Information on season's holidays closure

We will be closed from 2021/12/29 to 2022/1/5 for the season's holiday.

Regarding inquiries received during the holidays, we will respond sequentially after the holidays. Thank you for your understanding.

Have a good new year !

TOON, LLC.

New updated - "Audio Frequency Analyzer" ver 7.0

"Audio Frequency Analyzer" has been updated to ver 7.0 today!

"Audio Frequency Analyzer" is a powerful real-time audio analyzer (RTA) app for iPhone.

It is available in a variety of applications, such as sound room tuning, speaker settings, audio equipment testing, stage setting measurement, evaluation of sound mixing environment and Investigation of noise environment.

"Audio Frequency Analyzer" can measure the frequency response in 30 split band scale of 1/3 octave in realtime. Also it can be displayed the FFT analysis result.

# 1/3 octave band frequency response


# FFT analysis


In the latest version, we have renewed the UI design and added a new feature to change the slope of the FFT graph.

# FFT analysis - Slope OFF


# FFT analysis - Slope ON （3dB/oct, center frequency 1kHz）


Detailed information about this app is available on the AppStore and can be found at the following link.

Paco de Lucía

Today was the birthday of the great guitarist Paco de Lucía (Birth of December 21, 1947).

A genius who transcended the boundaries of flamenco and opened up new horizons in guitar music.

Whenever he came to Japan, I went to listen to his live concerts.

Speaking of live concerts, the super guitar trio with John McLaughlin and Al DiMeola in "Friday Night in San Francisco - Live" (1981) is famous, but I would like to mention "Live Under the Sky" (July 25, 1981, Denen Coliseum, Tokyo). I was particularly impressed by his performance with Chick Corea at this live. It was an unprecedented outdoor live performance in heavy rain.

When I received the sad news that he passed away on February 25, 2014 during a live tour in Mexico, I cried at his loss.

In his later years, he was playing guitar with the superb technique like his younger days, but I had admired his ever-evolving attitude and musicality.

The album entitled "Fuente y caudal" (1973) was the starting point of Paco's music for me. It was the beginning of Paco's creation of new music in the tradition of flamenco. If you have a chance, please listen to it.
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Le marché de Noël 2021 in Kyoto

Yesterday, I went to the Christmas market, "Le marché de Noël 2021" in Kyoto.

In Japan since October, COVID-19 virus transmission has been kept very low, and events where people gather have been permitted.



It is held every year on the second weekend of December at "L' Institut français du Japon-Kansai Kyoto". The location is not far from the Hyakumanben intersection and surrounded by the facilities of Kyoto University.



Maybe it was already dusk, but less crowded than last year.



It was getting a little chilly, so I had a glass of Alsatian sparkling wine and a glass of hot wine, which made me feel very tipsy.



A percussion live performance by Steve Eto. It was a mysterious improvised music, but the heavy bass of the big hand drum was very pleasant.



I measured the frequency range of his music sound and found that the lowest frequency range was about 40-50 Hz, which was higher than I expected. After all, the sound of live drums seemed to rise quickly and resonate strongly.

I was able to fully enjoy the early Christmas feeling!
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The aftermath of the Amazon "AWS" system failure in my house!

There were something wrong with my smart home environment since this morning!

Alexa was not responding to my calls, and my SwitchBot which remotely controls my home electronics, was not responding at all!

I've been wondering if it might be because of the news that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing a major system failure in the East Coast area of the United States.

When I checked the SwitchBot support page, I found out that there was a system failure in AWS and that smart home appliance control is no longer available for all products. I had similar problems with AWS failures before.

SwitchBot support page: Apology for the system failure on Wednesday, December 8, and notice of recovery.
- Date of occurrence
　Cloud Service Abnormality: December 8, 2021, 2:37pm to 11:39am
　Server congestion period: December 8, 2021, 11:39 a.m. to 10:59 p.m
- Affected products: All products
- Faults that appeared: Devices went offline and could be remotely accessed.
　Device goes offline and cannot remotely control the device
　Display error 190
　SwitchBot scene does not run
　Unable to log in to account
　Failed to operate from Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, IFTTT, or LINE Clover
- Cause of failure
　There was an anomaly in the Amazon Web Service (AWS) that we use, and the requests for the period of the anomaly were piling up, causing a large amount of access to be concentrated and the lines to be congested.
- Future measures
　We will consider improving the fault tolerance of our services through cloud services.

In addition to SwitchBot, a number of other online services and apps are no longer available. I was remind of how much we depend on cloud services like AWS.

Alexa started responding in the early afternoon, and SwitchBot managed to work properly in the evening. I will have to access the SwitchBot support site to check what is going on, and I would like to reconsider whether it is safe to control IoT devices via such a cloud service.

I think it's very dangerous that the decentralization, which is one of the merits of the Internet, is being centralized by cloud services, and that its significance is being lost.
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