Sapporo Snow Festival is Approaching

It’s that cold season of the year again and people are looking forward to go skiing and snow-boarding. Most of the travel bureaus in Tokyo are advertising packages to northern and north-eastern Japan. With unusually freezing temperatures sometimes going below zero even in the capital Tokyo, this season is going to be great for skii lovers and also for snow and ice sculptors!

A special event in the winter calendar here in Japan and maybe all over the world is the “Sapporo Snow Festival” (雪祭り). If you are planning to go to Sapporo to see the event, you should reserve the air tickets and hotel accommodation well in advance to save money and to find a good hotel close to the festival site. Two or three month advance bookings will give you return air fare from Haneda + Hotel B&B for three nights for approx. 30,000 JPY. For those of you who are interested in seeing the sculptors in action, I recommend going to Sapporo couple of days before the festival opens in the first week of February. The best vantage point to see all sculptures is the Sapporo TV tower. The evening light up at the festival site creates an unearthly aura and that’s when you have to be there to witness the best of the season.

In day time you may consider visiting the Sapporo beer museum, open market and surely the “Shiroi Koibito Park” where you will see how Ishiya chocolate factory makes its flagship product. Some of the photos I took in my visit there last February are posted below.

View from the Sapporo TV Tower

Skaters

Sea World

Forbidden City

Ken & Kei

Ice Slide

Miku Hatsune

Taj Mahal

Japanese Castle

A Sculptor from Thailand hard at work

Night view from TV tower

Sea World light up

Ice Carvings

Ishiya Chocolate Factory

Making Shiroi Koibito

Sapporo Beer Brewery

A modern day bank job

We have heard stories of tunnels dug to loot from banks both in real life and in movies, but these guys must be real Engineers to construct a state-of-the-art pathway to a German bank from a nearby Parking lot. Police suspects they took months to build the 45m tunnel which was done quite well with proper braces and high-tech equipment. Watch the BBC video here.

What to do in Otaru?

Otaru is a great place to soak in the spirit of winter, just about forty minutes away from Sapporo. If you want to experience -15~20 Celsius temperatures in a beautifully well-preserved small town not quite far from Sapporo, Otaru is the place to go. Otaru is  actually a small harbour town famous for its canal and exceptional quality glass crafts. The sea food is lovely and walks along the famous Otaru canal can be relaxing. Don’t forget to stay till late and wear extra warm clothes to see the floating lanterns in the canal. Maybe you will need a pair of ice grips for shoes too! Seafood and warm soup served at Maruta Japanese Isakaya near the station are both delicious and cheap!

Otaru

Otaru Station

One of many glass-craft shops

Shopping street

Rickshaw

Otaru Canal at Night

Maruta Japanese Isakaya

Phantom Island Undiscovered

Today the BBC ran a news article about a Pacific island that was on marine charts, maps and even on google earth, until a group of researchers found it to be non-existent! Either the early Cartographers made a mistake in including “sandy island” in the maps or the island disappeared without a trace sometime in the past. Sandy island is not too small and it would be interesting to see the past satellite imagery from the area to see whether it really existed or not. A very intriguing puzzle to solve! Read the full article from the BBC here.

“This site is running teamviewer”

Probably you have seen the above message when you try to connect to locally hosted pages by typing “localhost” in the browser. This happens if you have teamviewer installed, which listens on port 80 by default. One of my colleagues got this message today and asked what he should do to fix it. Simply you can try terminating the teamviewer process or you should permanently make teamviewer listen on some other port. Go to Extras -> Options -> Advanced  -> Show Advanced Options -> Advanced Network Settings in teamviewer UI and check “Don’t use incoming ports 80 and 443”. Now you should be able to work on your sites on localhost.

DIY guide to replacing a Nokia N95 flex ribbon cable

A common problem in slide-type phones is sudden display glitches, that may end up in a blank screen. Usually it takes few days to few weeks after initial symptoms (glitches when sliding up/down to open/close the num pad) appear to end up with an unusable screen. Most of the time, the underlying issue is a torn flex ribbon cable. Simply replacing the cable will solve the problem, so you don’t have to throw away that phone.I tried this out recently with my five year old N95. Please go to this link to see how to open up a Nokia N95.

A replacement flex cable will cost about $12 (with a working front camera) at Focalprice or Alibaba. You can buy one for even $4, if you are fine with a fake front cam.

N95 flex cable

The flex cable connects to the main board (it’s easy to see the connection once you open the phone). The LCD screen should be connected to the flex cable circuit via a latched lock. That’s it, and your phone display is fixed!

Belkin wireless PCI network adapter driver for windows 7 x64

I recently received a Belkin network adapter from a friend, who asked me to help find the Win7 x64 driver for it. After an extensive web search, we realized none of the drivers suggested in forums work on win7 x64. So many people had come across this driver issue and apparently many of them had given up. Drivers in the Belkin website itself don’t work! However, after playing around with some drivers bundled with windows, I could find one that really works. If anyone of you have trouble with this network card, please do the following and let me know how it went.

Network card: Belkin PCI Network Adapter F5D7000; Chip: Broadcom; OS: Windows 7 Professional SP1 x64 (English)

Device Manager -> Update driver software -> Let me pick from a list -> Broadcom (not Broadcom corporation) ->Broadcom 802.11g network adapter -> OK

Once you do this, a working driver for the card gets installed and you are ready to go! Appreciate your feedback.

Sri Lanka Telecom sets usage limits at your expense!

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has gone back in its tracks and has started to promote “limited broadband internet” packages in recent times. As I remember, when I signed up for a home package in 2002/2003, they delivered unlimited internet at 512 kbps download and 128 kbps upload speeds. Although crawling at snail’s pace of 512 kbps, we still had no cap limit for downloading. Now SLT is changing the game by promising 2 Mbps to 16 Mbps connections (at exorbitant rates for higher speeds in the spectrum) with a CAP LIMIT! In an age where 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps and 1 Gbps connections are available at reasonable prices for home users in other countries WITHOUT cap limits, SLT is still crawling while setting limits to usage! Either they are unable to give a facelift to the already deteriorating network infrastructure in Sri Lanka or just trying to rip the customers off to earn few more bucks.

As one of my friends updated me recently, the way SLT plans to establish this CAP LIMIT scheme is appalling. They are trying set this limit for not only new customers, but also for those customers who signed up for unlimited packages about ten years ago. How? By luring them to buy a host of new connections disguised as cheap and fast packages! More bait for unsuspecting customers? Why not? The bait comes in the form of a wireless router at 1,990 LKR, which SLT says is worth 6,990 LKR. If you are not shocked yet, here’s another one. SLT wants 500 LKR to change your perfectly unlimited package to a LIMITED package. That’s if you don’t buy their so-called wireless router. If you opt for the router, the transfer fee becomes 1,000 LKR! So you basically pay them extra to downgrade the service. I will take one of their packages as an example to show the truth behind the deal. “Abhimaana” is a package (up to 2 Mbps DL) targeting employees of the state-sector priced at 390 LKR per month. The cap limit is a mere 2 GB. In this age of youtube, video conferencing and sporadic, yet heavy downloading, 2 GB is negligible. If you exceed 2 GB, then you have to pay 25 cents per Megabyte. So, if you reach 10 GB, you are paying an extra 2,000 LKR on top of the 390 usage charge (Now customers who have unlimited packages pay only 1,690 LKR per month). Well, if you exceed 10 GB, then they slash your speed to 64 kbps, which is as good as not having a connection at all!!

From the SLT website

From the SLT website

From the SLT website

The bottom line? SLT seems to be lacking the capacity to give a true broadband experience to Sri Lankan users and they are experimenting on misleading unsuspecting users into signing up for CAP LIMITS by abandoning their unlimited packages. I hope SLT will learn from its mistakes, learn from those customer-centric providers in other countries who give FTTH, LTE and WiMAX at mind-blowing speeds and play fair for the sake of their customers.

Unusual Forex rate fluctuation?

Over the last weekend, the Sri Lankan Rupee (LKR) showed unusual variation against the USD, JPY, AUD and some more hard currencies. The peaks and valleys were so far apart with a remarkably high frequency (eg. USD/LKR: High: 131, Low: 113). The ups and downs were more or less stabilized during the week with occasional drops that recovered quickly. Even the anticipated foreign currency injection by the IMF may not have caused an unusual trend as this. However, I wondered whether the CBSL once again pegged the rates as they have been doing for a long time. Even so, a violent fluctuation like this may not have been realized by pegging. Or is it just a technical glitch? I didn’t see any reason for this trend in media, so I am still looking for a viable explanation. Screen grabs from www.xe.com.

JPY/LKR

AUD/LKR

USD/LKR

JPY/USD

AUD/JPY

Battle of the tablet Titans

I stumbled upon a news story on Reuters about an intriguing judgement made by a British Judge ordering Apple to run ads with the quite unusual slogan, “Samsung didn’t copy the iPad”! We knew Apple and Samsung had locked horns over patent issues and were fighting in a global scale, and this new judgement adds some spice to that while changing the status quo of the game. Few months ago, an Australian court ordered and later lifted a ban on Samsung Galaxy Tab sales there, due to a legal proceeding initiated by Apple. These claims and counter claims for trivial patents including colours (Apple actually has a patent for the white colour as I heard from one of my friends), has gone too far according to tech experts and critics. While real intellectual property should be safeguarded from infringement, in a way this judgement can be used as a Judicial precedent to avoid future clashes over trivial matters that impede technological development.