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「２くらべ」ブログパーツフラッシュ版がいよいよ誕生！遊んで、作って、是非お友達と共有して下さい！

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Made some Super Mario Mushroom Burgers for my girlfriend’s birthday.

1-hour in the kitchen.

7-hours of full stomach (these were big burgers).

eternal cuteness.

Credit to Instructibles.

Took me a few searches, but finally found a decent explanation on how to duplicate your OS X Leopard DVD. The key is not to choose “New Image” in Disk Utility, but to go through File > New > Disk Image from …

Remember, you’ll need to use a Dual Layer DVD.

Picked up one of these on my birthday:

My previous mass-storage device took only older IDE disks, which was proving to be a bottleneck. iMacs don’t come with eSata yet, so the fastest interconnect is FW800. The Stardom Decktank houses two SATA disks and comes with a FW800, FW400, USB2.0, and a bunch of card-reader slots. Here’s how it looks in action:

For now, each bay holds a 1TB drive. One for backup, the other for additional storage. The unit runs much quieter than my previous setup. And the disks are held in with Stardom’s standardized enclosures:

so one could conceivably get a few more of these and swap them around. I don’t think the Decktank supports hot-swapping the disks though.

Like weddings in any other culture, weddings in Japan put a nice dent in the wallet. But Japanese weddings also put a nice dent in an attendees wallet too - through the customary practice of “money envelopes”.

It’s customary as a guest at Japanese weddings to give a special envelope of freshly minted bills. So customary is this practice, every convenience store sells the special envelopes. Here’s one I picked up at the Seven-Eleven around the corner:

Like a McDonald’s kids meal plastic puzzle, there a couple pieces that must be combined. Here are the pieces:

The bills you give must be freshly minted, 10,000 yen bills in odd amounts. An even number of bills is a poor omen, as the amount can be split evenly between the newlyweds. An inner envelope holds the cash.

There are two “greeting slips” depending on the occasion, one for general congratulations:

and one specifically for wedding congratulations:

For my occasion, I picked the wedding one:

The inner envelope with the cash gets put inside the outer envelope …

On the back where the outer envelope is closed, the layering of the flaps makes a difference:

The top half folds under the bottom half if the gift is for a glorious occasion (wedding, graduation, etc.); the bottom half folds under the top half if it’s a condolence gift (funeral, etc.). Don’t want to mistake this one!

Went to Akihabara yesterday (Saturday) and picked up a cute USB hub:

fully 2.0, as should be expected at this point. Found it down one of the side-streets doing a fire-sale of sorts. I also found a bluetooth dongle that claims to reach a 100m range; go to T-zone if you need something like that.

Most - if not all - new apartment buildings in Tokyo come with ethernet strung throughout each apartment, but it can be difficult to obtain information about how the setup is configured. The apartment I moved into last year had at least one ethernet tap in each room, all connected to what looked like 10/100M router hidden near the fuse-box by the apartment entrance. Not wanting to disrupt my Internet, I was hesitant to fiddle with it. Besides, I was relying on wifi for the past 6 months so it wouldn’t have made much difference to upgrade it.

About a month ago I got my hands on a new iMac, which meant surfing the web closer to the 100Mb fiber connection the apartment comes with. But this was throttling activity to the in-house NAS I’ve got setup for storing music and movies, so I made an impulse purchase yesterday at Akihabara and picked up a gigabit switch. As it turns out, what I thought was a router for each apartment is just a switching hub, so simply replacing it with the new gigabit switch now gives me gigabit all throughout the apartment. schweet!

For testing the network, I used the HELIOS LanTest. Now my bottleneck is the hard-drive on each end. RAM-disk NAS, anyone? :)

My first iTunes bill since purchasing the iPhone arrived today. The long list with company-name details and the final total gave me a chuckle. All this excitement - for free!

So far my favorite apps have been Exposure, Bloomberg, and Midomi. Exposure’s “Near Me” feature of showing photos taken in your current vicinity is great; Bloomberg’s slick black interface is cool and easy to read; Midomi’s incredible accuracy is fun to say the least (has not been very successful with J-tunes though). Of course, I use Twitterrific regularly, but the lag between button presses is getting annoying. Rotary Dialer is a fun party favor, and Tap Tap Revenge is entertaining when killing time.

Overall I have been quite satisfied with the iPhone purchase. The battery and occasional lag are the most annoying insufficiencies, but can or should be compensated for in due time (there are plenty of 3rd party battery-pack options if you include iPod battery packs; lag I suspect are memory / coding bugs that will be fixed on updates). MobileMe / push of email, contacts, and calendar have been working pretty well for me. Props to the team for extending an extra month for free after the initial hiccups!

So, am I missing any apps you’re enjoying?

皆さん、お疲れさまです！いよいよ米国で普及しているExpressionEngine (エクスプレッションエンジン、以下「ee」)のコミュニティーサイトがオープンしました。去年から使いまくっているこのブログとCMSのプラットフォーム、大変お勧めします^^ 次世代のウェブサービス開発や、コンテンツの多いウェブサイトの管理に困っているエンジニアーに向いているプラットフォームだけではありません！コンテンツ作者や、デザインを中心にしている方の人生も楽にしてくれます（笑）。

今回のデザインは Moresided からです。システム設計は（株）マジです、そしてブログやサポートしてくださっているのはもぎゃさん。

まだまだオープンしたばかりですので、これからユーザーガイドやウィキも追加していくつもりです。是非力を合わせてeeを使いこなして行きましょう！