My Set-up

It’s always fun to see how other people use new tools to get their work done. Inspired by usethis.com’s series of interviews, Takaaki has written up a really neat piece about exactly what hardware and software he uses in his daily life. I would LOVE to read more of these because it gives you so [...]

Making a Chess Screencast

This is an overview of the presentation that I gave at Yokohama Barcamp. Me and my brother Steve went through making a chess video screencast — going through moves on a board, and commenting on them as we go along.  Before go any further, here is a list of the software I used:

Screenflow
Skype
Skype Call Recorder
Snapz [...]

Tracking Twitter reponses to Obama’s Town Hall in China

Earilier today Barack Obama had one of his famous ‘Town Hall Meetings’ in Shanghai, where he took questions from Chinese youth in attendance and from questions posed on the internet. Naturally, there were some interesting responses to all this on Twitter. As a sort of exercise in ‘Twitter coverage,’ I tried experimenting with Chris’ TwitBlog [...]

How Short Links Can Solve Ginormous Problems

My brother Mike is living in Vancouver, and besides being a pretty awesome graphic designer (he worked on Megedeth’s site!) he has also been helping to promote his friends’ band, Magnus Rising. He’s perpetually working on their webpage, and is always considering new and interesting ways to promote their stuff. The other day we were [...]

Getting Started with Drupal: The Non-Retarded Version

The worst thing about all the documentation over on Drupal.org is that it’s just not very accessible to non-developers. But first I want to address the question,
Why even bother with Drupal?
Despite the headaches I’ve experienced with installation and administration, Drupal is super powerful. It’s really good at presenting content in interesting ways, and in a [...]

Making the Shift to Online Journalism

I don’t do stuff like this very often, but last night I had a chance to spill my guts to about 30 or 40 people on a topic that I’ve kinda been obsessing over for quite a while. I’ve met a lot of people who write for a living over the past few months, and [...]

In Defense of Blogging: Lifestreams are Lifeless

A few days back Om Malik published a blog post called ‘The Evolution of Blogging,’ which (among other things) asserted that:
Blogging needs to be social. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one — in my mind — is the changing nature of content. “We will all be streaming life moments as [...]

Tracking the Urumqi Riots on Drop.io

Over the past few days we’ve seen some pretty startling events go down in Urumqi. The riots there have left 156 people dead (both Han and Uighur) and more than 800 injured so far. Like any breaking event in China, the early hours are pretty critical in making sure that photos and videos that leak [...]

Pop-up Translations in Safari with Apple’s Japanese Dictionary

I’ve never really thought that OSX’s dictionary app was very useful. I mean, I’m not going to open up that application whenever I want to check a word. I’ve always preferred mouse hover screen-tips like Firefox’s Rikai plugin.   But even that isn’t a perfect solution. I don’t really like having to toggle it on [...]

The Apps on my Mac

I was just browsing samuraicoder, and I noticed that he’s done something very cool on his about page. He has provided a short list of applications that he uses. It’s nothing big, but it does provide some great value to his readers. With that in mind, I thought I’d run down through a list of [...]

How to Build a Twitter-Powered Community Events Calendar

Recently I stumbled upon a pretty amazing service called TwitterCal. Basically what it allows you to do is add an event to your Google Calendar via Twitter using the following direct message format:
direct message to gcal:
Secret Stone Cutters Meeting at Hobgoblin Shibuya, on Monday, June 25, at 9am http://tinyurl.com/cqj5jg
After sending this message, your event [...]

Podcasting Tools

I attended Danny Choo’s Tokyo CGM Night in Harajuku last night, and at one point in the evening ended up chatting with some people about podcasting. While I haven’t been regularly* involved in a podcast before, I have been collecting podcasting tools over the years just in case.
*Note: Me and some friends in China tried [...]

Mastering RSS: Control your Inputs, and Improve your Outputs

Contents

Tools Mentioned

Introduction
Consuming Data
Scraping Data when there’s no Feed
Combining Feeds
Applying Filters
Responsible and Valuable Output

-
Netvibes, Delicious, Twitter Search
Dapper, Page2RSS, Versionista
Xfruits, Yahoo Pipes
Feed Sifter, Feed Rinse, Filter my RSS
Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Feedburner

At Tokyo Barcamp, I gave a short presentation about the content in this post. I hope I can edit this video a little more, and maybe throw [...]