Wednesday January 27
 
18:01
 
Korean music

일본에와서3년이나됐는데도아직도내가자주듣는음악은한국음악이다
Even though I haven’t lived in Korea for 3+ years, even now most of the music I listen to is Korean. The latest Jaurim EP is superb (“제목 없는 음반”).

I most listen to:

1. Delispice 델리 스파이스
2. Humming Urban Stereo 허밍 어반 스테레오
3. 3rd Line Butterfly 3호선 버터플라이
4. Rollercoaster 롤러코스터
5. Rainy Sun 레이니썬
6. Nell 넬
7. You-me 유미
8. Casker 캐스커
9. Lucid Fall 루시드폴
10. Cherry Filter 체리필터
11. Jaurim 자우림
12. Loveholic 러브홀릭
13. Jadu 자두

Know them? #1, #2, #4, #7, #10, #11, #12 and #13 should be known to most Koreans - the rest, probably not. If you like Portishead, you must listen to #5. The last 4 I only like a subset of their music.

Wednesday January 27
 
14:40
 
Lenovo one key recovery – how to fix it

Before I bought my Acer netbook, I bought a Lenovo netbook.

Right from the beginning, I got disk error. I decided wipe the C drive and install Windows 7 over the Japanese OS. It worked OK, but the initial disk errors bothered me, so I decided to restore the laptop to original state and return it. And there I hit a problem. Windows 7 had repartitioned the disk and one key recovery (OKR) no longer worked.

Eventually after a day of investigating, I did finally manage to get OKR to work again, restore the netbook to original state, and return it for a refund. So that time isn’t wasted, I’m going to post what I found out about OKR – because after searching around, I know lots of people are having issues with it.

Switched off, the OKR button is supposed to boot you to recovery mode to restore the hard drive. But if anything alters the partition information of the HDD, it stops working – instead it boot you into Windows.

The reason for this is that the recovery partition is special – it has a #12 partition ID, which is a Compay Configuration/Diagnostics Partition (details here). Most partitioning software doesn’t know about this partition ID and when you change partition information, such as by adjusting partition sizes or creating a new partition, that ID gets reset to something the partitioning software knows about. That stops the OKR key working.

To restore the ID, you need gparted on a USB key or on CD. Search Google and you can get it easily enough. Method:

1. Boot into gparted.
2. Identify the disk identifier for the recovery partition – eg /dev/sda4
3. Open up the gparted console
4. Type fdisk /dev/sda (ie. take the number off the identifier)
5. Type m for help if you want
6. Type p to print the partition table – check you get the same number as above
7. Type t, then 4 for the partition number (replace with the number of your partition)
8. If you want, type L to list codes
9. The code you want is 12, enter 12 and then type w to write
10. Do not use the GUI from this point – if you do, it will remove the code 12
11. Exit gparted and try the OKR button. It should work.

An alternative is to set the boot flag on the recovery partition. The lenovo will then boot using the recovery partition.

Wednesday January 13
 
15:17
 
@ Lemonsoju award for stating the blooming obvious

Many beaches are very popular on warm sunny days.

via Beach – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Tuesday January 12
 
15:01
 
Record video on the iPhone 3G

Finally an app which allows videos to be recorded on the iPhone 3G. Low res quality at 10fps, high res quality at about 2-3fps – not the best, but better than not having the functionality at all.

Competing with iVideoCamera is ShowTime, also $1. Apparently the high res quality is a bit better than iVideoCamera but it lacks the low res option and some say it’s buggy. Hopefully iVideoCamera will improve the framerate for the high res option in the next release.

Friday January 8
 
13:38
 
Suicide

I just found out one of the bloggers I used to read religiously about Korea committed Suicide in 2006. Yeah, it took me a long time to find out – but after he left Korea, I stopped reading his blog.

One of the reasons I stopped blogging about personal stuff is that people read your blog and think they know everything that is going on in your life. People who read Shawn’s blog had no idea of what the guy was really feeling behind the scenes, and Shawn’s suicide illustrates that.

I actually bought Shawn’s original book when I saw it on sale in a bookshop in Korea. He inspired many people with his blogging and humour.