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Saw this on another blog and just had to post it. Wow.

Sumo Baby | Neil Duckett

「殺し屋イチ」と言うマンガからイメージをスカャンをしてこのデスクトップイメージを作った。

I scanned an image from the “Ichi The Killer” manga and made a desktop wallpaper out of it.

Follow the link for the full image.

If you don’t already know, I’m an avid user of the photo sharing site Flickr.com. I happened to come across a user on there that has some really amazing photos of old Japan. I’m not sure exactly how he acquired all of them, but they are great. Below are just some samples. To see them all head over to Okinawa Soba’s photos on Flickr.com.

僕はよく使っているFlickr.comと言う写真サイトで珍しいものをたくさん見つけた。「Okinawa Soba」と言う人が昔の日本の写真をいっぱい載せた。どやて手に入ったか分からないけどすごくきれいな写真だ。下にちょっとだけ載せたがOkinawa Sobaのサイトで全部見られる。

LITTLE GIRLS OF JAPAN CARRY BABIES WITH BROKEN NECKS

Cherry Blossom Road

THE GEISHA WHO REFUSED TO LOOK

MEANDERING MONK MOVES IN THE MORNING MIST...

GEISHA IN A JAPANESE FLOWER GARDEN

Finally got an iPhone. Yokoso mobile blogging!

“As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, the Japan Iron and Steel Federation got ironsmithing genius Kogoro Kurata to display his insane 1:1 scale model of the Scopedog mecha from the 80s anime series VOTOMS. Weighing in at two tons and standing a full four meters tall, it dwarfed everything else at the exhibition. The cast iron structure was actually finished in 2005 and has been on display before at other Japanese conventions…”

via Gizmodo

OK, this is waaay off topic for my blog BUT…

I’ve FINALLY figured out a decent solution to the Google Calendar sync problem with iPhones. This is the best solution I could come up with until Google gets around to offering us free push calendars. Let me know if you can make an improvements or find something better.

Required hardware: Mac with OSX Leopard, iPhone/iPod touch.

1. Create a calendar in iCal as a temporary holding place for your iPhone events.

2. Setup Google Calendar to sync with iCal by following the instructions HERE.

3. Set the iTunes preferences for your iPhone to sync to both calendars from the previous 2 steps.

4. Download and install the Yellow Camp iCal Actions from HERE.

5. Create and save the following workflow in Automator:

*Get Specified iCal Items (add the [calendar from step 1])
*Move iCal Events (move to: [calendar from step 2])
*Find Events in iCal (find:[events], whose:[calendar] is: [calendar from step 1])
*Delete iCal Events

6. Add an entry to your crontab file to run your new workflow every hour as outlined HERE.

Don’t forget to use absolute paths or it wont work!
You can tweak the recurrence settings to your liking, just check out the man pages for “cron” and “crontab.”

That’s it!
Now every time you sync your iPhone to your computer all the new events you added to your iPhone calendar will be copied to your iCal. Once the cron job runs all those will be moved to the google calendar, which will then be synced with your iPhone.

I just found the greatest thing for lazy bloggers (like me). It’s a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to automatically convert any RSS feed into blog posts. If you’re an avid user of a feed aggregator, such as Google Reader (like me), then this makes adding news/blog items to your own blog a simple one click process. For more detailed info head on over to the WP-o-Matic website.

Now that I have this up and running expect more Japan related posts from external sources. All posts from external sites will show up in blockquotes and have the original link at the bottom (like the previous post).

I’ve never seen anything sum it up better than how 青木純さん(Aoki June) does in this short film, “Hashire” (Run!).

I just finished putting some of my new Final Cut and After Effects skills to work for the Turntable Radio video podcast. These videos feature DJ Baku, Ken One, Exsample, and Miyajima (all very talented Japanese turntablists) performing a live studio session in Shibuya.

You can check them out over here.

I learned a new word last week:

腸炎（ちょうえん）pronounced “Choe-en”

It’s a medical condition when your intestines and/or colon get inflamed. I believe it’s also known as “Chinese stars in the stomach” or “please-God-kill-me-right-now disease.” As you can tell from the description it’s not the most pleasant of ailments. I was cursed from hell with a 40°C (104°F) fever and wasn’t physically able to leave my apartment, or accomplish anything productive for a full week. So just remember this and please think twice before you buy that 30% off sushi.