The human factor

One night I woke up from shaking. It’s immediately crystal clear: an earthquake. The big question, as always: will this be the big one? How does one feel? Frightened and helpless: one can not do anything against it. It’s shaking, and you can’t do anything.

How bad is that fear? I think I did not hear of this as a phobia so far, but I would not be surprised if people move for example to Hokkaido, the north part of Japan, as there are fewer earthquakes.

Here I will try to sum up steps and some backgrounds about running Linux on the Playstation4. The guides I read were sparse on background details, aimed at saying ‘click here and there, and then you have a Linux’. But for debugging one needs to understand more of the background. The guides also use Windows systems for the preparations, I try to provide the details so a reader can perform the steps on all systems. The install steps could actually be simpler when done from Linux, but I will stick to the procedure also used in other guides.

Why would one learn foreign languages?

Over my journey of learning Japanese until now, I had various stages of motivation. All started with a ‘I like the country, I want to go there again for holiday, and learn the language a bit’. Right after starting to learn, progress is quick, that motivates very much. To me, the big achievements so far were these:

• ability to give a self introduction
• ability to tell what I did in the past week
• telling a joke in the foreign language, and having the other person(s) laughing
• meeting the first person where my Japanese level was slightly better than their English level, so settling with a talk in Japanese
• situations in your life when the canonical word to express it comes out in the language you learn, not your native one
• giving a presentation in Japanese - in a direct talk one recognizes if the own words are not understood, but in a presentation that is very hard

Others have goals like ‘I want to pass the Japanese language proficiency testi (JLPT)’, which can be taken in 5 different levels. For me, taking the first levels of JLPT was interesting, but towards the higher levels the testes skills (quick reading and answering questions) does not match with my learning goals - I try to optimize for better speaking and understanding in conversations.

Christmas in Europe and Japan

Before Corona, flights from Japan to Europe in the middle of December were full of couples with one partner from Europe, and the other partner from Japan. Often such couples spend Christmas in Europe: it’s the time to meet family, to enjoy a quiet Christmas. With many Christians in Europe, most countries also have national holidays then. On the 24th, Christmas eve, presents are given and received.

I was asked to share my experiences about the System76 launch keyboard, and a Mastodon post would not provide enough space - so a blog article it is.

My setting and needs

What’s my environment like, making me consider a 285$ keyboard?

Since forever, I did not pay much attention to the keyboards I use.
In the last 5 years, I mostly used the keyboard build into Thinkpads, with German and English layout. From a trip to Korea I brought an external keyboard back with me which I used at work, also here I used English layout. I use Linux, and ibus and fcitx5 as input switch methods, so I can input German, English and Japanese characters.

How are society and the low Corona infection numbers in Japan related?

I was looking forward to quite some things when moving to Japan, to the food, bathing culture and more. I was also signing up to other aspects, like a society where people are watching each other, more than in Germany.

A first flavour of that is in TV series about Japanese life: older woman with a worried face picking the trash bags of others from the outside, verifying if trash was correctly separated and the rules got followed. People are also, compared to other countries, very sensitive to noise in the house. One of the fears of renting a room to a foreigner are loud parties, which would disturb others.

Japan online lesson experience and online learning

I was recently talking for 1 hour with a Japanese class and teachers, about the internet, Open Source, and what online lessons can look like.

State when Corona started

When Corona started, I heard from various people about the state of online lessons at schoole: it was really bad. In Germany as well as in Japan.

• Knowledge on how to do lessons via Internet instead of teaching in front of students and children
• Internet connectivity, devices for access

I was worried about that. Schools in both Germany and Japan were facing these questions, in danger of just getting visited by Google or Microsoft sales, and then buying ‘something’, which might mean tax payers money spent on software or services which lead to vendor lockin, personal data being at risk, and more. To be clear: although I use very much Open Source, here I merely would like the people in schools to make educated decisions, instead of buying something from whoever knocks their door first.

My view so far

So.. my view on Linux containers, managed with i.e. podman or docker so far were this: complicated, and for servers.

I run Linux for myself on desktops, and on servers, where I host things like DNS/bind, webserver, Wikis, Tiny tiny RSS for collecting RSS feeds, and so on. I run these services on a virtual system in Germany.

So far, almost all of these services were running natively: that makes it easy for me to update them as I trust the Linux distro maintainers of the distro to fix security issues when they get known.