This hotel room costs less than a deluxe bowl of ramen, but you’d better come prepared. For budget travelers in Japan who’re looking for a cheap place to spend the night, capsule hotels are the first thing that comes to mind, since they often charge less than 5,000 yen (US$43) a night. The downside, though,…
This hotel is on a major thoroughfare through Edogawa-ku. This is also the area where I visit/stay whenever I’m in Japan. The airport Limousine bus makes stops at Ichinoe station and Kasai station along this same road. In fact, I think the bus may stop right IN FRONT of this hotel when it stop at Ichinoe. Ah, such memories. I haven’t visited Japan since 2019. I do hope to return in 2022. I have my fingers crossed.
They only “said” they changed the recipe but it’s still the same. In this metaphor, I’m clapping back to Mark Zoidberg and his renaming of the FakeBook to Meta-statis.
Big announcement this week from the newly renamed FaceBook entity to “meta” by ZuckerburgCo. Facebook is changing the embrace and exploitation of Face Recognition (which they have already sold/re-sold to the likes of anyone paying into their platform to get to the data). Dropping and deleting the vast Face Recognition database is being sold as an innate good to humanity, not least of which includes all the subscribers to Facebook. But don’t be too quick to rush to judgement and accept this at face value. Because as ZuckerburgCo. knows, it’s all about the slippery wording.
Vox.com has an article out today (link above) more or less emphatically contradicting the big announcment over the deletion of Facial Recognition databases. In it the pull quote below:
For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we’ll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we’re living up to our responsible innovation framework.”
That quote is meta speaking for meta’s future intentions re: Bio-metric data y’all. What is a responsible innovation framework, anyways? I thought they were deleting the facial recognition data. This sounds like a contradictory, misleading, soft-ball. Like a caveat at the end of a definitive statement. It appears that meta has future applications for bio-metric data that could pale in comparison to the Face Recognition for Facebook vers. 1. And the meta-verse is just the beginning of this new round of personal privacy invasion/collection by ZuckerburgCo. You’ve been warned, caveat emptor.
Lots of fun with green screen on the BlackMagic Design ATEM Mini Extreme switcher, doing virtual studio “visits” to other youtubers. Much fun is had, and the quality of the key’d in backgrounds is pretty darned good for the price. BMD for the win.
Watchdog finds dubious data gathering, illusory solicitations for consent The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said many internet service providers are sharing data about their customers, in defiance of expectations, and are failing to give subscribers adequate choices about whether or how their data is shared.…
I half suspected this years ago, when I first learned about things like DnsCrypt. I didn’t quite understand why one would want to encrypt/verify their DNS lookups. I’ve learned since then that some part of man-in-the-middle attacks is using DNS lookups to re-direct to malware websites. The encryption component on the other-hand is meant to prevent anyone from easily seeing the DNS referral/lookups being made from end-to-end. With a software service like dnscrypt-proxy, you are defining a DNS host you trust, but furthermore you are encrypting the lookup, making it marginally more private. Alleviating the need to run your own personal DNS, or maintain a local Hosts file where you keep the mapping of host/ip address yourself. Dnscrypt-proxy IS a local dns service, and relies on a network of volunteer dnscrypt-proxy hosts who do the referrals/lookups and send back the ip address for a given lookup query. Now think about a careless, predatory ISP who only wants to drive their infrastructure into the ground using year 2000 era Cable Modem technology. Rent-seeking at its finest. No investment in infrastructure, no attempt to replace copper with fibre optic. No. Just drive that old investment into the ground and raise the marginal return by any means necessary. Generally this is by having you sign up for triple-play/triple-pay schemes where they make you subscribe to cable TV channels you’ll never watch to get a better monthly subscription rate.
However what happens then when that well dries up? It’s not likely they’re getting people to drop their existing cable modem provider for another one, because most Cable providers are local monopolies. What to do? Well, most cable modems have their configurations burned into them at the factory. Default DNS server on your cable modem? Well that’s provisioned up at the head end, at the ISP using the provisioning directives built-in to the modem. Simple lookup (almost like DHCP), and you find the ISP’s dns server, and then the data collection begins. ISP is watching, monitoring, auditing, surveilling you like you were an enemy of the National Security Agency. Everything is logged, tagged, collated, collected and sold to idiots like Peter Thiel (of Palantir fame) or Robert Mercer (of Cambridge Analytica fame). These mercenary personal data collectors de-anonymize the vast stores of data collected on you and correlate A-L-L of it, to sell to other more shadowy users of your personal data. The circle of surveillance will target you for untold marketing, or worse, attacks against your personal computer on the ISP’s network. However, they don’t care, they just want more and more money.
*Nota Bene: With full credit going to one Mr. Kilgore Trout and his essayist/biographer another Mr. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (from the book Breakfast of Champions)
“Gilgongo!” was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was the word: GILGONGO!
In the language of the planet, that meant “Extinct!” People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter. The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hundred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.
Reading these words takes me back to age 14 when I first read this bit of adult doggerel at the urging of my Mom. If you can believe it, the book like all great literature tries to meet you where you are. Not a kids book. But understandable by a kid, let me tell you. The crazy goings on, Dwayne Hoover/Wayne Hoobler’s decent into nervous breakdown, Midland, Ohio. There was just so much to read and laugh at, but the big triumphal meetup between Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, and the sharing of the book, “Now it can be told”,… boy that was art, man. Total art. But some really doozy’s along the way too, like the seeming throw-a-way synopsis of Kilgore Trout’s lifes work. Short stories like Gilgongo! What harkens back, to that time of yore, was a story last night on the PBS News Hour and the most recent announcement of animal species being taken off the endangered list (wait for it! there’s more to this sentence) and placed on the extinction list. Yeah Boy! They lift you up only to take you back down again. A Mollusk and number of birds all gone, all Gilgongo. I always will think of this every time I hear or read about an extinction event.
Instant ramen becomes fizzy drinks, and we’ve tried them all so you don’t have to. Just the other day, Nissin, the creators of Cup Noodle, the world’s first-ever instant noodle, came out with their craziest 50th birthday announcement yet: they would be releasing Cup Noodle sodas. That’s right, the esteemed makers of the instant Cup…
Lucky for us average citizens, unaware of this novelty, it’s only a promo from Nissin to celebrate their 50th anniversary of the Cup Noodle product itself. Can you believe it? Cup Noodle has been around 50 years now. My, my how time flies by.
Firmware-based system recovers encrypted data in seconds, but manufacturers are proving reluctant A team of researchers claim to have come up with an upgrade that makes SSDs impervious to ransomware attacks – detecting infections and reverting unexpected encryption within a matter of seconds, at the cost of a small increase in latency.…
I say, “Give me the latency”, and I’ll take cold comfort in the insurance that any ransomware script kiddy from Russia will have a bad day. Bring it ON!
Shouldn’t the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can “echo all around the world”? Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of…
Alan Levine ladies and gentleman (the Linklover himself), pointing out the fact that if you don’t preserve something yourself on the web, then WHO is going to preserve it? If you hope, wish, the Inter Wayback Machine will be your only hope, that may come true. But that’s no guarantee either, over time. Which reminds me, a funny thing about end notes, even in real book publishing. I started/stopped multiple times reading through Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” after hearing about from her co-author Nell Scovell. That’s a whole other book, story, anecdote. So I thought you know I just read this auto-biography from Nell Scovell and she’s really good, so maybe I should ALSO read the book she helped Sheryl Sandberg wtih. So I did, and dear reader, that book is chock full of Sociological references and academic citations par excellence. Everything is documented, backed-up and fact checked by real Stanford U. folks who made certain her book was a slam dunk in it’s thesis and claims. However, reading through all those end notes it occurs to today, just as I finished it, almost HALF of the citations were themselves effing URLs,… The other half fully MLA/ReWorks style print/journal publications. So even as I write this I think about the link rot to every video, anecdotal recollection and random weblink tossed in for completeness. How long before before someone even as famous as Sheryl Sandberg’s magnum opus begins to tatter and fray in the end notes? It will happen.
When I first started blogging, it was on the old Userland Frontier website created and hosted for “free” by Userland software (a product of super-genius, Dave Winer). The reason why I chose that platform? Same as most people I guess. I read about in the pages and online editions of Byte Magazine, as Jon Udell began plumbing the depths of RSS, and the River of News, long before algorithmic curation of wall-gardens we call Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those were the days, weren’t they? But now we still can do it, just using different tools, and hosted on personal domains. And that’s key, your domain, your stuff, your responsibility. It’s the self-sufficiency and freedom we hear being paid lip-service in pop-culture political circles, and pundit channels on social media. ONLY, it’s actually true, and we benefit directly from the fact we have the agency, autonomy, and means to own our little section of land out there on the Interwebs. Nobody can grief me, swat me, take it away or hold it hostage. As long as I keep paying my domain registrar, it’s mine. It belongs to me. But occupancy isn’t the same as ownership, and that’s where Alan’s admonition about link rot comes in. Whatever you do, invest the time and keep painting, sanding, weeding and re-linking those old resources you treasured. Find them, site-suck them and host them locally if need be.
Feel-good story about a Japanese convenience store becomes one of the most unexpected surprises at the Olympics. If you’ve ever visited Japan, you’ll know just how wonderful its convenience stores are. Unlike a lot of convenience stores overseas, the ones in Japan are warm, clean and inviting, with door chimes to welcome you and a…
Amen and amen, to fellow Japan traveler Devin Heroux. He has to try a curry bun (Kare pan). And don’t just limit travels to 7/11 either. Try out ALL the combini. Try out Family Mart (Fami Chiki- that’s their signature chicken cutlet made with dark meat). Also try Sunkust and Lawson’s too. They’re everywhere and just as high quality and interesting as 7/11. But truth be told 7/11 is better in that they have the International currency ATM. You can get Japanese cash at the ATM so much easier than any actual bank in Japan. Most Japanese banks save for one or two of them have agreements with U.S. international ATM networks. But 7/11 does! So I go there once a week when traveling to get my Suica card charged up for all the trips on the JR trains, and other private lines and subways around Tokyo.
Can Mr. Sato collect them all or will he wilt beneath the early summer sun trying? Stuffed with sweet red bean paste and consisting of a soft, doughy exterior, anpan is a timeless classic and a ubiquitous feature in bakeries across Japan. The baked sweet is so popular that convenience store chain Daily Yamazaki has…
I love when Mr. Sato does a quest of some sort. I’ve seen him order different food items (some of them were “extreme” large portions from promotions done at various food chains). But Ampan is even cooler still. And it’s all within Metro Tokyo. So it’s conceivable one could hit all the train stations and get to each of the locations. I like that they try to promote local specialties, so there’s more variety than your bog-standard, base level ampan. So here it is a the full tour of all the locations where Mr. Sato sought each version of ampan.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 