Boogie Board RIP as writing tablet on Linux

Sorry for long long pause. I was move to Tokyo this April and act as one of Ubuntu Japanese Team Member mainly now. It seems far from 'country life' however I am fine as before. And now I am writing some article to Japanese Ubuntu magazine "Ubuntu Magazine Japan", am happy if you have interesting ( But articles was written in Japanese ).

By the way, recently I bought "Boogie Board RIP" from some shop in Akihabara which discounts to 2,500 JPY. This tablet enables to save your drawing or writing as PDF file. And manufacture of this board serve software "Virtual Desktop Companion Software" which makes tablet as writing tablet for Windows OS, not for Linux.

However, some of earlier hacker investigated and wrote about how to get realtime information of tablet ( Oliver Migeot and Mark Johnson ).

I wrote linux driver for Boogie Board RIP on github.com. And if you are Ubuntu user, DKMS PPA is also available. ( Note that boogie driver is not well tested. )

On Ubuntu Terminal;

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hchonan/boogie
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install boogie-dkms

and plug your Boogie RIP to PC, it will work as writing tablet associate with x.org evdev driver. Evdev driver will be installed as part of default Ubuntu(Unity) desktop environment.

New e-book distributing company J-COMI

One of greatest manga artist Ken Akamatsu founded new e-book distributing company J-COMI, and opened its "beta" web site j-comi.jp on 26 Nov. Now on j-comi.jp, all of Akamatsu's known manga series "Love Hina" is available for download as PDF formatted e-book.



"Love Hina" ( 1999-2002 ) was successful manga sold total 10 million, however now it is discontinued publishing. "Love Hina" author Akamatsu thought how to share discontinued work with manga fan, decided to establish J-COMI and distributing his work with author's sight.

E-book file on J-COMI is DRM free and J-COMI says user can copy E-book file freely. Some advertising/afferiate page is inserted on E-book, its revenue will connect to author (not publisher) directly. Akamatsu says it is not problem casual copying J-COMI e-book because it contain advertising. Also says some of cutting-edged e-book format is difficult for general users, it is important using spread PDF format.

According to announcement, "Love Hina" was downloaded from j-comi.jp total 1 million times during 3 days. I am looking forward to watching future developments of J-COMI.

Open Source Conference 2010 in Sendai

I represented Tokyo OpenSolaris User Group at Open Source Conference 2010 in Sendai last Saturday (2010/05/22). Here is some resources of the Conference.

• Seminar (in Japanese) - "Latest Topics about OpenSolaris" ( Support Page in Japanese )
  
• Recorded Ustream movie




• Presentation
OSC2010 Sendai - OpenSolaris Seminar 「OpenSolarisの新機能とトピックス」


• Lighting Talk ( in Japanese )
  


• Movie




• Presentation
OSC2010 Sendai - Tokyo OpenSolaris User Group Lightning Talk 「地方在住でOSS活動をするには」


• Photos

How to create OpenSolaris Live USB Stick using 'dd' utility

Several months ago, I wrote tiny utility which enable to make OpenSolaris Live USB stick on Windows box. However some of expert user asked how to create Live USB stick with 'dd' utility on one's UNIX-like OS.

OpenSolaris's USB image file ( which often distributed with '.usb' extention ) is just 'dd' image of root partition. But it is not enough to create bootable USB stick since do not contain required data such as MBR, Grub and Partition Tables.

'usbcopy' shell-script on OpenSolaris generate such data using 'grub', 'fdisk' and 'format' command internally. I have to generate using other way on Windows box.

When developing v0.02 of USB Creator, I made some pattern of required data ( I call this 'head image' ) and flash it before USB image. Header images included in OsolLiveUSB002.zip may be useful for 'dd'-command user.

Please try to flash following procedure below;

1. Download .usb image ( this example is for Ohta-san's b123 image )

$ wget http://kohju.justplayer.com/docs/mirror/OpenSolaris/eeepc-special/osol-1002-b123-x86-WC-EeePC.usb -O osol-1002-b123-x86-WC-EeePC.usb

2. Download OsolLiveUSB002.zip ( not v0.03 !! ) and extract

$ wget 'http://devzone.sites.pid0.org/OpenSolaris/opensolaris-liveusb-creator/OsolLiveUSB002.zip?attredirects=0' -O OsolLiveUSB002.zip
...
$ unzip OsolLiveUSB002.zip
Archive: OsolLiveUSB002.zip
inflating: OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/0.dat
inflating: OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/1.dat
inflating: OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/2.dat
inflating: OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/3.dat
inflating: OsolLiveUSB002/OsolLiveUSB.exe

3. De-compress header images

$ gzip -dc OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/0.dat > 1gb_headimg.dat
$ gzip -dc OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/1.dat > 2gb_headimg.dat
$ gzip -dc OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/2.dat > 4gb_headimg.dat
$ gzip -dc OsolLiveUSB002/headimg/3.dat > 8gb_headimg.dat


4. Flash your USB stick with concatinating header and .usb image
I used 2GB-Stick of head image this time;


(become superuser)
# cat 2gb_headimg.dat osol-1002-b123-x86-WC-EeePC.usb | \
dd of=(USB Device) (Additional Options)

Sasano Kannon Temple 1,200 year celebration

Last Sunday 1,200 year from construction celebration ritual was held at Sasano Kannon Temple (Sasano Avalokitesvara Temple, >sasanokannon.com in Japanese) in Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture.

Sasano Kannon Temple is a Shingon Buddhism temple which is said to constructed in Jul., 810. The main image is a Sahasra-bhuja Sahasra-netra(=Thousand-Armed, Thousand-Eyed) Avalokitesvara. Along with the Sasano-bori(Vintage folk toy Sasano wood carving hawk) is very famous (>kanpu.net in Japanese).

On climax of the ritual, Monks were skimming all of the Mahaprajnaparamita sutra (=Large Sutra on the Perfection of Wisdom) for pray about everyone's happiness. The youtube-movie below is beginning of the sutra skimming.

Solar eclipse

On Jun 22 2009, Solar eclipse was seen in Asia region. I saw partial eclipse in live. Since I have not equipment to take eclipse photo enough, taken some indirect photo.

Next solar eclipse which can seen widely in Japan will be May 21, 2012 ( annular eclipse ).

Cherry and Ginzan hot spring hike

I went to buy cherry for gift last Sunday. After buying, explored Ginzan-Onsen ( Ginzan Hot Spring ) to take photos. In spite of cloudy condition, I had a excelent time within nostalgic Japanese sight.