Monthly fee? About $65 or 6200 Yen.

Until the end of May, Softbank is running a campaign where you can get a free 8GB iPhone or a cheap 16GB iPhone. The Internet plan has been reduced in price during the campaign too. I thought about getting one. I currently have a Samsung 709SC and I’m spending around 3000 Yen a month for my phone plan with no Internet, so I’d have to more than double if I get a ‘free’ iPhone. Here’s the price breakdown.

White Plan : 980 Yen
You can call anybody on the Softbank network for free between 1AM and 9PM. If it’s after 9PM, or if you’re calling a non-Softbank phone, the cost is 21 every 30 seconds. (I currently have this.)

White Plan Family Discount : Free
This is an add on of the white plan. You can call family members for free if they have a White Plan and are under your account. (I currently have this, it comes in handy and it’s free.)

S! Basic : 315 Yen
This is like an Internet connection fee. You have to have it if you want to 1) Use the Internet and 2) Want to have an e-mail address for sending MMS/Text. It’s important because you can’t send a normal SMS to non-Softbank users. (I have this too.)

Packet Flat-rate Full : 1029-4410 Yen
I spoke to a guy at Softbank and he said you can use unlimited Internet for up to 4410 a month. If you use less than 4410 Yen a month, you’re charged less. But if you have an iPhone, I bet you’ll be using the packet plan a lot.

Handset Cost : 1280-1760 Yen
This is a monthly fee for 24 months. The 8GB is 1280, the 16GB iPhone is 1760 a month. “But Steve, you said FREE!?” Well, they don’t want you to run off with the iPhone, so to make the iPhone free Softbank applies a discount.

Monthly Discount : 1280 Yen
This is for 24 months. You are actually paying full price for the phone, but this discount cancels out that price, making it free. It brings the 8GB 1280 Yen cost to 0, and it makes the 16GB only 480 Yen per month.

Tricky monthly phone charge and discount.
It’s tricky because even though it’s a 2 year contact, they don’t start billing you for the physical phone until the 3rd month. This makes it 26 months total until you’re done paying off the phone.

The final price estimate
8GB : 2324 – 5705+ Yen per month
16GB : 2804 – 6185+ Yen per month

In the end it costs more than the price estimate because you’ll probably call more than just Softbank users, but this gives you an idea of the price. If you cancel, you are charged a cancel fee of 9975 Yen and you must pay for the remainder of the phone. So if you get the free 8GB iPhone and you cancel on month 12, you owe for the remaining 12 months + 2 months (because they didn’t charge you the first 2 months). So you owe 1280 x 14, or 17920 Yen in addition to the 9975 cancel fee. OUCH!

I thought about getting the iPhone, but I already have a phone which I’d have to pay the remaining 9 months on. Lame. I already have a 16GB iPod Touch. It’s nice, and with all of the Apps available I’ve completely replaced my Palm PDA. I think I’ll just stick with the iPod Touch for now.

For anybody curious, here are some Softbank iPhone commercials.

Tags: iphone, softbank

Here’s a solution to the problem of the command prompt disappearing. I use the command prompt to ping things etc and one day it just started to disappear when I went to start > run > cmd. Out of no where it just started to go away leaving me with a “WTF?” look on my face. Without running cmd I’d run something directly such as “ping japanitup.com” or “ipconfig” and then I tried “regedit” and that didn’t work either. And then out of nowhere I got slapped with the “NTVDM CPU has encountered an illegal instruction” whaaaaaaaat theeeee….

Check out this screenshot. NTVDM.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created. Doh!

Oh yeah, let me just start NTVDM back up Mr. Windows…. like I know what the hell that is? I did some research on this and found out that NTVDM.exe is. It basically allows you to run Dos programs on Windows NT or XP successfully. It emulates the old school DOS/16-bit operating system to allow older programs to run, such as the command prompt eh? Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: command prompt, microsoft windows, software, solution

iTunes is a great piece of software in my opinion but it does have some disadvantages and some problems on occasion. One of the worst problems I’ve had with iTunes is after an upgrade it started skipping songs… what I mean is a song plays fine for a while and then gets all messed up and sounds like a scratched CD that’s skipping. I would play the song in Windows Media Player and it sounded fine. I play the song in iTunes again and it sounds fine.

If you are running into the same problem with iTunes sucking balls then here are a few solutions that might work for you.

iTunes Skipping on Windows XP Solution 1:

1. Exit iTunes
2. Upgrade your sound card drivers (just to eliminate that as an issue)
3. Upgrade to latest Microsoft direct X version:
4. Click the Start Button, then click the Run button
5. Type: dxdiag and then hit enter
6. Click “sound 1″ or similarly named tab
7. Slide the bar to “basic acceleration”
8. Exit
9. Restart iTunes

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: apple, itunes, microsoft windows, software, solution

When I click on Send and Receive in Microsoft Outlook I started getting the error Interface Not Registered. This error started to appear after I installed some video editing software and also ran some updates to the software. I searched around the Internet and found this solution from Microsoft which fixed my problem.

You receive the “Interface not registered” error message when you try to send or to save an e-mail message to the Drafts folder in Outlook 2002

SYMPTOMS
If you use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor in Microsoft Office Outlook 2002, and you try to send e-mail messages or to save e-mail messages to the Drafts folder, you may receive the following error message:

Interface not registered

Or, you may experience the following symptoms:

• You receive an error message.
• The e-mail message is not sent.
• The e-mail message is not saved to the Drafts folder. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: microsoft, microsoft windows, outlook, software, solution

When is the last time you backed up your computer? I’ve had friends that lost a ton of info including those prized digital family pictures. I’ve lost some email in the past. Today I’m backing up my computer. You might consider doing this when you have a free moment. Here are some backup related links:

How to decide what data to back up
Norton Ghost – Cool software… I think…
How-To: Automatically back up your computer
Automatically back up your hard drive

Tags: backup, hard drive

When I first purchased my laptop from Dell Inspiron 9300 back in 2005 I decided to buy the complete care package warranty because my laptop was basically going to be my office. Today as I sit here in Japan I’m glad that I did! My headphone jack is failing, only the right headphone/speaker is working, and that’s a problem because I often work with headphones on. I was on the phone for 45 minutes today with Dell and found out my warranty covers repairs in the U.S. and other international locations which is great! I should hear from a tech here in Japan within 10 business days and my motherboard will be replaced free of charge in the comfort of my home. I’m satisfied with Dell and their products. I’ve only had one problem with my Dell Inspiron 9300 and that was the DVD drive a year ago. They swapped it out no problem and I was back in action within 48 hours of my phone call. Nice!

Tags: laptop, Tech Talk

Question: How do I check the amount of free disk space on a FreeBSD server?

Answer: The best way to check how much free disk space your FreeBSD server has available is by using the df command. This works on linux/unix servers, not just FreeBSD. After you SSH into your server you can either type “df” (df means disk free) which will show you the raw numbers or you can type “df -h” which means human readable and makes the output easier to read by displaying it in kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes instead of the default kilobytes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: hard drive, linux, server, solution

I thought I’d post about the BCMLogon.dll problem I had with my computer in case other people run into the same error. I had this BCMLogon.dll issue with my Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop. Apparently it has something to do with the wireless card. I don’t know what happened to create the error and I don’t remember changing any settings recently. Here’s the error my computer gave me:

A recently installed program has disabled the Welcome screen and Fast User Switching. To restore these features, you must uninstall the program. The following file name might help you identify the program that made the change: C:\WINDOWS\system32\BCMLogon.dll Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: BCMLogon, BCMLogon.dll, Fast User Switching, microsoft windows, software, solution, windows

Problem: Can not write in Japanese and English using Wordpress. Characters display as ? ?? ???

I was trying to figure out how to write in Japanese on my Wordpress blog. All Japanese characters were coming up as question marks, appearing like “????? ? ?? ???” instead of characters. I searched for a solution to this and found a few plugins that did a ton of unnecessary things, and some didn’t work. I tried out Gengo but I didn’t like it very much. However if you’re reading this for a solution on how to write Japanese and English or translate your page it might work well for you! Here’s the link to Gengo.

If you’re running Wordpress 2.2 or higher, then the Collation should be set correctly. Here’s a link to their documentation, and here’s an excerpt.

As of WordPress Version 2.2, DB_COLLATE was made available to allow designation of the database collation (i.e. the sort order of the character set). In most cases, this value should be left blank (null) so the database collation will be automatically assigned by MySQL based on the database character set (i.e. DB_CHARSET). Set DB_COLLATE to one of the UTF-8 values defined in Unicode character sets (utf8 section) (see dev.mysql.com) for most Western European languages.

Now if you are running an older version, or you upgraded from an older version, or for some reason things aren’t working out I’ll post my solution below. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: english, japanese, software, wordpress

I’d like to get away from Microsoft Outlook and just use Gmail for all of my email. I really like the hosted email service they currently have. My only complaint is that this is my personal gmail account and if I send a business related email it’s going to say: <me@gmailaccount.com>; on behalf of; BizName [bizemail@thatemail.com]

Let’s face it, the majority of business use some form or Outlook for the email client. And the two latest versions show the on behalf message which can look either suspicious or unprofessional. I did some looking into this and I found this

How do I customize the ‘From:’ address on outgoing mail? Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: rant