Post Computex Photo gallery. Part 1 – Gear

There are a lot of candidates for the center of the world’s IT industry: Cupertino, Redmond, Palo Alto, Tokyo, Seoul, – but these days it seems to be Taipei.

The definitive expression here is DIY, widely known in English speaking countries as an acronym for Do It Yourself, but here in Taiwan adopted as a uniquely specific lexical item referring just to the homebrew computer industry. If you walk into any of the many, many, many expansive computer stores in Taipei you will be overwhelmed by a selection of parts unavaliable at all but the rarest of US computer stores, and more interesting struck by the odd lack of brand name desktop systems.

“Here in Taiwan, if you can’t make your own PC you’re not a man,” I was told earlier today by a Taiwanese guy named Kevin. This is a sentiment that I can imagine evoking a kind of cultural jealousy in hardware geeks throughout the entire planet.

This little number from Foxconn has the distinction of being one of the coolest and best looking PC case designs I have seen. They also have the fine distinction of having provided one of the exhibitor ID tags that was used to sneak me into the show.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of attending Computex, Taiwan’s trademark computer and technology expo, the largest in Asia and the second largest of its type in the world after Hannover, Germany.

Of course I took a number of photos, and here is a sample of them. I have divided photos into two parts: Gear and Girls, since as everyone knows the motivation for attendance at these tech industry shows is based almost equally on both of those things.


Some of the literally hundreds of case designs on display.


This is exactly what we’ve all wanted for all these years! Screw laptops, next time I buy a portable I want something that looks like Q cobbled it together.


This isn’t an ipod shuffle, but an unreleased prototype product of the socalled iVogue mp3 player line from Jetway. They estimated a July release date, but the website doesn’t even have a listing for these products yet, much less pricing information.


Easily the most impressive piece of actual new technology I saw at the show. This is an experimental prototype CPU cooling system, from Korean manufacturer KM Korea. The demo had a chip of some kind running at about 50 celsius, quite hot to the touch. You press the button and it activates their cooling device, and the heat instantly drains away from the chip surface, cooling it to about 15 celsius in only a couple of seconds. I have no idea how it works, and where the heat is being dissipated to. Perhaps the table concealed some kind of wormhole, through which the heat is sent into whatever dark dimension in which Cthulhu waits.

New Photo Galleries

Since I’m about to leave for Taiwan I thought I would finally upload some of the previous travel photosets that I had been meaning to post ever since I created the blog. Click each thumbnail for the corresponding gallery page.

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Beijing, 2004

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While in Beijing I of course had the visit the Great Wall.

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This is a set of photos I took of the outside of an abandoned Beijing Opera house I found in a sidestreet. The decaying hand-painted posters are great, I only wish I could have somehow taken them down and saved them from the inevitable demolition.


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Urumqi, 2003 and 2004

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Turpan, 2004 and 2004


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Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2004

Japanese Right wing truck

My previous post contains this quote from ESWN:

the majority in Japan is either embarrassed, intimidated (as in: if you speak up, an ultra-rightist sound truck going to show up outside your home and/or workplace to harrass you 24 hours a day with diatribes of hatred)

This raises the question, and it was raised to me by a friend, how intimidating are these famous right wing trucks that drive around and congregate to celebrate certain days or intimidate certain foes? Judge for yourself. Here’s a photograph of one that I took in downtown Kyoto.

/Kyoto/rightist_truck
(Click the thumbnail for the full size picture)
A publicity truck for one of the various ultra right wing groups in Japan. Notice the loudspeakers on top, standard for trucks representing a political group of any stripe.

The upper line of text translates to “Establish an independence constitution”
The large text below the flag reads “All-Nippon Freedom Brotherhood”

The emblem to the left of the door is the Imperial Crysanthemum, with the kanji for ‘self'(short for freedom) in the middle.