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80sanime

Nayuta is the retro psychic alien lizardman conspiracy theory anime of my dreams and I want everyone to experience it.

adamukun

Posting to watch later

Tech issues

Been having some weird tech issues lately, so I’ll just list them out to try and get my head around them.

1. Malfunctioning hard drive on my main PC - One night I come home and fire up the PC and it says “disk read error” after the BIOS loads. Agh, what to do... I try reinstalling Win 10 on one of the two other drives in the system, but it won’t let me for some reason.

As I am frantically googling and contemplating buying a new SSD just to fix the PC, an article suggests switching the boot order. I try that, and lo and behold my old drive still had a functioning Windows 7 install on it! That automatically initiated a chkdsk that cleaned the bad sectors on the malfunctioning drive and allowed me to do a clean Windows 10 install.

I was able to back up just about everything that matters, but it looks like I inadvertently caused Chrome to treat the bookmarks on my other PC as the master copy, so that when I reinstalled Chrome on this PC the old bookmarks were gone. Would be fine except I had some important numbers listed there :o

2. iOS update screwed up all the offline video on Adamu Jr.’s iPad - I updated iOS to 10.2 thinking I wouldn’t mind having whatever performance upgrades it might have. Little did I know that the new “TV” app replaced the “Videos” app, and did so on a way that completely broke the offline videos I had loaded on there! The videos remained on the device but were completely inaccessible. I had to do a factory reset and use the VLC app to transfer files over WiFi.

That’s the kind of thing that will make me want to switch to Android in the future! The Amazon kids tablets look fairly compelling...

3. Firefox randomly deletes wife’s bookmarks - That’s it. That’s basically all I know about the problem. About two days ago Mrs. Adamu noticed her bookmarks were missing on our MacBook Air. I looked around the usual places but there is no sign of them at all. The bookmarks aren’t deleted on my user account. Why did this happen? She hasn’t backed them up in years, but we really have no choice but to start from the last backup. Sigh...

"Standard curry" with a big slab o' pork on the top. #yum #snowfood #snowkyo

#snowfood #snowkyo #yum

Can only assume the 7-11 staff are nine inch nails fans #nin

#nin

Spooky condemned apartment building in #shinjuku

#shinjuku

Morning offering for my local Inari shrine. May the fox god help us all to prosper! #shrine #japan

#japan #shrine

Recently some convenience stores aren't carrying Coke Zero and it's really messing with my mojo #wtf #smh

#wtf #smh

The watch came on by itself! The hands aren't working but I can just look at the digital time. Guess it just needed some light to charge... #watch #love

#love #watch

Today's #bento

#bento

Wearing a broken watch today so I don't forget to get it fixed! #broken #watch

#broken #watch

Tech stories from the most recent trip home.

1. Rehabilitating an old laptop:

This was my desk setup for my most recent visit home, which was the first father-son trip to bring the boy home to see Grandma. At home in Japan we only have one laptop, so I was worried that being mobile-only could present some issues (for example, not having the ability to easily add videos to my son’s iPad or play some older games if I had some downtime).

Luckily, my sister’s fiance had an old laptop around that he wasn’t using -- a Core 2 Duo Dell D620 with 1GB of RAM and a 60GB hard disk. I took that and upgraded the ram to 4GB and installed Windows 10, and now it is a very passable laptop - plays YouTube no problem, runs Chrome with multiple tabs without any issues, allows me to use iTunes with the iPad, and even runs a fair number of older games, including StarCraft and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. All in all, quite a successful side project that I was able to complete during the alone time when my son was sleeping but I was still too jet lagged.

2. Connecting my Japanese iPhone 6S to an American carrier:

For mobile Internet, in previous trips I have tried various solutions, including a cheap Virgin mobile hotspot (not very successful) and buying an iPad mini with LTE and relying on T-Mobile’s 200MB of free data (successful but too bulky). This year, luckily my Japanese mobile carrier just recently began allowing device unlocking for the iPhone 6S if your contract has been in effect for at least six months. I completed the procedures on the website and took the phone to a T-Mobile store stateside, and it could not have been more painless - for a total of $60 (20 for the SIM, 40 for a monthly plan) I had 3GB of LTE for the duration of the trip.

Having a bona fide LTE iPhone to use is just so much more convenient than having to deal with a mobile hotspot or tablet. I could use the navigation, send photos, and even FaceTime if I wanted to. The coverage was very good too, except some spots that I visited in rural Maine.

Anyway just thought I would quickly post and share my experiences.

vortexsophia-deactivated2022110

The joys of an LTE iPad when visiting the U.S. from Japan

I am here in Virginia visiting my cousin before heading up to ct to see the rest of the family. Jet lag has taken hold so I am now the only one up and about while everyone else is sleeping, so I thought I would just pound out some thoughts. Over the years of visits home I have been messing around with various solutions to get mobile internet access without paying too much for it. Last year I picked up an iPad mini with LTE and went for the T Mobile connection, which comes with 200 mb of data for free. Sure the iPad mini isn't as cheap as getting a mobile wifi hotspot, but given that I use it for my personal iPad for the rest of the year I figured it was justifiable. Last year it worked out really well because it is a very serviceable GPS and I can use an app like AIM to send and receive SMS messages. The only real problem was that in Connecticut t mobile reception was really poor. So for this year I decided to supplement the iPad by activating an old flip phone with a pay as you go plan. With that I can spend $2 each day I use the phone and then I can always be reachable even when t mobile doesn't get reception. Most of the time I am in a place that has free wifi anyway so it only matters when I'm on the road. I fly to ct today so it still remains to be seen whether t mobile has improved their connection there. But I have been pleasantly surprised that the reception in the DC area is basically perfect. There was just one destination I went to that was out of range, but I knew I could just drive a few minutes toward a major road and it would be fine again. On top of that the iPad mini gets amazing battery life, so I was able to use it as a gps for a full day of driving to multiple destinations and it only drained the battery to 38%. So basically for the additional cost of getting an LTE iPad instead of wifi only (about $100), plus a little extra for the flip phone, I am able to be as connected as I need to be on any trip to the U.S. If SoftBank continues its unlimited roaming in the U.S. program I may be tempted to switch back when I get s new iPhone - which would render all my hard work moot basically. But given that I am planning to move back in the next few years, I will have to start thinking about getting an unlocked phone that I can take back and forth

Time for me to complain about Hearthstone

For a while now I have had fun playing hearthstone and have even bought the single player levels and spent $20 on packs. But since the most recent update the game has been broken for me and that is really too bad. First off, since the update that brought the blackrock mountain expansion, connectivity has been a problem. Until now I could reliably finish a game even when traveling on the subway (I play on a wifi iPad mini retina using tethering). But now if at any point the connection is interrupted the game freezes and never comes back. No error screen or anything -- I have to force quit the game and relaunch the app, which of course causes me to lose the game I was playing. Another problem I have had is that for some reason I am not receiving the bonus cards that are supposed to come with completing hero challenges in the single player levels. A search through the official forum indicated I should log out and log in again. This didn't work when I tried it on the pc, and when I tried it on the iPad I became no longer able to log into the game at all! For this issue I plan on submitting a support request because at this point I basically can't play the game anymore. Anyway just thought I would use the time I would have spent playing hearthstone to complain about it instead. Thanks for reading!