::A Geek in Korea::

My daughter and I are always using the Nexus 7 I bought. The thing is perfect for most of my media consumption, and rarely leaves my side when I am at home. I installed a few applications for my daughter when I first got it to keep her entertained. I can live with the clutter of some coloring applications and videos for her to watch. The collection of videos I put on the tablet was actually the largest consumption of the onboard memory! This was suitable for a simple single user install, because she was only allowed to use the tablet when I was there, and I controlled this by unlocking it for her.

She figured out my lock screen after watching me input things repeatedly, which meant that I needed to either lock her out, or change how I was using the tablet. I don’t want her sending out random emails, or accessing saved work materials via the cloud. Since she clearly wanted to use the machine to draw, I decided that rather than stop her, I’d just give her a smaller sandbox and I set up a user just for her.

The Nexus 7 has a built in multi-user mode which lets you have three active profiles at once. When you first log in, it creates the initial login experience, and you can customize this setting in any way. The initial user remains the “owner” of the machine, and can boot this new user off and has all root permissions, but otherwise it’s like starting a new tablet experience. I downloaded a few applications using my own account for my daughter to use, but I could have set up a parallel account just for her. I could also limit her access to online materials by removing some of the applications, or customizing the screen in such a way to prevent her from reaching more applications on the machine.

The only annoyance is that there isn’t an efficient way to share media between users. If I have a movie on my user space, my daughter would need to download the same file to be able to have permission to see it. So far from my searches, I’ve only been able to find one “shared” folder for all users, which is the “Android/obb” folder (for whatever reason, this is shared between applications, but media can also reside there.)

Using the /obb folder is a bit of a hack solution, but it lets me dump a file there so I don’t have to cut my storage in half by duplicating everything. Right now my daughter just draws and takes pictures of herself, but if she started using larger chunks of storage this would be an issue. Migrating to the cloud is okay for Wi-Fi friendly usage, but I’d rather control when my daughter gets access to the web. Right now the only major annoyance is when a paid application for children tries to sell her something with a banner advertisement click through to the Google Play Store. Inexcusable.

Eventually my wife will become savvy enough to use a touch screen interface for something she can’t do on her phone, and I’ll carve up the user space once again for her. She uses her phone for a little more now than just calling, and I think I’ve caught her with applications I didn’t even install for her, which is a step for her technophobic nature. She chided my purchase of the tablet as being unnecessary, but it’s far better than I expected. Teaching Glow basic computer skills is going to be fun (and scary!).

This is pure (slightly NSFW?) madness.

People go to a “Robot Bar” in Japan, with ladies in bikinis dancing around to pop music with enough neon and lasers to make people go blind or discover any seizure triggers they have. Pop music, Japanese girls in bikinis, and lip syncing robots that look like sexualized/militarized Chuck-e-Cheese cast offs on tank treads.

So, this “exists”, but this is what I thought all of Japan was like ALL OF THE TIME. I thought this level of weird was going to be inescapable. Imagine my disappointment that this sort of stuff is just in weird bars deep underground. Japan’s going to really need to ramp things up if they are going to be able to keep up with people’s expectations.

I got bit by my tendency to use disposable emails when signing up for new services online that are likely to flood my inbox with a multitude of emails. When I went about my day using Twitter like usual for the past few weeks, posting snarky comments and retweeting people like I normally do, I was probably a victim of hacking, or put under the suspicion of having my account hacked. I didn’t notice any change, but it’s happened like that before. Twitter had a massive password breech and I got notified that my account might have been vulnerable and my password needed to be reset.

The only problem? Since I signed up for Twitter only a few months after it started (I was a serious early adopter of the platform), and the email I used is now defunct. Not only that, but the email had also previously been hacked, password changed, and used for phishing my relatives. GREAT. That’s what I get for failing to keep accurate contact information.

Despite sending a help ticket to the Twitter service, since they are unable to verify phone numbers with my service provider in Korea, and I can’t recover the email to prove my account is legit. Them requiring me to log out of my account to change my password via email has locked me out of the service on all other devices other than my phone which I am using a dedicated app to post.

Oops.

Rather than give in, I’ve set up a semi-permanent “spam” account for new things I’ll sign up with in the future, set up an extra strength password, and migrated my account to @geekinkorea.  I’ll start using my new account on my phone, which will end my last way of getting to my old account. The phone is where 99% of my Twitter interaction happens anyway, so once that’s switched over, I won’t notice much change. I’m already following most of the people that I enjoyed reading anyway. I’m just down approximately 450 spam accounts that used to follow me (I averaged 5 new users to my stream for a while. Bye bye!). I’ll get back to normal posting stuff once I make sure all the relevant information from the previous account has been extracted from my phone.

Minecraft – Pocket Edition is a limited version of the “Classic” mode of Minecraft. I’ve owned Minecraft for a few years at this point, but being able to play it without serious lag on my old PC was a limiting factor to my enjoyment. While the fully featured version was fun for a few hours alone, building fortresses and slicing through monsters while my daughter watched, I didn’t play it much.

The problem with it being on the PC was that sitting down to play it full screen on my computer wasn’t enough to occupy my full attention, and I wasn’t dedicated enough to get more involved in the more complex aspects of the game. It’s a sandbox that gets easier as you last longer, but lets you do some incredible things if you put the time into it. There are some beautiful modifications and elaborate maps that have lots of clever things built in them, but I just wanted the first few days of fighting off zombies while trying to construct a house to be my experience in the game. Since I didn’t play it on a multiplayer server, I’d rather not spend lots of time building something beyond what was necessary for survival, and exploring “seeds” where something unique happens on the random generator was how I spent the majority of my time before growing bored and stopping.

The Minecraft – Pocket Edition was neat simply because I couldn’t believe that it could run on my phone. Some of my students in the camp had it, and after I heard that familiar ”creeper” sound, I knew I was going to need to try it for myself. Minecraft on the toilet? Why not? I’m not entertained enough to sit down at a PC and play Minecraft for hours, but I’m usually on my phone, I’m bored, so Minecraft is perfect.

I’m going to challenge myself to play it in “survival” mode, with hostile monsters, and put together a small fortress to defend myself like I used to with the fully featured PC version. There aren’t programmable elements, like redstone or pistons, so you can’t recursively program a game within the game like some ambitious people do, but that isn’t why I played Minecraft in the first place. The limits of the portable version don’t bother me, and the game remains in active development so even the missing features get a little closer day by day. So far the challenge of being able to survive Zombies and Skeletons well enough to collect wood has been difficult. (No coal anywhere to be found! ARGH!)

It does drain the battery pretty quickly, so it’s not like I’ll be able to play it all day, but it’s a very fun time waster when I have a few minutes and two hands. The interface would be much better on a larger tablet (which I am looking into buying anyway), but it’s not like I’m building something elaborate anyway (yet). The PC version is superior, but the Pocket Edition surprised me by even being playable.

Nintendocore cover of a  Jonathan Coulton Song featuring a video made from clips from the silent film robot classic Metropolis?

Consider this geek niche itch completely scratched!

Usually around the end of December a lot of shows will go on hiatus or have a “recap/best of” episode made up of clips so that people can enjoy their time off. Having a few episodes of shows to wash the dishes to or prepare breakfast for my family is all I need to keep me entertained. One of my favorite podcasts, Caustic Soda, has a limited amount of materials available through their RSS feed, but has all of their content otherwise available on their website.

I listen to all my podcasts at 1.35x speeds thanks to the Presto plugin using BeyondPod. Anything released that I am subscribed to via RSS will be faster, but files I listen to downloaded from the internet are usually just played with an mp3 player on my device and will be 1x speed. It might seem weird, but listening to a talk-heavy podcast at normal speed seems too slow, so I actually wanted to speed up the file playback. (First world problem, I know.)

I found out that you can actually select a folder and make a “local feed” from a folder on your phone to use BeyondPod for playback. The hardest part was getting the path from the folder I made written down so I could find it in BeyondPod’s menu. I downloaded a ton of the back episodes of Caustic Soda to keep me entertained while the “Holiday Recording Slump” happens this year.  I’d advise against listening to Caustic Soda while eating food. Several times I’ve lost my appetite while they’ve discussed some disgusting topic.

Since I just discovered this, I thought I’d pass it on for anyone that wants to speed up playback on their local files. I would imagine this would be very useful for audiobooks, since Beyondpod keeps track of the files you’ve completed, you can resume at any time, and you can manage the files easily. The folder just shows up like any other feed and is managed the same way.

Angry Birds Star Wars

There hasn’t been official, licensed Star Wars content in the past decade that has interested me in any way. The entire prequel franchise killed my interest in the series as a whole, and other than watch the Rifftrax versions of each of the movies, I haven’t watched any part of my favorite childhood series in ages. I can still quote nearly all of it from memory, and it has strong cultural and generational ties for me, but Star Wars really isn’t a thing for me anymore.

Angry Birds has also been something best forgotten. The last time I played Angry Birds was the release of Angry Birds Space, which was a clever extension of the series, but had ad placement so intrusive that I was unable to play the game. The advertisements prevented me from seeing the game, so I stopped. They added some gravity elements to the “Space” that kept the series interesting, but I was never a completest. A few hours of launching birds is enough for me every few months.

Angry Birds Star Wars is incredible fun. I know, right?

— Jason B. (@jasonrbarry) November 10, 2012

I was surprised when the biggest Star Wars fan I knew dropped praised for the Angry Birds Star Wars game on Twitter. How could these played out franchises improve each other? The very fact that Rovio would put their name on anything (There is an entire Angry Birds branded store locally in Galleria department store), and Star Wars merchandises everything imaginable means no expectation of quality, but somehow it works far better than I expected. The elements of Star Wars, such as the lightsaber, force push, and the Millennium Falcon were all cool additions to the Angry Birds formula. A Yellow Bird that looks like Han Solo that blast lasers pistols as it flies through the stage? Yes, that is pretty cool.

I played through the Tatooine section of the game, which killed my battery before I took a break. A lot of the levels have clever uses of the new elements, like reflecting lasers with the lightsaber for increased destruction, or being able to use gravity and a strategic force push on floating detritus to rain down destruction on pigs below. The story boards between levels are weirdly cute too.

I was surprised that the advertisements were much more subdued and only on the screens to retry the levels that I’ve seen. It wasn’t like the enormous banner advertisements that blocked the screen and made the levels unplayable like on the previous versions of Angry Birds Space. The game doesn’t offer anything substantially new for someone that doesn’t like the Angry Birds formula, but if you liked the previous games, this branded content adds new complexity and solutions to the best methods of destruction of bovines. I’d recommend it for a quick free game. Be warned, it will kill batteries and drain your productive time.

I’ve been running Doggcatcher as my default podcasting client for the last three years, but tonight I finally uninstalled it entirely. Doggcatcher has never run without crashing on either of the phones I used it on. While it was feature rich and had the sped up playback feature I required, it locked up my phone one too many times and I finally decided that while I had paid for the app, it wasn’t fulfilling all of it’s duties and needed to be replaced.

I eventually settled on BeyondPod, and ended up purchasing it despite having a week to preview it. Not only did it have a sped up playback option, but the discovery process of loading new shows meant that I could quickly replace the 20+ feeds I follow easily, and find new shows as well. It also has a more intelligent layout, smart playback lists, and lots of sorting and display options for organizing the feeds. It also integrates RSS feeds better into the design to work as a hybrid news reader.

The best part of the switch to BeyondPod was that it doesn’t crash as often (so far). It doesn’t lock up randomly, or crash my entire phone. I was so locked in by my purchase of an expensive podcast player that I tolerated poor performance and was hesitant to buy a new fully featured player. Now that I decided that performance was worth the price tag of a slightly more expensive app, I’m happy with my decision. I’ve used the last app for three years, so I’m sure I’ll get some value out of the money I spent “upgrading” my player today.

Today there was a small class project I presented to my students. They needed to use adjectives presented in the unit and come up with a business plan that would describe different aspects of their company. Then they needed to come up with justifications for each of their choices and run through a mock interview session with someone pretending to be an loan officer. They were supposed to use convincing language to explain their idea.

One of the groups was finished early, so they wanted me to come up with a concept for my own interview while they acted as interviewers. I have a hard time coming up with a concept interesting for me to explain in detail that isn’t difficult for the students to ask questions about. I decided I’d have a crowd sourced audio tagging service where users could listen to audio provided on the web, add tags to the content to allow people to seek out the information easily, and use it to learn English or skip to content they were interested in videos online. I thought it would be an improvement on the links that Youtube provides that seeks specific times in videos.

The students let me get me through half of my pitch before they got out their phone, fired up the application, and showed me the finish product. Pikicast is basically that concept, already packaged and ready to go for Korean learners. My students showed me a demonstration where he searched for a keyword, and a podcast with that word being discussed or used in context was available. It had scripts and everything.

My concept wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close enough that I just stopped right there and just asked them questions about the finished phone application rather than talk about my idea for a hypothetical one. I was surprised that the idea had already been explored before I had even heard of it.

The class I taught today had a lesson about using past tense expressions to discuss fads. It was an entertaining activity to discover the origins of different trends in Korea. Most of the trends of the past decade I’ve seen personally or remembered hearing about, but occasionally they would bring up things before my time in Korea. Seeing what they thought was interesting, and how they looked at trends in the United States that made it to Korea was also fun.

According to my students, Starcraft, PC rooms, the IMF crisis, and fast Internet speeds occurred together in the same year, and sometime between 1997 and 2001 there were two television channels dedicated to Pro gaming (specifically Starcraft) as a result, and that trend continues today. According to some of my older students, both Disco, and Roller Disco were popular in Korea in the 1970′s, along with long hair for men. I totally missed that era, and trying to picture some of the students that would have been young and living through it totally cracked me up.

I also brought up trends that originated in Korea that went “viral”, discussed the meaning of “viral marketing”, and talked about how memes morph as they travel across the world. If I taught in a modernized classroom we would have been watching some of the weird variants of the Gangnam Style video that have popped up as that video has gone worldwide. One of the trends that also originated in Korea a few of my students knew about was the “Play Dead” (시체놀이)(sijaenori) phenomenon, and I demonstrated the later mutation of “planking” on some desks.

We built a timeline of different trends, their associated years, and used the lesson’s grammar to practice talking about trends that continue, died, or existed at certain points in the past. It was interesting to see when people remembered certain things happening, and how trends sped up once ubiquitous Internet connections allowed for the dissemination of information.

If you are thinking of using this activity in your own classroom, a word of caution. Opening the wikipedia page for Internet Phenomena is a dangerous way to spend time at work. If you don’t have an iron will you’ll likely fail to do anything productive. I was lucky to avoid finding too many unknown links that would have diverted myself from getting my lessons prepared, but I really would like to expand on this lesson in future sessions because it was a lot better than I had expected.