The famous Converse All Star shoes have become popular again nowadays, but, having a flat sole, aren't a good choice for who is short and wants to look a bit taller.

Watching this Japanese TV Commercials compilation, I was that in that market they introduced the perfect hybrid! (the CM is here) Inside there is a wedge heel!

Marvelous!

Unfortunately, as for every marvelous items, it looks like it's on sale only in Japan...

Long story: when some years ago I went in Japan for the first time, I bought a Wii and a lot of GameCube games, as they were sold for just 100 yen cadauno (around 80 cents at the time)

I also bought 伝説のクイズ王決定戦 （Densetsu no Quiz Ouketteisen - The legend of the quiz tournament of champions), a quiz with voice recognition where you have to say the right answer, in Japanese and without a list of "possible" answers.

Ok, I never played it, but the box is nice to keep on my shelf... and then there was the very useful mic included in the box

The games that use the mic are:

• Mario Party 6
• Mario Party 7
• Odama (a "ninja" themed pinball created by the designer who created the only Dreamcast game that uses the mic)
• Karaoke Revolution

In the beginning, I only owned GameCube games: Wii games were "too new" and were starting from 2000 yen - $15, so I preferred to save money and buy 20 games for the same price - I didn't even have Wii Sports, as in Japan it's not bundled with the console.

When I came back to my country, to play PAL games I installed the WiiKey.

The problem is that the Japanese Wii works ONLY in Japanese.

Yes, if you take a copy of the Italian Wii Sports DVD and you run it on a Japanese Wii (using a modchip, because there is regional lock), everything will still be in Japanese!!! (unless a game does not contains the files required for Japanese language)

So, when on Waninkoko blog I read about his new Region Changer, I immediately using for changing the region to PAL.

What a dumb decision! It was an untested beta (Marcan defined it as semibrick) and I got an half-working Wii tthat would hang when the keyboard would open because the Italian dictionary wasn't installed, and had double channels for weather, news, and so on...

A mess!

In the end, using AnyRegion Changer I fixed the problem, but I never managed to run any of my  GameCube games anymore.

I tried everything, loaders, dozens of different MIOS, but ALL my GameCube games were hanging at boot: strange....

I tried using a GameCube SD adapter to load them using the old SD Loader: nothing

I tried the new DIOS MIOS, for loading games from USB: nothing, no game started

Yesterday I told myself: "enough, there is no way to make them work", and, while I was disconnecting controllers and memory cards, including the mic (that's actually using the memory card interface). Just when I unplugged it, BOOM, the game started!

I tried my games: all were working now!!!

Moral: when the GameCube mic is conntect to the Wii (at least to mine) and you try to run a game that doesn't use it, it will hang at the booting logo.

Yay, now I can play Donkey Konga!

It's terrifying, look.

Nothing is left, what was an elementary school, now is rubbles. Street View let you go to see the inside.

The outside, the entrance, the kitchen, the classrooms on the first floor...

And also other cities, that were far from the coast, are empty, due to radiations...

Watashi ga Renai Dekinai Riyuu (

The three girls went to live together to feel less lonely and have more fun, but they have a totally different personality, what will happen?

The target it's a little girlish, but I find the series very interesting and funny.

It's composed by 10 episodes 50 minutes long, a torrent with english subtiles can be found easily on the net.

Grappa (to be not confounded with Italian grappa) helps us: it's a shopping bag with a SHOEI helmet inside! Say no to those pesky rubbles that always want to hit your head, just wear Grappa and you are safe!

Here it is:

It looks unbelievable to see that last year, only in Japan there were almost a thousand of seismic events with magnitudo greater than 5 and almost twenty thousand for the ones over 3.

He shows how you can let your browser draw Doraemon using SVG and HTML5

Here it is:

And this is the code behind:

<div>
<svg height="300px" width="400px">
<circle cx="200" cy="150" r="100" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="200" cy="150" r="98" fill="#5ccff0"></circle>
<circle cx="200" cy="168" r="80" fill="#ffffff"></circle>
<circle cx="180" cy="90" r="20" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="220" cy="90" r="20" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="180" cy="90" r="19" fill="#FFFFFF"></circle>
<circle cx="220" cy="90" r="19" fill="#FFFFFF"></circle>
<circle cx="190" cy="92" r="5" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="210" cy="92" r="5" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="200" cy="110" r="14" fill="#000000"></circle>
<circle cx="200" cy="110" r="13" fill="#ff0000"></circle>
<circle cx="200" cy="182" r="58" fill="#ff0000"></circle>
<rect x="140" y="124" width="120" height="58" fill="#ffffff"></rect>
<rect x="199" y="124" width="1" height="58" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="210" y="130" width="40" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="152" y="130" width="40" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="210" y="150" width="50" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="142" y="150" width="50" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="210" y="170" width="60" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
<rect x="132" y="170" width="60" height="1" fill="#000000"></rect>
</svg>
</div>

The explanation: first he creates a new layer (<div> ...</ div>), then puts in a tag that tells the browser to interprete the following instructions as an svg design (<svg> ...</ svg> ). Inside the svg tag he has specified the height and width of the drawing, and then there are the instructions for drawing circles and rectangles to make the face, eyes, whiskers, etc., and here it seems pretty obvious: rect is for rectangles, circle is for cirles, xy the relative position, width, height, is width and height (want to draw a linge? Set the height to 1 pixel) and fill designates a color to fill, in 8bit RGB hexadecimal.

The main advantages of using this technique instead of placing an image are two:

1. takes up much less space and so is faster to load
2. you can enlarge the image indefinitely without losing quality or making it look pixelated

Do you know the furin?

It is an ornamental bell very popular in Japan, usually made of glass, with a clapper attached to a strip of cardboard. When the wind blows you hear a relaxing "ding-ding-ding."

But what if we want to place it in our room, or in other windless places?

That's easy, there is the electronic furin:

How will work the touchscreen?

Will this "tacchi paneru no monitaa" be truly revolutionary?

Let's see the video:

"uh, convenient, right? Here, open Google Earth, this gesture will magnify..."

I found an interesting video where it's shown at Digital Signage 2011 in Tokyo:

This system will retail around 140000 yen, with software sold for 10000 yen..

This "meat" is light, potentially cheap, with low fat and low calories, but has an huge defect:

The main ingredient!

... in the video they call it "sewage mud"...

Well, we have lots of this ingredient, but will you eat an hamburger like that?

I am talking about the Sanwa Prepeat printer, it's a little bit pricey, about $6000, but can print on rewritable PET sheets. Sure, sheets are pricey too, $3 and are sold in 1000-sheets boxes, but if you consider that delete and rewrite can be done for free, for large corporations it can be convenient.

Jut take care to write on this expensive media using special felt tip markers and don't fold the sheets  

Here is the presentation video, in Japanese with English subtitles:

To help the Japanese population, the Italian division of become.com put a link to the Italian Red Cross website.

Guess what? They got a C&D letter for using the Red Cross name without prior consent! 

LOL, people is paying hundreds to have a link on a PR5 page, and they call the lawyers to remove it!

Free advertisement becomes bad publicity

The sight is terrible, and is available here:

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html

Update: There's also a Picasa album with more shots, and a kml file to see the area with Google Earth.

I find it very interesting and astounding: if today is normal to see CG effects in almost every video, at that time it was not normal, except for big movie budgets.

This is the video:

Why stop to play when you have "other" needs?

Finally, urinating is no more a boring task!

With two different sensors, an infrared one and a microphone to hear the "dripping", there are many different games, for measuring your "aim", "power", "speed"

Available in some Tokyo bars, I bet that the water bottle sales will skyrocket

I can see a long line for the male washroom...

Let's hope for an "home" edition?

If not for that feeling that every Hollywood remake is gonna be awful, why? Maybe just a prejudice?

By the way, cool, i just saw that there is the remake of The Karate Kid on the works. So cool, and I immediately went to watch the trailer:

What? The feeling that every remake is awful is not just a feeling?

So, they took The Karate Kid and removed:

1. The Karate (Replaced by Kung Fu)
2. Japan (The story is in China)
3. Miyagi sensei (With Jackie Chan as Mr. Han)
4. Daniel-san (With Will Smith's son that, dressed as a rapper is Dre - please note that Will Smith is also the movie producer)

Ok, the protagonist moves from a city to another, and is bullied, but it's a brand new movie! Why not choose "Kung Fu Kid"?

Set in Taiji, a small city near to Osaka, opens our eyes on the problems, filming with high-tech cameras camouflaged as rocks the biggest dolphin slaughtering organization in the world.

We, westerners, we all love Japan, beautiful scenery and suggestive culture, and when we read criticisms about Japan we tend to ignore them... but we cannot ignore this.

I love Japan, i teach Japanese every week, but I cannot tolerate a dolphinarium that offers dolphin-based treats and snacks to the visitors while watching the dolphin show!

The meat of the dolphins, highly toxic for the high mercury level, is eaten for "tradition", and it (was) also present in the school menu of the Taiji schools. (then removed after the documentary).

Luckily, things are changing, the demand for cetacean meat is falling, as for whale meat, that recently has become cheaper, due to low demand. Even if, some politicians very conservative has enacted a promotional campaign to make the population aware about whale meat. But about how good is for health that meat, by showing kids in primary schools, making future new consumers!

You can watch the documentary on Youku, by buying the dvd on Amazon.com, buying the digital download on iTunes, or "other ways"