Hi, what’s the location of this store. I’m in Tokyo at the moment, and can’t find it for the life of me! Comment by claire — April 10, 2010

The store is located in the minato town district of tokyo. i havent been there in the last 2 years since ive moved ^^.

I was just about to post a link to their page for you, where you can check out their gewds, but the Homepage of the Happily store changed

from the pink and white layout back to the old and boring AM/PM one, also it says that AM/PM merged with FamilyMart in 2010,

and since Happily was just a “modified” AM/PM conbini it might be gone by now.

aww damn, their 600 calorie bentos were to die for :<

a crowded plaque makes haiku out of bar names:

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below, a perfectly ordinary cup of yogurt

But if you take the top off. . .

Over 1,000 words of text! It looks like some Dr. Bonner, schizophrenic shit. Yes, the yogurt is trying to sell me A WEB-CAM.  Now, multiply this by EVERY OBJECT YOU CAN BUY in shops here and you have some idea of the advertising overload – what we call 情報汚染 (literally , “information pollution.”)

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Went to look for a new apartment or small house because the old one got a lil bit to small for three of us since mina moved back in, i wanted something with a bigger living room,space for my home office, 3 seperate rooms, one for each of us and a larger kitchen. Ive found one,
this house was advertised as having a “SPECIAL MACHINE IN FLOOR!” I couldn’t resist checking it out. Most places have “Hot water!” or “nice view!” maybe “Air Condition!”  but. . . SPECIAL MACHINE IN FLOOR????

curious?  HELL FUCKING YES!
Ok, so when ive watched the place for the first time a month ago with mina, the real estate guy removed a secret trap-door to show us the mystery device:

then you can see the . . . conveyor belt?!? this thing is built fucking solid like a industrial robot D: ..

Bending over, you can see the THIRTEEN BOXES arranged in a circle. You punch in the number of the box you want into a remote, and the machine rotates to that box, plops it in the conveyor belt, and lugs it up to floor level, lifting the trap door up with it. WTF.

This is maybe the most awesome…insane..overkill crawlspace trapdoor thingie ive ever seen….
I asked the real-estate guy why this thing even exists and he didn’t know, this one was a first timer for him aswell and he kept scratching his head while reading the floorplans and the manual of the machine someone scribbled on it. I assume it’s for  smuggling. “Odd numbered boxes are heroin, even numbered are guns. . . except for #13. That’s the MYSTERY BOX. That one contains the souls of abducted pets.”

i fucking love it..   just cant stop playing with it, and i dont even have a bed to sleep yet :p  i might not even need my bookshelves anymore ^^

In Japanese, shitamachi (下町） literally means “lower city” – in other words, down by the river. But it’s as much an economic distinction as a geographical one: shitamachi neighborhoods tend to be ramshackle and full of collapsing buildings. (of course, the “new trendy” sections of Tokyo are often full of super expensive apartments the size of closets, while on the other hand, shitamachi people often own their own property, so who is to say you should judge a book by its cover?)

Anyway, I like shitamachi places because they often have a cool, post-war vibe. The buildings look like they were thrown up in a hurry after the bombs. It’s not slick or cool  Actually, shitamachi is popular ..
Anyway, here are some photos from  an east-Tokyo neighborhood called Mukoujima:

The cluster of buildings above is so random it looks like some Katamari Damacy shit!

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This is quite possibly the best commercial I’ve seen this year (partially subtitled for your enjoyment)

Aliens, awkwardness, and a blonde girl speaking Japanese with a terrible accent. This commercial has got it all!

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A couple of years ago i stumbled over this device called Track-IR, a infrared camera with built in image processor and infrared illuminator which picks up the movement of 3 reflectors on a clip you attach to a baseball cap, or in the pro version a clip with 3 leds you simply snap onto your headphones, translating that head movement information to head movements of your ingame view in 6 axes.

this is quite usefull for games using controls like joysticks..steering wheels but it can be even quite helpful in MilSims like ARMA2

the following video from TIR explains track-ir in a nutshell

this one is the latest version of the track-ir sensor , track-ir5, on the back it has a window that let you take a look onto their quite powerfull image processing chip which takes load from your computers cpu so you wont get framerate drops from the software having to calculate the positions of the leds on your head itself.

the camera delivers a raw resolution of 355×288 with about 120 frames per second and sets you back about 160-200 $ last time ive checked. fancy little thing, just a bit to expensive, so ive looked around for alternatives.

There is this little software called FREE-Track, which lets you use a software calculated approach on head motion tracking using regular webcams

sweet..webcams are cheap, but their technical specs usualy move around between resolutions of 320×240 and 640×480 and framerates not exceeding 30 frames per second, cameras with higher resolutions or framerates can be quite expensive and additionaly you still do not get pre-processed informations from the webcam, just a raw picture, the freetrack software has to analyze first which adds significant cpu load. you have to mod some cameras by removing their infrared filters so they would pick up the light from the led clip…  blah
nah, it shall be no webcam then. For freetrack i needed something a bit more dedicated to this task, and yet cheap.

standard WiiMote, about 30$

…..batteries included

….keep away from children below the age of 3

sooo.. whats the deal with the wiimote..

Nintendo doesnt really admit that their little gamecontroller has quite some computing power ^^.

it contains a custom PixArt infrared camera exclusively manufactured for nintendo, which is located behind that black window on the front (visible on the right side of the pic), this camera delivers an interpolated image of 1024×768 at 100FPS with a 41° field of view (trackir has 46° thats not bad :o ). additionaly that IR sensor comes with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz :o , awesome..so we got onboard image processing here…

the wiimote connects to the wii via a bluetooth IC from broadcom to transfer the relatively massive data of the accelerometers and the output of the IRsensor

it is using the regular HID bluetooth standard for input devices , so now theres my way to hook it up to my pc ^^

i am using for that a Toshiba bluetooth usb dongle and the bluetooth stack drivers on its cdrom

now for the infrared lights i have to use for my headset clip…..  3 infrared lights go for about 5$ or something…  i was to lazy to go to a electronics store and just grabbed a

wireless Wii “sensor bar” for 9$ which really just contains 2 IR led light sources so the wiimote camera can pick those up, plus a handy power switch..

but when i took it apart at home ive found 3 leds on each side of the device, 6 IRleds and a power switch for just 9$ sweet… so i can even build a 4 led clip now ^^ .

for now ive just used one of the leds, on the tip of a ballpoint pen ive taped onto the top of my headset, relatively far on the front, just enough not to get into my field of view, to make it easier for the camera to pick up the motion of it, this setup gives me 2 axis of freedom … up, down, left , right , enough for a test. i sync´ed the wiimote with my bluetooth dongle, launched freetrack, and selected as camera source the nintendo HID device.

awesome.. it worked instantly, the the processed red dot of the led on the camera image was visible, and it already got tracked by the software :o

ive adjusted some sensivity settings in the preview window and launched ARMA2 right away, could not wait any longer to see it work ingame.

ive chosen a helicopter training mission, because thats what troubled me the most in that game, being unable to see whats going on left and right , and on the landings i always chopped off

trees with my rotors…

what you can not hear in the video is me saying stuff like “whoa…whoa, thats friggen awesome…”   every 20 seconds or so  XD

almost perfect landing..
sooo…  the price for this rig was roughly about 60$ with additional batteries and other work materials…
i´m making a note here

–huge success–

the flag of the Benin Empire,

which was located in what became Nigeria.

i guess thats why they will never have nice things there