It's time for yet another minor festival! Or rather, yesterday was. March 3rd is hinamatsuri, which is a day devoted to girls. Cue much pinkness and flowers. May 5th is apparently when boys get their moment in the spotlight. Thus, people joke that April 4th is the day for transvestites, transsexuals and all other kinds of gender benders, which is a little unfortunate for people like my brother, who have that as their birthday but are not in fact members of the LGBT community. Unlucky, Blair!
So what do you do on girls' day? Play with dolls, of course (hinamatsuri means 'doll festival'). The custom is to create elaborate tiered arrangements of dolls representing the imperial household, with the emperor and empress at the top, and various hand-maidens, advisers, priests, entertainers and warriors below them. I suppose it's a little bit like a nativity scene. Indeed, historically at least, Japan has had a slightly troubling tendency to deify the emperor. Maybe that's what happens when you have non-monotheistic religions, resulting in a god-vacuum.
Of course, no Japanese festival is complete without a special food to eat on the day. With school lunch we got a packet of hina arare, which are sugary rice puffs. The kids seemed intent on throwing them into each others' mouths, but I think that was just lunchtime hi-jinks rather than part of the custom.
In the evening one eats chirashizushi (lit., "scattered sushi"), which is a bowl of rice with a selection of (mostly raw) seafood artfully arranged on top of it. This technically qualifies as sushi since it consists of vinegared rice with various toppings, but it's not what one pictures when someone says 'sushi'. I splashed out on a deluxe octagonal box from the supermarket. I think my palette is slowly adjusting to the odder tastes of Japan. I used to give ikura (big orange salmon eggs) a pretty wide berth, but I found it a welcome addition to the chirashizushi. Also, at the supermarket I bought a bag of dried squid, not for novelty value or as a joke gift, but because I actually fancied eating some. It's a good beer snack once you get used to the chewiness.
Ok, if you're not interested in technology news you can probably stop reading now, as I'm essentially going to review a gadget. Alternatively, if you are a fellow geek who has found this blog through Google, you could start reading now, if that weren't a paradox.
I received my Archos 5 Internet Tablet on monday, and I've spent just about every spare moment since playing with it. This is a pocket-sized touchscreen device which, depending on your perspective, you can see as a) a ludicrously overpowered mp3 player, b) a high-end smartphone minus the phone or c) a small, underpowered computer. It runs Android, Google's operating system for mobile devices, meaning that you can install whatever applications you like from an ever-growing library. Or, if you're feeling particularly hardcore, you can write your own using the freely available Java API.
As I said before, I bought it because I wanted a good kanji dictionary, and an in-car GPS and music system. But I'm hoping it'll prove handy for various other things, like watching TV in bed or listening to podcasts in the bath (as it can stream media over my home wireless network).
My initial impressions are fairly positive. The screen looks good and the device is small and light. I bought the cheapest (~£200) 8GB solid-state memory model; hard-drive models with up to 500GB are available, but they are chunky and expensive and, I would imagine, more likely to break. I figure that since it can stream there isn't so much need for huge storage, and as it has a microSD slot, I can easily triple its storage at a later date. The battery life seems quite impressive, although it does take an age to charge over USB, which is your only option unless you want to shell out for a charging dock. Archos' marketing strategy seems to be to entice you to buy as many hardware add-ons as possible, which I won't be doing, since it was enough hassle importing the thing in the first place.
Some things worked like a dream straight out of the box. It found my network, connected, and updated its firmware without a hitch. Other things have been more troublesome. Just getting it to talk to my computer on USB was a nightmare, but I'm willing to accept that might have had more to do with my ageing WinXP laptop. The biggest disappointment is the supposed FM transmitter. The unit contains a transmitter but no antenna. Previously, it was possible to use the headphones as an antenna, but apparently the performance was so poor that they recently disabled the option in the firmware to stop people complaining about it, meaning that you are forced to buy the car mount accessory if you want a usable antenna. Sod that for a game of soldiers. Instead, I bought a third-party in-car transmitter (with a USB port to power the Archos) from my local electrical shop for less than a tenner, and that works fine. So it's not a big problem really, but I object on principle to the borderline false advertising of saying it has an FM transmitter.
Using the Archos is not always a super-smooth experience. The device has frozen up on me a few times, but it's been nothing a quick power cycle didn't fix. Some people say that Android isn't yet a mature OS, and there may be some truth to that. But I really admire what it's trying to do: provide a common, open software environment for all mobile apps. This is in stark contrast to current market leaders Apple, who seek to lock down every aspect of the hardware and software that they can, using wilful incompatibility and threats of litigation to defend their dominant position. Their machines work very nicely as long as you use them in the exact way that Apple want you to, but I don't like the idea of, for instance, some prudes controlling what I can and can't run on my own hardware.
For their part, Archos seem willing to fight the good fight. From what I can gather, they appear fairly proactive about fixing bugs and offering firmware upgrades. Perhaps realising that their user base contains quite a lot of serious nerds, they actively promote the fact that you can run a stripped-down version of Linux on the internet tablet if you so wish. There are people out there who will attempt to modify just about any electrical device to run Linux, but it's not often you see the manufacturer encouraging them.
While I'm here with my geek hat on, I'd just like to give some mad props to a couple of free applications. It always amazes me that people go to all the effort of writing quality software for nothing, then release it on the net and sort out all the bugs that people report. These people make the world a better place, and all they ask is a voluntary donation, a request which I have honoured in both of the following cases.
The Archos comes with navigation software installed, but you have to buy a subscription. Even if I were not a miser, I don't think they have coverage for Asia. So, I use Trekbuddy. I had this on my old Sony Ericsson, but there's also a version for Android. The main limitation is that it doesn't actually tell you what route to take to get to your destination, merely showing your position on a map. You must also produce these maps yourself, but thankfully auxiliary programs (like Mobile Atlas Creator) have sprung up to automate the slightly cheeky process of ripping maps from sources like Google Maps. So, it's not exactly the most user-friendly application to get set up, but once you do it offers free, off-line GPS mapping for ever more. It's mad configurable and the writer is heroic when it comes to bug fixing. Hats off.
Unsurprisingly considering it isn't on sale in Japan, the Archos does not come with a kanji dictionary. For that I'm using Aedict, a basic but functional and well-presented free Japanese dictionary. It's young software and thus a little glitchy, but I imagine this will improve with time. As far as I'm concerned, the killer app within this app is the 'kanji pad', which allows you to draw whatever symbol it is that's puzzling you in the manner of a finger-painting toddler. The Archos's big screen is really handy here.
At first I was disappointed with the kanji pad's performance. You see, there's a very specific way to write each kanji character, and the program is quite sensitive to this. Doing the strokes in the wrong order confuses it a little, and if you get the number of strokes wrong it flat-out won't work. To a kanji beginner, this would be maddening – for instance, the character that is just a square (which means 'mouth', incidentally) confusingly has three strokes, since the top and right sides are done without lifting your pen. But there is actually a more-or-less logical system to work out the stroke order for any given kanji, which this is forcing me to learn. In just three days my kanji pad hit rate has improved considerably, and it does have the fringe benefit that my calligraphy will be better, and Japanese people will stop laughing at me when they see me writing. Whenever I whip it (the Archos) out at school to look something up, the kids are fascinated, and seeing whether they can get it to recognise the kanji of their names is always a fun game.
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