::A Geek in Korea::

(xkcd is brilliant.)

My faith in humanity has been restored. There is now a Firefox plugin called Youtube Comment Snob that filters Youtube comments based on the following critera:

• The number of spelling mistakes.
• lack of capital letters to begin a sentence.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation!!!????

This will basically remove 99% of all comments from Youtube. While it might not sort the remaining comments for actual interesting comments, at least I don’t have to bother myself reading all the dumb ones anymore.

Last week, my Cowon D2 died. Luckily, there is a service center in the city, so my wife could get it repaired the same day she brought it there. Unfortunately, when she got it repaired on Friday, they told her she needed to replace the entire motherboard, and that the repair would run close to 30% of the price of the entire player. She complained a lot, so they threw in a free battery replacement. Since my old battery was showing a little wear and tear from daily use, I was happy with this compromise.

Happy, until I noticed that whoever had replaced my motherboard had incorrectly hooked up the audiojack, and I only got mono sound in my headphones. For a company that prides itself on having the best quality sound and service, this was infuriating. I was upset that an expensive repair didn’t even get a proper diagnostic check as simple as LISTENING TO THE PLAYER to make sure it worked.

My poor wife had to return to the store Monday for me while I was at work late and get it fixed a second time. The service technician said that since we had only gotten it repaired two days earlier, it probably wasn’t our fault, just a defective product. Gee, thanks, you mean it wasn’t our fault you installed something that didn’t work right? They waived the fee for fixing the product since we hadn’t caused the problem, but my wife was still a little angry about having to go down to the service center twice for their mistake. They didn’t even apologize for their mistake either. Annoying.

According to them, I wasn’t cleaning the usb slot well and it might have caused some dust to get inside and damage the motherboard. I have no idea if this is true. I checked the local electronics store, and there is still NOTHING on the market close to the Cowon D2 in terms of battery life, features, and design. Even though I had to pay for a repair, I would have only ended up buying a new one of the price was any higher. It’s still the best in it’s class feature for feature in my opinion.

I’ve got my D2 back in time to avoid being bored on my long 2 hour break today, and I didn’t have to ride the subway without something to listen to. I’m catching up on a few of the podcasts that updated that were too long to listen to at home on the computer. Listening to short fiction at home, and not with the privacy of earphones is weird to me now. I also got my political fix during my walk with Yoshi, which is another one of my podcast related habits. I tried a few Linux podcast products. gPodder was the one I ended up using most often since it had a GUI and wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was easy to import my OPML list into it, which is less annoying than copying and pasting 23 podcast URLS. If I was big into automation and command line, I would have used hpodder (I didn’t check to see if it did OPML lists though).

I’m glad I can get back to listening to my podcasts now.

I’ve got my Ubuntu “Hardy Heron” 8.04 LTS beta upgrade running in the background as I type this. It says it’ll take less than an hour to download (I love my fast connection), and I’ve clicked a SINGLE button to upgrade the entire OS. Amazing.

I’m really pushing my luck by upgrading today. This afternoon, right as I was settling in to watch The Daily Show on my Cowon D2, something weird happened. I was watching the show, but all of a sudden the screen went dark and it output a bunch of random numbers. The hardware wouldn’t turn off properly, so I did a reset. It rebooted, but then crashed at the opening screen. Now it no longer turns off or on. I hadn’t upgraded the player, dropped it, or did anything to change the player in months. I had a weird issue earlier in the day where files I had deleted didn’t disappear from the player properly. I don’t know why that would have occurred, but I’m not sure if it is related.

We’re going to take the player to the Cowon service center tomorrow, and hopefully I can get it back quickly. The last time I had to return the machine,I had accidentally bricked it when I had upgraded the firmware. This time it is absolutely not my fault. I wonder if they can fix whatever is wrong.

I was looking at players in a similar class at the store while they were telling my wife where to go to fix the player. Even a year later, there is NOTHING on the market in Korea that can TOUCH the features, battery life, and flexibility of the Cowon D2. The 52 hour battery life is so insane that it DOUBLES the closest players in the same league.

I’m so happy with the purchase, so even this problem will be forgiven. Maybe if I’m really lucky, they’ll even upgrade my unit to one with a few more gigs of onboard storage. I’m not crossing my fingers or anything, but it would keep me from needing to upgrade my mp3 player for a while.

There is a proprietary, Korean only office document format I’ve been waging war on since my first interactions with Korean business culture. My very first document was sent in “Hangul Word Processing” format, or a “.hwp” file. Heard of a .hwp? Probably not, because it’s the Korean-only equivalent of a Microsoft Word document, except it isn’t widely read by competing document readers.

While Microsoft Word documents used to be this proprietary sort of file that locked people into using the MS Office suite, that has gone away due to programs like OpenOffice that can open a variety of different formats. As of now, OpenOffice can handle most Microsoft documents without a hitch.

However, OpenOffice has problems with the Korean word processor Hangul’s .hwp format. OpenOffice can only read up to a Hangul 97 file, while newer versions of the program break the importing and conversion filters.

While the rest of the world ran on Windows MS Office, Hangul was more popular in Korea because it has Korean only features (Korean Hanja support, better formating, etc…), and is much easier to pirate. If you work in a Korean office, documents are usually handled in both .doc and .hwp formats frequently. My first contract was sent to me in .hwp, and I basically replied with an email saying, “What the heck is this, and how do I open it?” (At the time Abiword had the only Hangul 97 compatibility available. Thus starting my lust for non-MS word processors.)

Recent versions of Hangul broke their ability to be read outside of the proprietary Hangul word processing program. Whenever we had to deal with these files, I usually had to ask the person to resend it to me in a format neutral form, like a .doc or an XML file. I consider sending proprietary formats without asking if people have the means to open them “bad manners”.

A LOT of people don’t value open file formats to any large degree here due to a myopic view of the computer and business worlds. My wife has told her business that she has no way of reading Hangul-only documents, and that they should save them to open formats so that ANYONE can read them without needing to buy that specific program. Her boss told her to go pirate a version of Hangul instead. Actually, he told her to “download it for free from the Internet,” but left it up to her to “find out where” to do that. There certainly no LEGAL way she could find to do that. One of the reasons the makers of Hangul almost went out of business was due to rampant piracy.

Since I’m not going to pirate software on principle (Go go FOSS!), and asking an employee to pirate software to do their job is simply ASTOUNDING, I wanted to find out what other alternatives we had. Short of buying Hangul for Linux or Windows, not much. Nothing else reads this document format. That’s why proprietary software and file formats suck. We want to do work, not worry about what is needed to open a file.

We called my brother-in-law, who happened to have a legit copy of Hangul we could have. He came over and I installed a legal copy of Hanguel 2002 via Virtualbox so that my wife could do work at home. He had a spare, so now we don’t have to worry about this damn format anymore, and we didn’t have to pirate something!

I’ll keep using OpenOffice, but since the Korean translation of OpenOffice isn’t great, my wife can use this as an alternative. I’ll make SURE to teach her how to save things in open formats so that we don’t get locked into using this program and will be able to migrate to an alternative as soon as it is available.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 got released today, and it’s a substantial improvement over the default version currently available in the Ubuntu apt repositories. I went ahead and compiled the source so I could have my own up to date copy of the game (!) because it’s such a huge improvement.
I had been playing the 1.3.15 unstable release for a few weeks. When my friends from England visited, we played a few local games which got me playing again. The new 1.4 stable release builds on all the awesome new features and even had some more surprises in store. All this in a free game? It’s hard to believe.

The new animations and portraits of the characters are so much better and more professional. I haven’t played enough of the new game to know if the balance is better, but the classes and factions seemed very balanced to begin with. If anything has been tweaked, it’s almost certainly for the better in my experience.

I’m working through one of the new campaigns that are included in the 1.4 release. I’ve moved on to playing at “Intermediate” levels. Right now this is providing a good challenge, but is in some ways less challenging than “easy” levels. Larger enemy armies means more experience, which translates into more upgrades for my characters.

I hit a wall several times in some of my previous campaign attempts, but I’m having an easier time these days. This might be due to better balancing, or that I’m learning the game rules better.

(For those of you impatient enough to download the new version, but hate compiling for whatever reason, get the Windows version and run it in WINE. It runs flawlessly.)

I’ve also learned that the core team that’s made Wesnoth is moving on to “Silver Tree” that hopes to create a 3-D RPG game. Basically the game is “Wesnoth 3D”. This is both good news because modifying 3D models and creating new ones is much easier than doing good 2D art. That means more interesting things will be produced, easily, and open up people’s creativity. While I want the Wesnoth game to continue to flourish and grow, a new groundwork being laid out in 3D will allow for more things to be done (hopefully!).

I am an Ubuntu user that tends to stick to Gnome applications when I can. One exception I made was when choosing my music application. Amarok is a fantastic program to manage music. It’s got tons of features, is extensible, and is really pretty damn cool. It is a KDE application, but both Gnome and KDE applications run in both desktop environments. They simply launch additional windows widgets to draw the menus and handle how the application interacts with the user.

For whatever reason, when I ran Amarok, the system resource usage was exceedingly high. Playing an .mp3 file and maintaining a short play list would eat up 80% of my processor. There HAD to be some sort of bug with it. What can manage my music, play everything in my collection, and use up less resources?

Enter Exaile. The people creating Exaile want it to be an “Amarok for GTK+ written in Python”. Sure. That sounds like exactly what I need.

After I installed Exaile, I selected the plugins I wanted to use, then let it archive my music. From there, it was simple to set up a Random Playlist of 100 songs and start listening to my collection. One of the cooler plugins will let me control the playlist by using menu buttons in the system notification tray. It pops up windows with the album art fetched from Amazon.com. You can even click on a song and find it’s lyrics instantly. It has podcast integration (I never listen to them on my PC though), and everything else I need.

One of the best parts of Exaile is integration with Internet radio stations. It works like Streamripper, where you surf through a list of stations sorted by genre. You can open up a Shoutcast station, add it to a playlist, and listen to it with no problems. Sadly, when I played with streaming radio, the mp3 tags didn’t let it update my Last.fm profile.

While there are a few features missing from what I used to do with Amarok, but Exaile uses few resources at all. While Exaile is a much newer project, it’s come into a usable program quickly. The last time I installed it (0.14 version), I quickly switched back to Amarok, but with the 0.2.11 release of Exaile is my new default player.

Amarok has a pending 2.0 release with all sorts of cool technology on the way. If they improve the performance, I might consider switching back. The competition and constant improvement in applications this high in quality is astounding. I’m happy reaping the benefits as well.

(Windows and Mac users, there are rumors for an Amarok release on your platforms as well, so don’t feel left out for long.)

My wife got a call from the KT company about a service we could sign up for. This is a normal thing, as she get offers for free phones for using their service without upgrading for several years. They usually call and offer a phone if she’ll upgrade her service plan to something slightly more expensive for a few months.

This time it wasn’t about a phone. It was about a product tied into our Internet service. We have “Megapass” Internet. There has been a product roll out of “MegaTV” in Daejeon, and we got an offer for three months of free service. What’s “MegaTV“? IPTV. What the hell is that? Imagine on-demand movies in a set top box delivered via the Internet. It’s like AppleTV, except without the stupid.

When I came home from work, there was a wire from my Internet connection socket over to our television. The MegaTV box sits like a cable box, and when you fire it up it’ll show a menu. It’s not programmed with live television channels like cable, but instead has a large list of titles available for instant viewing. Choose a title, and it’ll play. The stuff is compressed. The newer the material is, the better the compression seems to be. The grainy action stuff reminds me of something slightly better than DiVX 3.0 era compression, not that great, but watchable.

There are newer titles available for a small fee, like a pay for view movie, except it’s ALWAYS available to watch. You don’t have to wait for a title to start, you just press a button and it begins. It also will remember where you stopped watching something and bookmark it for the next viewing.

While the number of foreign movies is as larger than any corner store, they have several television series too. I started watching “The Shield” a few months back, and now I can watch the series from the beginning. This alone will make it worth the low subscription fee if we keep it past the free trial offer. The Shield ran on the same channel that carried “Battlestar Galactica”. If THAT ever came available, I could watch the entire series with my wife with subtitles. That would kick tremendous ass.

Right now, both my wife and I are weary about greater access to on demand movie and television access. She said she had intended to run some errands, sat down to see if there was something she wanted to watch, and only realized the time she had wasted when I came home from work.

I got up and watched a movie this morning. Deathproof was free, and it was so bad it left me with a headache that lasted for five hours.  I had to take a nap because it hurt my brain so much. At least it was well compressed and looked better than some of the older movies I had checked out. Planet Terror is 100x better in every regard.

Then, I went and upped the ante by purchasing a Rifftrax for “Batman and Robin”. (HOLY CRAP. WHAT AM I DOING?! VOLUNTEERING TO WATCH THAT? WHY!) The MegaTV service has nearly half of the Rifftrax catalog on demand. If working out the sync issues is easy enough when watching it on the TV, this could be a regular thing for me.

I’m basically a podcast addict. I’ve accepted this. If my podcast feeds run out before I’m home, I’m annoyed to listen to the same old music day in and day out. I’m a sucker for free niche programing, and podcasting lets me scratch intellectual itches while I commute or walk my dog. I’ve got a few more podcasts added to my feed list to share:

Koreanclass101 has an awesome series of podcasts for people interested in learning Korean. There is a native English and Korean speaker, and they guide you through a dialog line by line. They review concepts, explain grammar, help with politeness levels, grammar, and all sorts of other stuff related to learning Korean. The website itself is a confusing mess of check boxes and sign up offers. The feed itself is free, but you won’t have any written documents that supposedly accompany the material unless you sign up. Anyone trying to get a little studying done on the subway will be able to follow this podcast and learn some basic to intermediate level grammar.

60  Minutes (The Full Broadcast) is an enigma. Who would have thought a show like 60 minutes, who’s target audience is approximately 60+ years old would be hip enough to offer a podcast? Also, offering the entire show as a series of podcasts so you can listen to what amounts to an advertising free version for everyone is astoundingly progressive considering the source. The interviews are top notch too. There are some intense stories on this podcast too. It’s not a light or fun podcast in the slightest.

Nova’s podcast is very lame compared to 60 minutes. This PBS science show is made of teasers and only introduces concepts that are discussed on full shows on the actual television show. “Like to learn more, watch the whole thing when it airs…” LAME. The Naked Scientists are the premiere science podcasts I subscribe to at the moment. It’s a shame, because Neil deGrasse Tyson is a really entertaining fellow. If he did his own podcast, I’d subscribe in a second.

This week has been good for diversifying my news sources. NPR is great, but nothing beats a slow, grinding interview with 60 Minutes. Plus, Andy Rooney’s nonsensical rants are as bizarre as I remember from childhood. Maybe even moreso, as I can understand what he’s saying, but can’t understand why he’s still on the air.

I have had rotten luck with every single pair of headphones I’ve bought in the past year. They break. They have loose wiring. Their rubber inner ear lining gets lost. I’ve gone through four sets of headphones this year. I am a heavy user of portable audio devices. I listen to my mp3 player every single day, usually one to two hours daily, depending on what I need to do around town.

My last pair died due to some bad wiring. I needed to pick up a new style because what I was using were atrocious. I made a huge mistake insisting that the brand was know for quality, and thus was above releasing a substandard set of ear buds. I dropped good cash on them in Europe and got completely ripped off. My wife has not let me hear the end of it.

Her headphones are flat and large. I dislike the weight on the outside of the ear. I remember the big fuzzy headphones that used to be popular when I was in high school. In summer, they make my ears all sweaty. Ew.  I borrowed them today for my walk, but it felt like I had small ear muffs. The sound was acceptable, but the piece that fits snugly over the ear to keep them in place was new for me. It’s better than a band connecting to the two ear pieces, but it’s still odd. I thought I would strongly dislike it since I wear glasses, but I got over it after a while.

I went to the store to pick up a new set. I took a long look at the sets available and settled on moderately inexpensive pair. There was a set with a similar design that were “stick deeply in the ear canal” style. This tends to cancel outside noise, but the small pieces get lost. Having already had problems with this style headphones this year, I decided for the fixed style, “Jab in ears” plug.

Walking around downtown and on the subway today, I can say that while putting on the ear hook style headphones is more difficult, they do keep the plugs locked into my ear well enough that I don’t have to be constantly poking at them to stay in place. That alone makes this purchase of headphones my best of the year. I kept the case of my terrible headphones to keep my new headphones from being a tangle of wires. The next mp3 player I own will have Bwluetooth. Screw all this wire nonsense.

Tags: headphones, mp3

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v/ZbGdGfKW9yc&l=600&t=OEgsToPDskJ1C-rtq9D6ywo6Q7esa1CT&sk=HoKNzrsn4F-suFBmvIMFsQU&sourceid=ys[/video]
A few weeks ago, I started watching Dennou Coil. I’m not a big anime guy, but I watch a few shows over the course of the year when I hear good things about them. This came recommended, so I tracked down the first episode and was impressed enough to look into the rest of the series.

The premise is that a young girl and her little sister move to a city in the near future. The children wear special glasses that allow them to see an augmented reality that exists, and interacts, with our own. The main character has a “digital” pet that acts just like a real dog. However, if you would take the glasses off, there is nothing there at all. The children of the city are involved in tracking down lost cyber pets, hacking, and discovering “Illegals”, these strange creatures that escape from abandoned places that fall out of disuse in the city.

It’s not a Pokemon style “collect them all!” sort of thing. This is more like a group of children getting involved in a world that seems like it’s only 20 years away (The series takes place in 2026). The main characters try to earn money to buy upgrades for their glasses by doing odd jobs for their hacker grandmother. There is a giant mechanical “street sweeper” like creature that erases any hack it finds, which forces the children to run away when confronted.

It’s a very clever show. The story is very touching at parts, and other times veers into a near-future that is exciting to me. It’s not a gonzo sort of “Mecha” future, but an understated current. Not much is different except the glasses. It’s plausible enough that you care about the characters and their adventures. I’d recommend it for someone looking for an animation with high quality art, a nice science fiction story, and (so far) interesting characters. This is one of the few series I am watching before it “ends”, so I don’t know if the quality will be maintained throughout. I’m watching it as it progresses and it seems to be holding my interest. I hope it keeps up the quality.

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Tags: DennouCoil, anime, geek, ar, augmented reality