My iPhone has, in the year and a half I’ve had the thing, replaced an awful lot of other gadgets I used to carry with me.  It’s rarely the BEST tool for any given job, but it’s typically Good Enough, and since it’s my phone I always have it on me – so I don’t need a standalone MP3 player, camera, netbook or so on.

It has NOT replaced the PSP or DS Lite that I usually have on me, though, because it’s not great for gaming.  That isn’t to say that there aren’t great games for it – at the very least, the Cave shooters are Quality Titles – but the battery on it drains so quickly just over the course of a normal day that I don’t want to put extra stress on it through gaming.

So, my old iPod Classic lives in our car now instead of my backpack, I leave my camera at home unless we’re going on a trip or some such, and my netbook has become, well, kind of a window into Japan – when it’s not being used as a flip clock, that is.

That is, I found a webcam that’s pointed at Tokyo Harbor, and I just leave the webcam up on the eeePC and I get a bit of the sights & sounds of Japan.  The webcam is also near an elementary school or a park or something, so the usual background noises – cars, boats, planes and the like – are occasionally broken up by the sounds of kids playing; it’s kind of fun.

I happened to be watching it the other day right around sunset and thought it looked particularly neat so I thought I’d share a couple of screenshots I took about an hour apart; I love the flare effect in the first of these as the sun is setting and then seeing all the lights come on as it gets a bit darker in the second.