All About U.S. Import/Export

The Customs and Border Patrol people have a lot of info online. Under the Imports section, they list the duty required for items entering the U.S. (Harmonized Tariff Schedule).

And regarding paying duty on gifts:

It comes as a rude surprise to many people that recipients of gifts mailed from abroad will have to pay any duty owed on the item before they can receive it. Duty cannot be pre-paid by the sender (duty can't be paid until the duty rate is assessed by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer. This can't happen until the item actually arrives in the U.S.), it can only be paid by the recipient. We are aware that this can place the sender in an awkward position, but there is nothing CBP can do. We suggest you include a note with the package offering to reimburse the recipient for any CBP duty they are charged. For more information, please see our brochure, "International Mail Imports" under the Publications section on our web site at www.cbp.gov.

This can bite you in the butt if you send a $200 item but mark it up to $700 on the customs form for insurance purposes (particularly for something that has primarily sentimental value). The recipient will have to pay duty. This happened to me, and it sucked...I knew the item wasn't valued at $700, but I had to pay something like $50 in duty, high in part because it was a textile item.

"Akihabara News"

Interesting, but looks mostly like advertising.

Silk Screening

I thought I'd posted this, but evidently I didn't!

A.B. Dada's blog has a couple recent posts regarding t-shirt printing: T-shirt silk screening revisited and a follow-up post. The former links to a site with photo instructions on how to silk screen. Cool.

Japanese Language Parsing

Interesting-looking piece of software, MeCab. I had been wondering how to parse Japanese text into keywords, like search engines would have to do. Turns out it's not as easy as splitting text on spaces as in English. There are bindings for Perl, also.

MeCab apparently uses Markov models to parse text. Supposedly it doesn't need a dictionary or corpus, using "conditional random fields" to build probability data. Cool!

According to the MeCab page, other parsers include ChaSen, JUMAN, and KAKASI. In my searches, the latter was cited quite a bit.

Interesting Amazon Lists, etc.

Listmania: T-shirts - Various t-shirt books.
Listmania: for Fun and Profit - Random hobby books, many of which are interesting.
Guide: Ditch Your Designer - References to doing one's own design.
Guide: Know how a print can be original - References to traditional print-making (not t-shirts).

Airsoft Arms

Edo sent me this link to Airsoft Arms, an airsoft gun and miscellaneous military item shop near Columbus. Looks like the orange tips are mandatory; the manufacturers must make them specially for export.