Category Archives: freetime

Rusutsu Snow Trip 2013

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In January,  we took the family up to Rusutsu in Hokkaido for a bit of snowboarding and skiing. Yes, this post is a little late.

The resort feels very much like a bubble place, but essentially is a collection of hotels and a few chalets around three main mountain ski areas. We stayed in the Resort Hotel North, which is at the base of one of the ski areas. Is it really a bubble era hotel? Well, it has an animatronic talking tree, some animatronic bears (or dogs, perhaps), and a full double decker carousel in the foyer which you could ride for free every evening, so yes, it’s very much a bubble hotel, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you aren’t paying bubble fees.

We went for an all in package with breakfast and dinner, especially as the food at the in-house restaurants was good – believe me, we’ve stayed at places where the breakfasts were awful, and yes, I’m looking at you, Yamada Onsen in Niseko! As I’ve learned, with kids, having a buffet with a decent selection is vital to keep the complaints down.

Rentals weren’t too expensive, and the kit was very good, as is pretty much standard here nowadays, and the staff were fairly multi-lingual given the decent number of Chinese and Australian guests – also pretty much standard here nowadays.  The instructors were good too, and our eldest got some lessons in when she wasn’t skiing with me. For once I wasn’t renting ski boots, having picked up a cheap pair of Head ski boots in Jimbochou for Xmas last year, and it was nice to have a consistent setup for a whole trip.

Rusutsu’s got a good selection of courses too, and on clear weather days, some great views. I’m not sure whether I prefer it to Niseko, but it’s still got a decent selection of runs, and some hilarious tree routes. There’s a snow park, where I spent a morning. I’ve never been much into jumps and such, but I did actually have a good time in there, so next season I might invest a bit more time in the snow parks and see how it goes.

I also took my GoPro out, and got some great shots of the kids skiing, and us out on our snowboards. As I’m a much better boarder than skier, it was interesting to shift from trepidation on even easier intermediate slopes on skies, to double diamond slopes through the trees on my board, and just feeling challenged, rather than concerned I was going to break something.

I tried the camera both mounted to the board, and a headcam, and actually, I think it works as both, but obviously you get a lot of snow blowing up onto the camera on it’s board mount. One note though, unless you have the anti-fog inserts, you’ll want to regularly open the casing to lot the condensation dissipate after about 20mins.!

All in all, we had a great trip, and even the flights and travel went fairly smoothly, so no complaints there.

Icon Patrol Glove

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I’m one of those people who likes to get out on his motorbike most days of the year. Since I don’t pack it away from September till April, I’ve found it’s useful to have a nice, warm pair of winter gloves, ones which are preferably waterproof to an extent too, even though here in central Japan, the  winters aren’t even so wet.

So, when my old gloves were declared worn out, I went looking for a new pair. I don’t have any electrically heated kit, so I needed something basic, relying on the material only. I’ve always heard good things about Icon kit, but never actually tried any, so I looked through their glove selection, and bought some of their Patrol Gloves courtesy of local distributor, AFGMotosports. The local bike groups over at JapanRider and Gaijinriders seem to rate them too. Reseller Revzilla did a video review.

icon patrol glove

I’ve had them for a few weeks now, and I have to say I’m quite impressed. Firstly, the sizing – I went for the size above that which their website suggested – getting XL over L:  when you measure, go in three dimensions, and not flat across the palm, and opt for the larger size if you’re on a boundary.

The glove fits very well, nowhere is it tight, though the fingers do feel a little short, but fine for me. The thumb has plenty of freedom, so indicators aren’t an issue, and so far, no embarrassing misses and catching the horn.

The construction looks good and you feel protected – the large knuckle protector adds to that sense, and so far, nothing is coming unstitched. That gauntlet long wrist cover section fitted well over my jacket too, meaning there were no irritating breezes coming up the jacket arm. I also like the reflective section – I’ve made the mistake of having too much black in my gear over the years, so I’m always looking to improve my visibility level. The main materials are goatskin and the waterproof textile, with some synthetic suede on the wear points.

I’ve worn them around town, and over a 200Km run, where it was ~5-10deg.C and they kept me sufficiently warm for the most part, and still felt comfortable on the handlebars, despite the wind, and you don’t sweat in them either, a problem with some (cheaper) gloves. In the rain, they do indeed keep your hands dry, but as the waterproof layer is beneath, the outer layer will appear wet at times, but that’s fine.

They’re worth the 75USD in my opinion, and again, I bought through the distributors here in Japan – AFGMoto – who are keen to sell kit in either Japanese or English and seem to offer decent pricing on a lot of their kit, so no arguments there. I have to say, if like me, you tend to do these things over e-mail, their response time is usually excellent.

Ripping CDs for Fun

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OK, maybe fun is not the right word, but over the last few years, I’ve been ‘digitally archiving’ a few items – it started with some old photo prints and negatives (that’s ongoing), and then I tackled my DVDs, and now I’m looking to sort my CD collection out (I think it’s ~400 discs).

So why do this? It’s a combination of convenience and sound quality really. I want to hear the music as I paid for it, but it’s a bit difficult to have all those CDs available around the house, and keep them away from the kids. Also, I have ripped all my CDs once, usually into iTunes, and over the years they’ve been in a smorgasbord of bit rates and formats, from 128kbps AAC and MP3, up to newer ones which are VBR ~256kbps AAC.

Now I’m doing this final rip to a lossless format, I can then simply transcode to whatever size/quality a target needs in the future, and enjoy that ‘CD quality’ of this master.

How am I doing this? For the rip, I’m using Exact Audio Copy which is a nice piece of freeware, and rips the audio from the disc using a variety of methods to try to make sure that what you get, as its name suggests, is an exact copy of the disc. It’ll then save this, with all the meta-data it looks up online as either .WAV files, or several other formats you can set up. I’m using the FLAC encoder, so it’s losslessly compressed, and is quite widely supported across players and platforms. This is also open source, so I should be able to play/convert it well into the future.

With even my lowly Windows machine, this takes only a few minutes per disc, including meta data tweaks I need for some of the non-English discs, so it’s more a case of just feeding the machine than anything else. As for size, FLAC, depending on settings, brings most of the CDs in at around 350MB, about half their native size, but obviously nowhere near the ~65MB AAC or MP3 would give you – alas the price you pay, but given disk space costs, it’s not a deal killer.

When at my PC, I tend to listen on my Sennheiser HD-555 headphones, via Foobar2000, which I find to be a nice, simple sound app. The hardware, for what it’s worth, is a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI Express card, which I find to sound better than the onboard Realtek codec, or the HDMI audio feed. On the Mac, it’s the built in Intel HD audio, which sounds acceptable, but the Creative card shows why there’s still a little more benefit in a separate sound card.

When not using the headphones, I have some ancient Sony SRS-Z750PC computer speakers which are fine for podcasts, background music and game effects, but aren’t great. In the future I may get a better set of speakers and even a separate amplifier for my computers, but that’ll have to wait a bit. (A real home music system for the living room is higher up the agenda!).

Is it worth the time? Actually, I think it has been – some of my very old rips always sounded a bit harsh, and going back to listening to the CD equivalent makes it all the more difficult to live with, and its been good to listen to all that music again.

The Last Day of Movember

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Mo&Sons-Mo-is-King

Well, all good things as they say, must come to an end, and here we are at the end of Movember, and I have to say I have grown fond of my moustache, but alas, it will be coming off tomorrow morning.

Mine was quite conservative – I was tempted by some of the more liberal styles, but I had a business trip, some important visitors, and a friend’s wedding during the month, so I went for something simple.

Of course, Movember is also about raising money, so I’d like to thank everyone who donated to all the ‘Mo Bros’, and especially to those who donated 420 USD through my page – it really means a lot.

So last year I did NaNoWriMo; this year I did the much easier Movember, so who knows what’ll happen next November – perhaps I’ll do both.

Only a week left in Movember

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So we’re over 75% through Movember and that top lip isn’t looking too bad, albeit after a slow start!

Check progress over on my Movember page.

It might be surprising, but I’ve never done a moustache before – I’ve always been more of a beard type person, preferring the full set if I’m going to be unshaven. Whilst I’ve gotten used to it, I think I’ll be shaving it off that first week if December.

Still, that gives everyone more time to donate to the men’s health programmes they support, so the next time you’re getting your prostate checked, throw some thanks to the Movember people.

The Blender Open Source Film Projects

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I first got into open source in 1998 when I installed Caldera’s OpenLinux. Open source worked for me as I could barely afford hardware, let alone software, and I’ve always kept a Linux (or FreebSD) box running for various tasks and for playing with.

Today, most people have heard of open source, or at least use some open source software, perhaps whether they know it or not.

One aspect of open source which perhaps people aren’t aware of are open source films – creative,  original content, created open source. One of the best ‘studios‘ for this is the Blender Foundation. Blender is itself an open source 3D modeling and rendering system, and they use the foundation and industry sponsorship now to actually produce content where all of the source materials – models, music, renders, all of it, is available open source, with the CG works mainly done in Blender itself.

I first bumped in to these projects in 2008 with their “Big Buck Bunny” short film, which was well written and well made, taking on the children’s animation genre.

Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny

Then I went back to their 2006 project ‘Elephants Dream‘ , which is darker, more for adults,  a grainy, atmospheric tale of two workers seemingly in an almost sentient machine.

Elephant's Dream

Elephant’s Dream

Next up was ‘Sintel‘, a fantasy short about a young woman searching for the dragon cub she nursed, and lost.

Sintel

Sintel

Their latest work is ‘Tears of Steel‘, which is unique as it’s goal was to use Blender to create the CG parts of a mixed live action VFX short film, based on a science fiction premise.

Tears of Steel

Tears of Steel

It’s another well executed short film, which brings home the flexibility of the open source tools, but also the wealth of talent of the people who use Blender and the strength of the community.

I quite like the idea of artistic works like this being open, so just as programmers and tap into source code to learn how things work, aspiring film makers and also take a look inside some of these high quality films and maybe learn a few things.

 

Izu, Skylines and Odd Tea Shops

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Over the last couple of weekends I’ve managed to get out for a couple of morning bike trips; from the first one I put some video together from the Hero2 mounted on the handlebars. There are three main routes – #134, the Pacific Coast road along Sagami Bay, the Toyo Tires Turnpike, a twisty mountainous toll road, and then the Izu Skyline Parkway, another long stretch of twisting roads with some great views of the coastline as it snakes south down the Izu peninsula.

The second trip I met up with my old friend Colin, and his rather nice Triumph Daytona 955i, at Kawaguchiko lake after a 100Km ride up some normal roads and the Tomei expressway, and we meandered back homewards down the 413 Doushi road, another relaxing, scenic road through mountains and valleys, except this time we had to break out the rain gear.

We also stopped off at Cafe Gout Temps which has to be seen to be understood – it’s a Japanese house with British castle and tea shoppe fascias bolted on, and crammed with authentic looking church pulpits, pub statues, doll houses and all manner of oddities. It serves a good avacado and mushroom pasta dish and some fine English tea as well.

Cafe Gout Temps

Cafe Gout Temps

Some more photos

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It’s been a while since I stuck a small gallery up on here, so I took a few random photos from the library to put up.  They’re from a few places, mainly Japan and a recent trip to Guam and from the beaches and from the woodland.

湘南ベルマレ　１−１　東京ヴェルディ

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Last night we went down to the BMW Stadium in Hiratsuka for a family night out to see a live football game between the local team – Shonan Bellmare – and visitors Tokyo Verdy. It was a very decent night out all told – the stadium is in a nice park and there was a lot of stalls almost like a mini-matsuri outside, selling shaved ice with fruit syrup, beer and a decent array of snack foods. The stadium is a nice, if somewhat Soviet-era looking concrete construction which apparently can hold around 18,000, but it felt plenty full with last night’s attendance of 9,370.

Shonan play in J2, the lower of the two Japanese professional leagues, but that’s OK – my local team in the UK isn’t exactly top flight, but that doesn’t stop an entertaining game, and the crowd were treated to some good football for 90minutes, and even two well taken goals in the second half giving the final scoreline of 1-1. Points have to go to the Verdy fans who put up a solid 90minutes of drums and chanting, and at least from where we were sat, drowned out the locals.

It’s been a while sine I’ve been to a J League game actually, though I always watch games when I go back to the UK, and whilst the support style might change around the world, the community feeling on the terraces and the appreciation of the play seems fairly constant. I have to say though, watching an evening game 3Km from the Pacific Ocean in a t-shirt and shorts contrasts oddly to Boxing Day games in the north of England.

Bottom line: if you’re in Japan, and you haven’t checked one out, go and see a J League game, and if you’re visiting, put it on your to do list.

I didn’t take many photos as I was assisting in keeping the kids under control as it was their first ever live football game, and whilst my eldest said she liked it, she was tired after 75mins., and my youngest spent some time with one of us walking about as he was fascinated by the stadium and all the people.

Suddenly, lenses for my D40

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Something must be going on, as I now own 3 lenses for my dSLR, whereas up until six months ago, I only had the one which came with it.

Nikon D40

Nikon D40

To recap, towards the end of 2006 I bought a Nikon D40, with it’s stock 18-55mm kit lens. I actually bought it a month or so after our first child was born as I’d been playing with a friend’s D40 and frankly, the difference in photo ‘quality’ between that and the Ixy point and shoot camera I had at the time was amazing, and so I talked myself into buying my first digital SLR camera.

AF-S-DX-Zoom-NIKKOR-18-55mm-f-3.5-5.6G-ED-II

AF-S-DX-Zoom-NIKKOR-18-55mm-f-3.5-5.6G-ED-II

Since then, I must have taken thousands of photos with it, and never had a problem, whilst getting some truly memorable images, even with my poor grasp of photography. During that time, I think I’ve gone through three point and shoots by comparison.

However, despite one of the main advantages of dSLRs being the ability to change lenses, I’d never bought another lens. I’m actually hardly unique in that, as the vast majority of entry level SLR buyers never buy anything beyond that kit lens.

That all changed earlier this year when I found a couple of situations where I really wanted a bit more ‘zoom’ to get some photos of the kids, and the 18-55mm just wasn’t quite getting it (to be fair, it’s hardly a real zoom lens) so I spoke to some friends who really know about this, and read some well known blogs on the matter, and consulted the amazing dpreview.com site.

In March, I bought the 55-200mm VR lens from Nikon/Nikkor, and was impressed at the zoom and the great images it gives, which meant I could get pictures of the kids without them being distracted by the camera being so close, and them ‘posing’, which is not what you want sometimes. It’s also allowed me to get photos of the quirky local buildings and landscape features I wanted to take pictures of, which usually gets comments like ‘Why do we have a picture of a rusty pipe?’ now and then from the family. The ‘VR’ part of the name is ‘Vibration Reduction’ which is Nikon’s take on image stabilization and often they achieve this in-lens, rather than in the body. VR is now available on the 18-55mm kit lens now I think, and it really helps image quality on a zoom like this, reducing the need for a tripod in some situations.Note that with these AF-S lenses, their focussing motors are also in the lens, as the D40 body does not have one built-in.

AF-S-VR-Zoom-NIKKOR-55-200mm-f-4-5.6G-IF-ED

AF-S-VR-Zoom-NIKKOR-55-200mm-f-4-5.6G-IF-ED

The only downside of the 55-200 VR obviously is that I can’t take quick shots of the kids and things up close with it – it’s not designed for it – so I can swap to the 18-55mm, but that in itself seemed to be a compromise, and increasingly I was reading that a better compliment to the 55-200 VR would be a shorter 35 or 50mm prime lense (i.e. it doesn’t zoom, having a fixed focus). I like to take photos at events, which is where the other end of the need is

After quite a bit of reading (and saving), last week I chose a 35mm lens, again from Nikon – the 35mm f/1.8, essentially over the 50mm, partly on cost, but also on reviews of the lenses themselves, including photo blogger Ken Rockwell seeming to prefer the 35mm, putting it into his lens Dream Team, Steve Huff also liking it, and website Gizmodo having it as a top combination. It’s worth remembering that due to the way the DX works, a 35mm lens is the equivalent of a 53mm lens in ‘film’ photography parlance apparently.

AF-S-DX-NIKKOR-35mm-f-1.8G

AF-S-DX-NIKKOR-35mm-f-1.8G

So now I have my 55-200mm and my 35mm lenses in my camera bag, and after 5 months with the extra zoom, I’ve gotten shots I couldn’t have before, so I’m really pleased with it. I’m still learning how to use the 35mm properly, but already I see why Steve Huff says this lens will help make you a better photographer – it really makes you want to move and get the picture you want.

Although this is all at the bottom end of what can easily become a very expensive hobby, I’ve always been impressed at the quality of the photos my D40 gives me, and impressed at how even though I thought the kit lens was great, these two new lenses get even better images, and because of the way the camera designs work, in the future I could buy a newer DX based Nikon like the D3200 – with yet more pixels (6MP on my D40 compared to 24MP on that) and HD video, and still use these same lenses with it.

Although this level of SLR is now being challenged by newer mirrorless cameras, I’m fine to invest a little still in this well built kit, whilst remembering that the best camera, is always the one you have with you.