There's been a lot of stuff happening about SOPA and PIPA the last few days. Wikipedia has been blacked out, so has Reddit.
There's something lacking in all of their explanations of why they're blacked out though. I think this one by Khan Academy is the best one yet. Well worth the 10 minutes, and you'll fully understand the whole problem in 10 minutes.
Since there won't be a lot of meetings and things this week I decided I wanted an office for the week to get some computer time in.
I had been looking around for places to rent by the day/week before I came here and a pretty good site I've come across before in my researches of co-working space is Loosecubes. They're a site where anyone can post that they have free office space available. There's quite a lot of good places there actually (even in Tokyo) but there was one place in particular whose own website I had come across before. That one was Moboff (short for Mobile office).
Moboff has several locations, but their Shinjuku location looked really awesome.
We tried to reserve an office through the website but since it was such short notice (I basically wanted access from yesterday) I didn't want to wait several days for a reply. So I just showed up at their front desk and asked if they had some available seats.
They normally only rent out per month with a required membership fee, but after the receptionist called up the owner and a little bit of hassle (because there was no system in place for what I wanted) they were kind enough to give me a deal and let me in on a per-day fee.
The space is awesome, there's everything you'd expect (coffee machines, internet, good chairs) and the room and layout is great, it was easy to get productive there.
The only downside was that the place was practically deserted. Now I've only been there one day and it might be a fluke, but it seemed like they could really use some more business. Perhaps opening up to per-day or per-week customers is a good idea.
Normally if you pay per month for the shared-office you don't get assigned a desk, you just come in the morning and hope there's a desk free and take that one. This doesn't bother me at the moment but if I was looking to be there long-term I would want a fixed desk so I could put a screen there, but for that you need to rent a private office.
Personally I don't see the reasoning behind this, they shouldn't be charging full price for a "maybe there's a desk for you, maybe not" kind of thing. And if they only have enough members to fill the desks (so there's always at least one free) then why not assign permanent desks? Just rent out all the desks and people can leave their stuff there if they want. I don't want a private office because that defeats the whole purpose of a co-working space, I want to meet other people.
It was permitted to drink at your desk, but not eat, I suppose because food can cause quite a lot of smell which might bother other people. With the whole of Tokyo available right outside the door I doubt I'd bring food very often anyway though.
Overall my first impression is really good. If there had been reserved desks it would be a place I would definitely want to use long-term. But as it is right now, it's a perfect place if you just want a productive space for a day or a couple of weeks.
The location is great, about 10 minutes from where I'm staying. It's on the 20th floor so there's a great view and it's really close to Shinjuku station if you want to do something after work.
I've blogged earlier about wanting to get a really nice carry-on bag for flights.
Before I went to the US this summer I found an awesome Samsonite bag that I bought and am absolutely loving. It's just perfect and the quality is outstanding. I really believe I will have this bag (unless it somehow gets lost) for pretty much the rest of my life.
But I do feel that there's been something missing to the equation. I've have had the thought to have a separate bag for my laptop, but it never really clicked with me until I saw that Emanuel had it.
To me it makes perfect sense, so I went out and bought this Victorinox bag with life-time warranty.
The reasoning goes like this: I can have all the things I want on the plane with me in that bag. And then in my rolling bag I can have everything else that I won't touch for the duration of the flight. I can simply throw that up above (without even having to be particularly careful) in the stowage area and then put the laptop bag under the chair in front of me, where I'll have easy access to all the important things.
Not only is that very convenient, it increases my total luggage capacity by quite a lot and it also leaves me free to check in my rolling bag if need be. Like if I find some sort of fluid that I simply must have with me home, it can theoretically be done without purchasing (or bringing from home) another bag.
Another added benefit of having a separate computer bag is that when I arrive at my destination and have business to do, I can bring my computer in a nice-looking bag instead of walking around like an idiot with my computer in my hand.
I'm very happy with the Victorinox bag that I found because it fits perfectly on top of my Samsonite and the whole back can be put over the handle of the bag so it sits very stable on top.
I can also fit an amazing amount of stuff in it, not that I plan on fitting that much but a perfect example is the stuff below. A bag filled with Apple'y goodness.
That's my 15" laptop, big fat book, headphone case and iPad, all the in main "pocket". I also have a notepad and pen in the outer pocket.
I normally don't travel with books that big, it's either something small or I will have the book on Kindle/iPad for easier handling, so replace that book with a Kindle and the storage space is quite abundant.
With this I think I can be very efficient in security control, have maximum storage capacity and maximum convenience.
On top of everything, both my Samsonite and this new Victorinox bag look really awesome.
Hello good friends! It's been a while and I said I'd update so here comes some updates! It's mostly going to be pictures because it's late and so forth.
Overall, things are going swimmingly over here! I love it as usual and I managed to spend some awesome time with Emanuel (he loved Tokyo too). I've done some shopping and been keeping busy as usual!
I'll probably write up more details later. For now, here's some pictures!
I went and bought a really nice kitchen knife that's the kind that I've been wanting. It looks very traditionally Japanese and the shop I bought it in seemed really legit so I hope it's good quality.
He stamped my name on to the knife, which was pretty neat.
I went to Meiji Shrine with Emanuel during the day of new years eve and we found a bunch of priests walking around.
This is the temple at night, after standing in line for about an hour and thirty minutes to get to the front.
We went into an arcade and Emanuel managed to win a bear.
Required photograph from high spot.
Me and Emma in one of our favorite places.
And a group picture of me, Emma, Emanuel and Sherry.
And this is just a picture of the 30th floor in an office building I've been having meetings in.
So my Wordpress blog got infected with some trojan crap through a security-hole in one of the plugins I was using. The effect of that was that for a short period users were re-directed to some spam site when clicking links on my blog.
This was about 3-4 weeks ago or so.
I reacted quite promptly (within 24 hours) and moved my sites architecture over to Jekyll, a tool to generate static HTML. So now there's actually no running code on the server, which makes the site itself literally impenetrable from a security standpoint.
This is all well and good, but it also means there are some bugs on this site until I get time to fix it all. Like the search on the right is not working at the moment.
I just fixed the general deployment structure so I can start writing in a decent manner again and deploy without too much hassle. There's still some plugins I need to write however to handle adding new files and images and stuff like that. I don't want to have to resize images manually so I'll write small script that takes images and moves them into the correct folders and resizes them in to three sizes and stuff like that.
For the time being it works decently doing it manually so that's what I'm going to do.
I'm writing this because I will be going to Japan in two days and I've just spent some time fine-tuning this stuff so that I can blog in Japan without too much trouble!
Hi, Emma here. Fredrik and I looked around at Gaijinpot for apartments in Tokyo. I love looking at apartments, wether it's Swedish real estate through Hemnet or apartments in Tokyo. So I'm highjacking Fredrik's blog to showcase some of our findings.
First, let's take a look at what apartments we've stayed in so far;
Apartment 2007 & 2009, ~13 sqm
I remember the initial shock walking into this "apartment". The actual living space is probably smaller than most people's bathrooms. But it didn't bother us. And apparently we liked it so much (lol) that we returned to exact same place 2 years later. Since we were only there as tourists, staying just a month, we didn't really care that much about the living standards. After all, you don't spend that much time inside. There were some good subway lines within close distance, that's all we needed.
Apartment 2010-2011, ~24 sqm
Now when we came back in 2010 we wouldn't just be tourists, we would actually live there, for a year. So we amped it up and splurged on a 24 sqm apartment. That's 11 more than last time! And a lot more central. And more expensive. I liked it, it was practical, small and cute.
If you've never been to Japan, these places may seem insanely small. Well, they are. But you get used to it. Next time we return and stay for a longer period I want a bigger place though. And I want a kick-ass view overlooking Tokyo. So, as I mentioned in the beginning of the post, we browsed for some apartments just for fun. But still reasonable ones. All apartments have a monthly rent of 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000, are between 50 - 70 sqm and are in central Tokyo. (Our previous apartment was 10 000 SEK / € 1 100 / ¥118 000 per month, but it was intended for short-term stays)
Apartment #1, Concrete wall to the left
Now this is more classy, huh? What I've noticed is that they very often leave the concrete walls exposed. I love that raw feeling.
Apartment #2, Concrete bathroom
Apartment #3, More concrete walls
This is what a typical cool-looking "house" in Tokyo looks like to me, you see them everywhere. I think about 4 families live in this complex. Or maybe the double. If I can't live in a skyscraper, I could definitely settle for this.
This is one crazy house! It's 45 sqm and a few stories high. A bit too "open planned" for me, I wouldn't want to use the bathroom. Imagine the reaction when you have guests over who want to use the toilet.
Excuse the horrible montages, it wasn't me. These last three images show my current dream apartment. 2 bedrooms, 54 sqm, 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000 per month and it has the view! Just look at that big window!
Well, some day :)
Even now, I can not perceive the size of Tokyo. I love that fact. I simply can not put into my mind how large it is. The following video reminded me of that fact.
And so in an attempt to try to visualize the size of Tokyo, I want to compare it to Sweden. I've wanted to do this many times before but haven't prioritized it. It is actually harder to create a decent visualization of this than I first thought. Here is an attempt, but it is far from perfect.
Let's start with some definitions. The Greater Tokyo Area is an area that is sort of considered to be Tokyo to many people. If you live in the Greater Tokyo Area you probably work inside Tokyo and you live within Tokyos train network and things like that. For all practical purposes you live in Tokyo, but you might officially be living in a different district than Tokyo. In this area 32.5 Million people live.
Let's overlay the outline of Skåne, the part of Sweden in which I live, on top of the Greater Tokyo Area. The green outline is Greater Tokyo and the red outline is Skåne. The grey parts in this map is indeed city. So Greater Tokyo is basically like building a very large city over all of Skåne and putting 3 times Sweden's population in that city.
Greater Tokyo vs Skane
Let's do the opposite and put the outline of Greater Tokyo on top of Skåne, just to be more clear in the illustration.
Skåne vs Greater Tokyo
There is significantly much more green in that picture. But in the bottom left we can see a small patch of grey, that's Malmö. Sweden's third largest city. Let's compare Malmö to Tokyo.
Malmö has a total of 650,000 people living in it including those that don't really live in the city but in towns on the outskirts that are officially part of Malmö. Tokyo is the one region that is officially called Tokyo, which is significantly smaller than Greater Tokyo. In Tokyo there lives around 13,000,000 people. That's 13 million compared to 650 thousand.
Let's put the outline of Tokyo on top of Skåne so we can continue from the picture above.
Tokyo vs Malmö
The green is Tokyo and the red is Malmö. Pretty interesting. But I think it is better illustrated by putting Malmö on top of Tokyo.
Malmö vs Tokyo
There you go. For those familiar with Malmö you get a pretty good idea of how big that area is, and as you might be able to imagine from the map, that grey area is covered with skyscrapers.
Let's zoom in on the interesting part of Tokyo, the most lively centre. It's illustrated in the blue square below and is roughly the size of Malmö, just slightly larger.
Square we zoom in on
In this little square, we have all the common tourist spots. This little square inside Tokyo, inside Greater Tokyo, is the area we managed to slightly explore in a month the first time we were in Japan. Or to be honest, we didn't even explore half of it.
Zoom in on that square
When we lived in Tokyo the past year we lived in Nakano, which is leftmost dot on the map. The other dots are the different famous areas, those that are written about most in tourist books and blogs. Odaiba is my favorite area to just relax and walk along the "beach". Akihabara is my favorite area for electronics and Shibuya is my favorite area for partying.
When my mom came to visit for a week we rushed around every day and we managed to see these 10 spots in 6 days, so we did almost two places per day and that was a very high pace. These 10 places are the bare minimum you should see if you ever go to Tokyo. And these are just a small square within Tokyo, which is a small area within Greater Tokyo, which is just one part of Japan you should see.
On Friday last week I was out shopping with Emma. Walking through a home-decoration store and walking past some printed paintings I thought: "I'd like to commission some artwork, I'd really like to just have some easy way to find and get in contact with artists whose style I like."
I subsequently went home and looked for places you could buy unique art or commissioned art online. Unfortunely, Googling "Buy art online" brings up nothing but spam and crap sites.
So I thought of a solution, I spent a few days thinking about it and looking around and I couldn't find any other solution to my problem.
The solution would be a site where artists can go and post their work to make a profile and to sell finished work. The artist should also have the option to put up a couple of fixed prices for commission, so that the customer can just go to the site and buy finished work or click a button to make a commission request at a fixed price. That would be the dreamworld.
I went to Elance.com and looked up someone that seemed to be proficient in market research and asked him to research competitors and the size of the market.
As it turns out, there actually is a site out there that try to do almost exactly what I wanted to do. The only exceptions is that they don't offer one-click commissions, you still have to contact the artist. But they provide an easy contact form.
Zatista was started by Internet industry veterans from eBay who believe there is a better way to discover and buy original art. We are a world-class team of entrepreneurs, and art enthusiasts dedicated to making the art-buying experience enjoyable, easy, and affordable.
Former eBay employees going together with artists to create what I want? Not exactly the competition you want to have. While they don't have one-click commission purchases I think starting a site with just that would be a serious uphill battle, not worth it. So I guess I should just be happy that I found a site that does pretty much what I want, because it really is an awesome site!
If what you want isn't available on Zatista, I got some other half-decent sites back from the research as well.
I was talking to a friend about passwords and I came to think of this:
The always epic XKCD is of course right, choosing four random words as your password is better than choosing a series of numbers and letters. Now the comic makes it a little bit too geekish maybe, talking about bits of entropy and whatnot. But the way I always learned to calculate brute-force strength is by taking the "degrees of freedom" or in other words, how many possibilities there are, times the number of times you have that possibility, i.e. how many instances of this thing you have. So if you have a 4 digit pin-code, there are 10 possibilities for each number, 0-9, and you have 4 of them. So you have to go through 10 * 10 * 10 * 10 or 10^4 or (degress of freedom)^(number of instances).
I'm pretty sure that's right, but correct me if I'm wrong, please.
Assuming it's correct, choosing a password out of just letters, big and small, lets you have 54 degrees of freedom. 27 letters of the alphabet * 2.
If we include numbers and some signs, we can make alphanumeric passwords that are stronger. Using for example 0-9 a-Z and !"#?%&/()=?_-, we get 77 degrees of freedom.
But let's assume that a word, is one thing. It's not a number of letters, it's one thing. There are about 20,000 common words, and most dictionary-attack dictionaries contain maybe 50,000 words, but let's be on the modest side and assume 20,000 words exist that you are allowed to choose from. That means in a passwords based on only words, you have 20,000 degrees of freedom.
So let's plot the strength of a password to the number of instances of the type that the password contains.
The horizontal line I've put in is at four words. So the way to read this graph is by following that line. A word-based password has the same strength as an alphanumeric password of length 9 or the same as a letter based password of length 10.
It's interesting to note that alphanumeric and just plain old letters are very, very similar in strength. Adding a 0 at the end won't make you that much harder to break.
But having one common word as your password (like using 'password' as your password) is about the same strength as having just 3 random letters.
I'm pretty sure I can remember up to 6 random words strung together, but I'm absolutely sure I can't remember about 16 random alphanumeric characters, which is of the same strength.
So when you're choosing your next password. Make it 4 random words and you're pretty much all set security-wise. Though make sure that all-together the four words are longer than 10 characters, or you can't brag that our password is safer than those other peoples password :P
In the end it's all about remembering them right? And remembering 4 words is pretty damn easy.
Click here if you're interested in the few lines of code for the graph.
Jag försökte (och lyckades till sist) precis logga in på en Zyxel P-2601HN-F1 Router/ADSL-modem från Bredbandsbolaget. Jag googlade runt en hel del för att försöka hitta router IP så jag kunde logga in på admin och ändra runt inställningarna till vad jag ville ha.
Tyvärr så har BBB ändrat grundinställningarna på modemet/routern så att inloggnings-ip var 192.168.1.254 istället för standard 192.168.1.1.
Om någon annan också googlar innan de försöker med mer tekniska metoder (som jag) att hitta var man loggar in så kanske detta kan hjälpa till lite grann.
