(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series). Arriving International flights arrive at Narita, outside Tokyo. It’s worth claiming your Japan Rail Pass in the large JR office here (follow signs to the trains, and it’s before the ticket gates)…
(This is part of a guide to travelling Honshu on a moderate budget and in limited time. Click here for the whole series). I arrived in Kyoto on my second day, via Shinkansen from Tokyo. You arrive at the huge JR Kyoto station, from which you can link to the local JR lines, the private…
(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…
(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…
(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…
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…
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)…
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…
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.…
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…