A new game called Airplane Mode asks players to enjoy being a passenger on a six hour trans-Atlantic flight that plays out in real time. This strikes me as almost as amazing as Penn+Teller’s Desert Bus.
Check out these amazing set of features to enjoy:
Fairly accurate satellite imagery of your flight path.
Snacks, premium beverages, and meal service (incl. fish option).
Carry-on bag with a book, headphones, pen, and charging cable.
Overhead reading light and complimentary aircraft information card.
Inflight safety video produced by IFC’s in-house team of expert air hosts.
Randomized events on every playthrough, such as turbulence, bad wifi, and delays.
Authentic ambient noise—whose baby is that???*
Inflight entertainment system featuring a flight tracker and hit movies of the 1930s.
Our award-winning magazine, Stratospheres, filled with articles, crosswords, and Sudoku.
Consumer SSDs (solid state drives) have been transformative for the PC world. Their massively smaller size, temperatures, and power requirements have made ultra-thin laptops possible, nearly double battery life, massively increase drop resistance, and their speed has increased performance of disk operations/booting by 10x or more.
The only down side is that they’re fairly limited in capacity. While platter-based drives are selling consumer-priced 8-10 terabyte drives, your average consumer-level SSD is a paltry 512GB for the same price. As prices drop and one upgrades their SSD, one is faced with a terrible upgrade procedure. Upgrading your SSD often means backing up your data, making a windows re-install usb, re-installing your OS, and restoring all your data and re-installing your apps. Annoying to say the least.
It would be great if one could just copy the current image to a new drive, expand the partitions, and just swap drives – but that doesn’t seem possible…or does it.
Equipment you’ll need:
First you need to know what kind of SSD your system has. Is it SATA, PCIe, M.2, U.2, mSATA, or SATA Express, or a soldered-on drive? There is a lot of confusion here, because there is the interface type (SATA, NVMe, PCIe) but there is also the plug type (SATA, M.2, etc). Often you will find guides that interchange or equate them in confusing ways.
Once you have determined your drive type, you need to buy an appropriate drive-to-USB adapter.
Hardware you’ll need
Get one of the following that matches your system configuration:
SATA to USB – use this if you have a standard 2.5″ form factor SATA SSD or SATA hard drive. I have had good luck with the Sabrent models.
DiscGenius – used to wipe any old SSD (if you want to erase your drive and sell it)
The Procedure:
Make a backup. No, seriously. You should make a full backup of your system and all those important photos and documents. Go buy an external hard drive and download a free backup program, or buy a cloud storage solution right now, and back up your system. What you’re about to undertake could result in a dead drive if something goes really wrong (static discharge, select wrong source/dest drive, etc). Besides, you have already been doing backups of all your stuff already – right. RIGHT?
Plug in your new SSD/M.2 drive into your USB adapter and plug it into the USB port. To be safe, unplug ALL unnecissary drives – including USB, external backup drives, etc. The less confusion the better.
Click on the ‘Clone’ operation in the lower left sidebar.
Select your SOURCE drive. Proceed to the next step.
Select your DESTINATION drive. Make SURE this drive is your brand new, empty drive.
When you click next here, you’ll see the partition layout of the source and destination drives. You’ll notice there is a tiny partition at the start of the drive – this is the boot partition and doesn’t need to be touched. The next, largest bar will be the system drive. Many laptops will have a 3rd, very tiny partition as a backup partition.
While not immediately clear, you can actually click, move, and resize these partitions! If you can expand the second/larger partition to the end of the space, do so. If you cannot, you need to carefully MOVE (not resize) the 3rd/recovery partition to the end of the drive. Then you can resize the larger middle partition until there is no more free space between the tiny first and tiny 3rd partitions.
Click proceed to image the source drive to the new destination drive. This could easily take 30-90 minutes or longer.
Once you are done, shut down the program and power down the system.
Take your new cloned disk out of the USB adapter.
Physically swap the old drive in your laptop/PC with the newer drive. Unplug the system/disconnect internal batteries to avoid accidental poweron while doing this.
Plug back in and boot. If you did everything correctly, you should be able to power up with the new drive and boot right back up like nothing changed. When you check the free drive space, you should notice all that new capacity!
Wiping and selling
If you wish to sell your old drive, then I recommend using the program DiscGenius to wipe it before selling it. Simply deleting the partitions doesn’t actually wipe the data – and it can all be read by crafty people. Don’t do this wipe of the old drive until you’ve used your new SSD for at least a week to make sure it won’t prematurely fail.
Take the old, smaller drive you wish to wipe+sell and plug it into the USB adapter you used above. Plug this into your PC.
Start up DiscGenius
Delete all the partitions on the old drive. Make SURE you are picking the correct, old drive and not your current boot or a spare drive that’s plugged in.
Right click on the now empty drive, and select ‘Erase Sectors’. Fill the sectors with random data and then click proceed. This will overwrite EVERYTHING on that drive with junk data. It will take around an hour or two. Once you’ve done this, nothing can be recovered from the drive. Safely unmount the drive, shut the program down, and unplug the drive.
You can now sell or use the drive for some other purpose.
The countdown to midnight on Dec 31st always gets me to thinking about time.
time++ is a public art installation commissioned to visual artist Raven Kwok by TODTOWN. It combines the aesthetics of computer generative art and the function of time service. In this customized generative system, particles that represent the current second are added with the elapse of time. With each assigned a shifting size and distance threshold, these particles form a self-organization and collectively display the current time in hour and minute.
Detecting individual identity through walls using just wifi
For one-night only, Three Shining Swords took the stage at the Meguro Persimmon Hall in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward on November 28 for an unforgettable night of cultural storytelling. A unique adaptation of George Lucas’s 1977 brainchild, this Star Wars kabuki play focused on the franchise’s latest episodes, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and stars one of Japan’s most renowned kabuki actors, Ichikawa Ebizo, as Kylo Ren.
This fellow put together probably the best buyers guide for all the different kinds of SSD’s and interfaces. Definitely worth a read if you want to know the ins and outs of all the current market offerings.
Beams – 6 floors of dizzying clothing, crafts, and art.
Tokyo Kitsch – Unassuming little shop selling traditional, quirky and, as its name suggests, kitschy Japanese souvenirs
Kagaya – One of the city’s longest-running smoke shops and deals in everything from standard cigarettes to cigars, pipes and lighters. You’ll find fine Cubans alongside product from places like Dominica, Honduras and Nicaragua
Kakimori – Specialist stationary shop. Kakimori’s has a massive range of pens, inks and letter sets. Best of all are the made-to-order notebooks, prepared in five to 10 minutes.
Atelier Sougeikan – Atelier Sougeikan offers calligraphy lessons where you’ll get a chance to decorate an item of your choosing, such as a fan or a lantern, and take your creation home with you.
Karimoku 60 Shinjuku – Turning out exquisite, retro handmade furniture since 1940. The company’s creations are all made from domestic wood and designed to suit Japan’s smaller homes.
Tokyo135° Shinjuku Alta – An offshoot of the nationwide Tansuya chain, Tokyo135’s Shinjuku Alta branch attracts a diverse crowd looking for slightly funkier kimono for all occasions.
Pass the Baton – modern recycle shop. You’ll find a range of second-hand items, including antiques, furniture, clothing and art – many of which have been previously owned by well-known celebrities.
Solakzade – Solakzade’s Harajuku boutique is home to a distinctive range of unused vintage and antique frames sourced from Japan and around the globe. The shop has a particularly broad selection of styles in its 10,000-frame trove, including a few shades that date back all the way to the 1800s.
Mask Shop Omote – a favourite among the city’s actors, mask-makers and headwear enthusiasts. The selection ranges from the usual to the fetishistic, including Venetian-style masks, medical gear, Hyottoko (Japanese-style clown masks), and items with animal motifs.
House @ Mikiri Hassin – high-concept clothing by up-and-coming Japanese designers alongside select secondhand items from overseas
Nude Trump – long-standing vintage clothing shop with a chaotic jumble of outré garments and accessories with all kinds of studded, sequinned and fur-print oddities.
Coded field is part of “Tokyo FESTIVAL Special 13” organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture). This is a public art program that takes place surrounding the Zojoji Temple in the historical and traditional Shiba district. Structural and geographical data of Zojoji Temple will be analyzed by using programming “Code” and is generated in virtual “Field” with this coded information embedded. That invisible information will be translated into light and sound and experienced in real space through balloon-shaped special devices developed independently by Rhizomatiks. Dance numbers are performance by ELEVENPLAY
Traveling abroad has never been easier – and one of the things that makes it so easy is having an internet connected cell phone. Access to google maps, train schedules, email, video chatting, and IM’s makes travel a breeze. Finding free wifi, however, isn’t always easy/convenient. It’s much better to have data through your cell plan.
Sadly, US telecom carries are barely above highway robbers compared to most of the world – especially when it comes to overseas travel plans. The cost of adding overseas for even a few days/month can far outstrip the cost of just getting a local country plan.
Turns out, someone has done a good job of comparing all the different sim plans in Japan. Just figure out which one works best for you and buy. You can often pick up the sim in the airport, or even have it mailed to you before you even leave home. Now that’s convenience.
Just don’t forget to bring a paperclip so you can do the request brain surgery. 🙂
A good GPS can save your life out in the wilderness. I always carry one with me when heading out climbing or hiking. But GPS units are somewhat notorious for being expensive, heavy, burn through batteries, and often have clunky UI’s and features. Some units charge you money for map updates. Things are getting slowly better.
I currently own a handheld Garmin Oregon, but had a friend who has the Fenix 5x watch. I was amazed how well the interface worked and the quality of the GPS. The Fenix 6 was just announced, and older units went on sale. I recently saw the Fenix 5X on sale for $299 during an early Black Friday sale and couldn’t pass the opportunity up.
The next question is – how are the maps for hiking. The default watch now comes with Garmin’s excellent maps and are upgraded regularly for free. My well-healed hiking friend says he has yet to find a trail in the Pacific Northwest that’s not in the default maps.
I was even more happy to learn that the Fenix 5X allows you to upgrade your maps yourself – including open map packs and systems. I tried out the maps on GMap – which include more details and topo features than the default maps. Using the free Garmin BaseCamp software package, you can copy the free maps from GMap into the tool’s list of maps, then load those maps onto your watch. I found the process to be really smooth and worked without much fuss.
