Firefox, Safari and Shiira

Firefox hasn’t felt right since version 2 was released. There are some nice new features, session restore being one of them. Although, it seems like this feature was added simply to alleviate the anger when the browser inevitably crashes every few days.

So the time has come, once again, to try some other browsers. When looking into Safari and the plugins available for it I stumbled across Shiira, a japanese developed Mac browser. Shiira is based on the Safari rendering engine, Web Kit, and their goal is to simply “create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari.” Shiira 2.0Beta has some great features such as Page Dock and an Exposé like method of viewing open tabs. After only briefly using Shiira I’m impressed and will be trying it out as my main browser over the next few weeks and will post up my thoughts. You can see screenshots of all the features here. A Mini version of Shiira is also available for use in the OS X dock.

A Safari plugin that I found via 43folders is Inquisitor 3 which enables Spotlight-like functionality in the Safari search bar. A very slick plugin and well worth a look if you are a safari user.

Japanese for Gamers

Trying to configure my Japanese Wii has been difficult at times. Due to the Japanese containing lots of Mandarin characters my girlfriend has been able to translate a lot of the menu options but it’s still quite hit-and-miss with a lot of the options. Against the difficulties I’ve managed to configure wirelesss and access the online store, but I’m still quite lost in the menus, especially on my own.

Today I found a site that covers a lot of Japanese language that is directly related to gaming. Japanese for Gamers covers common Japanese for reading game magazines, using game menus, RPG, Sports and strategy games and gaming companies. After a quick look I can already recognise some of the options that I’ve seen in the Wii menus. I’ll fire up the Wii later and see if I can put them to the test.

The site is a geocities site, so I’ve Vacuumed it just in case it dissapears. If it does I’ll post up the archive. If there’s any more resources for import game players please post them in the comments.

Taiwan Visa run to Tokyo

My last Visa run for a new Taiwanese Visa was to Tokyo. Thankfully this time I got an extendable Visa as I am now registered on a course at Kaohsiung University to study Mandarin. This means it’ll be at least three months before I have to do another run. Hopefully I can register on another course before this one is up and extend the Visa for four months

For anyone else thinking of doing the Tokyo run, here are photos of the Journey from the train station to the Visa office so you can easily find your way there:

Translator Required - Famicom TV Remote Controller

I picked up a Famicom controller TV remote while in Tokyo recently. The only problem is, the instructions (unsurprisingly) are in Japanese. Most of the Japanese includes Mandarin though, so my girlfriend has been able to decipher some of the instructions, but we still can’t get it to work.

From what we can tell, the A button should be pressed once, followed by the B button and while keeping the B button held down press and hold the left arrow on the D-pad. The red LED on the controller lights and stays lit, and as far as I know it should turn off when it has the correct frequency for the TV. I’m not sure if it’s the translated instructions, or the rare brand of TV that we’re using that is the problem. I’m posting the Japanese instructions here in the hope that someone can translate them, in the meantime I’ll try and track down some Japanese reading Taiwanese and see if they can help.

Japanese Wii advertising

The recent sales figures from Japan for the Wii release show that Wii Sports came out on top, outselling the US favourite, Zelda: Twlight Princess. This has been reported on a few blogs as perplexing or a shocker.

While this is strange in comparison with the US figures, when considering that the advertising in Japan features almost solely Wii sports, and that this is the flagship title, it is no suprise the this game is outselling the others. The Tokyo subway is covered with poster ads for Wii and Wii Sports, and a Wii Sports TV advertisement is running inside of the newer trains.

This could also be proof that the Wii is selling as planned - that non-gamers are buying the console who may not have heard of Zelda, opening the new market that Nintendo is aiming for.

Photoshop Colour Profiles

A quick tip for anyone wondering why their images appear washed out when ’saving for web’ in Photoshop - Check you are using a web colour profile.

I had never found this to be as big an issue when using Photoshop in Windows XP and it only caused enough of an issue on the Mac as for a recent project I’ve been using more vivid colours.

This Design Geek article explains why this happens, and how to correct it. It also explains that Windows has a higher gamma than OS X, meaning colours appear darker - which probably explains why It’s only just become an issue for me.

Ensure you’re using a web colour profile by going to Edit -> colour Settings, in Photoshop, and change the colour profile to one that has ‘Web’ in it’s name, and that the RGB working space begins sRGB followed by a series of numbers.

Edit: It seems the solution to this problem is not so simple. Somehow I’d managed to check the ‘Desaturate Monitor colours By: 20%’ option in colour Settings - which makes images in photoshop appear exactly how they appear when exporting for web. With this option unchecked, having a Web colour profile barely makes a difference to the working space colours.

There’s some helpful discussion in the comments of this blog post about colour profiles and OS X but apparantly no definitive solution. I’ve set the gamma on my Macbook to 2.2 to match Windows and that somewhat helps but is not ideal

Does anyone have any input on this?

Photo Tour of the Kaohsiung computer district, Taiwan

The Jianguo Road area in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan is full of computer and technology related stores. I recently ordered a 120GB SATA drive for my Macbook and used the trip to collect it as an excuse to snap a few shots of the area and any interesting things that caught my eye.

You can see all of the photos in this Zooomr Photo Set (My free Flickr account is maxed so I’m testing out Zooomr), and I’ve featured some of the more interesting photos below-

This tablet PC is an 8.9inch Fujitsu Lifebook P1510. the screen swivels so it can be used in both laptop or tablet mode. With a 1.2Ghz Pentium M it’s not the most powerful system, but it just feels so damn good to use it. i can’t remember what the resolution was but I can remember thinking it was fairly decent for a machine of it’s size. Comes with a 60GB HD, USB2.0, Bluetooth, Modem, LAN, WiFi and finger print sensor but only 512MB of memory.

A shot from the balcony of what seems to be the biggest gaming store in the area. This store is absolutely crammed with games for all platforms, consoles, DVDs, figurines, Web Cams and other hardware. It makes me wish I could read Chinese or Japanese so I could play some of these games.

No this isn’t a Wii, it’s a Core Duo based small form factor system that are quite common, although not as common as the millions of variations of mini MP4 players. At $29,990 it works out at about £480 or $900US, which seems a bit expensive to me, I’d be more tempted to buy an Intel Mac Mini - although, all prices are negotiable here

I know there’s places in Taipei and Japan that are bigger and better, but this is still a long way away from anything you’d find in the UK etc, I could hang out there all day

Typo and Trackback Spam

I recently got hit with over 100 spam trackbacks on an article and then a few more everyday. I really like Typo, although trackbacks suspected of being spam are still listed under an article.

John Wilger has a quick fix for this by adding a few lines to two template files for Scribbish.

Asynchronous Image Uploading and Database Storage

Here’s a code snippet that I mashed up recently. I started with Asynchronous image file upload without AJAX and worked in code from one or two tutorials. The result is an asynchronous image uploading script, using an iFrame, that resizes the images and stores both the original and the thumbnail in a database.

Get it here:

The table that needs to exist in your database:

CREATE TABLE `image_upload` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`size` int(11) NOT NULL,
`content` mediumblob NOT NULL,
`thumb` mediumblob,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

Trulia Feed Creator for Wordpress

Here is the first release of my Wordpress plugin for creating a Trulia compatible XML feed of properties. The feed can be submitted to Trulia and subsequently used for creating a Trulia Map of your properties.

The current version of the plugin is 0.3 and can be downloaded from the following links: