Random photos of stations I have visited

[JR East]

On 12/27/2023 at 1:30 PM, mojo said:

 

Some Hard Off branches have started labelling used HDDs this way, and it's really helpful. The first number is the number of power cycles, the second one is the number of hours it's been on for. Very useful for telling how hard a life the drive has had.

 

@mojo - You're right, it's a first foot step on two important information in yellow below)  but it's not enough to me as some S.M.A.R.T info are very important like those ones to really appreciate if it's a long lasting HHD or not (Failure rate is based on data provided by BackBlaze. The current attribute value is matched against the observed failure categories and an annual failure rate is determined.)

 

 

 

Purchasing a second hand HDD can be interesting as long as you do not want to save important things on it. 

 

 

 

 

[kuro68000]

22 hours ago, JR East said:

 

@mojo - You're right, it's a first foot step on two important information in yellow below)  but it's not enough to me as some S.M.A.R.T info are very important like those ones to really appreciate if it's a long lasting HHD or not (Failure rate is based on data provided by BackBlaze. The current attribute value is matched against the observed failure categories and an annual failure rate is determined.)

 

 

 

Purchasing a second hand HDD can be interesting as long as you do not want to save important things on it. 

 

 

 

 

 

Agreed, I wouldn't buy a used one for anything important. Well, with the exception of retro stuff, IDE and MFM drives.

 

My understanding is that they test the drives somehow. Not clear on the details though, is it just a format or do they have a tool that at least looks at the SMART data to see if a failure is imminent?

 

I keep thinking about setting up a storage server with proper redundancy. At the moment I rely on backups. Picked up some mis-priced 100GB Bluray discs for that purpose. What holds me back on the server, aside from the cost, is the lack of good cases. There's one that is OOS everywhere. I want lots of 5.25" bays, but otherwise not huge.

[kuro68000]

 

 

Two parts as I had to stop to check my map. Google described this route as "mostly flat", which is "mostly true" except for the massive and very steep slope that would have been a major issue for anyone with mobility problems! In fact I don't think I could have walked up it.

[kuro68000]

 

Ishiwara Station (石原駅), the Chichibu Railway.

 

 

 

 

 

To be honest I thought that the Famicom was light beige, but here's one that hasn't yellowed and it's white!

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

 

Kind of a classic modern Japanese street scene there.

[kuro68000]

 

First time I've ever seen the 5 layer 125GB discs. That's an original Super Breakout machine!

 

 

Sadly Shogun Burger was closed.

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

 

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

 

 

With and without Night Sight. It looks more like the without photo in real life.

 

[kuro68000]

 

I should have taken a photo of the content. It was a really nice meter in a leather case. I'm not sure why there are so many analogue meters in Japan. Is it just that people sell analogue ones when the owner passes on, or is there a preference for them? I know some people like to see the needle move.

 

 

Complete in box, 550 yen...

 

 

[kuro68000]

 

Kamiooka Station.

 

 

Motomachi. I wish I had made a video at the station of just going down the escalators. It's a deep station. The ones at Minatomirai are even better as they are really long.

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

 

Minami Makigahara.

 

 

A nice Toshiba MSX, and the original Nintendo video game system before the Famicom.

 

 

 

Great name for a bar.

[kuro68000]

 

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

[kuro68000]

 

Nakano Station view.

 

 

Some Hard Offs are doing 20% off everything up to 2,200 yen. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything I wanted for that price.

 

 

Nice urban scene in Tachikawa. With and without Night Sight. As usual, without looks more realistic. In another country it would be a dark and scary alleyway, but here it's just a nice little path winding through some houses.

[kuro68000]

 

Lots of great clothing in Japan... Uniqlo has some CLAMP stuff at the moment. I'd love to get it, but they only do women's sizes, and my wife isn't really into it. Most of the stuff I see at Off House, like this, is far too small even if it is a men's size.

 

 

Some rare Cassette Vision games. I meant to get at least one, but forgot as ever. I might go back, we shall see. These games are not emulated so you can only play them on real hardware. The reason is that they aren't just memory like most game cartridges, they have the CPU and RAM in them as well. It's all on a single chip that NEC made, with only the graphics chip in the console. As such you can't read the data out for emulation, at least not by any conventional means. Little is known about the CPU either. It might be 8 bit, but NEC did some 4 bit CPUs around that time as well which were quite a strange architecture. They had very few instructions, and often to get some outcome you had to do a tangentially related instruction and then undo all the effects you didn't want.

 

 

Some very nice MSX machines too. I'm going to end up getting an MX-10 or similar size one, I won't be able to hold out.

[kuro68000]

 

Oh yeah, this thing. So the story is that this game, Rez, came out on the Sega Dreamcast. They then ported it to the Playstation, but at the time the Playstation 2 didn't have a vibration feature in its controllers. Or maybe it did, but it was kinda basic like on/off rather than the more subtle one that the Dreamcast had. The Dreamcast one was fantastic - in racing games you could feel your wheels going up on the kerb, it was great.

 

So anyway, Rez is a a sort of shoot-em-up by with rhythmic music elements, so you really need to physical sensation feedback. Therefore, they had to make vibrator peripheral. It's not entirely clear what you were supposed to do with it... Your hands would be full with the controller, so... They basically made a sex toy.

 

I'm actually a little surprised that nobody else thought of adding this feature to one of the many adult dating sims released in Japan, but that doesn't seem to be a thing.

 

 

Uh, anyway, here's Musashi-Yamato Station.

 

[kuro68000]

 

Here's an interesting example of where Night Sight actually looks better, while still looking like night time. You will need to expand the images to full size, but in the Night Sight one you can see the stars, and the sky is darker. You used to be able to control Night Sight to make it do that more reliably, but they seem to have removed that option and I don't know how to make it consistently do this. That said, it might be possible to do later using the RAW file.

 

[cteno4]

On 1/3/2024 at 8:24 AM, mojo said:

i want the first bench for the backyard and the wooden seats on the left for the screen porch. Mojo, could you please see if they would sell them then ship them over to me?

 

thanks,

 

jeff

[kuro68000]

10 hours ago, cteno4 said:

i want the first bench for the backyard and the wooden seats on the left for the screen porch. Mojo, could you please see if they would sell them then ship them over to me?

 

thanks,

 

jeff

 

I would not trust that first bench with my weight! In person it looked like it was about to collapse. The other ones look nice though, quality Japanese workmanship.

 

Anyway, I went to Utsunomiya today, on the Shinkansen. Had some great walks. Unfortunately I forgot to charge my phone, so I was only able to record two of them. Still, the second recording should be a good one!

 

I started from Utsunomiya Station with a ride on the Light Rail system.

 

[kuro68000]