Dancers, Sendai Getting to Sendai is easy: grab a Shinkansen train from Tokyo Eki. The Hayate services are best: you’ll need a reserved seat, but these fly past all but the biggest stations. Step out of the huge Sendai JR station and you’re within walking distance of just about everything, although there’s also a subway…
Matsushima, near Sendai, Miyagi-ken I came back from last year’s trip around southern Honshu determined to work on my kanji and head back the next year. One year, one hundred and twenty kanji and three more terms of general study later, I was on a plane to Narita again. And this time, with something approaching…
I’ve written on a number of occasions about the fascinating-but-flawed ‘Facebook causes x% of Divorces’ story that pops up in the media every year or so.It first lurched around in 2011, and then crawled back out in January. I anxiously await the next outbreak in January 2013, summing up the results of a survey conducted…
Meet Viaziz. Or rather, http://www.viaziz.com/adtracking/39. How did I get there? Here’s a nice advert that appeared on my Facebook page today. Save money on a Canon camera at www.saveonproducts.net. Click it and, rather than the website listed, you’ll land on the Viaziz page above. Looks interesting. You can’t buy the camera, of course, but you…
Since I’m thinking about all things WordPress, I’ve updated my Custom Captcha for WordPress into a proper plugin called Stop Registration Spam. The idea is the same as before: to prevent automated registrations, and the spam that comes with them, by posing a question that will be simple for your visitors to answer, but impossible…
I always prefer to read API data in XML, but there are times when that becomes problematic – especially due to cross domain access policies. If you’re working on a single app it’s possible to solve that by proxying the XML with a local PHP script, but if you’re working with the browser only –…
The WordPress platform is a great way to run a blog or website, but it is under constant attack from spammers. Even if you prevent anonymous commenting, require user registration and implement the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin, you might find yourself – as I did – receiving dozens of automated, spammy registrations per day. However they’re getting…
Every so often I receive an email from the Press Complaints Commission with a list of its latest adjudications. As a tech journalist it’s not as useful as the ASA’s list*, but it is interesting reading nonetheless. And last week, while scrolling back, I came across a really remarkable bit of work. Witness this headline…
Pic: The Telegraph covers the original press release Back in March 2011 I wrote about a sudden flood of news articles claiming that Facebook was being cited in 20% of US divorce cases. After doing a little digging it transpired that the whole thing had sprung from the continual re-hashing, muddling and alteration of a…
I’ve now been learning Japanese for about three years – long enough to get a decent grip on everyday verbs, adjectives and nouns, and to start wrestling with kanji (80ish, so far). But there’s only so far you can get by speaking for 90 minutes per week in classes. So, I hatched a plan: to…