I get boxes

Delivery people have been giving me boxes lately. Small boxes and big boxes; cheap boxes and expensive boxes. I now have all the boxes.

Five years ago I built my current desktop PC. It's working (mostly) fine, but it's getting a little long in the tooth and it's time to build a new one. My plan is to build a new, shiny computer here on Okinawa; then bring my current desktop back to Osaka. With a second computer there I won't need to bring a laptop along every time I go back.

What I imagine my new computer will be like.

This cunning plan has only one slight flaw: this is the worst time in a decade or more to get a new computer. Because of COVID, supply chains and industrial production has been disrupted the world over, and it's particularly bad for complex electronic components such as CPUs, sensors and RF components (Wifi, bluetooth and so on). Products from smartphones to cameras have been delayed or cancelled, car plants sit idle, and computers are of course especially affected.

At the same time, the pandemic has increased the demand for laptops and desktops. Lots of people now work and study from home and they all need computers to do that. And when you're stuck at home with little to do, a gaming PC or game console seems like just the thing to relieve the boredom. PC sales are increasing for the first time in ten years.

How bad is it? I've tried to get a new laptop at work since late November. The order has been cancelled twice due to a lack of parts, and five months on I still don't know when I will finally get a replacement.

Concerned cat does not approve of the current component shortage.

Still, if you persevere you can get lucky. I've been looking for the AMD 5950X CPU, but it's been constantly sold out online (you can get it at 25%-50% markup from a scalper, but I don't want to give them my money). However, I also kept an eye on the stock at our local store (called "GoodWill"), part of the PC Koubo chain. The physical stores have a separate supply channel, and visitors can't snap up stock instantly. And they get regular supply drops of this CPU.

About three weeks ago the shop in Chatan got a shipment of the 5950X. We drove over, waited with ~6-7 other people until they opened (I'm not the only one monitoring the store page), and walked out with a 5950X, at MSRP - no scalpers or shady resellers and no inflated price.

I've since ordered the other parts I'll need for a working computer: a motherboard, memory, an SSD, a CPU cooler, a PSU and a case to put everything in. It all finally arrived this week, neatly packed in boxes on my workroom floor.

 

A pile of boxes. Put them together and you have a computer. Put them together wrong and you have some expensive junk. Don't put them together wrong. With that said, it's actually pretty easy.

One item is conspicuously absent: I didn't get a GPU. If other parts are hard to get right now, GPUs are effectively impossible. Cryptocurrencies are booming, and some them can be profitably mined with consumer GPUs. The major PC builders - the likes of Dell and Lenovo - get a lot of them to fulfil the demand for PCs. Then currency miners and scalpers hoover up everything they can get their hands on, through bulk buying and by using bots to grab anything that shows up online.

It's not just the newest graphics cards either. You can't get anything. I bought an RX570 8GB on sale about two years ago, for about $180. Today Amazon sells used cards for $380, and new cards go for $700 and up.

I gave up. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find a current-generation GPU, then pay several times what it's normally worth. I'll use the RX570 for now, then buy a new card in a year or two, once the COVID-related shortages fade and cryptocurrencies crash again.

Meanwhile I will put together my new computer this week, and once it (hopefully) works I'll move over my stuff from the old one, and prepare that one for shipment back to Osaka. 

Happiness

 Happiness is love. Real happiness is a working hot water heater. 

Now we know :)

Valentine's Day

 Valentine's Day and as every year, Ritsuko gave me a little something:

Chocolates and a Line prepaid card. The heart knows what it wants.

The chocolates are really tasty; each one is a different experience, with contents ranging from whiskies to fruit liquours. I'm having several weeks of enjoyment from these!

The other thing was a 1000-yen Line prepaid card. Line, for those that aren't familiar with it, is the most popular messaging app by far here in Japan, with group chats, phone and video calls, news, games and even a cashless payment service. And stickers.

Stickers are insanely popular. Large stickers, small stickers, animated stickers, customizable stickers... You get some for free, but if you want more you buy them. Anybody can put up sticker sets on the service, and some sticker creators manage to make a full-time living from Line stickers.

I've only every used the default selection. That marks me as a tight-fisted cheapskate, and the prepaid card is a not-very-subtle nudge to just get myself some fresh sticker packs already. Which I have! They were fun to select and they're fun to use. Might have to get some more...

Winter walks

I've spent some time walking and cycling around the Naha area lately, camera in hand. I haven't really done that in a few years; no idea why I stopped. Anyway, it's fun to explore your neighbourhood and nearby areas - there's still so many places to discover even right around the corner.

Naha has a reputation for being a bit rundown, ugly and full of tourists. I don't think it deserves that; there are many spots around the town that are beautiful, even serene. This is Miituji park and canal just a block from the waterfront.

Naminoue beach in Naha. It's right in the city and right next to the commercial harbour so it's hardly an unspoiled wilderness. This road bridge leads to the airport further down the coast. But it's still a nice beach, and I love that we can live in the middle of a city and still have a place to cool off in the summer just a few minutes away.

Critics are right about one thing: Naha (and Okinawa) has a lot of concrete construction, and a lot of it looks worn down and broken. But that's really a result of the climate here.

With frequent typhoons you really want sturdy buildings. The hot, humid climate and salty sea winds makes everything rust, makes concrete crumble, and mould will quickly discolour anything exposed to the outside.

Yang Kyou Fang (The Golden Swallow). Probably the best Chinese restaurant we know here. It's also conveniently almost next door. They've been hurting over the pandemic, like all restaurants, but seems to still do OK. Their take-out service seems very popular — we order now and again, and there's always other customers there picking up their orders — and they have enough space to safely have some level of eat-in service.

Speaking of Chinese restaurants, this fried pork is from another restaurant called  Kujakurou (Peakock) in Ginowan. It's older and perhaps more traditional than Yang Kyou Fang. Both are good.

"Gabe Useful — Junk"

Matsuo Park in Naha.

I'm back to using my old Pentax K5-IIs. It's almost ten years old now, and starting to show its age, but honestly still the one camera I find most natural and effortless to use. And I really enjoy the results I get, even in near-darkness. 

An Osaka New Year

 Osaka for New Year as usual. Except, of course, not like usual. Nothing this year has been.

New Year sales poster.

 On a normal year we'd go out to eat a lot. We'd probably spend New years eve at a certain bar with people we know. We would perhaps stay overnight at a ryokan somewhere, and we'd certainly go out mingling in the crowds. 

None of that happened. We did venture outside — it's low-risk away from crowds — but we ate at home every night, and we didn't meet anybody. 

We did take a Hanshin train to Kobe one day; had lunch at Raja, our favourite Indian restaurant; then took a long walk through the Kitano area on the mountain side. We picked a date and time we knew the train and the restaurant would both be quite empty. And Kitano is always quiet in the off season even in a normal year.

Hanshin station, Osaka.

Kobe. It's a worn-down port city but we like it.

A shop in the Kitano district, Kobe. We often get vegetables and other random food here when we come to Kobe.

One thing happened: I brought my Pentax DSLR with me to Osaka, for the first time in years. I'd been using a small mirrorless Olympus for the past several years; small, light and portable, but I was never really happy with it for some reason. Taking the Pentax in my hands felt like coming back home, and taking pictures suddenly felt like fun again.

Midosuji line. On my way back from Nagai park.

A cafe on Midosuji, Osaka.

San Marco curry. Good curry. Not a lot of people.

The four amigos. They all know I'm there; they were laughing and smiling when they saw me grab my camera and realized what they must look like from outside.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is to walk around at random, camera in hand. The mirroless was always a hassle to use; with the Pentax I don't need to look at it or even to think to get the right settings and take the picture. I took more pictures over this holiday than I took all the rest of the year.

 

We found Small Friendly Duck waiting at a street crossing, and he followed us home. He was a bit worse for wear but after a clean-up he is happy to stay with us in Osaka. Here he is posing with a matching vase of tulips.

We spent new year at home, talking and playing with our phones while Kohaku Gassen, the traditional music show, was playing in the background. It was good. Let's hope 2021 improves over its predecessor. It shouldn't be difficult.

 

Nagahori at dusk.

Happy New Year

The year of the cow

 

Happy New Year everybody! Let's hope the coming year turns out better than this one.

/Janne and Ritsuko

A Tale of Two Rice Cookers

December already - time flies. Got the long-sleeved shirts and fleece jackets out already. And we will spend New Year in Osaka as usual, and that city is definitely cold.

Anyway, we've splurged on a new rice cooker. Our old one still works fine (we'll bring it to Osaka), but for a while we've had two rice cookers here. They're both the same size, made by reputable Japanese makers and have similar functions. But the older one, from Sharp, cost around 9000 yen; while the new Toshiba is about 25000.  

Many claim that higher-end rice cookers make better tasting rice. Does the rice cooker really make a difference to the rice? Time to find out!

The Sharp on the left, the Toshiba on the right.

The picture itself is with my Olympus Pen, a camera I've never been really happy with to be honest, and here you see one reason why: the white balance just never comes out well when the light is even a little on the off side.

 

The old Sharp uses a regular electric heater, while the Toshiba has an induction heater (IH). An induction heater can vary the temperature very precisely and almost instantaneously, This should mean much better temperature control for the Toshiba. Our guess was that the Toshiba would be much better at keeping rice warm without burning it or drying it out, but that fresh boiled rice would be much the same.

We set both to cook half a cup (~80g) of rice, each with the recommended amount of water. The old cooker needs quite a bit more water than the new one. While cooking the Toshiba produced very little steam, much less than the Sharp. The Sharp keeps the rice at a boil, producing lots of steam, while the Toshiba induction heater can keep the pot just barely simmering.

Cooking done — they took about the same time — we sat down, each with two small bowls of rice. Was there a difference?

A simple dinner, with two bowls of rice. And, again, the colour balance is off.

 

In a word, yes. The flavour is the same; no surprise there. But the texture is very different. The grains from the Sharp have a nice firm center but a somewhat mushy surface. The Toshiba rice has a completely uniform texture that is pleasantly firm all the way through.

There's nothing wrong with the rice froim our old cooker; we've been happy with it so far, and we will continue to use the cooker back in Osaka. But the texture from the Toshiba is just obviously better. I didn't really expect that.

You can of course adjust the amount of water for the Sharp. But even if you do, it can't quite produce that even result we get from the Toshiba. Perhaps it's partly because the grains bounce around and rub off each other as they boil, while they lay still in the Hitachi. Now I'm curious if a 50K rice cooker might be even better...