AsRock Q1900DC and laptop power adapters

I couldn't find any concrete recommendations but I now know that the DC in fits the adapter of a Toshiba Dynabook Satellite T210 but since that adapter is needed for the laptop, I had to buy another. In my local shop the Toshiba replacements were expensive so I bought an adapter for a Panasonic Toughbook (it came with 2 different size jacks). So they also work.

Hotpot without the hot or the pot.

Back to the same place again (麻辣湯 - malatang). This time I remembered to take a photo before eating it all (harder than it looks).

It's awesome. It's basically Sichuan hotpot but without having to deal with a fire and a huge bowl of soup on your table. And ordering for one is easy. You choose your ingredients and 3 minutes later they bring you the cooked results. Unlimited rice included, all for 680JPY (4.90EUR)!

This time I went for 激辛, the highest on their spicy scale and it still wasn't that spicy. I might be getting the "foreigners don't like spicy" treatment, I don't know. I'll ask to go off the scale next time.

They also have awesome fried shaolongbao. These things are dangerous. They're dumplings, full of soup. Even when you think you've slurped it all out, there are still pockets remaining, hidden away, waiting to shoot a jet of boiling hot liquid up your nose when you bite down!

http://s.tabelog.com/tokyo/A1305/A130504/13165158/

Delivering mail from my home server to gmail

Mostly a note to myself

My ISP in Japan (OCN) blocks port 25 outgoing. It provides a relay host smtp.blue.ocn.ne.jp but it drops things if they have a dodgy looking from address. So I set up a postfix rewrite rule to make all of my mail from this server look like it was coming from my gmail account. This seems to make OCNs SMTP relay happy.

In /etc/postfix/main.cf, I added

smtp_generic_maps = regexp:/etc/postfix/generic

and that file looks like

/(.*?)@.*/ myaddress+antispamtoken+hostname-$1@gmail.com

Gmail thinks this is spam, so I had to set up a filter to automatically catch emails from myaddress+antispamtoken and mark them as not spam.

There are probably several better ways of achieving the same goal but the less I know about SMTP and MTAs the happier I am.

Fixing a Nexus 7

A couple of weeks ago, my Nexus 7 went into the sink while I was washing up. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't save it. About a year ago, a colleague dropped his Nexus 7 and smashed the screen. He was kind enough to give me that old tablet this week.

Thanks to http://www.ifixit.com, swapping the screens was fairly straightforward. I actually made it harder for myself because I read their full teardown and peeled back a lot of sticky copper shielding that I could have just left alone if I'd noticed they had an article for just replacing the display. Anyway, those guys are awesome. I was able to fix the speaker in another phone last year because of them, go buy some of their repair kits.

Here's what the insides of 2 Nexus 7s looks like :)

Also, well done Asus for making it fairly easy for me and my fat fingers to do this.

If anyone needs any help attempting the same thing, let me know.