read/write disks from almost any platform and in any format – even copy protected disks.
    1. GreaseWeasle V4 [NEW 2022] – https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/
      Interfaces with 8″, 5 1/4″, and 3 1/2″ drives. Amazingly, it only costs $31 CAD and seems to get as good reviews as the Kryoflux. Definitely one of the cheapest options on this list. Since it extracts the raw flux transitions from the drive, any diskette format can be captured and analyzed – PC, Amiga, Amstrad, PDP-11, and just about any other computers as well as many older electronic musical instruments and industrial equipment floppies. They also include a wonderful array of disk reading/writing software utilities. The design is fully open and comes with no license encumberment.
      [UPDATE 10-2022] I bought one of these and could not be happier (lots of info here). It’s pretty sweet!
    2. SuperCard Pro – https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=52
      Seems like this is the new high-end champion. Not cheap at $99, but it gets regular firmware updates, can read an amazing array of flux data. Can be driven from a USB port or as a stand alone device. Supports duplicating disks that were written with the data starting and ending at the index pulse (the majority of all commercial programs were created this way). It also supports non-index copied disks and has an analyzer program that allows you to duplicate 100% of everything written on standard circular tracks, regardless of their relation to the index pulse.
    3. Kryoflux – https://www.kryoflux.com/
      Used to be the holy grail of floppy readers, but not cheap at 105€. It is able to read all formats, save as a raw stream, or export to common sector formats like the Acorn Electron, Apple, Amstrad CPC, Archimedes, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, BBC, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, MSX, IBM PC, PC-8801, Sam Coupe, Spectrum, E-MU Emulator & Emulator II, DEC RX01 & RX02 and many others.
    4. Device Side Data’s FC5025 –http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html
      USB 5.25″ floppy controller plugs into any computer’s USB port and enables you to attach a 5.25″ floppy drive. Even if your computer has no built-in floppy controller, the FC5025 lets you read those old disks. It also understands formats used by Apple, Atari, Commodore, TI, and others.
    5. Supercard Pro – https://www.cbmstuff.com/
      I don’t know very much about this one, but here’s a review and this page which contains a lot of useful information.
    6. DREM – https://www.drem.info/
      DREM is a MFM/RLL hard drive emulator that can read raw dumps of a hard drive. It also allows you to read floppies. More here.
  4. ISA on modern PC’s

Cables/Adapters for connecting 3.5/5.25/8″ floppy drives to your PC:

Finding cables for your floppy drive can also be a pain. Here are some places you might look, but supplies and suppliers do come and go frequently.

  • CablesOnline – http://www.cablesonline.com/ also their (ebay store)
    CablesOnline has a good selection of universal floppy cables for a very reasonable price.
  • IEC.net also has a selection of floppy cables, and can custom-make floppy cables for you.
    • They also have MFM and RLL hard drive cables (and can make them to order)
  • Dbit – http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.html
    The DBit FDADAP board is a small adapter which adapts 8″ floppy disk drives (Shugart SA800 style bus) to work with the PC 3.5″/5.25″ floppy disk cable pinout. It has 34- and 50-pin connectors which can be connected to the PC floppy controller and the 8″ disk drive using simple straight-through ribbon cables (not included), and a 3.5″ style power connector for the on-board microcontroller
  • TexElec – https://texelec.com/product/8-inch-floppy-adapter/
    TexElec makes tons of retro computing dream boards (clone Adlib, IDE, floppy, and other controllers) as well as this 34 to 50 pin 8″ floppy drive adapter board that allows you to plug in 8″ floppy disk drives with a standard PC 3.5″/5.25″ floppy disk cable.

Dead/Discontinued controllers

  • Catweasel – http://www.nishtek.com/cw.html
    Discontinued PCI board for connecting to floppies. Like other solutions, it doesn’t make drives show up as a drive letter – but rather lets you read raw formats for all sorts of platforms.

Other resources/discussions: