I live in Tokyo. A picture is worth a thousand words…

Follow its path on Google Maps thanks to my crawled GeoData.

As I need to be confortable when working at home (or when playing games), I bought a desk and a computer.

Hardware specs:

• CPU: Core i7 920
• RAM: 8GB DDR3
• Hard disk: same disks as in France (3.3TB)
• GFX: nVidia 9800GT

And the result.

My desk at home with the computer

Buying and building a computer from scratch can be rather expensive, however it is sometimes required, and is probably less expensive this way than by plane with the outrageous 70 euro per kg imposed by Air France.

Thanks to EMobile, for a rate as low as 6700円/month, it is possible to have full unlimited 3.5G access (7.8Mbps) almost anywhere in Japan (currently covering 90% of Japan according to their website).

This comes with a D02HW 3G modem. What’s so good with this modem? Pretty easy: connect it on windows. It is detected as a CD-ROM drive at first, and you get the drivers CD just by plugging the usb key. Once you install the driver, you get an application you can run, and you just have to click one button to get online.
So, plug the USB modem, installation program is launched thanks to autorun, install, reboot (heh it’s win32), and get online.

On Linux, it’s not that easy.

First, the fact that this modem identifies itself as a “mass storage device” by default doesn’t makes things easy for linux. You need to manually load the usbserial driver by providing it with vendor/device settings. This is pretty much anywhere.

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1003

With this command (use rrmmod first if you already had usbserial loaded) you’ll get 3 new serial devices (or less, according to some sources on google). The most important one is the first one: ttyUSB0 (unless you already got other usb serial devices).

Now you’ll need a pppd chat script. This one is pretty much easy too in theory, however I felt into a problem that no other source on internet fixed. I first copied my script I use for Orange France, however I didn’t know the APN for EMobile, and it resulted into me being unable to connect at all.
So, here is a chat script that will work and set the APN too:

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT 'BUSY'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
ABORT '+COPS: 0^M'
'' ATZ
SAY "Checking if we have network...\n"
OK-AT-OK AT+COPS?
'+COPS: 0,' ''
OK "ATE1V1&D2&C1S0=0+IFC=2,2"
OK "ATS0=0"
OK AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","emb.ne.jp","",0,0
SAY "Connecting to GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/3G/3G+ ...\n"
OK ATD*99***1#
CONNECT ''

Save it for example as “emobile.chat”. Now comes the pppd command line. The one I use:

pppd connect 'chat -e -s -f /root/emobile.chat' /dev/ttyUSB0 460800 \
        modem user em password em \
        nodetach debug nolock defaultroute usepeerdns usepeerwins \
        noccp

usepeerwins is pretty much useless, but helps avoiding race condition on some modems according to pppd’s manpage (including Huawei E220, which is D02HW’s chipset according to lsusb).

Those options are verbose (you’ll get a lot of stuff you don’t care about when running pppd), and pppd won’t go in background once connected. This allows you to ^C the connection easily.

Can’t post pictures yet as currently 1MB transferred costs me over 13 euro, but I’ll have a real internet connection soon

As you probably noticed during the past months, more and more light has been given to 4chan.org, which might be called “root of all evil” by some.

Recently, the Time 100 list contained “moot”, the initiator of 4chan (who gets himself known as “Christopher Poole”. While I cannot affirm anything, “Poole” is most likely a reference to the “Pool is closed” meme, which came from a mistake between poll and pool) because of what looks like a hack. Following this, 4chan got increasingly coverage by medias, especially on the “Porn Day“, when tons of pornographic content was uploaded to YouTube (and which is likely to happen again next year).

4chan is also known to be linked to Anonymous and the war against Scientology.

This site has been around for a long time, and is just a place where people can post messages and pictures. Various “boards” exists (most famous being /b/, the “random” board where everything can be posted) covering many subjects like animes, trains, etc…
What made 4chan become the 4chan it is now is probably the fact that moderation is quite selective. Only a few kinds of posts are getting deleted (mostly pedophilia, and other illegal things of the same kind) and most other statements can exist, including racism, animal cruelty, death threats, etc…

Because of its increased exposure, 4chan is also getting targetted by spammers, with is quite successful on other boards than /b/ (where posts tend to disappear after a few minutes at rush times).

From times to times, someone’s post or something gets elected to the rank of “meme“, and will then exist for eternity, getting ready to get displayed in any situation, related or not. Memes have become an alternate culture, where people not aware of those are outcast (usually “newfags”) and have only two choices: leave or adapt.
While some memes are pretty much innocent, others can be seen as offensive by some people. There is no formal way to make a “meme”, it only depends on how many people will adopt something, and use it (for example, when closing a poll, 4chan administrator moot wrote “pool is closed”, leading to a famous meme).

Sometime someone will even write something like “Today I will take a gun, go there and kill everyone in sight, then kill myself”. This kind of post is common on 4chan, and is sometimes followed by real action, leading the original poster being acclaimed as an “hero”.

To sum it all, 4chan is a place where anyone can anonymously write about what they think, who they want to kill or are about to kill, what they think of various minorities, making contests of most shocking pictures, post tons of pornographic contents or requesting it, initiate DDoS attacks, etc… and getting aclaimed for it by other people, and sometimes even getting support.
This might sound like hell for some, or heaven for others, and while some might think “free speech”, it is not either (a “normal” post will not get any support, and will quickly fall to last page, then get 404′d). This does not give to the world a nice image of America, however any action against the site will most likely result in unforeseen consequences.

All memes must not be thought as bad either, as you can get nice things like some cheezburger (this is unfortunately too commercial now).