Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Stardom Decktank

Picked up one of these on my birthday:

My previous mass-storage device took only older IDE disks, which was proving to be a bottleneck. iMacs don’t come with eSata yet, so the fastest interconnect is FW800. The Stardom Decktank houses two SATA disks and comes with a FW800, FW400, USB2.0, and a bunch of [...]

Quick Akiba jaunt

Went to Akihabara yesterday (Saturday) and picked up a cute USB hub:

fully 2.0, as should be expected at this point. Found it down one of the side-streets doing a fire-sale of sorts. I also found a bluetooth dongle that claims to reach a 100m range; go to T-zone if you need something like that.

Gigabits away!

Most – if not all – new apartment buildings in Tokyo come with ethernet strung throughout each apartment, but it can be difficult to obtain information about how the setup is configured. The apartment I moved into last year had at least one ethernet tap in each room, all connected to what looked like 10/100M [...]

first iTunes iPhone App bill arrives!

My first iTunes bill since purchasing the iPhone arrived today. The long list with company-name details and the final total gave me a chuckle. All this excitement – for free!

So far my favorite apps have been Exposure, Bloomberg, and Midomi. Exposure’s “Near Me” feature of showing photos taken in your current vicinity is [...]

syncing iCal with gCal

If you’re still searching for the ultimate iCal <–> gCal syncing tool, you might be one step closer to heaven with BusyMac’s BusySync preference pane app. I had been using Macness’s gSync application but threw it in the trash like a moldy loaf of bread. I am now much, much happier.

jCarouselLite with hidenav

There are few carousel-effect plugins for jQuery out there, of which the most popular seems to be jCarousel. However the requirements – a skin css file, jCarousel’s own css file, etc. – are a bit much when all you want is a simple carousel effect for text and images. Another jQuery carousel plugin, the Accessible [...]

The Whale Hunt

Here’s a pretty neat interactive visualization of photos from a whale hunt by Jonathan Harris. Takes a some time to load, but very much worth it. It won the TDC’s Interactive Design Prize.

UTF-8, PHP headers, and BOMs

BOMs in a php file just killed 5 hours of my time. Ugh.
The gist of it is, if you call PHP’s header() and you have a BOM in a file that was loaded by PHP (in my case, a language file; the BOM was <feff>), the BOM will actually trigger a header call before *your* [...]

Good Crew releases a music video

Good Crew releases a PV! (PV = “promotional video” in Japanese English parlance).
Give it a spin, then let me share how much was spent on making it:

15,000 yen.
Update: The YouTube link is here. Thanks Gen!

日本国内CodeIgniterユーザー会 & カンファレンス

For English speakers living in Japan and enthusiastic about CodeIgniter, there will be a lecture / gathering (and ostensibly a party afterwards) at the Open Source Conference next week / end.
最近話題のCode Igniterにご興味を持っている方へ、来週のオープンソースカンファレンスでCodeIgniterのセミナーが行われます。是非参加を！
CodeIgniter is a wonderfully light yet robust and easily extendable PHP framework that has helped me develop miistation.com, kirakirajin.com (now defunct), and 2kurabe.com quickly [...]