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@kzimmermann@fosstodon.orgLet the #live tooting begin: sunny beautiful spring morning in Tokyo, bob sinclair on my playlist. Destination: geektown, #Akihabara. Let's see what interesting computer stuff I can find!
#Akihabara had seen better glory days in the 90s and early 2000s, where it was the best place in the country to get electronics before the advent of e-commerce and, more recently, #Amazon.
Still, it has its place as a used goods parts marketplace where you can find a lot of stuff if you look.
Located just two stations east of Tokyo Sta, #Akihabara is in a pretty strategic area, close to the historical "old" Edo town, known to Tokyoites as Shitamachi, but not that far from the center.
This is the façade of #Akihabara, lights, electricity and geekness, but of you're foolish enough to walk to those front page, big box stores, you're likely gonna be tourist trapped. Better to take the backroads.
Seek and ye shall find... Maid Cafés are plenty here. They used to go after clients much more agressively, but looks like COVID has watered the business down
Obligatory screenshot of my inner geek, chilling at a café in #Akihabara with #FreeBSD on my laptop. Not a Maid Café, though.
Stores going live, town getting livelier close to lunch time... #Akihabara
Yo, @claudiom@mastodon.sdf.org, I herd you liek #EeePC s...
8 US Dollars for this #EeePC. No warranty, too. Not even that it powers on if you plug it. Would you take it? #netbook #Akihabara
And finally the #RaspberryPi Paradise! But still a little high on the markup. About $85 for the top-of-line Pi 4 with 8GB RAM #Akihabara
Tech "junk" being sold like candy (and for the price of candy, too). Wish I had more space.
Had I the patience and the space, this looks like a good place to squat a few hours and build my own PC. I got neither at the moment, though.
"All #tech junk is equal, but some are more equal than others."
Some unlocked "junk" sells for as low as $10, but has no warranty (average price about $60). In this place, you can even test it out yourself in a "workbench“ with a myriad of power plugs. Seems that most of it "boots" but has physical damage (cracked screen etc) or missing HDD or RAM. Your risk, though!
The chained junk, though, goes from $150 and up...
Time to go home, I guess, but not without noticing Yodobashi-camera in the back.
Fun fact: it was at one of their big-box stores (but maybe not this one) that Linus #Torvalds took that famous picture shortly after the launch of Windows 7
@kzimmermann These days I think the markets in Shenzhen in China are the new #Akihabara. It's much more corporate and far less cool, but it's now where all the new tech comes from.
@mattrose
Pretty much, I guess... the world's factory.
@charims this is the store for you, then! 
@kzimmermann absolutely not. a great of artifact but too weak and too ineffifirnt and did paulsboro gma500 (actually a powervr design) ever go stable I think maybe not.
@kzimmermann one of my greatest conspiracy theories is that intel agreed to ship powervr in part to poison the well, ruin powervr, make their gpu unusable, while they went on to do other things.
this is of course nonsense: powervr was going to do a fine job on their own insuring that linux support was difficult, unpleasant, unsupported. hence, conspiracy theory.
Ⓐ @kzimmermann
It looks like they robbed my office storage rack;)
@kzimmermann sounds like goodwill :P
@danct12 sometimes it actually is and I find it in the trash, and not in some store shelf:
https://tilde.town/~kzimmermann/articles/dumpster_diving_hacker.html
Sadly I only found one laptop this way so far... but I'm writing on it right now :)
@kzimmermann That laptop is really a good find.. and a HDD containing "private treasures".
What is the model number of the actual drive and have you benchmarked it?
@danct12 the songs were some treasures indeed, that's where I got the bob sinclair on the parent toot! Can't say much about the "rest" :P
It's a Buffallo somethingsomething, never benchmarked it (hey, twas free). Looks like the Japanese love their Buffallo stuff btw. Almost every router and HDD I found here is from them, and a few are NEC.
@kzimmermann Make sense, they were a Japanese company.