“Otona no Kagaku” is magazine that comes with some kind of sience related device inside that you can put together.  There were all kinds of projects from synthesizers to airplanes, all sorts of fun.  Kids today are so lucky, I wish I had a magazine like that when I was a kid.

Anyway I’m too old for most of them to be interesting but one of them came with an Arduino board (branded as “Japanino”).  Since the magazine cost about as much as a new pre-assembled Arduino + shipping I decided to buy it.  The magazine is filled with a bunch of projects other than the one on the cover and explains how to go about doing them.  It’s amazing all the cool things people are doing with the Arduino. One guy uses an array of Arduinos to electricute himself in the face it seems.  To each his own I guess.

The Persistence of Vision project was really simple to set up.  Just a few screws and the website had all the software you needed already.  Here’s what the finished product looks like.

The IDE is really simple.  It’s amazing how low the bar is to get code onto these things.  Way back when (circa 2005) I still had to build a cross-compiler environment.  The language is like a C version of Processing, which is really intuitive and gets rid of having to write a boiler-plate event-loop in the main function.

Now I’m thinking about what to do next.  At work I’ve been experimenting with a presence system based on bluetooth which automatically locks the computer when I’m out of range.  Unfortunately Bluetooth has a pretty long range.  I wonder if there’s any NFC shields for the Arduino.  It’d be pretty cool if you could use your phone as a smart-card via NFC.

About a year ago I bought the first Android phone available in Japan for the sole reason of making apps. Unfortunately I’ve had very few itches that needed scratching.

About a month ago that changed, because the built-in Gmail app has a fatal flaw.

The Problem

If you temporarily lose connectivity while sending an e-mail, the e-mail gets stuck in a “Sending…” limbo.  There’s no way to re-send the message.  It’s not even possible to edit the message.  It’s not in the outbox, and not in the sent folder.

When OhLife first started I spent 30 minutes writing my first journal entry.  Unfortunately I’ll never get to read that post again because it never finished sending.

Also the native app doesn’t support Japanese emoji.  Which means that sometimes I get what looks like blank e-mail from my wife or my friends which were actually just full of emoji.

I decided to do something about it.  So I started using the Gmail mobile web app which doesn’t have this problem. Pretty soon however I started to miss the integrated experience of the native app.

My Solution

Better Mail is a native android app with a WebView hardcoded to mail.google.com.  But that isn’t all, it also listens to the same new e-mail broadcast as the Gmail app.  It will notify you of new e-mail without a constantly running background process.  It also includes a native menu so that you can navigate without having to scroll all the way to the top. Also, since Better Gmail is a separate application it stays in memory longer than a web-page would which makes it much less painful to use.  I also took the time to fix some of my pet-peeves with Gmail’s notification style. For example, I added a “Quiet Mode” feature that automatically turns off sounds and vibrations when you get new e-mail at 2 in the morning.

The Price

A buck.  Making this application wasn’t trivial, since I had to do some reverse-engineering.  While the die-hard Free Software nut inside me has some reservations about using DRM, it does improve performance a bit.  And performance is the biggest problem.

I have a lot of ideas in the pipeline that I could work on if there’s enough interest.  Eventually I would like to try injecting my own javascript code into the page to provide an even deeper level of integration.

Update:

I’ve decided to work on bigger and better things.  The code is now Open-Source (GPL) and available for free!

The Future

This app is definitely a minimum value product, there’s plenty of room to expand.  If anyone has a feature request let me know via e-mail or in the comments.

I need to work double hard now to work off the calories.  f^_^;

Getting this setup in Ubuntu is easier than getting it setup with Windows. The only gotcha is that you have to install Gnome-PPP first, since it doesn’t come with Ubuntu. I’ll try later using gnome-network-settings and report it in another post.

• First install GNOME-PPP using synaptic or apt-get
• Run it and press the setup button
• Press the detect button, it should find /dev/ttyACM0
• Speed: 460800
• Phone Line: Tone
• Volume: High
• In the Init Strings change Init2 to ATH0E1
• Leave Init 3 alone
• Leave Dial prefix empty
• Username: em
• Password: em
• Phone number *99***1# (Some people have success with just *99#)
• Internet!

These instructions come from http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hayamiz/20070616/1181994636 (Japanese)

(Since I map the Caps Lock key to Control, it might be possible that the combination is Caps Lock+Shift+Hiragana_Katakana. Changing this mapping in Windows requires messing with the registry so I’m not going to try it. Perhaps Lazyweb can confirm it for me. )

In the hour I spent smashing every key combination possible I found some other equally useless combinations. Here’s a list of my findings.

• (Full-width mode) ALT+Hiragana_Katakana: Toggle qwerty and kana layout modes
• (Half-width mode) CTRL+Shift+Hiragana_Katakana: Toggle half width querty and kana layout modes (toggles full-width romaji in full-width mode)
• (Full-width mode) Shift+Muhenkan: Toggle between kana and full-width romaji
• (Full-width mode) Shift+Henkan: Toogle between kana and half-width romaji modes

The biggest news is that I’ve been accepted to do an internship at Matsushita (The parent company of Panasonic) for 6 months. It starts this June so I should be back in Japan on June 1st. It’s really exciting and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get some real job experience in Japan. I just learned recently that this year is also the last year for JETRO, the agency that matches students with internships in Japan.

The title of the internship is “Modeling and Code Generation of ubiquitous device networks.” It sounds pretty interesting, and they are using Linux servers. I’m pretty sure that’s one place where I can be helpful.

This winter break I had a wonderful time in Puerto Rico with my girlfriend. She met nearly my entire family on my mom’s side of the family, but nobody on my dad’s side. Looks like one day we’ll have to go to PR together again. I think she’ll like the idea.

For spring break I went to Puerto Rico (again) with a few of my friends. They really enjoyed it and want to go back. I apparently make a decent guide to PR even though I probably know more about Japan. ^_^;;;

Well I guess that’s all the important interesting stuff. Let me know if you are going to be in Japan in the summer or fall!

今日ミス ユーニバスというビューティ パーゲント行われた。今度のMiss Japan （知花くらら）がめっちゃ美人です。 結果はMiss Puerto Rico（Zuleyka Rivera)が勝って、二番目が知花さんでした。日本の方がもっときれいで、頭よくて（スペイン語、フランス語，英語も話せる）、ドレスも素敵だと思い ます。 何点でPuerto Ricoが勝ったか分からない。（＞＿＜）

でわ春菜からのバトン行きます。英語の言葉使います！

【Ｑ１】自転車のことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ Bike

【Ｑ２】マクドナルドのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ McDonalds (also sometimes Micky Ds)

【Ｑ３】パソコンのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ Laptop, PC

【Ｑ４】お父さんのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ Papa

【Ｑ５】お母さんのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ Mama

【Ｑ６】合同コンパのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ ごこん。。。

【Ｑ７】セブンイレブンのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ (The) Seven Eleven

【Ｑ８】ファミリーマートのことを何と呼ぶ？

Ａ＞ Family Mart

【Ｑ９】自分しか使わないであろう、呼び方を教えてください

Ａ＞ Hmm I’m not sure…

【Ｑ１０】次にバトンをまわす人を、自分の呼び方で指名してください

Jules (sp?)
May
John
Meg

今日の昼にプラザ・カロリナに食べに行きました。　モールだからいろんな料理食べれるためにそこにしました。　 「Little Tokyo」という店あってすき焼きとかチキンカツがメニュに書いてあったんやけどすき焼きを注文した時に「そのメニュを気にしないで中国料理しかないんです。」と言われてめっちゃ不満足だった。　すき焼き食べたい気が残っちゃった。

Here are my results:

Apollon(アポロン)　英語名：Apollo(アポロ)
です。

■神話
太陽神として知られる、音楽と医療の神。
神話の中では明るく陽気な性格で竪琴を奏でる色男として登場します。
神々の中でも2枚目として通っていた彼ですが、女性には振られまくっています。
美形でも軽い男は女性には好かれないようです。

■性質
あなたは愛想がよく、女性男性問わずに周りから好かれるタイプ しかも失敗を恐れずにいろいろなことにもチャレンジします。
大きなことにチャレンジして、一発当てることができるのもアポロンの特徴です。
楽天的なところがあるので、あまり沈みこまないところも良いところです。
いつも明るいおかげで、周りも明るくなり、みんな安心してあなたと付き合うことができます。

チャレンジ精神が旺盛なおかげで、高嶺の花といわれる女性にも積極的にアプローチができます。
また、失敗しても立ち直りが早いのでさっさと次の恋愛にうつることができます。

ただ、周りからは『ころころ気が変わる人』『遊んでそう』と思われる傾向があります。
あまり女性にこの評価が広まると、食事には一緒に行ってもいいけど付き合うのはちょっとねぇ、というように見られてしまいます。
八方美人にならないようにすれば、女性からの評価が上がりますよ。

■Solution
そんなあなたにおすすめの「異性の心理」は『足元に注意』『キッチンでシンクロ』です。
こまめな気遣いができると、女性からの評価はさらに上がりますよ。

I can’t say I understand it 100% but it seems pretty good to me. I think it’s interesting how it has a Solution section. You don’t see too many of those in American personality tests.