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.

Well, it looks like I won’t be getting my internet at home until something like August 16th, but at least I should have phone and satellite TV starting Friday. Some nice news on the internet connection, I’ll be getting faster ADSL instead of slower ISDN, and will have to see what I get for ADSL speed since I think it may be faster than cable in the US.

Anyways, I did at least get a new toy to keep me occupied for a little bit (well, at least last night as I was setting it up). Its the Epson PM-A850 scanner/printer combo and I’ll have to say it produces pretty nice results. I was stunned at how huge and tank like it was, since I usually figured Japanese models were designed to be less space consuming. Shakes the table pretty good when printing too. It also scans negatives, so I’ll have to get some of those from home sometime to work on again (since I couldn’t get my old SCSI film scanner working with a firewire adaptor when I was back in the US).

Read the rest of this entry »

Its all John & Ashley’s fault after repeatedly talking about it on the trip that I’ve lost the last three days, though I guess at least it was something positive. Well, actually, it was something positive, a hilarious web comic that is so wrong and twisted in so many ways I have lost count. Good thing I’m not religious, just reading through the whole archives like I have the past few days would probably count as a few deadly sins. Highly recommended if you have a twisted and tolerant sense of humor.

Figure I might as well mention a few of my other daily reads along those lines. Of course there are probably no geeks that don’t hit Dilbert and MegaTokyo on a regular basis as well as User Friendly. A couple of my personal favorites though are Ozy & Millie for its wonderfully sardonic wit and Kevin & Kell for its well realized world of predator and prey with a twisted sociological and technological spin. And, alas less frequently, there’s Sabrina Online.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just got an iSight so I can (hopefully) video chat with family and friends while I’m in Japan. I’ve got it working (I think) with iChat/AIM and Yahoo IM (although looks likes Yahoo’s frame-rates suck). Now the question is, anyone already using any of these..?

Read the rest of this entry »