Strum GS-2!

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Strum GS-2!
Mar 282015
 

I’ve always been a fan of Applied Acoustic Systems’ software, mainly because I love how how it sounds, but also because I love the idea of using software to model instruments instead of relying on gigabytes of samples to create the same sounds. Their Strum GS-1 guitar modeler has been around for a while, and while it’s serviceable as a guitar sound, they just came out with a new version, GS-2, which for now only does acoustic guitar sounds.

For starters, the sound is incredible for a modeler. It sounds … well … like a real guitar. And it behaves like one, too. (And in the end, it’s all about the sound, isn’t it?) There are plenty of patches to play around with to get a good variety of sound colors, and since it’s not much of a memory or CPU hog, it’s pretty easy to run them through whatever VST FX you want to to dirty them up.

The playing interface is also updated, with three new modes. In the first mode, it plays like a keyboard instrument. Hit a key, get a sound. Not much to say there.

In the second mode, it plays like a rhythm guitar. Press a key on the lower half to select the chord, then press a key or combination on the upper octave to strum it. This mode is slightly tricky to figure out. Just banging out major chords is relatively simple: if you want a C, play a C. But if you want a C7, what do you do? You play C and then play the first white key below it. If you want Cm, play the first black key below it. And since F and E are right next to each other, they keys still operate the same, so it’s a little weird. Don’t think in terms of half/whole steps. Think in terms of white/black keys.

I really like the rhythm mode (called Guitar in the program), especially the variety of strums. There are also six different chord types, with different root positions and fingerings, so if you want open chords, you can choose those, or if you want power chords, you can choose those.

To get chords like a sus2 or sus4, you have to chord it out like a regular chord on the keyboard, and experiment! Hitting C-F-G will give me a Csus4, C-D-G a Csus2, and C-F-B a C7sus4. There are a lot of chords lurking in there, you just have to bang around a bit. The major/minor/7th chords are easy to find, though, and that should make simpler stuff easy to knock out.

The last mode is the loop mode, and that’s the most fun to mess with in a mindless kind of way. Hit a key, and the program will auto-strum it for you. To change patterns, select a different key on the upper octave. You can choose a bunch of different patterns, so that makes it fun to play with.

The upgrade was only $30 or so, since I’m already a registered used of Strum GS-1. I can’t recommend this upgrade enough! It sounds wonderful, and it’s really fun to play with.

Obviously, if you’re going to lay down something professional, you’ll want to get a real guitarist in, but for laying down a good acoustic track before then, this should work fine.

Computer Music Also Does Free/Alchemy and SFZ

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Computer Music Also Does Free/Alchemy and SFZ
Feb 132015
 

A couple of things:

One, the March issue of Computer Music Magazine is doing a huge Free VST/Sample focus, so you don’t need to speak Japanese to learn all about free VSTs. They’re doing a big tutorial on Synth1, too, which I think is worth reading if you’re interested in Synth1. It’s a pretty powerful free synth that has been around for a while.

Also, if you’re looking for the Alchemy player, CM’s crazy software bundle that comes out each month has the Alchemy Player in it. It’s not the same as the full version of Alchemy, which I love, but it’s better than nothing.

There’s a bunch of other free stuff they stick in there software-wise every month. Most of the “CM” versions are essentially demo versions of real products, with some of the juicier features removed, but you can use them all you want as they are. It’s a good way to demo products you may not even know you might need. (Or you may not need. You won’t know until you mess with them a bit.)

Two, I totally forgot that Alchemy will load SFZ format files. I just spent 20 minutes playing with the violins in SSO, creating a really neat pad in Alchemy with them. It’s dead simple to do, too, since Alchemy supports the format. Such a shame that they got bought out, and we’ll probably never see the new version of Alchemy. Good for them that they got the money, but bad for us, since Alchemy is a brilliant piece of software.

I’m kind of bummed that all of the Alchemy add-ons are unavailable now, but now I can go into my SFZ files and make my own. So it’s part loss, part win.

Lots of Free VSTs in the March DTM Magazine

 Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Lots of Free VSTs in the March DTM Magazine
Feb 122015
 

I just got my copy of DTM, a Japanese electronic music magazine, and they had a big issue this month on Free Stuff, with useful things like reviews and stats, and they were kind enough to dump a bunch of them on a DVD-ROM that comes with it.

Of course, being a Japanese electronic music magazine, you need to know the language to get the most out of it. But it’s a pretty interesting collection compared to some of the standard free VST recommendations out there. The most useful bit is the little graphic showing which plugins are 32/64 bit, and which are Mac/PC only. That’s the really useful bit for me, because I run Live in 64 bit mode exclusively. I have Reaper set in 32-bit mode, but I don’t use Reaper that much. That’s more like a “I have to record this ancient 32-bit plugin to a stem so I can work on it in Live!” kind of thing.

If you want to pick up a copy, go to Amazon Japan and search for DTM 3月2015年.

Live School

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Live School
Feb 092015
 

There’s a really good Intro to Ableton Live course going on right now on Coursera, taught by Erin Barra of the Berklee College of Music. It’s only three weeks long, but it’s a good way to meet a bunch of different people who are into Live, make some music, and pick up some tips.

I’ve been using it as a way to practice working with Live and Push, and as a way to create music on deadlines. That helps a lot. Having an obligation to a group inspires me for some reason, even if it’s for 4-5 people. The music is all going to be hosted on Blend via Dropbox.

And the music I am making for the class can be found on my Blend, right here.

One of the restrictions I’m putting on myself is to only use the tools in Live Suite, no outside VSTs. So far, it’s been fun. In a way, it’s freeing in that I don’t have to obsess over picking the “perfect” synth from my stupid long list of VST plugins, instead I’ll go with the instruments in Live, which are really good in their own right.

In order to get a little deeper into some of them, like Sampler and Analog, I’ve been using MacProVideo.com’s videos to go into more detail. That’s also kind of cool– using the class as a springboard for further individual study.

The assignments themselves are also fun, in that each assignment has basic minimum requirements that have to be met, like four tracks, two audio and two MIDI, and so on. The restrictions work both as minimums and as something to prod creativity.

Another nice part of the class– Ableton is letting students enrolled in the class demo Live Studio free for 30 days, and Studio usually runs in the $600 range, if I remember correctly.

Free Orchestra Sounds and Free Sample Players

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Free Orchestra Sounds and Free Sample Players
Feb 052015
 

I’d love to get some of the top-shelf orchestral libraries, but I don’t really have $2,000 lying around. And I love Free Things!

So I’m going to suggest taking a look at Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra. It’s free as in free speech and free beer. The quality is good, not great, but that’s all I need at my level.

The SSO library uses the SFZ open format, and the only player I can find anymore is the free SFZ sample player at Plogue. I tried to find the Cakewalk SFZ player, but all I got were 404 errors.

Plogue also kindly assembled a bunch of free samples for the SFZ player from Garritan, Digital Sound Factory, Analog Industries, Patch Arena, and Plogue as well! And they’re free!

Figure Drawing Challenge

 Art, Education, Technology  Comments Off on Figure Drawing Challenge
Jan 302015
 

I use art and photography to feed off of each other. So that one helps the other. Art helps me be creative with photography, and photography helps with art. Pencil Kings rebooted their Figure Drawing Challenge this January, and I had a blast. It was just enough work to learn some useful stuff and make good progress. My drawings are still too awful to share with the outside world, but I’m pleased enough with my progress for now.

I recommend checking out their site. I like their tutorials, and the challenges are great as social and artistic events.

The Best $50 Lens Ever.

 Art, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on The Best $50 Lens Ever.
Dec 272014
 

Okay, when I got the adapter, it was $150. But the lens itself was an amazing find.

I’ve had my A7 for a few weeks, and now my plan is to get rid of my Canon 60D and all of my Canon gear, except my IXY. I don’t need the extra gear.

I started looking around for a good telephoto replacement that I can adapt to my A7. I did a lot of frowning at the computer screen as I looked at some of the major online retailers, but it’s really hard to commit to buying a used lens I haven’t laid hands on.

We have a good local camera store that has a lot of used lenses, so I went by to take a look. They had a “mystery box” full of lenses they just got in, and I spent about 20 minutes looking through, until I found a great little Canon 70-210 f/4 Macro in an FD mount. The glass was perfect! $50, and it was mine.

I put it on my A7, and, uh-oh. It wouldn’t focus out to infinity. Was it the lens, the camera, or the cheap $30 adapter I got on Amazon a few years back for my Nex? Turns out it was the adapter. I picked up a Metabones adapter, which is in the middle of the price range for adapters at $100, and now it focuses out perfectly.

Since the 70, 100, 135 and 210mm lengths are all marked on the barrel, it means I can use the lens with the A7’s image stabilization, too! It’s a dual action focus/zoom barrel. Pull to zoom, twist to focus.

The macro part of the lens was a nice discovery. At 70mm, you can turn the focus into the macro zone and get up close. It makes this a great all-purpose travel lens. Honestly, this and my Leica 35, and I don’t really feel like I need anything else. The 35 for wide shots, and this for anything else.

I put both lenses and camera through their paces in the NC mountains, and got some great shots. I’m really enjoying this combo.

Sony A7 Mark II

 Art, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Sony A7 Mark II
Dec 172014
 

After the JLPT in DC, I ordered the new Sony A7 Mark II body, and it showed up a few days later.

If you’re expecting stats, then move on. This is more of an impressions report than anything else. What I liked, what I didn’t.

My initial thoughts? Tinged with confusion because the manual wasn’t so hot. I wound up calling Sony because I wasn’t sure why some functions wouldn’t work with my manual focus lenses. Part of it was on me, but part of it was a slightly confusing message that kept popping up.

Once I got that sorted out, I fell in love with it.

The menu UI isn’t perfect, but the shooting experience with it is great.

The viewfinder fooled me a few times into thinking I was looking directly through glass. It’s really sharp. Better than the rear LCD panel.

The customizable C1-C4 buttons on the body make it a manual focus shooter’s dream. I assigned the focus magnifier to C2, so I just have to press it once or twice, and I can get nice sharp focus. Then I assigned the image stabilizer to C1, so I can set the focal length of my MF lenses with a button press, a dial turn, and another button press. That’s about as fast as you can make it. I put ISO on C3, so I can tear through my ISO settings, depending on what I want to shoot.

There’s a ton of customization in the menus. It’ll take a little while for me to tweak it just the way I want it, but there’s a lot I can either tweak or ignore.

The camera feels great in my hands, and shoots great. Is it loud? Who cares? Honestly, I don’t get the obsession over shutter noise on the A7 cameras. I guess it goes make a certain amount of noise, but not enough for me to care. I’m more into getting good shots. It does that!

The image stabilization is great. It feels like I get 2-3 more stops of hand-holding out of the camera. There’s a noticeable difference when it’s turned off.

It also has a well-thought out auto-bracketing mode, that I set on 3 shots 1 stop apart, and just left it there.

The NFC is useful if your phone does NFC, I guess. You need to download an app and you can control the camera with your phone. It’s kind of hit-and-miss. There’s a whole Sony app store for the camera. It’s kind of cool, but it’s also sigh-inducing, too. (Another user ID and password, and something else to manage? Ugh.)

What’s most important to me is that I can take the pictures I want without thinking about the camera. I think about the photo, and that’s about it. In that regard, this camera is great.

My only gripe is a lack of native full-frame E mount lenses that are affordable. There aren’t many full-frame lenses on offer, and the ones that are AF are all pretty expensive. I already have some Leica M glass from 10+ years ago, so I’m covered, but it would be nice to have one native full-frame AF lens. Gotta start saving on the side for that, I guess.

Oct 012014
 

Paying full price is for Suckers.

Ouch, that’s harsh, isn’t it? But it’s true. When it comes to music production software and hardware, just about everything software (and some hardware) goes on sale 2-3 times a year.

There are a few products that never go on sale, but those products are a minority. A small one, at that. The perpetual sale nature of the software industry makes me question what the real value of any of this is.

It used to be that gear would go on sale once or twice a year. Now, every month there’s a huge list of companies making desperate offers to get you to buy their stuff. So, if there’s always a sale on, is there really a best time of the year to shop? Yes, there still is.

When? Around Black Friday, right after US Thanksgiving. (Check before, just in case.) As an example, I bought Native Instruments’ Komplete 9 Ultimate, which usually goes for $1100, for $575 last Thanksgiving. And I bought a few other things at very steep discounts (like SynthMaster), because I am what? Cheap! (Well, cheap but impulsive when I see a really good deal for good software.)

Komplete 9 was on sale one more time after that, and that was this past summer, but the deal wasn’t as good as it was last Thanksgiving. Same for Synthmaster. It’s been on sale, but not as cheap as it was then.

Black Friday is a great time to gear up a new studio, but sometimes companies have once-a-year deals that are outside of that time, so it pays to keep an eye on things year round.

I have a few places I check on a semi-regular basis:

  • On the front page of KVR Audio (or just follow them on Twitter), check the What’s New feed, and click on Deals.
  • Or go to Rekkerd.org’s Deals page.
  • Also, look at Rekkerd’s “Deals Archive.” That’s amazingly useful for bargain hunters like us, because companies tend to repeat the same offers at fixed intervals. (Some are regular like clockwork!)

If something has just come off of a deal, then you’re going to have to wait a while for it to come on deal again. (Unless it’s a Waves Audio plugin. I swear, they have everything on sale all the time, or so it seems. In fact, Waves has sales every weekend.)

You can also get some crazy deals at plugin resellers. The two I use the most are:

Both are totally legit, but you may have to wait a day or two to get your license codes. Plugin Discounts tends to have bigger savings, but Plugin Boutique will give you cash back in the form of a credit, which you can apply to your next purchase. Shop around!

As an example: iZotope makes StutterEdit, which is a great glitch plugin. It retails for $249. It just came off of a sale at $99 on the iZotope website, but I found it on Plugin Discounts for $88.

$88 for a $249 plugin? Yeah, I can do that.

When you do decide to start buying plugins, please go slowly. Don’t go broke buying tons of them. Buy smartly. And when you see a synth or plugin you like, make a note of it, and wait for it to come on sale. Most will, eventually.

A Few Closing Thoughts

First, when you go to pick out a DAW, make sure of a few things: does it use VSTs, or does it have its own plugin format? (Reason and ProTools use their own formats for plugins.) If you want to go cheap, stick with DAWs that use VST for now. It’s not an ideal solution, but it offers the biggest variety and the most potential cheapness.

You can hook up a VST to Reason through a VST host application, but it’s one of those things that’s kind of a kludge, and I don’t know that it’s worth the trouble. Rewire Reason into your main DAW instead.

Most VST makers will let you sell your plugins to other people. (License transfers.) Reason does not let users transfer Rack Extension licenses. You can transfer the Reason license, but not the RE license. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, keep it in mind. Read those EULAs! Rack Extensions are pretty cool from a tech point of view, and they make Reason really useful, but it’s a walled garden.

Some DAWs, like Studio One Artist edition, won’t allow the use of external plugins. Whoops! Gotta buy a more expensive version there! Studio One is a good DAW, but read the fine print. Same goes for the Studio One Vocaloid Edition. It only lets you use the Piapro Studio plugin. The rest are all Studio One only. If you don’t mind that, Studio One is an excellent starter DAW you can usually get for around $80-$90, and the full version is around $200-$300.

If you want to use Nerve and Serum in your music, you better make sure they’ll run in your DAW first! Read the developer’s website, and check for compatibility! Some plugins just don’t work with some DAWs, and you won’t know until you pay and suffer.

When it comes to copy protection, there are a few different ways companies do it– the worst in my opinion are the USB dongles, because they ruin your ability to go portable. How can I hook up gear if I have a dongle in every USB port? iLok and eLicenser are the more egregious ones. I can’t run Cubase without a dongle, so I tend to run Ableton more often. Native Instruments and Ableton both have very good copy protection, in that it’s not aggressively annoying.

It’s sad, but I tend to avoid perfectly good software if it uses iLok or eLicenser. I hate being shunted off into that kind of copy protection, especially when I’m a paying customer. (Even if I am cheap.)

This leads me to my final advice: learn how to program! I mentioned it briefly in part two, but making your own gear in Reaktor, Max For Live, Bidule, or C++ is a great way to save a ton of cash. It’s also a great way to learn more about audio and how those sounds are made.

Stay cheap, do your homework, and don’t forget to make some kickass music!

Ya Big MOOC.

 Education, Technology  Comments Off on Ya Big MOOC.
Aug 202014
 

I went back to Udacity in order to finish up some programming courses, and because they were offering a deal. It’s been a while since I did any work in Python, but it’s funny how quickly it comes back to you. (Well, mostly.)

The only thing that’s kind of weird is going back over all the work I’ve already done. It feels like someone much smarter than me has already done a lot of this.

I’ve also been finishing up a Coursera MOOC on Music Theory, just to refresh a bit. It wasn’t bad, but the class felt kind of rushed towards the end. Really rushed! It was a good class, but the final exam was a little unreasonable, based on the amount of experience a lot of the students had.

I think the faculty had a “Well, this is obvious, isn’t it?” moment, when, “No, this is not obvious to a beginner. This is far from obvious,” is what they should have realized.

Still, right up until that point, it was very good. And I still got my PDF diploma (or whatever), so it’s all good.

And now I know what a hemisemidemiquaver is. But I’m still going to call it a 32nd note. And no way will I call a quarter note a crotchet. Makes me feel dirty.

But other than that, it was pretty good!

I’ve taken a lot of MOOC classes, on a bunch of different platforms, and I like the Udacity model the best– there’s no “You can only take this class NOW” problem. Take it whenever you want.

Coursera is too traditional in its approach, from my point of view, and some classes place far too much emphasis on the social aspect of learning. Honestly, I rarely, if ever, have time to use the forums. I barely have time to do the classes, and you want me to waste time in the forums? No thanks. If I want to socialize, I do it in the real world, or at least over Skype or voice chat.

The time pressure of Coursera isn’t fun, either. If I’m learning for fun, I want to learn at my own pace. Especially if I’m paying for it.

But! Coursera has an outstanding variety of classes, especially in Business and Music. I finished up a Marketing class offered by Penn’s Wharton School of Business. That was pretty interesting. And the music courses offered by Berklee are interesting. Sometimes I’ll drop the $50 for the certified certificate, but I have a hard time justifying that for something like Songwriting.

Oh, I took a look at the edX Linux class. My eyes glazed over at the cost. Really, guys? I get that you’re a non-profit, but that’s a crazy amount of money for what I can get from some YouTube videos and RTFMing a bit. A lot of the first week’s videos were just ads for the Linux Foundation, and that did nothing for me, either. I dropped it. I don’t have time for it.

It’s too bad. I was really excited about this course, and about edX, but the amount of money they ask for is just way too much for what’s essentially a DIY course. Coursera has already set my expectations at the appropriate level– $49 for a certified piece of paper is about right, considering it’s “college lite.”

I’m not a huge fan of the amount of money Udacity wants for its certified courses, either, but the coaching is useful. edX just wants the money, no coaching. As mom would say, “Das geht nicht!”

Kindle Paperwhite: Powerful for Japanese Study

 Education, Foreign Languages, Japan, Japanese Language, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Kindle Paperwhite: Powerful for Japanese Study
Jun 052014
 

I finally bit the bullet and bought a second Kindle Paperwhite, this time for my Japanese language library. And I don’t regret it one bit. It has become an incredibly powerful tool for improving my Japanese, because I read more books, faster, with the Paperwhite than I have with any other reading platform.

And I’ve tried a bunch of different ways to read Japanese books.

Note that some of these are perfectly fine for English language books, but I’m judging them on their usefulness as Japanese learning tools.

I have tried:

  • Paper Books and an Electronic Dictionary.
    • Disadvantages:
    • Not portable
    • Slow lookups disrupt reading
    • Tiny text kills my eyes.

 

  • Vertical Text Viewer (for Android).
    • Disadvantages:
    • Lookups are easier, but require an external app, which can’t search online dictionaries if I’m on a plane, so EPWING dictionaries have to be added.
    • Only Aozora Bunko formatted e-books work with it. That means I can access a library of out-of-copyright books, but nothing current. (Not legally, anyway.)

 

  • OCR Manga Viewer (for Android). Takes images, OCRs selected text, and offers a list of possible definitions.
    • Disadvantages:
    • Supported file format is scanned images, so no legal way of getting current titles, unless I scan every book I buy page by page.
    • Constant dragging and selecting finicky text selection tool gets annoying after a while.
    • Even if there are scans, if the scan quality isn’t perfect, the OCR software will have issues, so I’m back at the electronic dictionary stage again.

 

  • Amazon Kindle App (for Android). Updside: You can save a lot on shipping, and you can make text bigger. Long press on a word to look it up. (See disadvantages!)
    • Disadvantages:
    • There is only one dictionary. It’s Japanese-Japanese, and you better like it, because you can’t use any others with the simple long press function. The other option is search in another book, which is slow.
    • Most books are text files, but a small portion are scans. If you wind up with a scan of a book you want to read, you will have no way of looking up words inside the program.
    • The dictionary search function does not de-conjugate verbs, which makes the dictionary useless.

 

  • Google Play Books and Magazines App (for Android). Updside: I couldn’t really find one.
    • Disadvantages:
    • No dictionary I could find.
    • Couldn’t find any current popular Japanese books in the Play store. Couldn’t access the Japanese Play store without a VPN, and even then, Google sent me back to the US store.
    • The only books I could find were all scans of out-of-copyright books, or books I’ve never heard of by publishers I’ve never heard of.

 

Why Paperwhite?

So there you have it. Nothing really works the way I want to, well, except for the Kindle Paperwhite. Kind of. The Paperwhite is a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it’s the best way to read Japanese books on an electronic device.

The Paperwhite has the long press to look up a word feature that the Kindle app has, which it turns out is incredibly useful, because you can add extra dictionaries to the search. So if I can’t find a word in one dictionary, I can select another and another, as many as I have on the device. And I’m not limited to just Japanese-Japanese, I can get Japanese-English, etc. (I recommend getting one of the EDICT-based Japanese-English dictionaries. They’re cheap and good enough.)

Also, the Paperwhite will de-conjugate any verbs it comes across, making the dictionaries useful again.

The e-ink display is incredibly easy on the eyes, even for long-term viewing, and doesn’t guzzle battery, making it a good choice for long flights. Text can be enlarged, too. It looks really good.

It comes with a 単語帳, which records every word you look up, and lets you go over them as flash cards. Not as versatile as Anki, but a hell of a lot less fussing is involved. And it automatically shows you the sentence you were in when you looked up the word! If it only did SRS, it would be perfect. Oh well.

Using it, I’ve been plowing through books at an alarming rate. Alarming in that I’ve never been able to read Japanese this fast before.  I’m being serious here. I’ve tried a whole bunch of different ways of going about it, but this gives me the most enjoyment with the highest overall comprehension. And I can try books that may be a little too hard for me, because I have the dictionaries to fall back on.

Early on, manga looked bad on it. Really bad. But lately, publishers have gotten on board, and while it’s not as good as holding a real 単行本 in your hands, it’s good enough for travel. You can even zoom in on images with a comic reading mode that isn’t too bad. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s getting a lot better. (I wish Amazon would come out with a bigger Paperwhite that did manga at a bigger size for ease of reading.)

I’m saving the biggest plus for last: what I’m saving on shipping and space taken up by books. It’s incredible. Oh, sure, I’m a bibliophile. I am surrounded by books. But I am not against using an e-ink device to read material like fiction. I just don’t care much about that. (Art and music are different. I like those on paper. Same with manga. Give me paper books… unless I’m traveling. Ugh.)

Now, it does not come without drawbacks. And they may be deal-breakers for some of you.

What it won’t help you with.

For starters, setting up an account with Amazon Japan in order to get access to the books takes some work. Amazon US has Japanese books, but the selection is a mess, and all the titles are in romaji, making it a big useless pile of nonsense words to me. I don’t do romaji, and nobody should have to in order to read Japanese books. Also, Amazon US doesn’t have anything I’d even want to read if I could find it. We’re back at the publisher problem. 20th century business practices in the 21st century. Ugh.

Also, if you already have a Kindle Paperwhite and use it with another Amazon, like Amazon US or UK, then go buy another one. The only way you can use one Paperwhite for both accounts is to constantly wipe it and reset it. Yes, I think that’s dumb, too, but there you go.

And don’t try buy a Paperwhite from Amazon Japan. Even if you use a service like Tenso, they will send you a polite warning never to do that again, or else your account will be closed for good. It’s odd, but they don’t care if you buy anything else and have it shipped to the US by a third party, but if you do it with a Kindle, there’ll be hell to pay.

The device itself tends to get slow over time. Hold down the power button and reboot it if it starts acting sluggish. I usually have to do it once a week or two.

Sometime Amazon Japan will have issues with my credit cards, for no apparent reason I can find.

I can’t find a good way to get at my 単語帳 outside of the Paperwhite. That kind of sucks. I’d love to be able to export it to Anki. So much for that.

There are a lot of books not available as Kindle versions yet. A lot of books I really want to read. And some Kindle versions don’t come out until a month or two after the print version. But with patience comes big savings, and it also keeps me from over-buying. I only buy what I intend to read right now.

Finally, the DRM. It’s annoying. But it’s the trade-off I knew I had to make when going Kindle for Japanese. On the upside, as soon as a book is available in the Kindle store in Japan, I can be reading it if I so desire, at a fraction of what I would usually pay for having the real book shipped.

Summing it up.

So my advice to aspiring learners of Japanese is to get a Paperwhite. But first set up a test account with Amazon Japan and make sure you can buy books from them. Maybe try it on another device first, like an Android or iOS device.

Were I Amazon, I would publicize the heck out of this as a learning tool. The Japanese government is desperate to get new workers into the country, and to help teach people Japanese. This device would be a great tool for that, while also giving overseas fans a legit way to buy into “Cool Japan” without hassle. Everybody wins. Really. Everybody. (Well, except for DHL.)

The Cintiq 13HD

 Art, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on The Cintiq 13HD
Apr 212014
 

A few months back, my Intuos graphics tablet died, so I replaced it with an Intuos Pro.

Well, I’m 3+ months into using it, and it’s not really working for me. It may be the change from a smooth surface to the rough surface of the Pro, or the general feel of the stylus, but whenever I use it for longer than 30 minutes, my fingers hurt.

I’m holding the stylus as light as possible without dropping it, and my fingers still hurt.

So I have spent the last week or two looking for an alternative.

I like my Samsung Galaxy Note 8, and I like drawing directly on the screen, so I decided to look along those lines.

I spent a LOT of time looking at the Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2. The Surface is a nice ultra-portable laptop, but I had a few reservations about it, chief being a display that is just too small for me. I think Microsoft did a great job with the Surface, and it’s pretty to look at, but I don’t like the Windows 8 interface, and the extra money to get 8GB of RAM and another $140 for a keyboard are, in the end, deal-breakers for me. I will probably revisit the platform when they come out with a new version, or my VAIO dies.

I also spent a lot of time looking at Yiyinova displays. The 22HD was the only one I was seriously considering, but the VGA connection bugged me. I would have had to put in a second graphics card to run it, and I didn’t want to mess with that. I already run two DVI displays, so there wasn’t any room to hook up a Yiyinova without adding another card. (And it doesn’t do HDMI.)

While I was flailing around, I found that MacMall was having a big sale on Cintiqs. They use an HDMI connector, and I still have one of those left on my graphics card.

To be honest, I wasn’t even considering one, because of the pricing. But the current Cintiq line has some nice specs, and it’s something I’ve always wanted. Even on sale, the new Cintiqs are a bit out of my price range. So I checked MacMall’s refurbished Cintiqs. Bingo! That’s the pricing I’m willing to go with. The refurbs are significantly cheaper, and come with a one-year warranty.

I decided on a 13″ Cintiq because I don’t have room for anything bigger. (Not much, anyway.) Also, the 22HD was $1599. Ouch. The refurbed 13HD was only $799, plus tax and shipping. I could live with that.

When it showed up, the tablet itself was pristine. No scratches, dust, or fingerprints. Nice. The stand and pen case, well, those were dirty, but not damaged. I have a tub of yellow goo called Compu-Clean that works wonders on this kind of stuff. It removed all of the dirt, dust, and other random stuff from the rubbery parts.

I’ve been using the 13HD over the weekend, and I really like it a lot. Setting it up with my dual-monitor system was kind of a pain. My main monitor is 1920 x 1200, and the 13HD is 1920 x 1080, so if I used the Cintiq as a mirrored display with my main monitor, my main monitor would get all messed up. (It changes the resolution to something that looks unpleasant.) I wound up mirroring my second display, a 1920 x 1080 Asus display. The Asus display isn’t terrible, but it’s kind of janky and over-saturated, and I’ve never been able to get the colors to not look weird. As a box that shows video, it’s fine. As something color-accurate… that ship never sailed, and probably never will.

One other minor beef with the 13HD is the stand. It’s cheap, and prone to collapsing if you aren’t really careful with it. So be careful with it. You only get three angles to choose from.

I like the controls on the side, but the controls on the Intuos Pro are better, and it’s a $500-$600 cheaper tablet. Instead of the great circular control of the Intuos, there’s a circular button with four buttons on it, and one in the middle. Meh. It’s okay, but not nearly as flexible. Instead of 8 more buttons (4 above, 4 below), there are only 2 above and 2 below. For the money, I want more buttons.

But these are minor complaints. Using it is a joy. While my Galaxy Note 8.0 has a capable pen and digitizer (also by Wacom), the S-Pen is too small and becomes uncomfortable over time. Also, there’s a distinct lack of really good drawing programs in Android. Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is the only program I can be remotely productive with, and it’s lacking far too many tools. (Gradients, anyone?) In spite of its limitations, I love drawing on my Galaxy Note 8.0. It bring a kind of immediacy I just can’t get from a graphics tablet.

The Cintiq improves on that experience quite a bit.

Using the 13HD with Clip Studio Paint (also known in the US as Manga Studio Pro) is a breeze. I love CSP for designing quick and dirty graphics and forms. It also runs Photoshop CS6 just fine, too. I tweaked the settings for Photoshop to change the controls to suit my workflow better. The only downside– I had to shove both programs in my Asus monitor window. Oh well.

I haven’t had a chance to put Lightroom through its paces yet, but I will soon. I hope this will speed up my photo editing workflow– using a pen on sliders should be faster than mousing over a bunch of sliders. We’ll see.

Apr 022014
 

Juan had a question about how I did the Anki cards for the A+ exam. I started to write a reply, and it turned into a book. So I figured I’d post the reply as a blog post instead.

I created two types of cards for this deck.

Card Type #1: Basic Question/Answer Cards

The first type of card is a basic question/answer card, with a multiple-choice question on the front, and the answer on the back. I used that for all of the practice questions and mock test questions. That was about 60% of my deck.

Filling up the deck was pretty easy that way. I just copy/pasted the data from my PDF books (in Foxit) into a text editor, cleaned it up a little with find/replace, dumped it into a spreadsheet, then saved it as the proper data type to import into Anki. It takes some time, but it’s still a lot faster than typing every question out.

This is why I recommend the O’Reilly bookstore. All of their books come in PDF format (among others), and are DRM-free. DRM is a pain in the butt. It serves no real purpose, other than interfering with my lawful use of the material to study. I can get around the DRM with Greenshot (which takes a screen capture, then OCRs it), so it’s not like it stops anything, it just makes everything less efficient. (And it doesn’t stop real piracy!)

Sadly, Microsoft Press just left the O’Reilly store, so you can no longer get the DRM-free version of their excellent A+ prep books.

For some books, my only choice was using the Kindle Chrome app. You can’t copy/paste because “reasons,” I guess. I used Greenshot to OCR each chunk of data I wanted, and it would dump the OCR-ed text straight into the clipboard. It was generally about 97% accurate, but fixing that last 3% was really annoying.

Then I dumped the questions and answers into a spreadsheet, and added them all to Anki.

I recommend getting good mock test questions. Lots of them. Dump them in after you do the mock tests, so you don’t forget the trickier questions. If you dump them in before, you’ll lose the “I’ve never seen this before!” effect.

Also, add the study questions for things you don’t already know cold. Don’t clutter your deck with useless info you already know. (“The sun is hot,” “Water is wet,” that kind of stuff. If it’s that obvious to you, leave it out.)

Card Type #2: Fill In The Blank (AKA Cloze Deletion)

The second card type I made was a Cloze card type. “Cloze deletion” is a fancy way of saying “Fill in the blank.” You add tags around the data you want to be turned into a “_____” in the question field, and it gets revealed in the answer field as the original text. So if I tag the word “ABC”, in the question card is shows up as “___,” and on the answer card, it shows up as “ABC” again.

Anki uses HTML tags (actually XML) to mark Cloze fields. <c1> for starting the first Cloze field, and </c1> to end the first Cloze field. So it makes it really easy to turn any raw text into a Cloze card without using the editor. Just take your sentence, add the tags, and import it as a Cloze-type card.

If I need to remember, “Standard ABC has a transfer rate of XXX MB/sec,” I would set “ABC” as Cloze field 1, and “XXX” as Cloze field 2. That way, I would get two different question cards.

The formatting would look like this:

Standard <c1>ABC</c1> has a transfer rate of <c2>XXX</c2> MB/sec.

And just that would generate two cards.

One like this:

Front:”Standard ___ has a transfer rate of XXX MB/sec.”
Back: ABC

And another like this:

Front:”Standard ABC has a transfer rate of ___ MB/sec.”
Back: XXX

That forces me to think about the right answer, and try to remember it.

I find it’s best to do it one fact at a time. A card like this:

“Standard ___ has a transfer rate of ___ MB/sec,”

is more confusing than helpful. I could put in any combination of standards and data rates, and be right and wrong at the same time.

For remembering general concepts, and keeping things straight like Windows licensing options, interface data speeds, and graphics card standard resolutions, Cloze Deletion cards are really hard to beat. While I’ll start to remember the multiple choice answers over time, I’m forced to think about the answer for every Cloze card I get, because the answers aren’t pre-chewed for me.

One final trick: if you have a Logitech gaming keyboard with a bunch of programmable G-keys, you can program them to add the Cloze tags (as well as do other things) in the plain text editor of your choice. That saved me a lot of time, too! I had a whole set of G-keys programmed with Cloze tags for up to four facts.

Is all of this tedious? Hell yeah!

But is it effective? OMG yes.

And it’s cheaper than going to one of those schools that charge an arm and a leg to give you the same info you could get yourself.

Dead-tree vs. E-Books

The only way to get the data in quickly from paper books is with a cheap scanner and some good OCR software. There’s a ton of OCR software out there, and some of it is even free. I’ve done scanning and OCR for some of my Japanese test prep. It’s not fun, but it’s doable. It just adds a lot of unnecessary time. (But it’s still faster than typing.)

Alternativeto.net has a good list of OCR software alternatives. Some are even free/open source.

If you have a paper book by one of the O’Reilly publishers, you can register it on their website, and you may be eligible for a $5 e-book upgrade. Not all publishers go with this, but some do. It’s worth it to check it out. That could save you a ton of time.

Otherwise, I’d consider the money on paper books “lost,” and go buy digital editions I can work with more easily. Wrestling books and scanning every page I need is a waste of time I could use studying.

I prefer DRM-free books, but some of the best books are Kindle-only. So I bought whatever I felt was the best for me.

I only bought paper books if they came with a PDF version, or some other electronic version of the book. One of the Network+ books is like that. It uses some weird Adobe secure PDF thing that’s a pain in the butt to install, and even less fun to work with. My copy/paste is limited by DRM, for “reasons.” I can always use Greenshot in a pinch, but I don’t enjoy going that route.

It’s a big long of a reply, but I hope it helps. Any questions, just put them in the comments.

Snowmageddon Round Two? (Random Stuff Post)

 Art, DIY, Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Snowmageddon Round Two? (Random Stuff Post)
Jan 282014
 

Well, we’re all waiting for the snow to start. We’re supposed to get anything from 2 to 6 inches of snow today through tonight, and as I’ve said many times, we don’t do snow well here. I’m staying off the roads today and tonight, so that means no piano class.

Bummer.

If I Can’t Go to the Music School, Bring the Music School to Me!

I’m going to catch up on my Coursera classes: the Write Like Mozart class, and Pat Pattison’s Songwriting class, which I signed up for again last night.

I signed up for his Songwriting class last year, but I didn’t have time to finish it. What I saw, I really liked. He gives a really good insight into how pro songwriters write songs, and how to improve my own songwriting. (Hint: it involves lots of practice, just like anything else.)

I might also watch some Max 4 Live tutorials. That also looks really interesting.

Bitwig Studio

Bitwig Studio is coming out in late March for $399. The part that’s really interesting to me is the ability to run it in Linux. I think that’s a brilliant idea. But from what I’ve heard, there’s no ReWire compatibility yet, so that’s a big minus for me. This is a good preview of Bitwig, and you can find more videos on their channel.

I wouldn’t mind demoing it to see what it’s like, but $400 is a bit steep for me after G.A.S. ate a lot of my money over the holidays.

I probably shouldn’t buy another new instrument until I’ve gotten good at using the ones I already have.

Rewire and Vocaloid Editor

Speaking of ReWire, I finally found a VST that will let me ReWire the Yamaha Vocaloid 3.0 Editor into Live or Cubase. Cool! You can find it here (the site is all in Japanese). Look for this text “V3Sync ReWire Synchronizer Version 1.3.0 をダウンロード” in the middle of the page, click the link, and install like any other VST. Point the Vocaloid 3 editor to the VST, and it should work.

I know you used to be able to ReWire directly from most Vocaloid 2.0 editors. What happened with 3.0? I have no idea.

Piapro Studio is a good alternative now that it’s at version 1.2. Now you can use sound banks from other companies, too, if you register your non-Crypton sound banks at Crypton’s Sonicwire.com website. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will soon.

Monitor Stand Update

The monitor stand is working really well. I installed it about a week ago, after letting it off-gas for a few days. It adds about 4.25 inches to the height of my monitors, so it took a few days to get used to, but I’m used to it now.

Naturally, just as I say that, I noticed a crack in the wood filler on the right side, near my heater vent. That’s what touch-up paints are for.

Slide Duplicating Project

This is a project I’ve been wanting to get back to for a while. I’m waiting on a Leica Screw Mount to Sony E Mount adapter, and then I may be able to make some good progress on it. I’m going to try what someone did here and remove the FD mount from my Canon FL Bellows, then attach it to my NEX with a LSM to E Mount adapter. That should give me enough focal length to get the duplicate slides in full view.

I hope.

Or I can just throw the whole mess on the copy stand. But I’d rather use a slide copier, because I can aim that at Mr. Sun, and get natural daylight for copying the slides. Artificial light always has weird spectra, even light bulbs that say they are “daylight balanced,” only do so in a way that fools your eye. It does not fool the sensor or the software.

Great Support

 Technology  Comments Off on Great Support
Jan 252014
 

I love it when I get great service and support. I love telling stories of, “Hey, this company is really responsive!”

This is one of those stories!

Thursday night, my CPU fan started making a noise I can only describe as “wailing like a banshee,” which is what a bad bearing sounds like.

I emailed support at Arctic Cooling, who made the CPU cooler I use, and in 3 minutes, I had a reply. I just had to give them my street address, and they’d send out a new fan.

The replacement showed up today. Nice. I’ll have to swap out the fan as soon as I can get a chance to pop the computer open.

Also, my extension cable showed up for the Intuos Pro tablet. Fits like a glove. Yay.

More Coursera Fun

 Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on More Coursera Fun
Jan 202014
 

Prof. Donald Hornstein is a fun lecturer to listen to. I highly recommend his new Coursera class on Environmental Law. If you have any interest at all in the environment or in law, take it. (Even for you lawyers out there– it’s a fun refresher.)

I take my CLE every year at the UNC Festival of Legal Learning, and every year, I look forward to Don Hornstein’s lectures. They’re not just entertaining, they’re also fascinating. He takes a subject that at times can be really dry and breathes life into it.

I also signed up for a class called “Write Like Mozart.” It started a few weeks ago, so I’m already behind. I’m going to have to hustle to catch up, but there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. I’d like to learn more about 18th century voice leading!

Is Paddy the Coolest Thing Ever???

I was sitting here, surrounded by my MIDI gear, when I had a thought that other people have already had. “What if I could use this stuff to edit my photos in Lightroom? Wouldn’t it be a heck of a lot faster?”

The answer is yes, so long as Lightroom doesn’t break the plugin you’re using.

Paddy is a program developed as donation-ware, that lets you use just about any MIDI controller to control the sliders in Lightroom to develop photos. If you’ve used Lightroom for any appreciable length of time, you know that fiddling with the mouse to change levels for all of Lightroom’s sliders is finicky business. Sometimes the sliders misbehave, sometimes the mouse misbehaves, either way, it’s tedious.

What Paddy does is take that tedious, repetitive mouse clicking, and if you have an old MIDI mixer with some motorized faders, you can zoom through editing photos in a snap. The faders will automatically go to the positions of the current photo in Lightroom, and you can just mess around with them as you please. I love the idea of this kind of tactile feedback, as well as the idea of mixing MIDI and photo developing.

This is one of those things I need to put on the “Come back to this in a few months” pile and see how the software is progressing.

All-in Ableton, Reaktor, New Graphics Tablet

 Art, Music, Technology  Comments Off on All-in Ableton, Reaktor, New Graphics Tablet
Jan 152014
 

After spending some time getting used to Live, I had a tough decision to make: Standard or Suite? The 20% off sale was going to end soon, and as much as I like the Intro version of Live, it’s not enough for what I want to do. The difference between upgrades wasn’t much. Max 4 Live is part of what pushed me over into getting the Suite. There are other reasons, too.

Downloading everything took 5 hours or so. My Internet connection isn’t the greatest in the world.

Reaktor

A lot of what I was doing while I was downloading/installing Live was learning how to program in Reaktor. There are a lot of really good tutorials out there on building synthesizers in Reaktor. It’s pretty fascinating stuff. I found a really good five part tutorial here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

Once I’m done getting comfortable in Live, I’ll start learning Max, too. That also looks really interesting.

My Poor Dead Graphics Tablet

After 12 years of faithful service, my ancient Wacom Intuos 2 graphics tablet has bit the dust. I replaced it with an Intuos Pro, the medium sized one. I was tempted to get the large, but the medium is about the same size as my old one.

I love the wireless connectivity. That’s really cool. But I read a lot of horror stories about the wonky USB solder connection, so I took out $3 of insurance on eBay, and bought a short USB connector cable that will connect to the troublesome port. I can just tape the cable down to the side of the tablet, and connect the charging cable to the short cable. That way, I won’t put too much stress on that port by plugging/unplugging the USB cable to recharge it.

You can get the small connecting cable here.

I also like the buttons, especially the way you can lock the tablet down to one monitor or another, which is handy for keeping perspectives right. (The tablet to monitor ratio thing. It can get too weird otherwise if you’re using two monitors.) My favorite button is the one that lets me use the control wheel to change brush sizes on the fly. That’s invaluable.

I’m not so fond of the feel of the surface of the Intuos. It feels… weird. I prefer the feel of my old Intuos 2 better. I’ll get used to it.

Monitor Stand is Done!

 DIY, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Monitor Stand is Done!
Jan 142014
 

It only took a month to finish it, but the monitor stand is done. It’s five feet long by one foot wide, with a couple of one by fours supporting it in the middle, and two screwed-together one by fours on each end. It’s sturdy as heck.

Painting it is what held everything up.

It’s been so ridiculously cold here that it’s been too cold to paint. I’ve been using spray paints, too, and they’re even fussier about having temperatures well above freezing.

I started with a simple grey primer, then added two coats of black satin, but it just didn’t do anything for me. It looked very “meh.”

Then I remembered an old woodfinishing project from years gone by. I finished a small 3-legged table with a nice black top, and faux stone legs. The faux stone effect came right out of a spray can.

So I went looking for more of that stuff. It’s been at least ten years, but I figured I could find it somewhere. I did. It was at the last place I checked. It’s a muted Black/White/Grey faux granite look that’s kind of muted. It also needs to have a clearcoat sprayed over it, so it will hold up better with time.

It took me two days to apply the paint, and one more to apply the clearcoat. Now it’s sitting in the garage, off-gassing. I’ll leave it alone for a few days, because I don’t want the house to stink, and I like my brain too much to melt it with the various chemicals in the finishes.

But it looks smashing! The faux-stone spray hides anything I may have screwed up well.

And it’s not made out of cheap MDF that will sag in a year. It’s made out of good old southern pine.

Would it have been cheaper to just buy the stand on Amazon? Well, yeah. It would have been faster, too. But my stand looks really cool, is a custom fit to my desk, and won’t sag. The finish has a rough bumpy stone feel, even. No regrets!

Piano class has also started up again. I’m still terrible at piano. When I get the stand in place, I should be able to practice more.

Also, Push is still fun, although I’ve been using it so much, my fingers are starting to hurt from thwacking the pads so much.

Push or “What Happened to Today?”

 DIY, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Push or “What Happened to Today?”
Jan 102014
 

I went with Ableton Push. I saw countless videos, read a lot of stuff on all kinds of forums, read all the marketing info, and in the end, I decided on Push over Maschine, mainly because 64 > 16. Well, not just that, but the scale mode in Push really excites me.

Maschine looks like something I may get down the road, especially because it’s really good at tweaking Native Instruments’ Komplete programs, and it has a really nice patch browser.

My Push showed up today, so I installed Live, started messing with Push and Live, and subsequently lost track of several hours just messing around with the scale mode in Push using a plain piano patch.

Oh, about Ableton Live: that’s a nice piece of software there. I had a lot of fun messing with it, too. I like how the tutorials are merged in with the software from the get-go. It made me feel like I could make music right from the start, or just perform with it. Everything feels easy.

I’m still trying to decipher everything about Live and Push, and that’s going to take a while, because I have a ton of other things to do, but I’m excited.

Also, my music composition class starts up again tomorrow. I need to start getting back into composer mode, and get rid of the holiday-induced G.A.S.

The monitor stand is progressing, too. I went and touched up some of the areas with wood filler in them, and sanded them down. I’ll start spray painting the whole thing black this weekend. Primer first, then black.

Reason Book and Other Stuff

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Reason Book and Other Stuff
Jan 052014
 

I’m starting to finally feel better. Well, except for the coughing that comes out of nowhere. I’ve heard that this cold takes a while to get over. Yay.

My Reason book showed up today. It’s huge! The type is kind of small, but the way it’s laid out, if it was published traditionally, this would easily go over 1000 pages. As it is, it comes in at around 356 pages or so. Lulu did a great job binding it, and color really makes a big difference– there are a lot of illustrations, and each one is sharp.

I haven’t had time to read the whole book yet (I just got it!), but I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with it.

Push or Maschine? Argh!

I’m still looking a lot at Push and Maschine as well. I’m leaning heavily towards getting one of them to speed things up. Since I’m not only using Reason, but also VSTs, I’m looking for something that will improve my workflow. I’m also looking for something that will help me come up with wild and crazy ideas.

Maschine has some nice features. It integrates really well with Komplete, and has an awesome preview method. But it looks like it’s geared more towards sampling, and I’m not really into that. I’m more into straight composition and using instruments, in which case Push looks much more attractive.

Push supports Live and Live Suite instruments natively, but Komplete and other third party VSTs don’t have that kind of deep support. I understand why. There’s also a third party solution that lets Push owners tweak the heck out of it so it’ll work better with third party VSTs and other DAWs as well.

I’m very glad that Ableton didn’t turn Push into a black box you can’t tinker with. I think it’s good that they welcome third party software. If anything, it should help sales.

I’d say the only bit I’m not looking forward to is configuring everything. Whoa. I sound like I’ve bought it already. I’m still thinking. It’s a lot of money.

Push Off to Asheville

 DIY, Music, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Push Off to Asheville
Dec 192013
 

I’m heading to Asheville to help the folks out for Christmas, so I’m gone for a while. I may or may not update, depending on whether anything interesting happens or not.

The monitor stand isn’t done yet. I’ll finish it when I get back. It needs more wood filler in a couple of places, and I need the weather to cooperate so I can lay down a finish.

Ableton Push

Ableton has a big sale on all of its software going on. I’m really interested in Push, though. I’ve been watching a lot of videos to see how it works, and how well it works, and it looks damn sexy. Of course, Maschine also looks sexy, but Push looks like it’s more up my alley, because it does scales. Lots and lots of scales.

I’ll need to do more research, though. Getting into Push is another $600, and if I decide to move to Ableton as a DAW, that’d be more money out for upgrading to Standard or Suite. We’ll see.

You Komplete Me

 Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on You Komplete Me
Dec 052013
 

Komplete Ultimate showed up today. It comes on a shiny little hard drive, and the install takes about an hour or two. I installed the full version of Kontakt first, then registered it, then installed the Komplete Ultimate cross-grade, and everything went just fine. I’m excited to get more into it. All of it. There’s a lot of it!

I’ve been looking at some of the other deals out there. One VST I picked up was SynthMaster, because it sounds great, and it was on sale for $49. I really like the sounds it makes. If you pay more, you can get more patches. In the case of SynthMaster, some great sound designers have made some really amazing patches, so I picked up a few to go with it.

I also picked up Chromaphone by AAS, because I’ve been looking for a good percussion modeling VST. I realize that Chromaphone does more than that, and, in fact, it does a lot of really wild and interesting things, too.

The last thing I picked up was a second monitor, because photo editing with just one monitor drives me nuts. Also, working in Reason with only one monitor also drives me nuts. I like having the sequencer/mixer in one window, and the rack in another. I found a Dell monitor on sale at Amazon, but it showed up with a bunch of dead pixels, so I sent it back. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get another one, so I had to spend a little more to get an Asus monitor.

Now that I have two monitors, though, I realize that I need to do something about my desk.

It’s always something, huh?

Oh, my new dryer showed up yesterday. It dries clothes beautifully, and it was cheap. Did mention it was cheap?

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, N1 Coming

 Food, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, N1 Coming
Nov 292013
 

Thanksgiving was nice. We had our usual fried chicken, because turkey is boring, and takes too long to make. I made some killer fried chicken this year.

We did NOT go to any stores. It’s Thanksgiving– it’s not a day to shop. That’s what Friday is for.

Deals!

I’m also looking out for good deals. Ever since the Propellerhead User Forum got shut down, I’ve been relying on Rekkerd’s Deals page a lot for info as to what’s going to be on sale this weekend and beyond.

The coolest thing I found was Native Instruments‘ massive software sale. Full versions of some of their software is half-off, everything except Komplete.

But it’s not what you think.

If you get a cross-grade from the full version of an NI product, you can get a big discount on Komplete, and Komplete Ultimate. The way it worked for me was that I bought Kontakt for half off ($199), then got the Komplete Ultimate cross-grade for only $374. Considering it retails for $1099, and usually goes for around $999, that’s a great deal.

I’m looking forward to playing with that. A lot.

I also scored a great deal on a new dryer. My dryer has been making scary noises and giving off weird smells, so rather than have the house burn down, I bought a cheap dryer. Really, all I need in a dryer is a low setting and a timer.

So long as it fits, dries my clothes, and doesn’t burn the house down, I’m happy.

N1 Coming

Tomorrow I leave for Washington to take the JLPT N1 again. I’m studying as much as I can.

Study-wise, I put a couple of N1 grammar books into Anki. It’s not enough, but it’s all I had time to do given the time I had. Studying for the A+ (and getting it) took up a lot of time.

Music Composition // Bargain Hunting

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Music Composition // Bargain Hunting
Nov 232013
 

My music composition class is going pretty well. I finished one piece, and just finished another. They’re just little musical doodles, but I like them. I’ve been using MuseScore a lot to do the writing, then I’ll output it as a MIDI, then import the MIDI file into Reason.

MuseScore’s playback is a fine, but the sound quality isn’t as good as I can get in Reason. Then again, MuseScore is free.

MuseScore is pretty solid, and it’s free. I like free.

I tried using the composition software in Cubase 7.0, but it wasn’t as flexible or easy to use as MuseScore. I might try again later on, because it would be pretty cool to have composition and production software all in one.

Bargain Hunting

I’m starting to check out what’s going to be on sale next weekend. Black Friday and on is a good time of the year to get deals on all kinds of music-related software and hardware. My big hope is that Native Instruments’ Komplete Ultimate is on some kind of sale, because I’m eager to branch out into some new sounds. I’m also really interested in Kontakt as a sampler.

Also, Nine Volt Audio is going out of business, so they’re selling all of their software in one big bundle for $199. (Except their Taiko v.2. Dang.) The bundle has some really good sounds in it. The sale ends in early January, and then that’s it. No more.

I picked up the bundle and downloaded it. Getting the downloader to run was a little troublesome, because my anti-virus kept wanting to call it a virus. (It wasn’t.) But after that, it was simply a matter of entering codes and downloading. Some of the libraries are Kontakt-only, so if I can get Kontakt, I’ll have some nice third-party sounds to play with.

Lots of Yellow and Red…Made it to Boston Anyway.

 Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Lots of Yellow and Red…Made it to Boston Anyway.
Nov 072013
 

I slept in a bit today, because I figured I would leave around noon and just toodle on up to Boston. I didn’t have to be there at any particular time, so I took it easy this morning and lounged a bit.

Okay, not really. I lounged for about 20 minutes or so, then got cracking.

Google Maps said it would take 5:45 to get to Boston. I laughed. I’ve made this drive before, and no way will it only take 5:45.

The Quest For Gas

I wanted to gas up at the nearest Costco, because in NC, they’re the cheapest places to get gas.

“Okay Google, where’s the nearest Costco?” 10 minutes later I got there… and they didn’t sell gas. Doh.

“Okay Google, where’s the nearest truck stop?” 10 minutes later, a closed onramp and a long detour later, they were out of gas. *Facepalm.*

“Okay Google, where’s the nearest gas station?” 10 minutes later and I finally found an establishment willing to sell me gas!

Yeah, it was that kind of day.

The George Washington Bridge is Never Green

I was listening to a lot of traffic info on the way up the NJ Turnpike, because I know how NY/NJ traffic is–it changes from minute to minute from smooth as butter to clogged up and not moving at all. “The GWB is green, the GWB is green,” I kept hearing that, so I decided to take the GWB across the Hudson… and hit a 30-minute delay right at the toll booth. Yay.

The whole time I’m driving, I’m also fighting the new version of Google Maps. The old version would let me seek alternate routes. The new version does not. I don’t like this improvement at all, but since I have a new phone, I can’t roll it back.

The phone keeps telling me to take weird routes I’m not used to taking, and I can’t tell if I’m actually going to save any time at all. It’s really frustrating and annoying. I don’t want to take the Merrit across Connecticut. It looks like a big red line of non-moving traffic from the map and from behind the wheel.

So I moved back to I-95. It didn’t move much, either, and Maps was still trying to get me to go back the Merrit. Ugh.

Before I left I-95, I pulled off at a service area to get gas and some food.

I finally got off on to I-91 and things were moving again, but this jaunt across Connecticut probably took 3.5 hours, when it should take two, max. The traffic was horrible on all of the east-west roads.

I got to the Mass Pike, and everything was smooth again, but the drivers were all crazy. And just as I’m pulling into Boston, the GPS drops, and stops giving me directions, and I wind up who-knows-where. When I got out from underground, it kicked in again and figured it out, but it was annoying to have to guess what it wanted to do next.

So my 5:45 trip took about 8 hours.

The hotel is nice. Expensive, but nice.

Nexus 5 Arrived

 Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Nexus 5 Arrived
Nov 042013
 

My N5 was waiting for me when I got back from Greensboro today.

First impressions: I love the look of Kit Kat. The phone feels good in my hand, too, although I think it’s going to become a grease magnet. I’m not a huge fan of the sharp edges, though. They’re a little sharper than I like, but they help me keep a grip on the phone.

The OS has a lot of changes under the hood, and some cosmetic ones. Google Now is on the left sweep from the main screen. I’m not sure I like that yet. Also, there are only 2 screens to put icons/folders on. I’m not sure how I feel about that, either. I’m used to 4-5.

Stock Android is my favorite version of Android. Very little “stuff” gets in my way.

Compared to the GNex, there is no comparison. It looks better, works faster, and takes better photos.

There’s an auto HDR mode, but it’s slow. Slooooow.

I had to go by T-Mobile to get a new SIM card for it. It uses the smaller SIM cards. I’m wonder if that’s going to be an obstacle for traveling or not. I’ll still keep my orange cave-phone with me, just in case. The T-Mobile folks were nice about making a quick swap of SIMs.

I need to start packing, so I’ll use it more on the road.

Kindle // Nexus 5

 Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Kindle // Nexus 5
Nov 012013
 

I finally bit the bullet and got a Kindle Paperwhite a few days ago. The first one showed up with a defective screen, and Amazon overnighted a new one out right away.

The display is really easy on the eyes. It’s the sort of thing you can just sit and read for hours. I read a lot on my tablet, but the Kindle makes it so I can read for hours and not feel any appreciable eye strain.

I’m looking forward to taking it with me to Boston and New York.

Oh, a New Nexus!

The Nexus 5 was announced earlier today, and I managed to order a 32GB model before they all disappeared. It was a fluke that I caught the announcement just as it was happening, or else I wouldn’t have gotten an order in on time.

My Galaxy Nexus has been a good phone for the last year and a half, but sadly, it can’t keep up anymore. It won’t be getting any more OS updates, and I’m tired of only hitting the 16GB storage wall. (It’s really less than that with the system overhead.) Some people virtuously declare that they don’t even need 8GB. I’m happy for them. I’m not one of them. I have a lot of music, e-books, and other “stuff” I carry on my phones all the time. I need that extra space, and I wind up using it all.

I hope the N5 arrives before I have to leave for Boston. I want to really put it through its paces on a long road trip.

On the other hand, it would suck if I had to leave it on the front porch for a week while I’m gone…. I better call somebody to have them check my porch in case it doesn’t get here in time.

Oct 212013
 

Man, that was nerve-wracking.

Part two of the A+ exam was trickier than I thought it would be. I know a lot of this stuff just because I’ve been messing around with computers all my life. I’ve built every computer I’ve used for the last 20 years. (Except for laptops.)

But if you ask me about cables, and numbers, and standards, my eyes (until now) would glaze over.

Now I know which version of Windows XP you really need. Or Vista. Or 7. (Yeah, that part was kind of weird, if you ask me.)

I also have a bunch of handy new skills in basic network troubleshooting, and dealing with Windows’ general random bugginess.

Finally, I have a new way of approaching problems that’s really useful.

I highly recommend getting as many A+ books as you can, and dumping them into Anki, then dump the questions into Anki, and review the bejeezus out of them.

Now on to N1 prep, and Career Forum prep.

A+ Part One: Pass!

 Education, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on A+ Part One: Pass!
Oct 112013
 

So far, so good. I passed the first A+ test. It was harder than I thought it would be. I’m glad I had 3 different prep books to drill questions out of. I must have taken about 10 or so practice tests. I nailed this one.

Now my sister and nephew are coming tonight for the weekend, so I need to get the house ready. And I’ll be taking part two of the A+ on the 21st.

And of course there’s still the N1 looming over me. I’m not sure what to do about that. Panic? Nah. I don’t have time for that.

Glass in Durham

 Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Glass in Durham
Oct 052013
 

Google brought its Glass wearable device to Durham today, and it was a madhouse. A controlled madhouse, but the lines were huuuuge.

Kudos to the Google staff, who managed the hordes of people who showed up. I only had to wait in line for about 30 minutes, and I came a little late. (Like at 11 am.)

Everyone was excited. We got little booklets that explained how to use Glass before we even went in. And they had waiters bringing us water so nobody got dehydrated.

Once I got in, I had to sign a release, then we went off into our little orientation groups. Then we got to try it on for about 10 minutes.

It’s a really neat device. My unit didn’t connect to WiFi, though, so it didn’t do much. But I can see how having it could be really useful for anyone who shoots video. I’m not as sold on the serious photography aspect, but I’m a camera snob. If the lens is too small, I have problems taking it seriously.

But I bet you could make some really interesting videos with this.

The heads-up display isn’t really a HUD. It’s more like a little TV that hovers just off and to the right. It’s not quite as earth-shattering as I was hoping for.

In my vision of a vision enhancing technology, it would be a real HUD that would give you an overlay layer on reality, like drawing big fat arrows on the pavement as you’re driving along to tell you where to turn, instead of making you look at a little monitor and look away from the road. It would kind of be like a world where your computer is a really good, really fast graffiti artist.

But I think that kind of tech is about 4-5 years away at least.

After we played with it, we could go upstairs and get food and beverages for free, and a poster. I skipped the food, grabbed a poster, and left. I had music composition later on, and I needed to get ready for it.

That’s been a fun class so far. Lots to learn, but a nice environment. I’ve already written one piece, too. It’s not great, but it’s a start.

I’m also cramming A+ material into my brain as fast as I can. I have my first A+ test on the 11th. Gotta study.

Miku In The House // New Computer // Glass Coming to the RTP

 Japan, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Miku In The House // New Computer // Glass Coming to the RTP
Oct 022013
 

So the Vocaloid software showed up yesterday from Tenso. It came in great shape. The install went smoothly, and everything runs fine.

Today I upgraded to Cubase 7.0 full version to get more flexibility with making music. Artist is fine, but the upgrade was cheap.

New Computer Up and Running!

Oh yeah, the software was all installed on my new desktop, which gets a 7.8/7.9 on the Windows performance index. That makes me happy, but also wishing I could get that last 0.1 out of it.

The SSD makes booting a dream. I go from BIOS screen to login in about 10 seconds. Maybe 15.

I tried to create a custom install for Win 7 using a streamlined set of drivers, apps, etc., but I found I was spending more time on getting a perfect slipstream than it would have taken me to just install everything.

I headed to the Black Viper’s website for info on de-cluttering my registry and services, and I also followed the advice in this post about getting the most out of my SSD in Win 7.

The only major pain in the butt was deregistering a lot of my software and uninstalling it from the old system. I wish there was an easier way to handle licensing. The Cubase USB dongle is useful, but if you lose it, you’re kind of screwed. I like what Adobe does with Lightroom: they trust the users not to abuse the number of licenses. Besides, it’s not like you can run more than one instance at a time, anyway.

I really like the new Vocaloid de-authorizing tool from Yamaha. That worked out really well. Uninstalling/reinstalling was a snap.

Glass!

There’s going to be a Google Glass event in Durham this Saturday, too. I RSVP’ed ASAP. I want to see Glass, and see if it’s going to be a game-changer or not. It’ll probably be a zoo there.

Getting Stuff Done Music

 Japan, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Getting Stuff Done Music
Sep 272013
 

Who hasn’t seen the Lifehacker article about coffee shop background noise being good for productivity yet? Just about everyone has, or so it seems, anyway.

In that vein, I have been looking for some background noise to have going so that I would stay awake and productive without having to drink 8 cups of coffee.

I found a website called SoundDrown where you can listen to a recorded coffee shop loop over and over. It was okay, but not quite interesting enough for me.

I’m still looking for something suitably interesting. For now, I’m going to stick with Music For Programming, but I’ve listened to their mixes so many times I’ve lost count. They are awesome “Getting Stuff Done” mixes, though.

If I fire up International Departures, I’ll just stop working all together.

Miku’s Coming…

I got notified by Tenso yesterday that my Vocaloid 3 bundle has shown up at their offices. Great.

I had to provide proof of my US address, and that turned out to be a slight pain in the neck, because I forgot that my passport doesn’t have my address on it. That’s what I get for doing this stuff at 6 a.m. with no coffee in me yet.

I heard back from them at around midnight telling me that I needed to send something better, and I sent them a scan of my driver’s license. I just heard back this morning that everything is A-OK, so I’m looking forward to getting my stuff from them sometime next week.

The fees from Tenso are surprisingly low. The total cost of everything is 1990 yen, and that’s pretty cheap for getting something express mailed from Japan. That includes about 980 yen in handling fees, but to be fair, if I asked a friend to send stuff on for me, I would buy that friend a beer, anyway, and I doubt that that friend could get such a good deal on shipping.

If the package arrives in good shape, I’ll probably start using them more often, because Amazon is crazy expensive for shipping. Also, I can buy used books if I have them shipped inside Japan and save more money that way.

Building a New Computer

Finally, my old computer is dying a horrible, slow death from overheating too much. I keep getting BSODs due to overheating, and I have finally reached the “Screw it” point where I picked out some parts for a new rig. This time I’m going for an SSD main hard drive to run Win7 and all of my programs from, an Intel i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM (for now), and a nice white Corsair case. For the mobo, I’m going with one of the ASUS TUF motherboards, to see how it does with dust, and an Arctic CPU cooler.

My old case was a ThermalTake LanParty, and as a mATX form factor case, it was great for small gaming rigs that could be really portable. But as a small form factor case, taking it apart and putting it back together was murder on my fingers. Also, graphics cards, HDDs, and PSUs all had to fit together like a puzzle, and the cabling would always get in the way.

And of course having all the parts on top of each other killed the airflow and heat dissipation. I’m kind of surprised it lasted as long as it did.

I’ll have to put it all together this weekend and get it up and running.

Miku 3.0 Bundle

 Japan, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Miku 3.0 Bundle
Sep 192013
 

Crypton Future Media, who makes the popular Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, announced an English version earlier this year, and also announced a bundle of the English version with new versions of the older voice banks for an upgrade price for those who own previous versions.

Since I own the older voice banks, I was intrigued. I haven’t given up on my grammar music project yet, even if it is on the shelf for now.

The deal is that if you owned and registered both previous editions, you could get the bundle for ~$150 US.

The bundle comes with a special edition of PreSonus’ Studio One DAW, so it gets a new user in the door of using a DAW. It also comes with Crypton’s new VST, Piapro Studio, that will handle its Vocaloid voice banks inside of any DAW that can use VSTs.

The only downside to Piapro Studio is that for now it only handles Crypton’s voice banks, and that’s minor. You could always create a track with Miku or any other Crypton voice bank, then output it in VSQX format to the Yamaha editor, then change the voice to the voice bank you need to use, and export it out as a stem.

I wanted to get the Yamaha Vocaloid VST plugin for Cubase, but this makes things easier, and saves me another $100 or so. It also comes with some extra VST plugins.

All in all, it’s a great deal, and for beginners, it’s great starter package.

Getting It…

There’s a catch of sorts. You have to have a Japanese address to get the upgrade bundle at this price.

To be fair, they have a US distributor, and that’s where a this restriction comes from. But the US distributor isn’t selling the bundle at this time. I don’t know when they’re going to sell it. Right now, the cost of the English bank from the US company is as much as the cost of the whole bundle from Crypton.

After some talking with customer support, I got myself a Japanese address at Tenso, who will gladly ship it for me. I set up an account with them, and voila! I have an address in Japan now.

There is another caveat: I won’t get support from the US distributor. I’ll have to get support from Japan. I am totally okay with that, because the Japanese customer support has been great.

Now I just have to wait for the software to be released on the 26th or so, and I’ll get it a few days later. Can’t wait.

Anki Assault / Piano Practice

 Education, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Anki Assault / Piano Practice
Sep 102013
 

In order to get ready for both the N1 and the A+ exams, I’m going all out on Anki for the next few weeks. I’ve just finished setting up a bunch of workbook practice sheets for Anki, thanks to e.Typist. It lets me OCR stuff and get it into Anki relatively painlessly.

For A+ material, if the book I bought is in PDF format, it’s easy to just copy/paste the text into Anki. But if it’s a Kindle book, then I have to use something like Greenshot, which take a photo of the page, OCRs it, and adds it to the clipboard. Then I just have to paste it into Anki.

Really, it would be a lot easier if these publishers just gave us text files. I paid for the book. It’s not like I’m going to give away the contents. I just want to turn it into flashcards I can use.

Also, I finally upgraded to Anki 2.0. I’ve been putting that off forever, but it’s finally time to bite the bullet. The transition took a couple of days to get ironed out completely, but now I don’t even notice the differences. The differences are there, and the workflow is pretty different, but things I used to complain about don’t seem like such a big deal to me anymore. As long as it’s fast, that’s all I care about.

Oh, Piano Class started tonight. That was a lot of fun. The Piano Lit class afterwards was interesting, too. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to piano music. My background is in marching bands, concert bands, and jazz bands. So I don’t know much about classical piano music. But it’s interesting.

Music School

 Education, Music, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Music School
Sep 032013
 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is starting something new this fall, a Community Music School for people like me who live nearby and want to polish our musical skills in a relaxed setting. It sounds really interesting to me, because as I’ve said before, I need to work on my music composition skills. I also need to work on my piano/keyboarding skills, because that’s the fastest way to enter music into my DAW of choice, Reason.

I spoke with the teachers at an event on Sunday, August 25th, and they both seemed like really nice people who were not only passionate about what they do, but highly experienced. So signing up was a no-brainer for me.

Composition starts this Saturday, Group Piano starts next Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it.

Also, I’m starting to go into full gear mode for the N1, which is coming up in less than three months. (OMG!) I’m also looking at getting my A+ certification, because it’s an easy way to show people I know what I’m doing when it comes to computers. I may get Network+ and Security+ later on, but for now A+ will be plenty.

The only thing I’m worried about is cramming for A+ will mess up my N1 prep. But I want to have the A+ certification before I go to Boston again. (Yeah, I’m going again.)

This fall is going to be crazy.

Enter Samsung

 Technology  Comments Off on Enter Samsung
Aug 152013
 

My old Motorola Xoom tablet has been slowly dying on my lately. It has been running slower and slower. Part of the reason, I think, is because Google/Motorola stopped supporting development of the Android OS for it. So it doesn’t get updates anymore, which means it’s stuck on 4.1.

Also, the hardware is old, so programs that have become more and more greedy when it comes to CPU and memory are running out of room to work.

It doesn’t help that it weighs a ton, and becomes uncomfortable to use after a few hours.

I saw a sale on the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 pen tablet the other day, and finally decided to buy one. I have a few good reasons for it.

First, it supports microSD cards up to 64GB. I have a lot of e-books and MP3 files, and I want to be able to fill that up. The tablet only comes in 16GB models, which I find somewhat annoying, but less annoying if there’s an microSD card slot.

Second, it has a Wacom pressure sensitive stylus, with that bit cooked into one of the layers of the OS. I like Wacom products a lot, so I see this as a definite plus. If I can find a good drawing program, I’ll be set.

I’ve had it for a couple of days now, and I like the tablet overall. The display is crisp, colors are good, and sound is good enough. (I use headphones anyway.)

Yes, it’s plasticky, but I don’t care. Compared to the Xoom, it feels feather-light. If plastic makes it lighter, then by all means, make it all plastic. It’s just as strong as anything else.

My only beef is with all of the “Software I don’t want or need” that Samsung insists on dumping on the tablet. I don’t need a Samsung version of every Google program I already use. What’s worse is that I can’t uninstall the Samsung software. Samsung makes great hardware, but I like the Google software.

Let me run what I want. It’s like buying a laptop full of crapware. I wind up formatting the hard drive and doing a clean install anyway.

I would love to put Cyanogen on this, but then I’m afraid I’d lose some of the pen pressure support, and it may be just as much or more of a hassle than keeping the software I won’t use, anyway.

Fahrenheit 451 or What Do I Do With These Things You Call “Books?”

 Education, Technology  Comments Off on Fahrenheit 451 or What Do I Do With These Things You Call “Books?”
Jul 312013
 

Lately I have been getting rid of books I don’t need. So far, I have donated about 8 boxes full to the local thrift shop. I set aside 2 boxes more for my friend’s son, who likes science fiction books.

My main targets for removal are old law books, old computer books, and out-of-copyright literary works. The law/computer books just aren’t current anymore, so other than as decorations or ballast, they don’t have much value. I’m hoping maybe decorators can use the law books, or someone might want the computer books for ballast.

The literary works I’m trying to give to people who can use them, but even that is difficult. With Project Gutenberg, I can download Mark Twain’s books whenever I feel like it, so having a paper copy doesn’t make any sense. But I know someone out there might want one. Someone like my mom, who looks at computers the same way you or I might look at a live snake.

I like books. They’re comforting. But I have too many, so the ones that don’t make the cut are going out the door.

O’Reilly has a good program going on. Register your O’Reilly books with the site, and you can get DRM-free e-book versions for $5 each. I spent a good two hours registering books, and I’ll probably start buying the e-book versions soon. I’ll probably get rid of some of the older paper copies either way. They just take up too much space.

Progress Report

 Art, Japanese Language, Music, News, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Progress Report
Jul 252013
 

So I start a lot of projects on this blog, and some get finished, some don’t. I use David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach to constantly examine what I want to do vs. what I can do. GTD is a lifesaver in that regard. It helps keep me focused when sometimes it feels like I’m being torn apart by ducks.

So here are some short updates on projects I’ve been wanting to work on/finish.

The Grammar Songs

I discovered that in order to make it work, I need to improve both my Japanese and my music production skills. I studied music from 4th grade all the way through college, so I know a lot about performing music, but I don’t know as much as I should about composing and producing it, which are two entirely different skill sets.

I’ve been using Coursera to work on the production side, and now I need to work more on the composition side. And when it comes to writing lyrics, that’s the result of daily writing exercises.

My Japanese is pretty good, but it’s not quite at that level yet, so I’m working on it. Same goes for melodies. I’m looking for a way to get more music theory under my belt.

Japanese Studies

Those are going pretty well. JOI makes it easy to load up on classes for grammar, conversation, and vocabulary when I need to, and they meet my level, which is a godsend. Being an advanced student in a room full of beginners can be helpful sometimes, but it’s hard to make progress that way. So I’m glad JOI has classes that meet my needs. That’s going well so far.

Also, because of work, I work with Japanese people on a pretty regular basis. The only downside is that since we’re in the US, we mostly speak English and follow US business customs. Not all the time, but a lot of it. Those times when I need to slip into Japanese Mode it comes in really handy.

3D and 2D Art

Well… that had to get put on the “I’ll do it after the JLPT” pile. There’s just too much going on right now, and too many projects require my attention, so I find it’s best to whittle it down to what I can handle. I still want to get into it, but I need to find the right time/place to do it.

I sketch whenever I can. I’m not very good at it, but it’s relaxing, and it’s fun. It also helps me with my photography, and my eye for how I want to compose photos.

Where ARE the Photos?

That’s another thing that’s being put on the shelf for now. I have a giant pile of photos to edit, and just no time to do it. Editing requires big chunks of time for me, and unless I’m getting paid to do it, I just do it when I can. I’m going through the older stuff and gradually adding it, though. I don’t know of a good way to bump old posts up to the top of the site just because they have new material. Maybe I’ll create a new tag?

Calligraphy/Shodo

Well, ever since my class in Raleigh ended, I’ve been going to my usual calligraphy classes. Before the classes in Raleigh ended, though, I spent some time studying Edo-moji, and that was a lot of fun. Now I’m trying to decide what to do next in calligraphy/shodo.

Other Site Stuff

I recently moved the site over to Suffusion, and I like it as far as CMS/frameworks go. I can’t really call it a template, because it’s more like a framework you have to set up and tweak yourself to get it to really sing. My current design is a little Spartan, but I’m from the Jakob Nielsen school of web design. It needs to be easy to read, and accessible first above everything.

Learning Lightroom 5 with George

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Learning Lightroom 5 with George
Jul 182013
 

I’m getting the hang of Lightroom 5 now thanks to George Jardine’s excellent new video series on mastering Lightroom. It’s really worth checking out if you want to get the most out of your photos, or if you’re like me, and stare at a so-so photo for 10 minutes, trying to figure out how to tease out the little bits that will make it better.

Sometimes a photo just isn’t salvageable, and that’s a shame. But George’s videos bring more photos into range of “fixable” for me.

One of the tools he really focuses on is the tone curve, more so than the other exposure controls in Lightroom 5. The nice thing about the Tone Curve is that it will “unbunch” bunched-up tones, bringing out the contrast. It does so without smushing up other tones as much as the sliders do. At least that’s my experience so far. I need more practice with the tone curve to make it work really well, though.

I picked up his Library videos a while back, and those were really useful, too. I have all of my photos cataloged and stored in folders where I can find everything fairly quickly, all on a small portable USB-3 hard drive I move from computer to computer. That way I don’t have to worry about messing up my catalog file. I just back that up to a removable HDD on a regular basis.

I recommend all of his Lightroom videos, they’re worth the money and very informative.

The money you’ll save on never buying presets again will more than cover the cost. Really, why would anyone use presets? No two photos are alike, so why would you treat all of your photos as if they’re all the same? I don’t understand the thinking.

My main problem now is plowing through the 10,000+ photos in my library backlog. I love to shoot photos, but edit them? Not so much. Picking just a few is always so agonizing. I love them all, even the really bad ones.

Grabbing the N1 Bull by the Horns

 Education, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Grabbing the N1 Bull by the Horns
May 072013
 

Well, it’s May, and that means it’s time to start getting ready for the N1 again. This time, I’m going to get more serious about it than last time, because I have some pockets of free time here and there to work on it.

My calligraphy class, which was taught in Japanese, is now over for good, so I have one less way to speak/learn. I had a lot of fun there, even though it was a one-hour drive each way for a one-hour class (well, it usually ran a bit over, but I really enjoyed it!)

That class, plus my twice-weekly business Japanese sessions have helped me keep my conversational skills going, but it’s hard for me to keep my grammar and vocabulary knowledge highly polished without doing some sort of language classes that focus on it.

Going over some of my notes from Yamasa really shows how much rust can build up in unseen areas. I notice that there are some grammar phrases I should be using, but I just never use in daily conversation, so I need to focus on those a bit more.

So this week, I’m going to try out the Japanese Online Institute. It’s an online speech + chat + whiteboard-based way to learn Japanese in either small groups or privately. The first 3 lessons are only $9, so I’m game to try. After that, group lessons range in price from 500 yen (if you buy 180 lessons) to 900 yen (if you buy 5). The dollar/yen pricing is a bit off, probably due to the plummeting yen.

If I like the classes, then I’ll probably pony up a decent chunk of cash to get some lessons at a discount. I want pummel the N1 this year, so I don’t have to mess with it anymore.

They have a nice variety of classes, so it looks promising.

Done with Intro to Music Production

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Done with Intro to Music Production
Apr 272013
 

That was fun.

I just finished up the Berklee Intro to Music Production class on Coursera. I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun doing it. I would love to be able to point you to my insanely popular tracks that are burning up all of the interwebs, but I’m still a scrub in that respect. The only way to get good at most things in life is to practice.

My only problem is that I keep coming across new and interesting things to do. Ahh! I need another 10 hours in the day. Someone get on that for me.

3D and 2D Resources for Blender, Metasequoia, Inkscape, and Sketchbook

 Art, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on 3D and 2D Resources for Blender, Metasequoia, Inkscape, and Sketchbook
Mar 122013
 

As I’ve been messing around with Metasequoia more and more, I realize that DeviantArt tutorials, while useful, will only get me so far. There are some really great tutorials out there, but it takes time to find the ones that apply to what I need to know, or the things I don’t know I need to know.

Things like how important it is to have a good set of references before I even start 3D modeling. It’s the sort of thing I knew, but didn’t really grab it until I had a few consecutive failures.

So I decided to double-skill-up (or maybe even triple/quadruple), by getting some books on 3D character creation in Metasequoia and Blender in Japanese.

I wound up buying all three books in the 3DCG日和 (3DCG biyori) series, as well as a book called 3D Character Animation Manual (it’s also in Japanese.)

3DCG日和

Volume 1 of 3DCG日和 covers the basics. And I mean it. It goes through everything you need to know to get up and running with Metasequoia, and explains why you need to drop the $45 on licensing it. (Plugins like Keynote don’t work without it, and you can’t save in other formats!) The tutorials are pretty easy to follow if you speak N2 level Japanese, or can handle N3 if you don’t mind looking up some stuff.

If you stick it out, you’ll make 5 or so models of varying types, from the dead-simple-easy dice-head guy to a big bad demon-type character. The exercises ramp up in levels of difficulty. It also covers UVs as well. The book covers low-polygon to mid-level polygon count figures.

There’s also some info on designing characters in Paint Tool SAI, a program I don’t have much experience with.

All of the illustrations are in color, so it’s easy to follow. One downside, it’s a 2009 book, so it covers an older version of Metasequoia, but I haven’t really run into any problems with it.

Volume 2 … I haven’t worked with yet. All color illustrations, though, and it takes you through building a model, adding clothes and bones, and animating it. It came out in 2010, so it should have some updated info on the first book. Also, make sure to check the publisher’s website for errata in volume 2.

Volume 3: To be honest I haven’t worked with it yet either, but after spending an hour reading it, it looks promising. It’s devoted to building 3D characters in Blender, which is a powerful (and at times frustrating for me) program. I’m looking forward to improving my Blender skills.

You learn by creating two characters: one low-poly, and one high-poly. It covers skinning and boning and animating as well. It came out in 2012, and covers Blender 2.6. (The current version of Blender is 2.66, so it’s pretty close.)

None of the 3DCG日和 books comes with a CD/DVD, for which I am grateful, to be honest. I’m tired of keeping track of all the coasters I get with books these days. You can download everything you need from the websites in the books. All three books are in full color, and for computer books, aren’t all that expensive: around 2500 yen a piece. That’s about $27-28 per book, plus there’s shipping, but you’d probably pay $50-$60 for similar books in English.

The 3D Character Animation Manual

The 3D Character Animation Manual is a good all-around book for learning the process. It starts from the design phase, where the author introduced me to Inkscape, which is an awesome freeware vector graphics program. (Think open-source Illustrator, but just as powerful.)

One thing he pointed out was the importance of having a good design and locking it down before you start modeling. That’s actually really good advice. ISAO gives similar advice in volume 1 of 3DCG日和. I’ve been polishing my drafting skills, because I’m out of practice. Ugh.

The 3D Character Animation Manual also covers the process of building a model, designing clothes, creating the graphic skins for it, and adding bones. It also goes into how to use Keynote, which is a plugin a lot of Metasequoia users are interested in using, but sometimes folks have some frustrating results.

Like volume 1 of 3DCG日和, it’s a 2009 book, so some info may be a bit dated, but I haven’t seen anything better than these two books on Metasequoia that’s any more current. If you’ve seen anything newer, let me know.

The 3D Character Animation Manual goes for 2800 yen new. About $30-31 these days.

The tutorials are pretty straightforward, and are in N2 level Japanese. N3 if you have a dictionary handy. It comes with color illustrations and a CD-Rom with the model data on it, an old version of Metasequoia, a plugin for handling UVs, and some extras. It’s about 100 MB of data. Most importantly, it has the X and Z guide image files for creating the face/hair/accessories for the tutorial character. You might have to dig a little to find them, but they’re all there.

Sketchbook Pro 6

So as part of learning how to make my own 3D stuff, I have been working on my 2D graphic arts, and wow, are they rusty. Fortunately, with some work, they have come back pretty quickly. Having a good sketchbook, a good eraser stick, and some good, sharp pencils helps, but so does having a good graphics and illustration program and a tablet that doesn’t suck.

I’ve been using Photoshop since version 4.0 in the mid-90s. Yes, I’ve been using it that long. And there are parts of it I still don’t entirely get. In fact, Photoshop is probably one of my least favorite programs for about 85-90% of what I do. But for that last 10-15% it’s vital.

I was getting frustrated with Photoshop and was looking for a good sketching program, and started looking.

A lot of people recommended Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro, version 6. It’s not a bad program. It has some useful features, like an ability to mirror across the center line. That’s handy for drawing things like eyes, eyebrows, ears, and other things that need to be symmetrical, but it only works if you draw head-on all the time.

It also has some useful tools, like a circle that you can plop down, and no matter how you draw, it comes out as a circle, or as a segment of one. It also has a set of French Curves, which were fine until I wanted to flip them over and use the reverse side… that irritated the hell out of me, because there was no way to do that without using mirroring, which I couldn’t use.

The brushes also irritated me. I’m a fan of Photoshop’s pencil. It’s a mighty layer of hard pixels. I want a black pixel there, I get it. No anti-aliasing, just pixels. I love that. But in Sketchbook, it requires setting up a custom brush, then futzing with it ad nauseam, and I still didn’t like the results. I suppose if you want that watercolor or marker look, it’s great. Heck, it even comes with a set of virtual Copic markers, so that can’t be too bad.

But it’s probably not going to see much use from me.

It’s about $35 for the CD version on Amazon, and $60 if you buy the download version from Autodesk. Yes, that’s correct. The disk is cheaper than the download. I don’t recommend dropping your money on it, unless you have to have a raster graphics drawing program. There are better programs out there.

Like Inkscape.

Inkscape is Inkredible

I discovered Inkscape when reading The 3D Character Animation Manual. The author was discussing how important it is to create a front and side view of the character you want to create that is in perfect proportion. And he was showing how he did it in Inkscape, and it looked really good.

The best part about Inkscape is that it is open-source. Free. As in beer and in speech. I had some bad experiences with the GIMP a while back, so I was a little hesitant, but Inkscape is a better Illustrator than Illustrator. It’s dead simple to use, has easy-to-understand context menus, and it’s easy to wrangle the panels. (It is always a chore in Adobe products to get those things out of my sight. I hate little context menus covering my artwork all the time.)

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. You do need to read some tutorials on Inkscape before you start using it. It’s not 100% intuitive. But it only took me 3-4 DeviantArt tutorials before I was up and running. Look for microUgly’s guide and White_Heron’s tutorials. Both are very useful.

I never really liked using vector graphics, probably because I didn’t like Illustrator. I like them now. Inkscape has given me all kinds of ideas for things I want to try.

Digital Sound Design Class

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Digital Sound Design Class
Feb 272013
 

Well, the intro to digital sound design class on Coursera is over. That was an interesting class, and I learned a lot. I’m looking forward to the next class I’m going to take on Coursera, Intro to Music Production, taught by one of the faculty at Berklee. It will be interesting to see what’s the same, and what’s different. I wonder if they will cover anything related to Reason, my DAW of choice. I don’t really use Cubase as much as I should, but it’s because I’m not invested in VSTs.

Support Your Local Hackerspace (Blender and Metasequoia)

 Art, Technology  Comments Off on Support Your Local Hackerspace (Blender and Metasequoia)
Feb 242013
 

I stopped by our local hackerspace, Splat Space, for a Blender workshop yesterday. Blender is used for 3D modeling, and it’s something I’ve always been kind of curious about. It was a good introduction to what the software could do. Blender can do a lot of interesting stuff. Also, the people at Splat Space are pretty cool. Sometime I’d like to drop in and learn more about maker-y stuff. (Like 3D Printing, learning to solder, and building my own synth. That would be fun.)

When I got back home, I decided to look up some tutorials on the internet, and got a better idea of how to use Blender. It’s pretty powerful, considering that it’s free. But the one thing I can’t get over is the reversed mouse buttons. That drives me nuts. You can change them, but I’m not a fan of Blender’s interface. Maybe after I use it more, I’ll feel more comfortable with it.

I also started messing around with another 3D modeling program called Metasequoia, which has been around since 1999, according to Wikipedia. (So it must be true.)

The LE version is free, but it has some limitations on the use of plugins and file types, which can be a bit of a problem later on. The full version is only $45. Considering that some of the higher-end programs can easily run into the thousands, this is a bargain.

The original program was written in Japanese, and so was the help file. The English translation is serviceable, but in order to find out how to use the program, I went to the Internet for help. DeviantArt and YouTube saved me in that department.

I’ve been messing around with Metasequoia all day. It’s a lot of fun to play with. I can see how one could easily lose track of several days like this. And Metasequoia itself is pretty straightforward to figure out.

FM Synthesis

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on FM Synthesis
Feb 172013
 

When Propellerhead Software released their new PX7 FM synthesizer for Reason last fall, I bought it on sale because I fell in love with the sounds of my childhood. It comes with over 100,000 patches that are translated from the Yamaha DX7, and that’s great.

But there’s one small problem: I don’t know anything about programming an FM synthesizer. I understand the basic theory behind FM synthesis and how it works, but I don’t know how to turn that into PX7 patches that sound musical and not like train horns. Yes, I could just use the 100k I got from the Props, but I’d also like to make my own.

Someone on the Propellerhead User Forum suggested this book: “FM Theory and Applications by Musicians for Musicians,” by Dr. John Chowning and David Bristow, Yamaha, 1986. I went to my local library and requested a copy, and they got it through an interlibrary loan. It just came in today. Looking forward to reading it, and maybe untangling those FM mysteries.

Also, I’m really enjoying the sound design class on Coursera so far. It’s all pretty easy to understand and relatively straightforward. Some of it I already know, some I don’t.

Snow and NEX BIOS Update

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Snow and NEX BIOS Update
Feb 132013
 

Two exciting things happened in my world today.

First, it snowed! Okay, it didn’t stick, and it wasn’t a whole lot, but it was pretty.

Second, Sony released a proper BIOS for the Nex 5N! Now it will do auto-bracketing of up to +/- 3.0 EV! That’s huge! Now the Nex is a “proper” camera in my opinion. I’m sufficiently pleased with it to the point that I’m okay with it if Sony abandons it from here on out. (They probably will, anyway, new NEX models have been out for a while now.)

Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4
Feb 092013
 

I signed up for Coursera today, mainly because I was interested in an Intro to Sound Design class taught by Steve Everett of Emory University. I’m coming in a little late, but I’ll still have time to finish it and get my certificate, if that’s what I want. What I really want is to learn how to do sound design.

I’ve been trying to get more and more into music production, but it’s always a question of time. I don’t seem to have enough of it to figure this all out on my own, so I’m hoping I can pick up some knowledge here and skip ahead a few steps.

I like the offerings in Coursera, but I wish they had more of a Udacity model that lets me pick up and finish a class whenever I feel like it, kind of like Khan Academy, only with certificates if I want one.

All three sites are pretty amazing in their own way, but it’s still a matter of making the time to get the work done.

Nektar Panorama P4

I keep forgetting to mention this. A few weeks ago my patched-together Edirol MIDI controller was dying again, and this time, no amount of pencil work could bring the dead keys back.

So I started looking at new MIDI controllers. I first went to the local Large Music Supply chain store, and tried a bunch of keyboards out, and just wasn’t impressed with any of them. Some were too mushy, some were too hard, none were what I was looking for.

I could have spent $300 now, and wound up buying another new keyboard in six months when I got sick of it.

So I kept looking, this time online. I decided to give the Nektar Panorama P4 a try. Amazon is good about taking returns, so why not?

The P4 has really tight integration with Reason, and the keys feel great. There’s some weight, but not full weight. The display and rotary knobs/sliders mean that I don’t have to fiddle with the computer as much.

Nektar also says that they’ll be doing frequent updates to keep up with the growing number of Rack Extensions in Reason. If a RE isn’t mapped, you can’t do anything with it from the P4. That’s kind of annoying, but it only affects the latest REs.

I like this growing trend of creating instruments that feel like instruments, and pull me away from the monitor.

Flick(r) on the Forehead

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Flick(r) on the Forehead
Nov 152012
 

Getting Lightroom and Flickr to play nice with each other has been a bit tricky for me, but I think I’ve managed to find all of the tools I need.

Setting up the Flickr Publish Service

For starters, I had to set up the Flickr publishing service in Lightroom. I keep hearing that there’s a plugin that’s even better at Flickr, but I managed to get the native Lightroom plugin to work pretty well, so I’m not going to mess with it yet. You can find a lot of videos about how to set up the Flickr publishing service by searching YouTube. I just figured it out from the menu. It’s not too hard if you’ve set up other programs to work with Flickr before.

Before you Sync your Flickr account with Lightroom, be careful about how you want to handle your metadata. If you’ve gone to the trouble to write up a bunch of comments and titles for your photos, make sure you set up the Flickr publish service for Flickr so that it doesn’t overwrite them with the photo metadata in Lightroom. (Unless that’s what you want.)

LR/Mogrify 2

I came across this plugin while looking for more information on setting up Flickr and Lightroom, and there’s a ton of people who love it. I headed to Photographer’s Toolbox, donated some money, and got the plugin.

MAKE SURE you download LR/Mogrify 2. If you get a bunch of errors in Lightroom, then you may have downloaded version 1 accidentally.

I had to install ImageMagick first. There’s a link on the LR/Mogrify page to ImageMagick, and ImageMagick is free.

LR/Mogrify 2 uses ImageMagick’s mogrify function to add some post-processing magic to your photos when you publish them.

I use it for 2 things:

I want to put a thin black border on the edge of all of my photos, so they look better in my blog. LR/Mogrify does borders really well. You can add as many as you want, and they’re non-destructive. They don’t cover any of the image. Instead, they add to the “canvas” size and wrap the border around the edge. I set my borders to 0.3% of the image size, equal on all sides, but you can do all kinds of fancy stuff with it.

I want to put a watermark on my photos that looks a little better than the built-in Adobe watermark. I found a post here that shows a really easy way to set up a drop-shadow watermark that will work on both light and dark photos.

To set up the watermark, you need to set up two instances of Mogrify Text Annotations. Mogrify doesn’t work exactly like the post shows anymore. You need to add a second line in the entry for text annotations. In the first entry, enter your watermark, pick a light color, and set the opacity to something you like. In the second entry, enter the same watermark, pick a dark color, and set the opacity. With the second entry, set the offset to 2px for each. This will create the drop shadow.

To test my LR/Mogrify setup and other Flickr Publish Service settings, I picked four photos that were verticals, horizontals, light, and dark, and set up the Publish Service for the Hard Drive exactly like I did for Flickr, to see how it would turn out.

It took some tweaking, but I got a look I like.

I still hadn’t published anything to Flickr at this point. Now I had to sync up my library with my Flickr sets.

Syncing Your Flickr Photo Collections With Lightroom Using ReSync

The next thing that needs to be done, if you’ve already got a lot of photos on Flickr, is to get your collections on Flickr in sync with your library in Lightroom. Doing it manually would be an insane amount of work if you’ve published a lot of photos.

That’s where Flickr ReSync comes in.

Download the latest version. 0.9.4 works just fine with LR 4.2, unless there’s a newer version up there. Follow the installation instructions. It installs like any plugin. Unzip and copy to Lightroom’s plugins folder.

Once I had it installed, I wasn’t sure how to get it to work. I couldn’t find a big shiny “Press me!” button. After going through the readme file in the zip file of version 0.6, I figured it out. Here’s how to use the plugin:

First, from Lightroom, after you’ve activated the plugin, restart Lightroom. (Just in case.)

Now, import all of the photos from your hard drive that are also in your Flickr account into your library. It might take a while, so go get some coffee.

While Lightroom is grinding through that, I’ll tell you how ReSync works– it matches the date and time you shot the photo with the date and time of your photos on Flickr. As long as you haven’t trashed your metadata, you should be fine.

Now that you have a library full of photos, you need to sync them up with your Flickr account. ReSync will create a bunch of Lightroom smart collections that will correspond to your various photosets in Flickr, and link them up with the photos you already have posted in Flickr.

To start syncing, go to the Library menu in Lightoom, drop down to Plug-In Extras, then select Automatic ReSync from the Flickr Resync submenu.

Go get some more coffee. This is going to take a while.

You may wind up with a stack of photos that the program can’t figure out. It’s pretty good about presenting you with a set of choices. Pick the photo you want to sync up with the photo on Flickr.

Now you should have a bunch of smart collections in your Flickr Publish Service area.

Fixing The Flickr Publish Set Order Bug in Lightroom 4.2

There’s one other thing that tripped me up: the sort order in the Lightroom library may not be the same as the sort order in your Flickr sets. I noticed that my sets were getting tossed in all directions, and Lightroom was the culprit. My photo sets were getting put in reverse order, from last to first. Annoying.

Here’s how I fixed it.

Go to library mode.

Now look at the bottom of main window in grid view. You should see a little drop down that says Sort: I picked Capture Time, because that’s how I want my sets to be sorted.

Then I set the order to a->z.

This alone won’t fix it. After that, go down to the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen, click on the thumbnail image of one of the photos, and drag it over to the side. Release it. Now drag it back to where it was.

The Sort: field should now say User Order.

Add a dummy tag or fiddle with all of the photos in develop mode, or just put them all on the map. Do something that makes Lightroom want to republish everything.

Republish the whole set. It should come out in the order you want now. This is a bug that Adobe has yet to fix for whatever reason.

Another good way around this is to use Jeffrey Friedl’s Flickr Publish plugin. Now that I have Lightroom obeying me, though, I don’t want to change anything. Part of me is afraid that changing my publishing plugin will cause me to lose all of my sets, and I cannot have that happening.

At first, finding all of this information required a lot of work, but once I got everything set up, I was kicking myself for not doing this sooner. It’s slightly complex, but the tools that are out there make it really easy to do.

I’ll put all of the important links here:
LR/Mogrify 2
ImageMagick (Needed if you’re installing on Windows)
Post on drop shadow watermarks in LR/Mogrify
Another post on how to do watermarks in LR/Mogrify, but nothing on drop shadows.
Flickr Resync
Jeffrey Friedl’s Flickr Plugin

Lighting up Lightroom

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Lighting up Lightroom
Nov 122012
 

I bought Adobe Lightroom 3.0 a year ago, before my trip to Japan last fall, along with the Photoshop CS5 upgrade. At the time, I figured that when I got to Japan, I would shoot a bunch of photos, and have the time to edit and sort them out. And somewhere in there, I’d have time to figure out how Lightroom worked, too.

How naive.

In reality, when I wasn’t wandering around in my spare time, I was studying until I passed out during the week. There was no time to learn something like Lightroom, which looked alien to me, who has used various iterations of Photoshop since version 3.0. (Not CS 3.0, 3.0.)

When I got back from Boston this year, I decided that my photos are not going to organize themselves, so I fired up Lightroom. “Let’s get this over with,” I thought with the same excitement one feels when going for a root canal.

And then I found out that Lightroom had been upgraded to version 4.0 (now 4.2, going on 4.3), and all of the cool kids were raving about it. Well, truthfully, they were raving about 3.0, too, but now it seemed like Lightroom did some cooler stuff, and generally processed photos better.

So I upgraded.

Learning to Love Lightroom

At first, I started messing with things to see what did what, and watched a few Adobe TV videos to get the feel for it, but while the library was pretty easy to figure out for someone like me who is familiar with databases, I had no idea what was going on in the develop module.

While I was desperately searching for some kind of help, I just happened to come across a link to George Jardine’s videos about Lightroom. Really, if I hadn’t been reading a totally unrelated thread on the Adobe message boards, I’m not sure I would have found these videos, and that would have been a shame.

George’s develop video series is about 6 hours long, and it contains 18 videos. I spent a weekend marathoning it, and by the time I was done, I finally understood how Lightroom’s develop module works, and I managed to figure out a way to process photos in a way that gives me results I like.

If you’re someone who likes to learn via YouTube, and are struggling with getting Lightroom to sing, I highly recommend George Jardine’s videos. They’re awesome. Just give up a day or two and watch them, then play with Lightroom to see what he’s getting at.

I have a bad habit of buying 4-inch thick $50 computer books, and later using them as doorstops. I have discovered that I just learn faster by watching videos of someone showing me how to do it.

One other thing: it took me until the series was completely over to really get everything sorted out in my head. I would recommend waiting until the last video before messing with publishing anything online, because you’ll wind up republishing it again.

And again.

If you’re like me, and have a massive pile of unprocessed photos, I highly recommend Lightroom. Once you get the process down, it’s an order of magnitude or two faster than Photoshop to power through with lots of quick, non-destructive edits. Now I don’t have to worry about saving 10 different versions of a 50MB file just to make sure I don’t screw things up. I can just dump all of my photos in one place, and let Lightroom do its thing.

More importantly, from within Lightroom I can publish my photos to my Flickr account, to my Picasa account, or send them to Costco to be printed up however I want. I love the plugins.

Here are a few links to some useful Lightroom sites:
http://thelightroomlab.com
http://www.lightroomforums.net/
http://tv.adobe.com/product/lightroom/episode/highest-rated/playlist/
http://www.lightroomqueen.com
http://www.mulita.com/

Calibrate that Nasty Monitor!

Before you start editing a bunch of photos, I would suggest that you do two things:

1. Calibrate your monitor. If you don’t know what that means, head to http://www.digitaldog.net and learn all about it.

I use a Spyder 3 Pro, and it does a pretty good job. You don’t have to get a Spyder, but get something to help you calibrate.

2. If you can’t find lens profiles for your camera/lens combo, you might want to create some of your own. Go to the Adobe web site and search for Adobe Lens Profile Downloader and Adobe Lens Profile Creator. With the downloader, you can search for profiles other people have uploaded, and with the creator, you can just make your own for those weird lenses you got off of eBay.

Another thing to consider, if you’re finicky about color, is the XRite ColorChecker Passport. It’s pretty handy for getting those white balances nailed, when the light is uniform. (When you’re dealing with mixed light, well, good luck with that.)

Penciling Some Notes

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Penciling Some Notes
Sep 072012
 

I dug out my old Edirol keyboard yesterday, and surprise, surprise, a large number of keys didn’t work.

Apparently over time, the contacts will lose the graphite they need to make the keys work properly, and according to this video, you can just fix it with a mechanical pencil and a 2H (not 2B) lead. Draw on the black parts of the contacts. If you screw up, you’ll have to erase and restart on the problem contact. I cleaned the more stubborn contacts with rubbing alcohol. Also, there’s a little black pad in the rubber cover, and sometimes that needs just a touch of graphite as well.

The main problem with doing this is taking the keyboard apart, and keeping track of not only the keys, but the springs that hold them in place. The best tool for removing the springs was a good pair of needlenose pliers. There are also a ridiculous amount of screws on this keyboard as well.

It took me a while to get some of the notes to work properly, but after a lot of fiddling in Reason, I got all of the keys to work again.

Now I can go back to messing with the new version of Reason, which I am digging, by the way. The last version of Reason I had was 2.5, and it’s up to 6.5 now. I love the new instruments, but I really love the new SSL mixer. That thing is a beast.

Buying Japanese Software Online

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Buying Japanese Software Online
Aug 102012
 

Download versions of Japanese software are available in large quantities these days from online software vendors that have sprung up all over the place. Not all publishers are on board, but many are.

I finally took the time to get a copy of my favorite Japanese OCR software, e.Typist 14.0. Rather than import it and pay shipping, I bought a copy from an online software site called Vector, downloaded it and registered it.

Here’s the deal: you can find some good software this way for cheap. It’s legal, and you save a ton on shipping. (You’ll still get crushed by exchange rates if you’re unlucky enough to use dollars, though.)

There’s a BIG caveat: If you don’t know how to read Japanese, don’t waste your time. Seriously. Don’t.

For starters, the website be in Japanese.

You have a translator app to turn it all into English? Well, will your translator website also translate the program for you as you run it? Probably not.

I’d say the only exceptions would be for things like games or Vocaloid soundbanks. Even then, installation is going to be painful at times, and a Japanese Vocaloid soundbank is really only useful if you’re going to use it for Japanese. Yes, there are people who can force them to do English, but English has many more sounds than the Japanese soundbanks have… and I’m digressing big time.

I really love e.Typist, by the way. It’s a great program for doing Japanese Language OCR.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas Anymore…

 Technology  Comments Off on Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas Anymore…
Mar 272012
 

One of the things I love about living in Japan are the toilets. It took a little getting used to at first, but after a while, I realized just how great they are. I’ll skip the details about why they’re so great, but now that I have my own Toto Washlet, I’m bringing that sucker with me wherever I wind up. (Or just installing another one and leaving it, like a Johnny Washlet-seed or something.)

Installing it took a little work, but once I got the kinks worked out, it runs like a dream. The idea of mixing electricity and plumbing? Not that scary with good wiring and good plumbing and modern tech.

Viva plumbing. Viva civilization.

Washed Out.

 Technology  Comments Off on Washed Out.
Jan 102012
 

Well, 2012 is off to an inauspicious start.

I got back from Japan to a dead washing machine. It made some awful noises when I was washing clothes for my trip to Japan in September, but I just figured it was being unruly. Nope, it was in its death throes. It stopped working completely.

Then the water heater broke. It’s in the attic (a stupid idea), so it dumped a bunch of water into the upstairs bathroom. Ugh. What a mess.

Happy New Year!

They Got the Computer Store, Too!

 Japan, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on They Got the Computer Store, Too!
Nov 092011
 

We have to submit our resumes for our JBPP class tomorrow, so I need a USB drive. I headed to the computer store to pick one up.

First I stopped at Family Mart, because I was out of food. (Except for rice. I have plenty of rice.) Anyway, then I went to the computer store. As I approached the door, one of the guys who worked there regretted to inform me that the store was closed, because it’s moving.

Ugh. Again? First the bicycle store, now the computer store, too? It’ll probably be a pile of rubble in 4 days.

So I stood in the parking lot and had a think. Where is the best place to find a cheap USB drive? I decided to go to the mall and try Aeon, and lucked out. I found a cheap USB drive for 898 yen. All it has to do is last for a couple of days, to be honest. Then I saw the big sale on the Frixion stuff. Score!

I’ve already burned through one of the ink cartridges in my blue Frixion pen. Aeon had them for 10% off, so I stocked up.

I browsed the book store again, and saw some really cool kanji books, but they’re kind of expensive. Maybe later. They look like kanji kentei prep books. (But really awesome prep books.) Downside: they’re 1000 yen a piece. A little pricey. Yeah, I said the USB drive was cheap at 898, but I was only buying one of those.

I also looked at the Minna no Nihongo books with lustful eyes, because we keep running into stuff from that in class. It’s tempting, but expensive. Maybe I’ll check Book-Off this weekend and see if I can find a used copy of MNN.

I stopped by Subway on the way out, then headed home.

It’s The End of the World. Or It’s Just Wednesday and We Feel Like It.

When I got back, something annoying happened. One thing that kind of irks me about living here is that I’ll randomly hear warning sirens– the same kind that you can hear on the tsunami videos– and I can’t tell if it’s police, fire, ambulance, or just Impending Doom. I heard them again this evening in my apartment, and quickly flipped on NHK, just to make sure I didn’t have to duck, cover, and kiss my butt goodbye. (You never know.)

Of course, as I flipped it on, they were showing a news show about how the tsunami warnings weren’t adequate enough, and in some places, told people that a 3m tsunami wave was coming, when in reality a 10m wave was coming, so people who should have fled, didn’t, and died as a result.

It was interesting, but I never could figure out what those sirens were about.

But I’m glad that they’re examining the whole tsunami warning system.

The discussion on the program about how to convey urgency to people was interesteig. Telling people 非難せよ (ひなんせよ hinanseyo “evacuate!”) instead of 非難してください (ひんしてください hinanshite kudasai “please evacuate”) conveys the proper urgency when a massive wall of water is about to obliterate everything. People may hesitate when they hear a more polite request to “please evactuate” (非難してください) versus the more urgent and less formal “evacuate!” or “get out now!” (非難せよ!)

An Unfortunate Episode in my Life? How About an Exam That Keeps Me From Going to Kyoto?

In other news, it looks like no Kyoto trip this week. Next Thursday we have a conversation test and a composition test. We already have our themes to write about– “An unfortunate episode in my life.” Fun.

There’s no way I’ll be able to swan off to Kyoto for a weekend with that hanging over my head. Nagoya, maybe. But Kyoto? No way.

JBPP is really starting to pay off. All of the little lessons we’re learning are starting to accumulate, albeit slowly, in my brain. I realize I’ll probably have to go over all of this again by myself when I go home, but the info is amazingly useful.

We went over e-mails again today, and while it was difficult, I think I’m slowly starting to get the hang of it. Tonight, I have to finish writing my resume in Japanese. Strangely enough, I’m not too stressed about it. It’s easier than doing it in English, because everyone uses the same general form.

Gettin’ Busy.

 Japan, Japanese Language, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Gettin’ Busy.
Nov 022011
 

Classes are heating up. Things are getting more intense and busier, with full weeks of regular class, JBPP, and electives. We don’t get any holidays this quarter, either.

And I have my first big exam on Friday, which covers 3 chapters of the book. I’m already making a grammar outline. We’ve got a listening/dictation test as well. Fun.

I Found a Better Price, Now What?

So I found the same electronic dictionary I bought this past weekend for 10,000 yen less elsewhere, but I really don’t want to go through the hassle of returning it, then buying another one on the other side of Nagoya. Is there something I can do about it?

The answer is yes!

I got some really useful advice from V-san, one of my classmates. She said to take the electronic dictionary back to Bic, and tell them that I found it cheaper. She said they’re really good about matching competitors’ prices. I’ll have to give it a try this weekend.

We had phone practice in JBPP today. How to answer the phone, hold basic conversations, etc. It’s one thing to do it in everyday Japanese, but entirely something different to do it in business Japanese, with the emphasis on proper use of 尊敬語 (そんけいご, sonkeigo) and 謙譲語 (けんじょうご, kenjogo.) There are lots of complex phrases to remember, which are essentially really polite versions of the same thing. But which degree of politeness you need to use is important to know.

Dumb Things in the Rain

 Food, Japan, Technology  Comments Off on Dumb Things in the Rain
Oct 302011
 

It’s Sunday, and I didn’t do much today. I mostly rested. But in the evening, I started to go stir crazy.

So I decided to go to the 7-11 that I saw on Google maps which was apparently a 20 minute walk away. I usually go to Family Mart, because it’s closer, but I hear 7-11 has good salads, so I figured I’d go there.

This was a dumb idea.

I decided to walk there. Another dumb idea. In the rain. Really dumb idea.

I spent about an hour looking for a convenience store that didn’t exist, in the rain. I did find a Lawson a block up the street, but it didn’t have anything, as in, it had been completely cleared out of bentos.

I had no idea that that sort of thing was even possible in Japan.

I trudged to the Family Mart, which was full of good food as usual. I decided to go for a hamburger tonight, because I miss America. (Pun intended.)

I nuked it when I got home, and had it with some Pringles. It was actually pretty good when I added some mustard to it.

Okay, this wasn’t a meal that would win any nutrition awards, but it was the best I could do given that I spent an hour walking to get it.

And now that I’m writing about this, I’m getting hungry again. Ugh.

ごろごろ and 電子辞書 (Gorogoro and Denshi Jisho)

 Japan, Japanese Language, Photography, Photos, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on ごろごろ and 電子辞書 (Gorogoro and Denshi Jisho)
Oct 292011
 

It’s Saturday, and for once it’s not raining. It’s not really sunny, but it’s not raining. I’ll take what I can get. My electronic dictionary is dying, so I’m off to Nagoya to buy a new one, among other things.

I got a bit of a late start, because I felt like lying around a little bit and just generally loafing around the apartment. There’s a good Japanese verb for this: ごろごろする (gorogorosuru). It just means to loaf around. Yep. I did that until about 2 pm or so, then headed to the station and grabbed a train.

Off to Nagoya Again

First stop was the Mermaid Cafe, to grab lunch. I wanted something simple, because for the past few weeks my stomach hasn’t been in top form. The Mermaid just does simple sandwiches and some basic pastries, and none of it is very greasy. I love their iced cocoa.

Finding a New Electronic Dictionary

Then it was off to Bic Camera, to stare at row upon row of electronic dictionaries. They have changed a lot in the 4 years since I bought my last one. Lots of color screens now, and lots of extra features, most of which I do not need. It was frustrating trying to find one dictionary that had all of the features I want, without a bunch of stuff I don’t.

The features I want are no longer available, and the dictionaries I want, I have to pay extra for. I wound up forking over 38,000 yen for the Casio Ex-Word business model. Handing over that kind of money is painful, but it has a lot of the stuff I want in it, and to be honest, I’m going to use it for at least the next four years. So I’ll pay extra to get that later.

If I think of it as a stack of 10 really useful dictionaries, and another 20 or so useful-ish dictionaries, in a form factor that’s searchable across all of them with relative ease, it’s totally worth it.

One thing it has that I really want is a working NHK accent dictionary that pronounces words through the little speaker. It’s awesome. Now I can get the pitch accent right if I’m inclined to worry about it.

I’ll review the Casio later, when I’ve had time to play with it more.

I spent a good hour or so staring, reading, poking, and buying.

When I think back to using paper dictionaries when I first started learning Japanese, there’s just no comparison. Electronic is the way to go. Even a cheap electronic dictionary is faster and easier than the best paper dictionaries.

Osu!

Done with buying at Bic, I headed back to JR Nagoya, and it was really pretty in the afternoon light:

JR Nagoya Late Afternoon Fall

After that, it was off to Osu (大須, おおす), a big shopping district with a giant covered shopping arcade and a famous temple. It’s a lot like Osaka’s Dotonbori area, or Tokyo’s Ameyokocho, with some Akihabara mixed in.

Banshouji Doori Entrance Osu

I spent a few hours wandering around in there, just looking at shops. I stumbled across the Osu Kanon Temple at some point. It’s  pretty famous in the area. I snapped a couple of photos.

Osu Kannon Temple

Osu Kannon Temple 2

As I was leaving the temple, I lucked out. It was just turning 5 p.m., so the giant clock was striking, and a little exhibition or play of sorts was starting.

Mechanical Clock Performance--Osu

The reflections in the window were pretty bad. The IXY just couldn’t handle them.

Mechanical Clock Performance--Osu 4

Mechanical Clock Performance--Osu 5

Mechanical Clock Performance--Osu 6

Sort of like mechanical dolls, set to music. They did their dance, and everyone enjoyed it.

And then it went back to being a clock again.

Mechanical Clock Performance--Osu 7

I went back to strolling. I found a pretty big electronics store that was pretty cool. It had all kinds of stuff, most of which was cheaper than Bic. Including the electronic dictionary that I just bought. (Ouch.) Same color and everything. (OUCH!) About 10,000 yen cheaper. (Ouch, OUCH!)

On the first floor, there was a sort of a community market of electronics and random stuff, where people just set up stalls. One guy had a bunch of great old shortwave radios. Oh how I lusted after his radios, but they were hideously expensive. He knew he had good merchandise, and it was priced accordingly. There were also guys selling old vacuum tubes– you name it. It was a lot like a mini-Akihabara.

If you wander to the street just north of the covered street markets, you’ll find a few used video game stores and some manga stores and the like, if that’s your kind of thing. There are some games I want to buy, but I’ll probably wait until I’m in Tokyo to buy them, because I can probably get them cheaper there. (I will probably learn to regret this.)

There’s also a Mandarake if you like toys and other collectibles. (Who doesn’t like toys?)

After that, it was off to Hisayaodori for some book shopping.

On the way, a couple of snaps of the Nagoya TV Tower. Yes, this shot is blurry, but I LIKE it:

Nagoya Tower at Night

Less blurry but not as cool version:

Nagoya Tower at Night

I picked up a few things to read, then went back to the station.

Couchin is Japanese for “This Chicken is DELICIOUS!”

I was hungry, and it was getting late, so I decided to head back to the area around Nagoya Station. I went back to the 12th and 13th floors of Takeshimaya, because there are a ton of good restaurants there. This time, I went to a place called Torigoten, because it specializes in Nagoya Couchin, which is a special kind of chicken that’s supposed to be super delicious.

I was feeling kind of run-down anyway, so chicken anything was on my radar. All of the restaurants had huge waits. This restaurant had a relatively short wait. So I sat for only 25 minutes until I got a seat at the bar. That’s not too bad for Nagoya Station on a Saturday night.

I ordered a Couchin set meal that consisted of a really good Oyakodon (chicken and egg rice bowl, with some chicken broth), and some kishimen (a flat noodle that’s a specialty of the Nagoya region) in a chicken broth served with cooked chicken.

Just what I needed, because I was still feeling crummy from my cold that I had a few weeks back. Still feels like there’s a frog in my throat.

After that, I missed the 8:42 train juuuust barely, but it was okay, because that meant I could get a seat on the 8:58 train home. I got back to Okazaki at about 9:30 or so, then got home at about 9:45 or so.

Long day, but fun.

Through the Trip Prep Looking Glass

 Japan, Photography, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Through the Trip Prep Looking Glass
Sep 202011
 

Note: This is about stuff I did before the trip, but I’m actually writing it about 10 days into the trip, but I’m going to put this chronologically before it anyway, so that it makes sense.

Because It’s There.

Before this 3-month trip to Japan, I decided to do what I did before I came to Japan four years ago– go to Mt. Mitchell. Mt. Mitchell is about 6,700 feet high, the highest mountain east of the Mississippi River in the Continental U.S.

The sign says so:
Mt. Mitchell--Sign

I don’t know why I feel this compulsion to go there, but it’s probably because I went there four years ago at just about the same time and the resulting trip was just amazing.

So before I go to Japan I went there to sort of psych myself up and put my brain into Travel 7,000 Miles Mode.

I went there sometime in mid-August.

I loved the scenery, and the mosquitoes loved me.

Have a look:

Going up to the observation platform:
Mt. Mitchell-- Woods

Another view along the way:
Mt. Mitchell-- View on the way to the observation deck

Even on cloudy days, the view here is great:
Mt. Mitchell--Views From the Observation Deck

Mt. Mitchell--Views From the Observation Deck

Mt. Mitchell--Views From the Observation Deck

This time I didn’t fall or hurt myself, so I took that as a good omen.

Getting ready for the trip was a bit hectic, since I’m going to be in Japan for around 87 days. The longest a U.S. Citizen can stay on a landing permit is 90 days, so I’m going to be cutting it kind of close. I’m writing part of this from Okazaki now, so looking back, I’d say that some things I did were smart, and others were just boneheaded.

Flying is Annoying, and Other Obvious Things

The most frustrating bit of travel preparation was getting my flight squared away. I was once again forced to deal with American Airlines.

I had agreed to finally pay the ransom for my kidnapped frequent flier miles, only to find out that I had to wait until I had been “ticketed” before I could upgrade. Then, by the time I was “ticketed,” (because apparently them charging me $2,000 isn’t enough, they had to make me wait a week) it was too late to upgrade, because all of the upgradable business seats had already been given away.

So now I have to wait until the day of my flight to go and beg and whimper for the upgrade I already have the miles for… which they already took from me once.

If You Take Medicine, You May Need This. It’s Annoying, Too.

Another thing I had to get before going to Japan was a yakkan shoumei, which is a piece of paper to show the folks at customs if you have more than 30 days’ worth of medicines to bring into Japan.

It’s a real pain in the butt to prepare this, but if you contact your local Japanese embassy, they’ll e-mail you the forms to fill out. I wound up sending about 20-30 pages worth of stuff in the end. It takes a solid 2 weeks to get one, and that’s if you FedEx your paperwork to them, and fax your application. I’ve gone over this before in my 2007 Japan trip posts.

Shipping Ahead Only Works If You’re Smart

I spent a few days getting supplies together and shipping them ahead to Yamasa. I’m grateful that they’ll let me send stuff ahead, because it’s less junk to carry. The downside is that I wound up shipping future me way too much crap.

I’m planning on taking the N1 or N2, depending on my grade on the summer N2, so I sent a bunch of JLPT prep books ahead. I also sent a bunch of general grammar books ahead, too.

I wish I hadn’t sent so many books to future me. They’re heavy and expensive, and I probably won’t use them all.

And I wound up shipping things I just don’t need, like coffee. I like coffee. I drink it. But they have perfectly good coffee here. Why did I pack 2 bricks of coffee? And cocoa? Why did I pack it? I forgot why. But I did.

Oatmeal. Okay, I love steel-cut oatmeal. When I’m in the US, I eat it every morning. I cook it in my rice cooker using the porridge setting overnight, and it comes out great. I figured that there’s no way in hell that I would find steel-cut oats in Japan, so I sent 4 pounds of it over.

Dumb. Dumbdumbdumb.

Turns out that there’s a grocery store in Nagoya that stocks Odlum’s steel-cut oats. It’s in Sakae, right next to Maruzen. Actually, it’s cheaper than shipping from the US.

Much cheaper.

Experience Is Sometimes a Good Teacher, and Sometimes Isn’t.

I thought I would need an inflatable doughnut to sit on, based on my prior experience.

Nope. Didn’t need it.

The jury is still out on the protein bars. I sent a few ahead, just in case. I’ll probably go through them, just to avoid sending them home. They were really handy last time, so I sent some ahead this time.

But generally, I shipped too much stuff ahead, and most of it was stuff I did not need, or could have easily done without. Priority Mail to Japan is cheaper than Royal Mail (what isn’t?), but it’s still expensive, and Priority Mail is the only option you have for shipping from the US to Japan. There isn’t a significantly cheaper option, unless you grab an extra suitcase.

Upsell or Really Good Advice?

Speaking of suitcases, I went on a bit of shopping trip before I left. I bought a monstrously large Samsonite suitcase, a 29-inch model that’s light as a feather, and big enough to stuff Jimmy Hoffa in (allegedly). The sales lady tried to upsell me on a model that was $80 more.

I thought she was just trying to get a good commission, but my skepticism was my downfall, because I really should have listened to her.

The more expensive model was 4 lbs. heavier, though, and I was being slightly nuts about weight and cost, so I went cheap on the suitcase.

Big mistake.

The cloth handle just couldn’t take the weight of the filled suitcase very well, and the wheels had a hard time keeping up with me.

Get a suitcase with double wheels and sturdy handles. This suitcase didn’t have double wheels, it only had single wheels, and crappy ones at that.

I went big and light because I tried to go one suitcase with it– more on that in another post.

Do I Win at Umbrella Yet?

I found a collapsible umbrella that’s big enough for me– it doesn’t suck, but it’s slightly annoying, in that you have to “reload” it to “fire” it open again. Annoying, but it’s around 55″ big (sort of golf-lite), so I stay dry enough. If you search long enough on Amazon, you can find anything.

I also picked up a tiny external Western Digital 1TB 2.5″ HDD for storing photos, movies, etc. on.

As usual, I tore through The Container Store, and bought lots of little stuff, none of which I can remember off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m using some of it, I’m just unable to remember any of it.

I bought a $6 strap handle from Staples for carrying boxes around. I’m going to have to lug boxes around at some point, so I’m going to see if it’s a solution. Not like I can fit a cart in the suitcase.

Camera!

I swapped out my EOS Rebel XSi for an EOS 60D body. All-in-all it’s a nice upgrade. I really like the 60D.

But there’s one problem with any SLR, and that is that it’s an SLR, and about as unobtrusive as a tank at a 3-year-old’s birthday party. I use it for the tourist spots, and places where I’m okay with dragging it around, but it’s a bit of a dilemma for daily use.

Denser Than a Neutron Star!

Space Bags. I bought a lot of the Travel Size. The size that’s one size smaller is really useless. Space Bags are somewhat useful, but they pose a problem– if you reduce the density of all of your clothes down to that of a neutron star, then your bags become ultra-heavy. Also, you lose all of the cushioning you get from air-filled clothes.

Useful…ish?

Other Stuff I Love to Take on the Road

Motorola Xoom Android Tablet: I loaded this up with my eBooks to the extent that I could, as well as games and other stuff. I’m so glad I have this. The battery life is still around 8-9 hours, too, so it’s generally good to have around.

Motorola Razr V3X GSM phone, unlocked. This is my workhorse travel phone for “Oh crap!” moments. This is what I use for communication when I want to make sure that I don’t accidentally get dinged for data charges, because it’s a dumb phone.

Downside: it doesn’t do Japanese texting. Just pop in the SIM and go. No software to get in the way of calling.

Nexus One: my aging smartphone buddy. Unlocked, of course. (Am I the only person who still insists on buying unlocked phones?) I packed it full of music, because the app memory is crippled at only 1 GB.

There aren’t many apps that I can port to the SD card, and I hate that. But it’s GSM and unlocked, which makes it mighty. Mainly it’s mighty for 4 apps: Google Maps (most important), GMail, Chrome, and Music.

Aging Sony VAIO laptop: 3 pounds, but still felt heavy. It’s probably the extra battery.

Adapters: I’m still looking for the ideal power adapter solution for travel. The fewer I need to carry, the better. Motorola sucks in this department. The Xoom and the V3X still have 12V plugs. I’m using my old 2007-vintage iGo laptop power adapter for my laptop, so it would work with the 2-prong power outlets in Japan. For some reason it won’t work as a USB charger anymore, though. Bummer.

Traveling is an ongoing experiment for me. I’m always tweaking some variables to see how it improves my experience.

I just wish I could get away with less crap.

London School of Economics (Lessons Learned from London)

 Great Britain, Photography, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on London School of Economics (Lessons Learned from London)
Jul 202011
 

Whenever I travel, I learn some new lessons about what works, and what doesn’t. Here’s my list for the London trip.

Now watch me totally over-analyze everything I packed.

The Best Camera Bag That Isn’t a Camera Bag

Camera Non-Bag: The Mountainsmith Kit Cube is very clever, and very useful. But, it comes with a couple of caveats. First, you must pad the bottom of the cube with something.

My backpack fell on the stone floor at Parliament when I was going through security, and it messed up my Zoom lens because the bottom just doesn’t have enough padding. It’s also not very rigid, which is both a blessing and curse. Rigidity would give it some more strength, but it would also lose its flexibility, which is its strong point.

So while it’s a great carrying alternative, keep in mind that it needs extra padding. I’ll probably go get some 1-inch upholstery foam or something.

There’s also an annoying leather bit that covers the adjustable cord that I immediately cut off. I have no idea why it’s there, as all it does is make it difficult to adjust the cinch for the cover.

With those caveats, the Kit Cube is awesome, because it’s compact and stealthy. It is the anti-camera bag, everything I’ve ever wanted. It fits into whatever bag you want to stuff it into, and it does so quickly and efficiently.

If you do any kind of photography, I highly recommend it… with those caveats.

Storing and Moving Money

The Eagle Creek Silk Neck Travel Pouch is really comfortable, but for the love of all that’s good, hand wash it in a sink, or put it in a mesh bag if you’re going to put it in a washing machine.

I just dumped mine in the washer, set it on hand wash, and the cord wrapped around the agitator and got ripped out. So I had to buy another one, because it happened the day before I left.

Doh.

After all of that, I only used the Neck Pouch when I was flying.

It’s too much of a pain to use for everyday stuff. It is small enough that I’ll probably use it again when I go overseas, because it was great for use on the plane.

Money Belt: Left it at home again. It’s a pain to rub my belly every time I want to buy something. Maybe I’ll get rid of it one of these days.

I used a chain wallet instead that I bought for my big Japan trip 4 years ago. It works really easily. Just loop the chain around a belt loop, and stop worrying so much. It’s big enough to handle even the most ridiculous currencies. It also looks kind of cool.

One huge mistake that I made was carrying traveler’s checks. I got ripped off on the exchange rate, and generally they’re an anachronism.

My credit union now has a special debit card that you can put a fixed amount of money on just for travel. The idea is that if it gets lost, someone can’t clear out your entire account. Sounds like an interesting idea, but I don’t know how practical it really is.

The best deal I got on currency exchange was from my credit union before I left.

The next best deal was using my debit card at an ATM. There are a ton of FOREX shops all over the place, but keep in mind that you are the source of their profits.

Protecting Electronics

I love the sleeves for laptops from Waterfield Designs. I have one for my Vaio laptop, and I picked one up for my Xoom tablet as well. I use a leather case from KeviKev.com for my Xoom, and I used the measurements from that to get a custom sleeve to fit the Xoom from Waterfield Designs.

It’s a bit on the overkill side to use a case and a sleeve for the Xoom, but I don’t want to break it.

Another great pickup from Waterfield was the sleeve case for my aging Nexus One. It has an extra pouch on the back, where I stuck an extra battery when I was flying, and my Oyster Card when I was in London. Very handy.

Dealing With Liquids

GoToobs from Humangear are awesome. They come in 3 oz (88ml) and 1.25 oz (37ml) sizes, which run for ~$8 and $5 each, or come in 3-packs.

They are a little expensive, but they are silicone, so they can take a lot of abuse, and they don’t leak. The tops have a good strong lock, too, and you can remove the tops to reveal a wide mouth that makes them easy to fill with whatever liquids you need to fill them with.

The opening they squirt through is covered by a thin layer of silicone with a + shape cut in it, to minimize leaking even further. Seriously, these guys thought this stuff through. I found them at a local luggage store, and at the Container Store.

I have used the cheaper containers before, and there’s just no comparison. You get what you pay for. Really.

The Container Store also carries legal and letter sized reinforced plastic pouches for ~$4 each that are an absolute steal. They’re waterproof enough and will hold a lot of clothes, or in my case, books, and are a heck of a lot cheaper than the Eagle Creek packing cubes.

They’re in the office supplies section of the Container Store.

I wanted those bags because I wanted to protect my books, etc. from anything that happened to rupture in my suitcase, but I can easily see using them for clothing. They won’t hold quite as much as the Eagle Creek pouches, but they’re cheap.

The Container Store also has some heavy plastic carrying bags for carrying liquids, which I used to transport my liquids, like energy drinks, GoToobs, Woolite, soaps, sunscreens, hair gels, and the like. I wanted to make sure that stuff didn’t leak out of the plastic bags they were in and get all over my books, which were in the legal sized reinforced plastic pouches.

Sounds anal? Well, yeah. But none of my stuff leaked.

Power Converters, Travel Adapters, and Charging Electronics

This was a major headache for me, because I stressed out about it a lot before I left. I really wanted to reduce the amount of crap I was carrying. I loathe carrying a bunch of adapters for my electronics.  Also, since I was going to the UK, which has funky power plugs, I needed a solution for that as well.

Brookstone makes a very good universal travel adapter that comes with two USB ports. It’s almost perfect for traveling anywhere.

I say almost, because it has this hinged cover over the US input side, and my laptop wouldn’t plug in, because the blades hit the hinged cover right at the hinge. Bad design on that part. Everything else I own plugged in just fine, but everything else I own is 2-pronged, so I have no idea if it supports 3-pronged cords. The glowing bit from the USB ports was kind of annoying at night, but I got used to it.

For my laptop, I got a plug adapter at Radio Shack. Worked just fine, but cost $20.

I bought and returned a power converter. I didn’t need 120 volt power, and the weight on those things is just nuts. Even the good ones break constantly.

Look at your electronics. If they can’t take 240 volts, just leave them at home. Most decent electronics can handle 240V, but read the label.

A $15 CyberPower retractable USB cable set from Wal-Mart was a great buy. It came with adapters that would fit micro-USB 5-pin, 8-pin, 5-pin mini B USB, and USB B– the square USB end that connects to printers and scanners. The cord got a little bit twisted over two weeks of heavy use, but it was $15. It still retracts enough for my needs, and it still works as a recharging cable.

With the USB cable, I could recharge my Nexus One without carrying the power plug for it. The plug that was Motorola-sized, however, would not charge my Motorola Razr (my backup emergency phone), because that requires 12 Volts.

Motorola is the bane of my travel existence.

My Xoom also won’t recharge over USB. It will only charge over a skinny pin plug that uses 12 volts as well. So that was 2 chargers I had to carry, plus one for my GeekPod as well. Someday I shall overcome this by replacing this stuff with stuff that uses USB to charge.

For $8, I found a USB cable with a plug on the end that allows you to plug in all kinds of phone and USB connectors to charge all kinds of phones. It doesn’t have a brand name. I got it at Intrex Computers, a local chain. I didn’t use this much, but what was great was that this gave me the microUSB plug I needed to fit into my old BatteryGeek GeekPod cable, so now I can charge my Nexus One with my GeekPod, if I need to. I can also use the Nintendo DS tip I have from the GeekPod to plug it into the USB cable so I can charge the DS with my laptop, so there you go.

All of that fits in a tiny bag, doesn’t weigh much at all, and that’s what matters the most.

Clothes, or OMG Cotton is SO Evil!

I learned some valuable clothing lessons from my long Japan trip in 2007, the most important of which is: COTTON IS EVIL. I love the feel of cotton, but it is the Devil’s work to have in my travel bag.

If I wash it in the sink and hang it up, it will not dry in one day. It may not even dry in two or three.

It does not breathe.

And Cotton shows sweat. It really shows sweat, so it makes me look gross when I’m exerting myself.

Cotton’s only saving grace is that it feels really good. Until I start hiking, carrying a load of any kind, and start sweating, of course.

And that’s what I do when I’m in travel and tourist modes.

So that’s not good enough.

For this trip, I vowed to make all of my clothing lightweight, synthetic stuff that breathes, dries quickly, doesn’t show sweat, and washes easily.

Socks: Balega. A joint North Carolina/South African operation. The socks are made of Coolmax, so they breathe, are easy to wash, and dry fast.

Boxers: Ex Officio. Best boxers ever. I bought 5 pair, because I don’t want to wash underwear every night. I washed 2 pair at a time. 1 packet of Woolite would do 2 boxers, and they dried overnight fabulously. I wear these even when I don’t travel. They’re really comfortable.

Shirts: I went with a variety from The North Face and Scott E-Vest. All were some kind of breathable nylon/Coolmax material. Some were long-sleeved for sun protection, some were short-sleeved for knocking around the room. Golf shirts from Scott E-Vest were great for looking dapper. All washed up fast, and dried overnight.

Pants: I used to use the Scott E-Vest travel cargo pants, which were linen, but they don’t make those anymore. It’s just as well, because linen pants don’t hold up to my kind of travel abuse.

I replaced them with The North Face Paramount Peak pants in 3 colors: a light khaki color, a mustard-brown color, and a dark green. All have zip-off legs for conversion into shorts, all have built-in nylon belts, so they don’t set off security scanners, and all come with one zippered side pocket, for storing those small things that like to fall out of pockets.

They also have a pair of Velcro cargo pockets, which are useful as well. The top pockets are a little too shallow for my taste, so things can fall out of them. But I’ve only ever lost one thing from them, and I found it rather quickly. I like the older version better. It has much deeper pockets.

All in all, they’re great pants. They shed stains, but not rain. If you’re caught in the rain, they will protect you for about a minute or so, then they’ll get soaked. But they dry in a hurry, so it’s not a big deal.

Jackets: I didn’t need my Polartec vest. I used my old L.L. Bean Gore-Tex jacket the most, but it’s showing its age. Newer rain jackets really are rubbish. They all feel like I’m wearing a trash bag, and for $100, that’s a rip-off. You don’t even get Gore-Tex for that. I wore my Scott E-Vest micro-suede jacket on the flight to keep warm and to carry extra stuff, but it’s not really rain gear.

I bought a $5 poncho at Dick’s Sporting Goods just in case. I never used it. It was just wasted space. I’m sure it’s useful for something, but I don’t know what.

I’ve already documented my problems in finding a decent umbrella that will also cover me properly. The drugstore umbrella is always a bad idea, although I suppose it beats being rained on, but not by much. The £15 Marks & Spencer’s umbrella was better, but it was bulky, unwieldy, and a royal pain in the butt to carry around.

I want to find a small umbrella that unfolds to a huge size. Surely someone makes such a thing.

Misc. Clothes Stuff: I wholeheartedly endorse clothespins with hanger hooks. They’re easier to carry than clothes hangers. I carry ~8 of them. Makes hanging wet clothes a breeze.

Also, it’s a lot cheaper/easier to just pour Woolite into some GoToobs than to carry around the little pouches.

Tech

Cameras: I dithered at first about taking my Canon Rebel with me, but I’m glad I did. It took great pictures.

The main lens I use is a 17-55 F2.8 EF-S lens by Canon, which is perfect for shooting with an APS-sized sensor digital Canon SLR. The Rebel has a field of view cutoff that leads to a magnification factor of about 1.6, so that gives me a 24-80mm equivalent lens. It’s not one of Canon’s L lenses, so it has a plastic body instead of a metal body, but if you take care of your gear, it shouldn’t be an issue.

The 80-200 F2.8L is monstrously heavy, and turns into a 120-320mm lens. It’s marginally useful, especially if you drop it. It weighs 5 pounds, which doesn’t sound like much until you have to carry it all over the place.

Next time I would make sure to bring a lens brush, to remove all of the glass bits right away. Would I take the big zoom again? Depends on where I’m going, and for how long.

Computers: Lighter laptops are always better. My Sony Vaio Z is old, but it weighs less than 3 pounds, which is great for carrying. Of course, buying a spare battery kind of ruins the whole purpose of getting a lighter computer, but since there weren’t any power ports on the flight, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Just finding a Sony battery for a computer that old was a pain.

The Motorola Xoom got used a lot, because of free hotel WiFi. Irritatingly enough, even though I have accounts with my Kindle and Google Books, I could access neither from the UK. So even if I wanted something new to read, I was out of luck.

Seriously, what’s the point of having these services for travelers if they don’t follow us where we go? It’s bad engineering from where I’m sitting. I suppose we should blame the lawyers for making deals that hurt consumers.

Getting a SIM card for the Nexus One was relatively simple, and I never used up all of my data. Vodafone was cheap. Much less hassle than trying to do it in Japan.

Bose Noise-Canceling Headphones: Bought these 4 years ago. Best $300 I ever spent. Wish they were smaller.

Google Maps. Don’t Leave Home Without It.

Having Google Maps on my phone was a real lifesaver. That’s something that I’d highly recommend for any future travel– a smartphone with a good data plan and Google Maps. Android over iPhone, because the iPhone version of Google Maps pales in comparison.

I would star the places I wanted to see in the morning on my Xoom, then find them on my Nexus One as I wandered about during the day. I used the navigation feature to figure out how to get there by train.

It’s really easy.

Amazingly, stupidly easy.

I could get a walking route, a driving route, or a mass transit route to wherever I wanted to go. The mass transit routes sometimes had good timetable info, too.

Odds and Ends

Oyster Card: Order yours six weeks before you leave for London, because the mail there is slow. It’s highly useful, and will save you a bunch of money.

Heathrow Express: It’s a lot faster and easier than using the Piccadilly Line to go to Heathrow. It costs £18 if you buy the ticket at Paddington/Heathrow, but if you buy online, it’s only £16. It’s £23 if you buy a ticket on the train. (So at least buy it at the station if you can!)

It’s a nice ride, and on top of that it’s an express, so you don’t have to stop at a bazillion stations along the way. You also have a place to put your bags, and you get a seat to sit in, plus WiFi. Those are all things you don’t usually get on the Piccadilly Line.

Food is Expensive in London. Everything is Expensive in London.

London is ungodly expensive. Pounds aren’t dollars, so if you’re not careful, you can get lulled into thinking, “Oh, it’s only £10 for dinner.” That’s $17.50, buddy. Those “cheap” £10 meals can drain your wallet in a hurry. That’s why I liked Base2Stay, because I could buy grocery store food and cheap food and stick it in the fridge. I saved a few dollars that way.

Marks and Spencer’s, the Cooperative, Gregg’s, Pret-a-Manger: all have lots of sandwiches and other food for cheaper than you’ll pay in restaurants. The Cooperative has better deals than M&S, and often has deals on soft drinks. I saved 20p on Fanta Lemon Ice there, and by eating some sandwiches instead of eating at restaurants all the time, I saved some money.

I loved the porridge in a cup from Gregg’s and M&S. Just add boiling water, stir and eat. I preferred the Golden Syrup flavor. £1 per cup. Not cheap, when you consider that I can get 4 weeks’ worth of oatmeal for $6 in the US, but that was my morning luxury.

I Still Hate Audio Guides

I began to loathe audio guides in London. All they did was get in my way and gum up my gear– especially my camera. The worst offender for entangling my gear was the multimedia guide at the British Museum, which had a little plastic pen that swayed around and clattered into things constantly. I really wanted to pitch it.

The most obnoxious use of audio guides was at Westminster Abbey, where if you didn’t get one, you didn’t learn a thing. Even the map had information removed so that you had to use the audio guide. I refused to rent one out of anger. At that point, I had had it.

More Miscellany

Clear expandable file: It’s really handy for those receipts.

Mead 5-Star collapsible 3-ring notebook: It was really handy. I removed the reinforced college-ruled paper, and replaced it with plain 3-hole copier paper. It took up very little space. The rings are on the outside of the notebook to keep the form factor small, and since you can use whatever paper you want, and however much you want, it’s very flexible. I used a lot of it for JLPT studying.

Inflatable Neck Pillow: I didn’t use it. I probably should have. My neck hurt like a sore tooth on the flight back.

Royal Mail: OMGEXPENSIVE. Even postcards are outrageous to send back. I’m never using that again, and I don’t recommend it. It’s cheaper to just buy another suitcase and deal with the airlines. No, really, I’m serious. I had to send some books back, and while the people at the Royal Mail are very nice, the prices are outright robbery.

In the end, I wound up carrying more stuff than I’d like, but it wasn’t as bad as the 2007 Japan trip. Still, I had a full pack on my back, and a full bag, but a lot of it was books for studying for the JLPT.

One day, I want to be able to carry one little bag as I travel, but since I love my technology and photography, I think that day is still far off.

Paddington Bares All

 Great Britain, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Paddington Bares All
Jun 302011
 

First a word about where I’m staying. It’s a hotel called Base2Stay in Kensington, about 5 minutes’ walk from the Earls Court Tube station. London hotels are ungodly expensive, and when researching a place to stay, I came upon horror story after horror story about cheap hotels that had terrible service, or no air conditioning, or smelled funny, or were in crummy locations, or whatever hotel horror you want to imagine.

All at a price I could not afford.

Base2Stay is pretty nice so far.

For £105 a night, I’m getting a clean room with a personal A/C / heater, a mini-kitchen, which few hotels can boast in the £100 range, and a nice bathroom with a towel heater, which is really handy for drying clothes. And the people here are nice in the “go way out of their way” sort of nice, plus they’ll shower you with restaurant coupons, should you so desire.

Room 114 is tiny. Microscopically so. It’s smaller than just about any hotel room I stayed in when I did my grand tour of Japan, and if you’ve read my Japan trip entries, you know I stayed in some tiny hotel rooms.

So I was a bit surprised when I saw what my £105 was getting me.

But in spite of that, it’s a nice little room with all the amenities I need– even a decent-sized shower. (But the shower head is too low, and the water can’t make up its mind if it wants to freeze or scald me on a regular basis.)

Is it perfect? No, but it’s a really good little place to crash that’s cheap for London, and expensive for most of America.

Like Elvis, Krispy Kreme is Everywhere

Anyway, on to the day’s activities… what excitement awaits? Well, today I got the phone straightened out. It wasn’t using the Internet properly, so I had to take it by Car Phone Warehouse to have them fiddle with it for a few minutes to get it to use the 3G properly.

Then I decided to head to Paddington Station to see about some lunch. Nothing really grabbed me inside the station as a lunch source, so I went outside and started wandering.

I found a nice little deli outside of the station, and had a chicken salad baguette and a coke for £3.50. Not bad for London. I went back to the station and did some grocery shopping at the Sainsbury’s there, and discovered that my U.S. credit card doesn’t work there.

I’m not even going to bother with it, I think. If I pay cash, it’s more painful, so I’ll spend less, and I will know when I’m spending money, because I will experience it in a more visceral fashion.

Spotted in Paddington Station, two things: 1. A statue of Paddington Bear. (Of course.) 2. A Krispy Kreme. (They really ARE everywhere.)

I went back to the room to study for the test after that.

Of course I bought doughnuts.

Okonomiyaki!

In the evening, I decided to go out for dinner for a break. First, I stopped by Boots’, the chemist’s shop, to pick up some liquid shower soap. Nivea for Men for £1. Inexpensive, and I’ll smell manly in a Euro way.

Then I headed on to Tokyo Spicy, a relatively new Japanese restaurant a few stores down from the Italian place I ate at the other day. The food was very good. I had okonomiyaki, which I haven’t had since I was in Osaka in 2007. I had it with pork this time. Yum. Wasn’t a big fan of the ginger beer, though. I prefer American ginger ale. The ginger beer was too sweet, and wasn’t very spicy. Give me Blenheim’s Ginger Ale any time. Mmmmm.

After that, I headed to Cafe del Coin, because the sign said they had crepes. They did not. They did have this chocolate caramel thing however, that was crunchy and went well with a cappuccino. Good enough for me. (I would have really liked a chocolate and whipped cream crepe, though.)

I haven’t had a good crepe since I was in Osaka in 2007.

Then back to the room to study. I love the room, but good lord, it’s tiny. It has just about everything I need, except a real desk and chair. It would be nice to sit on something besides the bed for a change of pace.

More Stupid Anki Tricks– Using the G15 Keyboard.

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on More Stupid Anki Tricks– Using the G15 Keyboard.
May 052011
 

I don’t know how many Anki users are out there with Logitech G15 series gaming keyboards (mine is one of the older ones), but yes, they do work with Anki. And by that I mean that you can program the G-keys to do all the answering dirty work for you, just as you would with a controller.

Right now, I have the G1-G4 keys set up with a timed macro to hit the space bar, wait about 0.7 seconds, then hit the 1-4 keys, so it will save me an extra keystroke.

It’s one of those 微妙 kinds of things to try to make reviewing go just a tiny bit faster… or at least to make the physical aspect of reviewing juuust a bit easier. I don’t think it does a whole heck of a lot, but it makes me think it does, and that’s all that really matters. In other words, don’t go running out to buy a keyboard just to do this… but if you already have a programmable keyboard, it might be worth the effort to do it.

Then again, it might not.

Of all of the interfaces I’ve messed with for Anki, I still think the wireless gamepad controller is the best/most efficient. The tablets are nice, too, but for the absolute least amount of work, it’s hard to beat the gamepad.

Xoom Xoom Xoom-a Xoom

 Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Xoom Xoom Xoom-a Xoom
May 012011
 

iPad, iSchmad. I picked up a Motorola Xoom the other day, because I like the way Honeycomb looks, and I’m excited about the prospect of Android on a tablet.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Me and 4 other nerds camped out for it at our local Best Buy on its release day. It’s no iPhone event, that’s for sure. In fact, the store clerk didn’t even know what we were talking about at first.

But I got one! Wi-Fi only, because I already have a cell phone bill.

So far, there’s not a whole lot to say about it. It’s Android. On a tablet.

Of course there are widgets, and I LOVE WIDGETS. Widgets are a large part of my motivation to switch to Android.

Using some of my various reader software is pretty nice. It’ll be nicer when it’s more tablet-friendly.

I’m hoping that there’s a flood of tablet-friendly apps coming out soon. That would be great.

My other hope is that this will replace a lot of the gadgets I carry around with me.

One downside: I don’t like the charger. Once again, Motorola has eschewed a USB charger in favor of this tiny little 12V pin charger, which looks like it’s going to get bent. I’m sure of it.

Apr 022011
 

This is something I stumbled upon last fall while trying to find an easier way to go through a ton of Anki reviews in a short period of time. I mentioned it on the Reviewing the Kanji forums somewhere, but I never posted it here. Well, here it is for posterity’s sake.

Problem: Using the keyboard to do Anki reviews is too much work, even for someone as lazy as you. Reviews are piling up. What will you do? What will you do?!?

OMG LAZY!

Solution: If you have a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2, you can use the Logitech Profiler to create a Game Profile for Anki. Just map keyboard shortcuts to the buttons on the controller that you want to use. I assigned the space bar to the shoulder buttons, then the number keys 1, 2, 3 and 4 to the numbered buttons 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. I also assigned the sync function ctrl-shift-y to the 9 and 10 buttons, to make syncing easy.

Now you just have to activate the Profiler when you run Anki, and you can slouch back and review in that half-catatonic gamer state you so dearly love, with barely a muscle moving.

Feeding tubes and adult diapers are optional.

It’s Not Perfect, But What Is?

There are a couple of downsides I have noticed: for some reason, the Logitech Profiler is kind of annoying, in that I have problems running other games with the controller. It wants to force the Anki profile remaps to all of the other games, so I only use this controller with my laptop, on which I don’t do much gaming.

Also, whenever I adjust the volume or screen brightness of my laptop, I have to switch to the Profiler screen, then back to Anki to “re-engage” the controller again. For some reason, the controller stops working in Anki whenever I fiddle with those buttons. It’s probably some sort of driver issue, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

In general, I find this interface to be the fastest and easiest way to do Anki reviews. It works even better when you hook up the HDMI-out from the laptop to your HDTV.

Android Apps For Japanese Learners

 Japan, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Android Apps For Japanese Learners
Apr 012011
 

If you’re going to go Android for Japanese first you need a keyboard. I like Simeji. It’s ugly, but very useful… and really, the only good choice out there, to be honest:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.adamrocker.android.input.simeji

Also, if you like to add Japanese-style emoticons, then Kaomoji List is a great add-on to Simeji. It’s activated through the “mushroom button” on Simeji’s keyboard:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.zeroindex.mushroom.kaomojilist

If you want to draw kanji by hand, then I recommend HanWriting IME:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.KwanLye.android.HanWriting

For a dictionary, there are a couple of options. My preference is DroidWing. It works great with EPWING dictionaries (just create an EPWING directory on your SDCard) and with web searches, if you know what search strings to use. You can search multiple dictionaries all at once, which is powerful.:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aokabi.android.droidwingfree

If you just want EDICT, then it’s hard to beat Aedict. It’s free:

https://market.android.com/details?id=sk.baka.aedict

Vertical Text Viewer is great for reading 青空文庫 (aozora bunko) formatted books.  青空文庫 is the Japanese version of Project Gutenberg, only the difference here is that the format they use has become an “underground” standard of a sort. You can even buy books, have them sent to a professional to be scanned professionally, and then format them yourself in 青空文庫 format. (The books get destroyed in the process, though.) Of all of the 青空文庫 readers out there, I like Vertical Text Viewer the most. It has a Mincho font you can download inside the app for extra legibility, and when you press and hold on a word, you can send the word to DroidWing to look it up! VERY handy.

https://market.android.com/details?id=org.example.android.npn2SC1815J.VerticalTextViewer

If you’re learning Japanese, chances are, you’re also struggling with a way to remember everything. I hope you’re using an SRS. My favorite SRS is Anki, and there’s a port of Anki for Android, called Ankidroid.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ichi2.anki

When you’re in Japan, post offices are really useful places for doing 2 things: sending crap home, and getting money for cheap. Finding them, on the other hand, can be tricky. This app claims to do it. (Requires a connection.):

https://market.android.com/details?id=jp.co.efficient.pnpostoffice

This last app is just cool: the Hyperdia search app– you can use the Hyperdia service to search for ways to get from A駅 to B駅 (A Station to B Station) all over Japan. Of course, these days, that might not work exactly as you think. Also, this requires an online connection to work:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.hyperdia.android.activity

I Have Joined the Robot Army.

 Technology, Travel  Comments Off on I Have Joined the Robot Army.
Jul 182010
 

The main reason for the switch was that AT&T said that Apple won’t let me unlock the iPhone I spent 2 years paying for on contract. Okay, fine. I can’t fight you, but I can never buy your stupid phones again.

Then AT&T told me “unlimited” wasn’t in their vocabulary anymore.

Okay.

So now I’m using a Nexus One on T-Mobile, with a month-to-month unlimited plan that’s the same cost as my old AT&T plan. We’ll see how long it lasts.

I’ve had the Nexus One (I’m going to call it the N1 from here on out) for a little while now, and I must say that it’s a great little phone. Unlocked, it cost about $550 US (ouch), but it’s a real trooper.

I got it unlocked to avoid more contracts–that $300 you save up front isn’t worth the $2000 you pay on the contract–and so that I could use SIM cards from other carriers when I travel overseas.

The main reason for picking the N1 was that as a Google developer phone, Google will roll out updates to it relatively quickly.

It comes with a stock version of Android, with nothing skinned over it, and that also means faster OS updates as well.

It also means that it doesn’t come with any bloatware.

There are some limitations: the onboard memory is small. Google’s own apps are not movable to SD for some reason they do not wish to divulge, so the onboard memory is always crammed full, and I’m already getting low memory warnings.

It supports up to a 32GB microSD, so that’s one thing in its favor.

Also, the touchpad tracking is a little off. This can cause great consternation at inopportune moments. Like when I’m driving and it decides to wipe out my route. Thanks for nothing.

Finally, no stock Japanese keyboard for non-Japanese phones.

But really, those are the only complaints I have about the phone, and they really are minor, because in every other area, it saves me so much hassle, it’s not even funny.

Google Maps is total lifesaver. There’s nothing on the iPhone that comes close.

Updates on Learning Japanese, Word Lists, and iPhone stuff

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Updates on Learning Japanese, Word Lists, and iPhone stuff
Feb 012010
 

Things have been hectic.

I decided to start taking JLPT exam prep classes offered at the NC Japan Center, and I find that that has been helping me to focus on acquiring new vocabulary and grammar. For some reason or another, I had gotten a bit bogged down doing the self-study thing. Maybe it’s just a matter of having too many books and too many distractions.

A class is good because it focuses me on doing just one thing at a time, rather than scattering my efforts all over the place.

The other good thing about the class is that I have access to a native Japanese speaker once a week for two hours, and I can share my toils with 3 other kindred spirits who are at roughly the same level, ability-wise. (And of course I have discovered where my Japanese language abilities lack. No surprises there, really.)

I prefer taking a class with adults over a class full of college students. No offense to college students, but adults are, well, adults. We’ve all been “out there” and “seen stuff,” so it makes it easier to socialize. Sitting in on college classes always felt kind of weird because of the age/experience gap.

Intermediate Kanji Book

Book-wise, we’re using “Intermediate Kanji Book, Volume 1” by Bonjinsha. It’s a good book for working on vocab, because it’s full of vocab exercises. Like any book, it’s only useful if you use it thoroughly. We’re using it pretty thoroughly. The only downside is that the book is kind of expensive. My copy was around $50 at the Japan Shop.

As the title implies, it comes after “Basic Kanji Book,” volumes 1 and 2, respectively.  The first two volumes will net you around 500 or so kanji, and this volume promises another 250 or so. There’s a volume 2 with another 250 in it as well, which will get you to the magic number of 1,000 for the level 2 JLPT.

Or you could just do Kanji Odyssey books 1 and 2, and that will net you 1,110. But I never did get started on book 2, because things got too hectic. I’ll probably snag some material from it as I go through IKB1, though.

Word Lists

I’ve been putting my earlier entry on word lists to use for the early reps of grinding the new vocab. I created a Photoshop graphic page that divides a 11″ x 8.5″ (so it’s landscape, not portrait) sheet of paper into six columns. Then I just print or photocopy the “master” page to make a bunch of study sheets.

I use the 5 lines as guides to fold the paper, so I can hide columns I don’t want to see, making it easier to study. Then I just study from Kanji with kana underneath it -> English -> Kanji + Kana -> English, and back and forth until one side is full. If I’m still feeling insecure, I fold over one side, use it as a prompt for the far right side of the back, and keep going until I feel comfortable. I decided to just put the kana under the kanji to save time and space, rather than mess with adding a separate step for kana. Really, if I need to know one, I need to know the other, so I might as well knock both out at the same time.

Otherwise, my rules are simple:

  • Put a few hours in between repetitions.
  • Don’t fill the column until you can get everything right. So that means test it, see if you got it right. If you didn’t, then set it aside for 20 minutes, then test it again. I can test other stuff in the meantime. This way, I can get multiple short lists of 5-7 vocab words going, and juggle them.

I’ve started cutting the pages down the middle lengthwise to save paper, too. So I can take one sheet of paper, and create two long, short, six-column study aids. I can fit 7-10 words on each one.

Once I feel comfortable, I use the list as a guide to grab sentences from online sources like dictionaries and dump them into Anki for long-term retention (and context.)

Kanzen Master

The class also uses the Kanzen Master level 2 grammar book, which is very good, but also kind of tricky, because it’s all in Japanese. In my case, I have to go to my reference books a bit to figure out what some of the entries mean, because the explanations are a bit terse.

We’re going to plow our way through it at our own pace. In the meantime, I’m picking up the level 3 grammar book to help me review all of the things I’ve probably forgotten by now. I love the Kanzen Master series for its thoroughness… 3-A makes great books in general.

iPhone Stuff

Just a few random things. Japanese by CodefromTokyo is on sale at the iTunes App Store until 2/3. 20% off, so it’s $16 instead of $20. It’s a good app that does a lot of things. My only beef is that it uses EDICT, which is free (as in Free Beer), and it wasn’t written by professionals. (Well, at least not professional lexicographers.)

You can get EDICT for free if you download Kotoba, and that’s free. Japanese does have a lot of other useful functions, though, like stroke order diagrams for most (not all) kanji, JLPT word lists, a simple flashcard program and other things that enhance the experience, but dictionary-wise, I’m not a huge fan of EDICT, and I already have Anki for flashcards.

So if you already have a robust study framework with Anki and better dictionaries, I’m not too sure where this program fits in yet. I’ll keep poking at it to see what other tricks it can do. I’d say it’s good for beginners to maybe lower intermediates, perhaps?

I prefer my 研究社 dictionary for the iPhone (even though it runs ~$30) as a Japanese-English, English-Japanese dictionary, simply because it was written by professionals. It doesn’t have some of the features of Japanese, but the new version is pretty strong for just a dictionary.

Same goes for 大辞林, which is an excellent 国語 dictionary. (That’s a Japanese dictionary which is all in Japanese.) The 大辞林 app even has a 四字熟語 dictionary section in it now. Cool stuff. It also runs in the $20-$30 range.

Syncing Backwards

Finally, I managed to solve a long-time vexing problem with my iPhone. At some point, my iPhone started telling me that I couldn’t sync my applications anymore. It wanted to overwrite the applications it had with the ones on my iPhone. That would not do, so I stopped syncing my apps.

Naturally, this made me a ball of nerves, because I was walking around with a bunch of $30 dictionaries in my pocket, worried that they’d get accidentally zorched. And I never could seem to find a way to make iTunes sync with my stupid iPhone and rescue all of my expensive apps that I had downloaded straight to the phone.

Until I found this link to an article about transferring apps from your iPhone to iTunes. All I had to do was right click? Seriously? That’s it? Gah! I thought Apple didn’t believe in the RMB.

I’m starting to lust openly at the Android phones now. I’m getting tired of the Byzantine OS that is all things iPhone and iTunes.

Turning Your iPhone Into a 電子辞書 (Denshi Jisho)

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Turning Your iPhone Into a 電子辞書 (Denshi Jisho)
Oct 132009
 

So what’s a 電子辞書 (denshi jisho)?

Japanese for “electronic dictionary,”  it’s a gizmo that’s really handy if you’re learning Japanese. They’re usually full of all different kinds of dictionaries, and now they have things like a drawing pad where you can draw a kanji on the pad, and they will (usually) recognize the kanji you draw on the pad. So gone are the days of tediously looking up kanji by their respective parts.

Sounds great, right?

Well, there are downsides. For starters, 電子辞書 are hard to find outside of Japan. You have to find a way to import them, and that can wind up being very expensive. Also, they’re usually bulky and full of a lot of features you’re not going to use. And it’s one more thing to carry around.

My Sharp Papyrus has an MP3 player and a bunch of other random crap I just never use. I’ve seen others that have TV tuners. Seriously? I just want to look up some words.

My iPhone does just about all of that, only better.

My iPhone Can Haz Denshi Jisho?

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you already own something that can easily be turned into a 電子辞書 if you’re willing to spend some money in the iTunes App store.

I’ve already mentioned the excellent 大辞林 (Daijirin) app, which gives you a great 国語 (kokugo— Japanese) dictionary for around $13 US.

If you need something more along the lines of a 英和/和英 dictionary (that would be an English-Japanese/Japanese English dictionary), then you can get the pretty good Genius 2 for $42, or the excellent 研究社 for $31, or the Wisdom for $24.

I love the 研究社 for its sample sentences, and its search robustness, but its interface is a little plain, and it lacks a super jump ability. You have to cut and paste words to search related words, which is kind of a pain.

There are also 四字熟語 dictionaries available as well as medical dictionaries. (The medical dictionaries are hideously expensive.)

To find Japanese dictionaries in the App Store, search under 辞書 or  辞典 (jisho or jiten… but you need to use the Japanese keyboard to generate those kanji.)

What About Drawing Kanji?

What about the kanji recognition? Does the iPhone have that?

Yes, it does. Of a sort.

Add the Chinese Traditional Handwriting keyboard under Settings> General> Keyboards> International> Chinese (Traditional). Then when you want to look up a kanji by drawing it, use the globe button to select the handwriting pad. Select until you see a big rectangular pad, and draw the kanji you’re looking for.

Draw slowly, and use proper stroke order. Then select one of the four kanji that pop up on the side. Voila. Kanji recognition– just like a $350 電子辞書, only it fits in your pocket.

Great iPhone Japanese Dictionary

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Great iPhone Japanese Dictionary
Oct 032009
 

I was looking for a good portable dictionary for my iPhone, and I’ve found a couple of programs. One is great, one is free. If you’re going to use either one of these, make sure you install the Japanese keyboard and the Chinese Traditional “draw the kanji” keyboard on your iPhone, and take the time to learn how to use them.

For starters, there’s Kotoba!, which is a very basic free dictionary that is “based off of Jim Breen’s JMDict.” JMDict is essentially EDICT, which isn’t a professionally edited dictionary. But it is free, and it is Japanese->English. The definitions are very stripped-down, and sometimes confusing or misleading, and sometimes just wrong.

But did I mention that it’s free?

Daijirin is Awesome

If you’re beyond the beginner phase of learning Japanese, and if you’re comfortable using Japanese->Japanese dictionaries, I highly recommend the 大辞林 (Daijirin) dictionary, which is available from the iTunes app store as well for $12.99 US. It takes a little getting used to at first, but once you get comfortable with the interface, you’ll realize just how great it is.

For example: even if your Japanese isn’t as strong as you’d like, you can touch-select words in the definition you don’t understand, and it will allow you to jump to the definition. You can keep jumping until you figure everything out, then jump back to the original definition.

This is a great way to pick up a lot of new vocabulary, and gets you more proficient at using Japanese->Japanese dictionaries, which are always better at explaining Japanese words than Japanese->English dictionaries.

The best part about the 大辞林 is that you don’t have to shell out $300 for a portable electronic dictionary to get it, which is how it usually comes, and it means one less thing to carry around.

PS3

 Technology  Comments Off on PS3
Sep 092009
 

Forgot to post this, but anyway, I picked up a PS3 when the new version came out.

Dear Sony,

I’ll tell you what it took to make me finally buy a PS3:

  1. For starters, you had to cut the price in half, from $600 to $300.
  2. You had to increase the hard drive size to something I could actually imagine using. 120GB is something I can imagine using. I also like the ability to swap out the HDD.  Nice touch adding the front panel… although these days, I can fit 120GB on a flash drive the size of my pinky. (Or I will be able to do it in 5 years, tops.)
  3. Adding DualShock to the SixAxis controller was a good idea. I was puzzled when the original PlayStation 3 came out without DualShock… it was only in about 7 years’ worth of PlayStation controllers. I’m sure that was done a while back, but when the PlayStation 3 came out without it, that was a turn-off to add to the other turn-offs. And I like that the controllers have built-in rechargeable batteries. The original Xbox 360 controllers didn’t have that, neither did the Wii. I hate buying batteries. The only thing I hate worse than buying batteries is when they corrode inside the controller.
  4. Most importantly, there was finally a critical mass of Games that Didn’t Suck. My rule is that there have to be at least 3 “OMG I have to  play this!” games out there. The original release games usually suck. It’s hard to get around that truth.

The original PlayStation 3 was very shiny, but it was freakin’ huge, too. The new unit looks and feels a little on the cheap side, but I don’t particularly care. I don’t sit and there and grope my PS3 all day. I use it for playing games or, whenever I get around to buying Blu-Ray movies, Blu-Rays.

I’m sure fit and finish is important to a certain degree (ask any Xbox 360 owner who had a RROD), but that’s what the extended warranty is for. One thing is certain– it’s a heck of a lot quieter than the 360, which often sounds like it’s about to launch from my entertainment center.

There are a few things that annoy me– updates, updates, updates. I buy a game, stick it in, get ready to play, and then have to wait 3 hours for 450MB of updates to finish downloading and installing. I can’t tell you how much I hate that. I’d love it if that were optional, or better yet, if I could play the game, and let the updates be handled in the background.

It’s not like it’s rocket science to handle more than one process at a time.

I also wish it did a better job of auto-detecting when I have the device plugged into an HDMI source. If you switch between a conventional TV and an HDMI TV, then you better have a way to hook up the PS3 using the composite video plug before you go HDMI, because it won’t do it automatically.

But it’s worth it to hook up the PS3 to any kind of HDTV, because the games look 10 times better than they do on a conventional TV. Even a computer monitor works, if you have the right kind. (That’s what I did at first.)

All in all, I have no clue how the PS3 is going to do in the long run, but I’m satisfied with it. I got my “must-play” games, all of which have hundreds of hours of replayability, and I have the ability to play Blu-Ray movies, too. Works for me.

Good job Sony, even if it is a little late.

A Few Days With the Epson 1400

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on A Few Days With the Epson 1400
Aug 192009
 

I got my Epson 1400 on Monday, so I’ve had a few days to play with it. Here are my initial impressions.

It’s big. No, I mean it’s menacingly huge. That’s no moon… okay, I’ll stop now.

It’s large enough to create problems about “Where do I put this… thing?” The extendable feed trays and output trays add to the problem. You wind up with this massive rectangular block with this one thing shooting 8-9 inches out of its head, and another tray shooting 5-6 inches out of its  belly.

It reminds me a bit of a NASA experiment. “This will be a servicing mission to deploy the feed and output trays for the Epson 1400 in low Earth orbit.”

So make sure you have enough room for it.

It’s also heavy. 29-30 pounds heavy. Don’t hurt yourself carrying it across the room. Its mass is significant enough that when it prints, it shakes the solid steel shelving I put it on. This isn’t some flimsy shelving, either. This is stuff made out of rigid steel tubing with reinforced steel shelves.

Yet when I print a photo, the shelves shake.

So don’t put it on that breakaway balsa-wood table.

The print quality is excellent. I grabbed some random photos from my trip to Japan, printed them on 4″ x 6″ glossy photo paper, and was impressed with the results. Even photos with really fussy light colors came out looking great. Bold colors are suitably bold, shadows and light areas are evenly printed.

Printing speed is noticeably slow. It takes about 2 minutes to print a 4″ x 6″ photo when you have it set at its highest output mode.

The software is thorough. You get options on top of options.

The much-hyped borderless printing is kind of a let-down. Whenever you select it, you get all sorts of warnings that the prints aren’t going to be as good as they would be if you printed with a border. The results are okay.

Installation was painless. (Except for lifting the printer.) The instructions say it takes around 3 minutes for the ink cartridges to charge. I’d guess it takes closer to 5 minutes. Just be patient.

One other thing: Staples just called me today to make sure the printer had arrived and that everything was okay. That was a nice touch. I give them a lot of credit for turning an unpleasant experience into a very pleasant one.

The Squeaky Feed Roller Gets the Grease

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on The Squeaky Feed Roller Gets the Grease
Aug 152009
 

Straying ever further from the main point of this blog, I recently had to delve into the world of printers for the first time in a long time. My 14-year-old HP LaserJet 5 scares me with a foul odor and even fouler-looking pages now, and my 8-year-old HP DeskJet 940c can’t stay in register to save its poor little life.

Getting Stapled

Since the State of North Carolina had decreed that last weekend was to be a holiday of mass consumption in order to get the kiddies ready for school, I went into my frenzy of printer acquisition. (Because printers were on the tax-free list.) Before the holiday, I had spied a neat deal online at Staples– an Epson 1400 for $179. It’s a great inkjet photo printer that usually runs for $300 everywhere else.

Alas, they were out of stock online.

So I went to the local store, which, according to the website, had the item in stock. I looked at the shelf, and they wanted $299 for it. I asked one of the sales people if they would match the online offer, and they would. But they were out of stock, too. They had some about 45 minutes away,  and they reassured me that if I went a few days later, I could still get the deal. (Yes, I was greedy– I wanted the deal tax-free.)

Okay, here’s where you should be very careful. Yes, sales usually go from Sunday-Saturday. But online deals don’t. And I didn’t know that. If someone tells you you can get the price, you should say at this point, “Can I get that in writing?”

That was my first mistake.

Thursday rolls around, and I knew I would be near the store that still had them in stock. I decided to check online before I left home to make sure they still had them in stock– they did, but they were low. The deal was still good. But by the time I got there, they had already yanked the deal off of their website.

Actually, they had not only yanked the deal off of the website, they had yanked the printer off of the website completely. It was as if it didn’t exist. So it didn’t matter what I said to the store employees there, they wouldn’t give me the deal.

Naturally, I was a bit upset. I hate it when the rug gets pulled out from under me, but what can you do? I didn’t take it out on the employees there– it’s not their fault. So I went home, wrote a letter to Staples explaining why I was upset, and what had happened.

I didn’t expect to get the deal at this point. I had already mentally walked away. If I could get the deal through writing a letter, great, but if not, I was over it. I always keep in mind what one of my old law professors taught me, “Never fall in love with something that can’t love you back.”

He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother

The printer frenzy weekend came and went. During the frenzy,  I found a great little Brother MFC 7840W (which totally rocks) from Best Buy for $199, reduced from $300. With a couple of gift cards I had, I walked out the door having spent only $125 on it. Tax free, too, because of the weekend. (It was also the last one in the Triangle. Woot.)

The 7840W is an awesome little multifunction printer. It’s a black and white laser printer that also is a fax, copier, and scanner. It has an auto-sheet feeder as well. Most importantly, it does wireless network printing like a champ. I guess it does scanning, too, but I don’t need that so much. The only weakness it has is the manual feed port– you can only manually feed a sheet at a time, and you have to hold the sheet you’re manually feeding. The other weakness is a lack of auto duplexing, but I don’t care about that.

Other than that, it’s great, and it fills the smoking hole left by my dying LaserJet 5. (No, really, it’s smoking.)

One neat trick I found is that if you cover the small round window on the right side of the toner cartridge with some black tape (or really any kind of masking tape), you can squeeze out a few extra hundred or so pages. Toner refills look bearable, price-wise. (Even more so with this trick.)

Pulling out the Staples

So anyway, here I am, happy with my little laser printer. I’ll admit I wanted the Epson that Staples had to print out a bunch of my photos from my journeys. The Epson is a great inkjet for photos… and not much else. After looking online, it’s hard to get a good deal on it from a reputable seller. It costs a fortune to ship, too, because it weighs a ton.

Much to my surprise, about 5-6 days after my email, I hear back from Staples. They were looking into the matter. To be honest, whenever I contact a company, I don’t ever expect to hear back, simply due to the volume of e-mail they get. I mostly wrote to get the frustration of having wasted 2 hours off of my chest, and to let them know that yanking a deal down in the middle of the day isn’t such a nice thing to do to your customers.

We exchanged some more e-mail, and after a few more days, they agreed to ship me a new Epson 1400 for $179 + tax, free shipping.

So in the end, I can say I’m pleased with how things turned out. Two new printers worth about $600 for about $300.

I win.

I’d say the moral to the story is this: always walk out on a bad deal, and go into every deal mentally prepared to walk out. Walking out on a bad deal is one of the most liberating feelings ever. It’s really fun to do when a car dealer tries to screw you over. I’ll save that for another post.

Be willing to haggle, and be willing to negotiate. Stand up for yourself, and tell companies when they do things that tick you off. Don’t be afraid to ask for something. If you don’t ask for it, you definitely won’t get it. If you ask nicely, you might just get it.

And never fall in love with something that can’t love you back. That way, you’ll always win.

Nov 302007
 

I carried a lot of useless stuff with me to Japan. It’s the sort of stuff you see in a catalog, and think, “Wow, that looks really useful!” when in reality you may use it once the whole trip, if you’re lucky, and end up having to lug it all over the place.

“But it’s so small, and folds away. It’ll hardly take up any space at all!”

Sure, that one thing is small, thin, and light, but when you add 10 or 15 of its little friends together, they start to take up a lot of space and add a lot of weight.

Think logically, and take only what you absolutely know you’ll use repeatedly with you.

Castoffs

  • Inflatable seat cushion: was actually less comfortable than the rock-hard chair.
  • Clothesline: never used it. I just found laundromats and did my laundry there.
  • Money belt: never used it. It’s Japan, not Europe. Sure, you might need one in Europe, and you might want to keep one on you just in case, but even the silk ones are uncomfortable, and in a country like Japan where even petty thievery is just unheard of, it felt totally unnecessary to me. Naturally, if you’re worried about losing your stuff, then go for it. I wasn’t too worried about being robbed in Japan. Now Europe is a whole different story.
  • Bicycle clips: didn’t need them. The bicycles there don’t eat your pants.
  • Luggage locks: didn’t need them. I bought one of the locks with a short cable on it… didn’t need that, either. Locking your luggage is one of those marginal things. If they want to steal your stuff, they’ll get it, and the hasps on those locks are a joke. If you really want to break into a suitcase, all you need is a pointy object to undo the zipper, then just run the locked zipper over it again to close it.
  • Travel wash/Travel soap: the little stuff you can buy in a bottle? Yeah, you don’t need that. Hotels have soap and shampoo, and it comes in big dispenser bottles, so you don’t have to worry about ruining the planet. That goes for any soaps/shampoos you bring from home, too. You just don’t need them, and all they do is add weight. If you stay in dorms, then buy your soap and shampoo there. You’ll smell like a local.
  • Little travel packs of toilet paper: just as scratchy as the stuff you’ll find in the toilets there. I never used it. If you must bring something to take care of business down there, I’d recommend getting those little moist wipes that are individually sealed, if you want to avoid the sandpapery stuff.
  • Carnation Instant Breakfast Drink pouches: Seemed like a good idea, but added a lot of weight, and drinking milk in the morning was just tough on my stomach.
  • Flashlight: Never used it. Might still be good to have one, anyway.

Marginally useful stuff

  • Travel blanket/bedsack: These are useful if you plan on staying in dorms. I used them a lot in the dorm I spent 2 weeks in, but after that, I sent them home because they were too bulky. I borrowed the bedsack. The blanket was too short, making it very uncomfortable as a blanket replacement for sleeping in beds/futons. Find a bigger version if you’re a taller person and you plan on sleeping in dorms.
  • Foam neck pillow: Really comfortable, but a royal pain to take with you. Find an inflatable one instead.
  • Foam head pillow (really small version): Useful for dorms and in-flight, but doesn’t store particularly well. I sent this home after I left the dorm. If you’re only staying in hotels, you don’t need it.
  • Portable travel radio: Wasted money, wasted space. The only radio I would take would be one that’s integrated into something else. Besides, 99% of what you can hear is in Japanese anyway. If you want to hear stuff from home, there’s always the internet.
  • Protein bars: Oh jeez. I took a ton of these with me, because I wasn’t sure about the whole sodium thing over in Japan. They were useful in spots, but not 10 pounds’ worth useful. Bring a few if you like to hike, but don’t bring too many. The food in Japan is wonderful, and there isn’t a protein bar out there than can compare. If you’re on a special diet, then check labels on the food at stores and conbinis. Even the food at conbinis compares pretty well to food you can get at any restaurant chain in the U.S., and it contains less mystery-ingredient stuff that comes in a chemical drum.
  • Blindfold/Ear plugs: I had them, just in case. I didn’t need them, but I had them. Avoid earplanes. Chewing gum is cheaper to unblock your ears.
  • Folding Travel Tray: Marginally useful, but I kept forgetting to use it. It does keep your stuff organized in hotel rooms, but you can just put it all in little piles on the desk, too.

Surprisingly useful stuff

  • Woolite pouches: If you’re smart and bring clothes you can wash in the sink, you’ll need Woolite. You can get packs of pouches at places like REI, and some kits come with a very handy flat plastic flap that works as a sink stopper. Or just pour Woolite into a tube and save a few bucks.
  • Coat hangers: 2 plastic ones are good for drying laundry, and less hassle to set up than a clothesline. Just bring two you don’t mind having broken by baggage handlers.
  • Clothespin with hanger hook: 2 of these, if you can find them, are even better for drying laundry or wet towels. Also good for wet underwear. Doubles as a good way to keep hotel curtains shut.
  • Microfiber towels: I used one small and one bath sheet. I sent the bath sheet home when I left the dorm, but it was a good towel. I kept the small one with me at all times as a hand towel. Most bathrooms in Japan don’t have paper hand towels, so BYO. Make sure you wash these a few times at home before you go abroad, and make sure you like them, because you may be using them a lot.
  • Plastic Knife/Fork/Spoon set: Usually, you will get chopsticks and such when you go to a conbini, but sometimes they forget, or they run out, or whatever, and you’re left with nothing. That’s when your KFS set comes in handy.

Best of the Best

  • iPod: It’s an iPod. It fights boredom. ‘Nuff said.
  • Sony eBook Reader: I love books. I especially love trashy science-fiction and fantasy books. So I managed to cram about 30 or so of my favorites into this thing, and it totally saved me. It has solid battery life, so you can fight boredom wherever you go.
  • Electronic Dictionary: In Japan, they call them denshi jisho, but I call them awesome. The latest models have a small touchpad on the base that you use to draw kanji on. It made my life there much easier. If you don’t know any Japanese, this won’t help you. It’s only useful for those with some Japanese knowledge.
  • Bose Noise-Cancelling Headphones: I can’t get on an airplane without these anymore. The only downside is that they’re bulky, but they are worth the trouble. Enjoy the cone of silence.
  • Carabiners: Yes, carabiners. They’re the hooks mountain climbers use to secure ropes. They’re also handy for clipping small bags to large bags. I love them.
  • Cell Phone: I’ll go into more detail in a following post, but a good cell phone in Japan is really nice to have. It doubles as an alarm clock.

What I wish I had done/taken

  • Better non-cotton clothing: I love cotton. I love how it feels on my skin. It makes me feel civilized. What I hate about cotton is that every drop of sweat stays on you all day, and sweat stains look nasty. I also hate how long it takes to dry when you wash it in your room. It’s not good for washing in the sink. Next time, I’m going to bring well-worn polyester layer-able clothes that wick sweat better, wash in the sink better, and dry in under 2 days.
  • Less Luggage: I wish I had just had one small-to-medium sized roller.
  • Stain Sticks: Both the pre-treating wash stain sticks, and the ones that remove stains on the go are things I pined for while in Japan. I’m sure I could have found them there if I searched long enough, but that’s wasted time, in my opinion.
  • More Packing Cubes: These are great just for keeping stuff organized in your suitcase. I already had some gear pouches for cords and rechargers, but something a little bigger for things like brochures I wanted to keep, but didn’t need, or a small cube for dirty laundry, one for clean shirts, etc. When everything is just dumped in the suitcase, it takes forever to find the little things.
  • A Good Compass: I needed one of these every now and then. When I needed it, I really needed it.
  • Good Rain Gear: I still haven’t figured this one out exactly, but I think next time, I’ll bring stuff with Gore-Tex in it. It does rain a lot in Japan, and if you’re not prepared, you can prepare to suffer. Also, try to find a big umbrella that folds small. The ones you buy in Japan tend to … well … suck. Spend the extra money to avoid needless suffering.

In the end, you have to figure out what your specific needs are, and do what you can to meet them. But try to find things that multi-task, if possible. Pack everything early, and that way you’ll see just how much room the little gizmos will take up. For a long trip, try living out of your planned bags for a few days before you go, and see what you use/don’t use. Figure out what you think you’ll need, and then only take half. (Except medicines.)

Try everything out in real-world situations. Use the rain gear in real rain. Use the bedsack in bed. See how dark that blindfold makes the room. See if the radio is any good at picking up anything other than static. Try to avoid repeating my mistakes, please!

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