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Japan on a budget, 4: Northern Kansai
(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series). I didn’t really mean to go to the North coast of Kansai, but managed it anyhow. A national holiday fell on the Monday of my trip, and on the Saturday before every…
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Japan on a budget, 5: Hiroshima and MiyaJima
(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series). From Fukuchiyama I headed across to Hiroshima. If you’re heading out this way, be sure to reserve a seat on the Sakura Shinkansen from Shin-Osaka; I can only assume they put too…
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Japan on a budget, 6: Nara and Yokohama
(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series). Nara, the capital of Japan before even Kyoto, is all about the parkland, deer and temples. It’s a short train ride from Kyoto, so I rolled up early in the morning. If…
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The Lewisham Riot
So, about the riot: I saw tweets suggesting it at 8am. I saw the BBM messages encouraging it at 4pm. By the time I got home, there was a police cordon around most of Lewisham. Shops in Hither Green were shut. On Manor Park, a group of kids (really, kids) swaggered with a huge bottle…
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“Uninhabitable” Japan? No, unchecked sources
Saw this on the front page of Twitter today. Sounds awful, obviously. The source? This article, from, ahem, ‘Natural News’ (which carries on the same page an advert promising to ‘cure almost cancer for $5.15 a day’). It says: …And senior political official Ichiro Ozawa suggested in an interview with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)…
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Facebook news: divorced from the facts
Everyone loves a good Facebook news story – or rather, a bad one. And over the past few days, a classic has emerged: Facebook will wreck your marriage. See for example: Facebook cited in 20% of U.S. divorces (CBC News): “Facebook use has been cited in 1 of 5 U.S. divorce cases, according to a…
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Kitten Block – Now for Chrome
Kitten Block for Firefox now has over 1,000 users and has been verified by Mozilla, but I’ve also had dozens of requests for a version that works with the Chrome browser. So, er, I made one. You can get it here. As with the Firefox version, it’s very simple: no options, just simple kitten-based blocking.…
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Hither Green in the news, 1893-1984
The Borough of Lewisham WW2 Memorial, Hither Green Cemetery, erected 1951 One great, unknown benefit of living in Lewisham is membership of the Lewisham Library service. It’s free, and besides allowing you to borrow books the card also gets you access to a load of online resources: being a professional wordmonkey I particularly like having…
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Taipei in a day (and a bit)
Once a year Taipei hosts Computex, one of the world’s biggest technology trade shows. Computex 2011 is looming on the horizon, so I went over last week to the pre-show press conference, meet some of the exhibitors and shoot this report. It’s a long way – 17 hours via Bangkok in my case – so…