Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

Ok, this is cool, but I don't need Bluetooth. Where's the wired version?

$190 on ThinkGeek
Info on Gadget Review

Reflections on Digital Photographs

A great article regarding the glut of digital photographs relative to film, and what to do about it. An opinion piece from the May 2006 issue of Spectrum. Wish I'd found the online version before I scanned this out of my copy to send to people.

Javelin Press & Boston T. Party

Javelin Press publishes a collection of interesting books by a man who goes by the pseudonym of Boston T. Party. According to Wikipedia, Boston T. Party has been identified. (Actually, according to the cover of the book Hologram of Liberty, this is the case.) Another take on the way things are.

Hitch

Joel told me about this device called Hitch that allows one to copy files from one USB device to another without PC intervention. Sweet.

Merchant Accounts

Discover Network - They're a full merchant processor for Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx, including Discover.
American Express - AmEx will deal with merchants directly rather than requiring the use of an acquirer/MSP.
Visa
Mastercard

We love junkfood!

Ikeda-san sent me these links like a year ago, which I discovered while I was cleaning out my inbox. The cleaning was prompted by reading a David Allen book....

Check these out when you miss American food!!

Nathan's
KUA ' AINA

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.

Small business info & Merchant accounts

Found some useful info on merchant accounts at About.com. There's other useful-looking stuff on there too.

Another site has more detailed information. Looks like charging for others is a no-no. Unfortunate.

Why I quit the company

Yoshi has a link to this interesting article from his blog. It's about how being a salaryman sucks circa 1992. I don't think too much has changed since then, except that there are a lot more "freeters" running around.

Well, being a salaryman does suck.

Fortune: New ways to get ahead

It's easier to move up by moving sideways? That might be true for women, hee hee. Ok, that was infantile. Believe me, I've been worse.

But the fact remains that if one's current field isn't something they can enjoy, moving to a field that one can get into and therefore excel is the smart thing to do. Perhaps I need to get back into software.

Airsoft Guns Again

I wrote a post about airsoft gun sales sites in the U.S., but neglected to post the manufacturer's pages.

東京マルイ
KSC
SIIS

There's a long article on Wikipedia Japan also.

A company called Sanken does import/export of toy guns. Cool!

White Rabbit Express

Noel tipped me to this service. Competitive analysis can be depressing at times.

"White Rabbit" reminds me of this candy that I used to like as a kid. Most people probably think The Matrix movie instead.

Random Anime and Fansub Related

The Fansub FAQ - From way back in '99.
Animania - Some guy's paper on anime. He interviewed Will Ray.

I guess I was looking for references to soyokaze.biosci.ohio-state.edu, that's what brought up the spate of hits.

UMD Movies Going Bye-Bye

(Reuters) Apparently UMD as a movie format is dying. Good riddance! Sony's business decisions lately are really stupid. Why did they think consumers would pay more for a format that has inferior quality, can't be copied, and can only be played on the PSP?

This is like they are killing their music player sales by mandating that SonicStage be used. Music check-in, no re-burning—the software sucks! I probably would've gotten a Sony player rather than an iPod if they only would ditch the software. iTunes or SonicStage is no-contest from the users' perspective.

Also, it's too bad that they didn't use Hi-MD for the PSP. However, since MDs have no copy protection and are slightly larger in size, I suppose that wasn't possible. Still, the gaping hole in the UMD cassette is another blemish on the format's resume.

Sony's technology is amazing, but the people making the business decisions are idiots. If they didn't act like they think they can dictate to consumers, then they might actually take over some market share.

Microsoft Product Lifecycle

Turns out that MS is eliminating support for Win 98/ME at the end of June this year. No big loss, but I had to check up on Win 2k. It's ok until 2010, it seems. See their Product Lifecycle page for details.

Airsoft Sites

SoftAirPro - FAQ
IceFire - FAQ
Pyramid Air

Net Machine Shop

I finally found the Net machine shop featured in Wired that I couldn't find the URL to: http://www.emachineshop.com/. Cool. Now I can proceed with my plans for world domination. They also have a sister company, Pad2Pad, that does circuit board etching. Build it!!

山本遊子のブログ

ここだったけど、ここに移った。以前名前をどっかで見たかな。今別の検索でサイトに巡り合った。

向こう側のアパート

隣のビルのアパートの賃貸情報を見つけた。実は、この部屋が良かったけど、引っ越した時に空いていなかった。ちょっと残念だったけど、結局あまり家にいないんで（いつも会社にいる気がする）別にいいか。

The Lie Behind the Lie Detector

Gotta learn how to pass a polygraph.

Fujitsu's 200GB 2.5"er

Turns out Fujitsu's 200GB Mobile drive is a 3-disk longitudinal product. It's interesting that they could get three platters to fit into the standard height. Fujitsu's product page contains limited specs.

A Margarita Recipe

Intriguing.

Japanese Post Office

This is extremely useful info for me! The Japanese Post Office has a nice online reference site for EMS now. Further, they have details on shipping food items to the U.S. There's a link to the U.S. FDA page on Prior Notice of incoming food items, as well as an online manual.

Watson's Weapons & Raufoss

For biiiiig guns, check out Watson's Weapons. Mostly .50BMG stuff. You can get armor-piercing incendiaries! Now only if one could get Raufoss Multi-Purpose rounds, some Norwegian AP ammo that apparently the Navy uses. The stuff uses RDX high-explosive, and detonates within the target after penetration. Ouch. I hear it's $30/rd. Now that'd be worth buying a 50-cal for!

Snopes, the Plague, and Ben Stein

This came up recently after talking to Katy about her dissertation on infectious (typically fatal) diseases. We'd discussed the merits of quarantining HIV/AIDS when it was in its infancy, and she convinced me that it wouldn't have been a good idea after all. The comparison was to the Black Plague, and the differences were that the Plague was visually recognizable and was fatal in a short timespan. HIV/AIDS is not outwardly visible and takes sometimes many years to kill, so quarantine is not feasible: There's no easy way to recognize the victims, and people don't want to go into quarantine so they wouldn't come out and say it. Anyway, I read up on the Black Plague on Wikipedia, and found out some stuff I didn't know, like there were three "varieties". The salient point was that the "Ring Around the Rosies" children's rhyme doesn't refer to the Plague, or so says Snopes, one of those myth debunker sites.

Another fun entry they had was a quote from Ben Stein regarding the state of America today where stupid celebreties are all-important and freedom of religion has gone out the window. There's one other one on the nature of stardom and role models that's worth reading. Ben Stein is cool.