Ever find it annoying that you have to look closely at your headphones to find out which one goes in which ear? Oh, you don’t care if your symphony is left-right swapped or automatically guess which shape goes on which side. Fine. But I’ve gotten tired of squinting for the little ‘L’ and ‘R’, so I’ve bought a set of replacement earbud covers and put a different color on each side. Now I just accustom myself to blue being the left ear, red being right (ooh, “red” and “right”, quite mnemonic…). Granted I look like the color-blind guy with mismatched socks, but such is the price of convenience. Red, blue or green might not be the best color choices if you are indeed color-blind, though.

I’ve had my Nintendo DS Lite about a month I guess and I think its a very cool piece of equipment. Nice size, nice finish, brighter screen than my old GBA SP. Unfortunately I discovered recently that it was starting to get scuffed up from being carried in my bag (yeah, big surprise, my own fault). I’d gotten screen protectors when I first got it, but I’d neglected to get a case.

The problem is a case can easily negate the advantage of the DS Lite’s size. I like that it can easily fit in my pocket — a case would bulk it up too much to do that. Well, today when looking around the video games section of Hiroshima’s Giga store, I found the perfect solution for me. It seems Takara-Tomy has, uh, “borrowed” an idea from Apple and recently released a sock sleeve for the DS Lite.

The Lite Slipon Socks fit the DS Lite snuggly, protecting all but one edge (which doesn’t seem a problem to me, it was the top and bottom faces that I got scratches on, not the sides). It doesn’t add much bulk, so its still easy to pocket. No joy for regular DS owners, its too small to fit the larger version. You also can’t put it in the sleeve with a GBA cartridge inserted (but of course a DS cartridge is no problem). It comes in three colors: gray, pink and blue (shown in the picture). There are also some “Like Leather” versions with a genuine fake leather appearance in a variety of leather and non-leather colors.

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I’ve had a Vonage phone for a couple months now and it works pretty well from Japan. As a result I have two different phones on my table, both with different dial-tones. One phone leads to Japan, the other to the US. It kinda reminds me of the doorway to Howl’s Moving Castle.

I haven’t given out the number to much of anyone since I was hoping to transfer my old cell number over from T-Mobile (its pretty obvious I won’t be using it again anytime soon). Alas, they weren’t able to do it and after my previous difficulties moving the number from Alltel to T-Mobile, I decided not to fight it. So I have a new number that is supposedly a local call from Tucson. If you’re interested in calling me, I can email it to you. Receiving calls for me is free and assuming you’re in Tucson it should be free for you too. Just keep in mind the time zone difference…

Oh, and if you’d like to sign up, let me know — they have a referral program that will give you a free month of service.

OK, one of the biggest pains of exchanging contact information with people is entering it into your phone. This is especially true here in Japan since names can be tricky, the phone numbers are long and the email addresses are often cryptic to prevent spam (I’ve met some people with combinations of punctuation I didn’t think were valid for addresses).

Coming to the rescue is the QR barcode format. Unlike the ones you find on your cereal box, these are a 2-D matrix like the ones on package tracking slips. They’re commonly used here as a way of making it easy to grab URL’s for web sites. The QR code is printed on the poster or flyer & you just take a picture of it and its automatically translated into a bookmark. For example, here’s one for TKK:

Another twist is support for address book entries. Some people have these on their business cards, one snap and you’ve got the info on the card in your phonebook. I’m going to print up my basic contact info on a sticker and put it on my phone. That way when I need to trade contact info with someone, I can just point them to the barcode on the phone.

Granted all phones here have had IR ports for data exchange for ages (even the ones in the US do, I transfered a lot of data from my T-Mobile phone to my Docomo one with the IR port). But those transfers take a bunch of button presses to get going and I don’t think most people have a clue how to do it. But everyone knows how to use their phone’s camera…

There are various programs and web sites that will create the codes for you. However the mobile codeatron is the first one I’ve found in English that formats the contents just right for the phone books on Japanese cell phones. Yeah, I know that isn’t useful for you in the US, but there are a few people reading on this side of the of the Pacific too. And you elsewhere can take it as a preview of things to come.

I’d forgotten to post that I finally got my keitai (a.k.a. cell phone) last Tuesday, right before I went to orientation. Fortunately I didn’t have anything to do at work that day, so I played around with it trying to figure out how it worked. Main thing is, alas, I didn’t get the model that I was really hoping to get (the GPS model), since it didn’t have English menus. 8-( So I opted instead to get another model that had the best camera I could find, a 2 megapixel one with auto focus (though it was far from free). Guess I’ll have to get the moblog posting software working again.

Here’s an example of what it can do, a picture taken from front of the office, looking towards my house (its the two story one with a garage under in at the left of center):

Anyways, if anyone needs either my keitai number or keitai email address, let me know.