Posted by Leefe on 31 January 2009 – 11:31 am
Have you ever gone looking at Threadless? There are some nice T-shirts there. It is a community driven T-shirt site. People submit designs; they get voted on; and if the votes are enough they get their T-shirts printed (& US$2000).
Since I don’t have time to do up designs at the moment I thought I’d have a play with it’s sister site, TypeTees. Similar deal, but this time you submit slogans to be voted on. Though, since they are so easy to submit there is a lot of chaff with the wheat.
So, I thought I’d start with some Japanese, something different from the rest. Unfortunately my initial attempts produced errors, the slogan was too long.
ねこと
いぬが
ふったら
かえります
There is a 65 character limit on slogans, and TypeTees converts the input box to HTML escaped Unicode. So at 8 letters per Japanese character it is a bit long. Limiting you to a max of 8 characters (65/8=8.125).
My next try was a nice short enter in Katakana.
ファーキュ
And it was accepted without error. Unfortunately TypeTees displays the slogan as HTML entities. 
& #12501;& #12449;& #12540;& #12461;& #12517;
Which is unlikely to get many votes.
It is a pity that TypeTees has a limited character set. I’ll just have to go and use Japanese slogans elsewhere.
Posted by Leefe on 30 January 2009 – 11:32 pm
Tokyo Institute of Technology at sunset with a nice fan of clouds.
Posted by Leefe on 26 January 2009 – 11:55 pm
Looking across the platform at Shinjuku station, from a train on the Chūō-Sōbu Line to a packed train on the Yamanote Line.
Posted by Leefe on 21 January 2009 – 11:56 pm
Looking back through the photos I have taken in Tokyo I found this one of a train covered in iPod advertisements. Not just the outside, but also all the ads inside.
Being the major transportation form in Tokyo, about 70% of all travel, trains are also the perfect venue for advertising. There are ads around the inside of the car just below the roof; banners hang from the ceiling at intervals the length of the car; and JR East carriages have video ads above the doors (with all the dialogue in subtitles).
But this train was special. All the ads are for iPods, all the poster, all the video, and it even had some on the outside. And not just this car, but every car of the train.
I wonder how much it costs to have a train devoted solely to your advertising? And is it worth it?
I have only seen a couple of devoted trains in my stay. But I can see when they might be effective: you have 5 to 30 minutes of a lot of people’s time, with only your ads to look at (aside from their keitai or PSP).
Posted by Leefe on 19 January 2009 – 11:55 pm
It is interesting the peculiarities of shops in different parts of the world. In Japan they play music at you when they are going to close, you get about 15 minutes warning. And quite often they will play Auld Lang Syne.
At night most of the local Summit closes, the food section stays open. Summit is like a Kmart, a supermarket and a 2 dollar shop combined into one store.
Since most of the shop has closed they close and lock all but one set of the entrance doors. Putting a sign behind the one not open, so you don’t try to use them.
The night this photo was taken they put the sign advertising their Sharp コピー (copy) centre sign out.
It was too good an opportunity not to take a photo. 
Posted by Leefe on 16 January 2009 – 12:01 pm
I have a nice new PSP 3000 and thought it nice to upload some video to it. But all the software I found for MacOS X crashes or produces bad files. All that is but one.
Looking through the things available in MacUpdate and VersionTracker wasn’t too useful. The stuff listed is all a little old, or unrated. And searching Google turned lots of links old bulletin board posts and sites that looked dodgy.
Finally I found a piece of software that worked, was stable and did the job, and I was able to upload working files.
What software did I try? And how does it stack up? Read below.
- iPSP Movie Loader (1.0.2, 2005, Feeware)
Free, but not updated since 2005. This program crashed every time I tried to open it.
- iPSP (2.0.4, 2005, Limited demo)
A shareware program. Opened some times. Tended to crash if you tried to do anything.
- iPSP (4.0.1, August 2008, Limited demo)
Without registration it keeps popping up windows telling you that it was a ‘feature limited demo‘. And when I clicked on the video icon in the left, it briefly displayed a listing of my Moives folder then crashed. (Not to mention their site has separate pages about version 2.0.4 & 4.0.1)
- ffmpegX (0.0.9x, January 2008)
After all the extra software you had to download separately (for licensing reasons), this looked promising. It has pre-set Target Format for PSPs. Movie conversion took around 30 minutes, though I’m not sure as there was no indication and I just left it in the background. The movie played in Quicktime. But the PSP did not see the movies uploaded using the instruction on their site. When I worked out where to upload the MP4s, the PSP thinks the files are corrupt.
So, what did I end up using?
- iSquint (1.5.2, March 2008, Freeware)
When you open iSquint, the first time, it asks you if you would like to get VisualHub their commercial product. After that it doesn’t bother you. It just works. (With a nice easy to use interface.) Drag the video you want to encode into the window; select ‘Optimize for iPod‘; click the Start button; and 15 minutes later your 700 MB file has been converted to a 180 MB MP4 ready to copy to your PSP. Selecting H.264 compression it took a little longer, 20 to 30 minutes. Copy the files to the PSP and they play without any problem.
Unfortunately this great product has one drawback. It is no longer being developed. In October 2008 the developer announced that the company was moving to other projects [2, 3]. Which is a pity, because it is a great program.
But not all is lost. iSquint continues to work. And the source of Techspansion’s 3 programs have been released as Open Source projects. There has even been a guild to compiling the Open Source projects written (by one of the compeditors to cash in on the current search for iSquint).
How to upload video to the PSP?
Here are instruction I would have liked to find more easily:
- Attach your PSP to your Mac with a USB cable.
- On the PSP, from the ‘Settings’ menu select ‘USB Connection‘.
- The PSP will shortly mount as a drive on the desktop.
- Inside the drive there should be a folder called VIDEO
If there isn’t create it.
- Copy your MP4s to this folder.
- Eject the PSP.
- You should now be able to play the videos by going to the Video menu, selecting Memory Stick, and choosing the video to play.
Notes:
- You can put videos into sub-folders of the VIDEO folder, the PSP can find and play them.
- The MP4s downloaded from YouTube also work on a PSP.
And for your reference, the machine I used to do the above is:
- MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- running Mac OS X 10.5.6
- PSP 3000 (firmware 4.21)
Posted by Leefe on 9 January 2009 – 11:55 pm
This train is only medium full, I have been on much more crowed trains in Tokyo, where you can’t move.
The interesting thing about this shot is the advertisement for boxer briefs in multiple colours and patterns. In Tokyo you see more adverts for fancy men’s underwear (than in Australia).
While there are still ads for women’s underwear, there more a balance. The social structure allows men to be more concerned about their appearance, without people queerying their sexuality.
And the man on the ad reminds me of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen from Changing rooms.
Posted by Leefe on 7 January 2009 – 2:00 pm
In recent news I see that Steve Jobs is having hormone issues. Reports say that his current weight less is not due to a recurrence of cancer, just a hormone imbalance.
Isn’t it obvious, at 53 Jobs, the mother of Apple computers, has entered menopause.
Jobs has entered the ‘grandmother‘ phase of his life cycle at Apple, and now needs to help nurture a new mother. Speculators believe that Philip Schiller is to be the new mother after giving the Keynote at this year’s MacWorld.
This is not a new phenomenon in the computer industry. With Steve Ballmer replacing Bill Gates as mother figure at Microsoft.
Still, many pause to see what effect this will have at Apple.
Posted by Leefe on 1 January 2009 – 11:59 pm
On new years eve we went and queued up at Sensoji temple in Asakusa. It is custom for Japanese to visit a temple to pray on the first day of the new year. And we though it would be interesting to go along and look while in Japan.
It was very cold. But the crowd was friendly and well behaved. No drunken behaviour. Little to no pushing or shoving (until just inside the temple). A different evening to one you might encounter in Sydney, Australia.
While we didn’t get to see any fireworks (they aren’t a feature of Japanese new years celebrations), there was a lively atmosphere. And lots of interesting food to try once you left the temple.
