I don’t think I ever saw Joel look so pleased with Taiwan as when we took him to guānghuá shāngchǎng. Oh, the computer goodness!
Unfortunately, our guest had little appreciation for Acer, a local Taiwanese brand. Not even these energetic Acer girls’ pitch about the “super super thin laptop line” had much success in [...]

Over the past month as made my way through the phenomenal guide Remembering the Kanji, I’ve learned some interesting things. Not only am I writing all the Joyo kanji with an accuracy I could only have dreamt of before RTK, but I’m starting to recognize some of the systematic aspects behind the post WWII [...]

I went to several local video game shops right before Chinese New Year. It had been long time since I’d bought or really played any console games, but the Wii was different enough and interesting enough that I decided to get one to play over my two week vacation. For new systems, [...]

I’ve made a Firefox extension that converts pinyin with tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks. The specifics of the conversion process are identical to those of the online pinyin converter I wrote earlier.
After installing the extension, a blue square will appear on the right side of the status bar at the bottom of [...]

Until last week, I had never realized how difficult uploading large files to a web site can be. HTTP isn’t really that well suited to it, and PHP has a couple of glaring weaknesses that make it nearly impossible. It all started when I ran into a minor problem at school…

Light-bot is a pretty fun, if simple flash game that I wrote about last year. At that time, I realized that by giving the robot recursive solutions, it was possible to reduce the commands needed to win from the previous bests of 160 or so down to 132.
Recently, Mark Beyers has found an even [...]

Byron of texturadesign emailed me this weekend about a group of US tech bloggers hosting a meetup in Taipei.
Hello,
We’re bloggers based in the US coming to Taiwan to cover the Intel Developer Forum and would like to meetup with Taipei bloggers on Sunday 10/19 for drinks and apps (on us).
They’ll be at in House [...]

I’ve been playing some flash games recently. Here’s one I kinda like. It’s called light-bot. The goal is to program a robot to move around and light up certain squares. The only things the robot can do are walk forward, turn left, turn right, jump and toggle the light (for [...]

I came across a very interesting article today.
Not only does this finding help explain why the brain is able to work properly when the body’s demands for fuel and oxygen are highest, but it goes a step further to show that the brain actually shifts into a higher gear in terms of activity. This opens [...]

What a great week for progress! Right on the heels of China’s first extra-vehicular activity in space, the privately run SpaceX has made history!
SpaceX’s Falcon 1 became the first privately built liquid rocket to orbit the Earth tonight, following in the footsteps of SpaceShipOne which became the first privately built crewed spaceship to fly [...]