Tuesday June 30
 
10:02
 
When I was young…

13-year-old trades iPod for Walkman, reports on mysterious ancient artifact

The tapes which I had could only hold around 12 tracks each, a fraction of the capacity of the smallest iPod.

Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?

If he really wants to know how it was in the past, he should disconnect his Sky TV dish, internet connection, DVD player, and Wii/Playstation/PSP and spend a week just watching TV with 4 channels.

Tuesday June 23
 
10:36
 
The ‘IC You’ Card

I hate having to carry around an “Alien Registration Card” which includes my full address - on top of burglary risk I have the continual daily risk that should my keys and wallet be lost together, thieves have a direct path to my home. Paranoid? My apartment had already been burgled once in Japan - I don’t want to make it any easier.

Now we have the new gaijin card. Yeah!

That’s still not the worst of it. I mentioned that embedded computer chip. The ZRK is a “smart card.” Most places worldwide issue smart cards for innocuous things like transportation and direct debit, and you have to swipe the card on a terminal to activate it. Carrying one is, at least, optional.

Not in Japan. Although the 2005 proposal suggested foreign “swiping stations” in public buildings, the technology already exists to read IC cards remotely. With Japan’s love of cutting-edge gadgets, data processing will probably not stop at the swipe. The authorities will be able to remotely scan crowds for foreigners.

In other words, the IC chip is a transponder — a bug.

Now imagine these scenarios: Not only can police scan and detect illegal aliens, but they can also uncover aliens of any stripe. It also means that anyone with access to IC chip scanners (they’re going cheap online) could possibly swipe your information. Happy to have your biometric information in the hands of thieves?

Moreover, this system will further encourage racial profiling. If police see somebody who looks alien yet doesn’t show up on their scanner (such as your naturalized author, or Japan’s thousands of international children), they will more likely target you for questioning — as in: “Hey, you! Stop! Why aren’t you detectable?”

No!

What does “not deemed to be acting like spouses” mean anyway?

And what’s Juki Net? Is it like Mixi for music? Are all gaijins going to be “required” to join Juki-boxu-net and download Japanese J-shit-pop every week?

At least laws here are written down, unlike Korea. Don’t get me started on Korean immigration.

Wednesday June 17
 
17:11
 
Opera Unite Has Awesome Potential

I set up Opera Unite last night. It’s very easy to set up, but you can see it’s an alpha. Here are some of the limitations I found:

• No https so passwords for password protected sections are clear text
• There’s no way to hide which services are running, which leaves you prone to hacking. ie. If you tell someone you’re running a chat service, they can automatically see you’re running other services also.
• There’s no way to administer remotely - eg, if you want to change an access password or add a new lounge.
• Names of services can be changed, but after renaming The Lounge, a “broken” version will remain in the services list.
• If you close the browser, all services stop - there’s no option to leave Opera running in the background, and you can’t iconify the browser to the system tray. This means Opera always has to remain running and take up space in the taskbar
• Photo browser doesn’t handle RAW files - would be good if it displayed the embedded JPEG
• Can’t play music to an iphone because there’s no flash
• Doesn’t work properly on the super modern IE6 (which I am forced to use at work)
• On Firefox 3 (portableapps.com version), after starting to play a song you are returned to the top of the music tree
• Photo folders are large icons only and filename gets truncated, which makes it difficult to navigate. There’s also no search.
• Webserver doesn’t have PHP or MySQL

But, this is alpha - you expect issues. All in all, Opera Unite is very cool and very promising:

• You can write your own Opera Unite services, which means you can bet your bottom dollar that other services will be coming soon, ala appstore.
• You can hack customise services easily. For example, the home screen can be “customised” by renaming installdirectory/unite/home.us to have home.zip, unzipping it, editing the files, zipping, and renaming back to home.us. Cool, huh? By doing that I can hide the list of services running (#2 above)
• Can run it on multiple machines - once you have your operaunite domain name (same as your my.opera.com id), each machine becomes a subdomain named as you choose. eg. party.myname.operaunite.com, work.myname.operaunite.com
• You can install the same service multiple times - so you can have multiple chat rooms, or share multiple directories, or have different passwords
• With minimal setup - pointing it at the right directory and adding a password, I have access to my entire photo library wherever I am. I’ve just renewed my Flickr Pro account but maybe I wont need to next year.

Now all I need is the iPhone to get Flash or someone to hack the media server so that it links to MP3s, and then I can stream music to my iPhone. I tried pointing the file sharing service at some MP3s hoping that would get the iPhone to play, but it didn’t seem to.

Some see Opera Unite as a gimmick that will drift into nothing. For me it’s already useful - I now have access to my entire photo library without uploading it to Flickr. And next time my brother can’t send me videos by Gmail because they are too large, I’ll just get him to install Opera Unite, start the file sharing service, and give me the URL.

If the services expand and Opera sets-up Unite to run even when no browser window is open, Unite could really change the web. You’ve got to try it.

Funnily, it’s not made me use Opera as a web browser though. I’m still using Chrome :)

Tuesday June 16
 
16:34
 
Wow - Opera Unite

How many times have we heard the announcement “X browser is going to change the internet” - but Opera Unite might just do that.

Opera Unite: a Web server on the Web browser
With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today’s fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time.

Take control of what you share online
Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

Share with other Web browsers
What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.

Tuesday June 16
 
15:00
 
Free Lee Child Novel

I was playing with Stanza on the iPhone when I found Lee Child’s novel Persuader available free in the online catalog, under “Random House Free Library”.

Child is an excellent author - it you have an iPhone I highly recommend downloading Stanza (it’s free) and getting Persuader while it’s still free.