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Category: Technology

Microsoft Banishes Japan from Language Pack Market?

May 13th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

submit_url = ‘http://www.longcountdown.com/2008/05/13/microsoft-banishes-japan-from-language-pack-market/’;It’s been well over a year since I bought a new Japanese PC with Windows Vista and Office 2007. I did my research and made sure to buy Vista Ultimate so that I could switch Windows to English at the click of a button. That was no problem when Microsoft made an English [...]

Posted in Technology | 24 Comments »

Have You Got Your .JP Yet?

April 13th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Not so long ago, I registered nickramsay.com and pointed it here. That was just one step in helping my blog reach #1 in Google when you searched for my name… although my arch-rival, Conservative politician, Nick Ramsay, has now reclaimed that spot. Well done, Nick. Best of four?
Get a domain name in Japanese
In [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

ID Cards Needed for Cigarette Machines

April 9th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

submit_url = ‘http://www.longcountdown.com/2008/04/09/id-cards-needed-for-cigarette-machines/’;If you are in Japan, you have probably already seen the bright yellow notices plastered all over the country’s cigarette vending machines. At first, I thought it was some fancy advertising campaign, but instead, they are announcing the launch of “taspo”, an ID card embedded with an IC (integrated circuit) chip [...]

Posted in Technology | 14 Comments »

Recent Posts in Category - Wordpress Plugin

April 8th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Hot on the heels of my ‘If Older Than’ plugin for Wordpress, I’ve put together another little script that returns a list of recent posts from a category you specify. So, for example, if you want to show a list of the last 10 posts from your Japan Food category, now you can.
On the [...]

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

If Older Than - WordPress Plugin

April 3rd, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

It’s been a while since I made a WordPress plugin, but today I had the urge to put some ads on my blog, in places where my regular readers won’t see them. I could have used a plugin such as the Shylock Adsense Plugin, but it has far more options than I need. Instead, I [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #9 - Features

March 28th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part nine of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I gave examples of using Google’s site: syntax. In this lesson, we’re going to have some fun with some really useful search features.
Google as a calculator
Did you know you can use Google as a calculator? Using either math or plain English, just [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Nick Ramsay Google Battle Update

March 24th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

In October last year, I laid down the gauntlet and swore I would take the number one spot in Google’s search results for my own name. My opponent was none other than the politician, Nick Ramsay, who happens to be a fellow Brit, born in the same year as myself! Supported by internet powerhouses Wikipedia [...]

Posted in Technology | 19 Comments »

What Software Do You Use to Edit Photos?

March 19th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

You remember I wrote about the controversial mascot for Nara’s Heijo-Kyo anniversary, right? Well Tokyo Mango picked up the same story and posted the photo you can see here. Clearly the little girl is frightened out of her skin at the sight of the antler-inflicted Buddha guy… or is she?
Seeing isn’t believing
It turns out [...]

Posted in Technology | 10 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #8 - Site:

March 17th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

This is part eight of my Google Speed-Search series. In the last lesson, I showed you some of Google’s special syntax. This time, I’ll continue that theme with the site: syntax element.
Searching a web site

If you know which site you want to search, Google’s site command is a wonderful time saver that often cuts two [...]

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments »

53% Still Use Internet Explorer 6

February 18th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Do you use Internet Explorer 6.0? According to my web stats, 53% of IE users who visit this blog are still on version 6 of Microsoft’s web browser.
In all fairness, unless you live behind a computer like I do, you probably aren’t even aware that Microsoft released version 7 in November 2006 to combat all [...]

Posted in Technology | 13 Comments »

Google Speed Search Lesson #7 - Special Syntax

February 6th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part seven of my Google Speed-Search series. This post looks at how you can use special syntax to finds results based on title, body text or url.
Searching only page titles
Let’s say you wanted to find profile pages for Michael Jackson. The most relevant will have “Michael Jackson profile” in the title, right? So, [...]

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Japan Scam: Domena Eagle Jet Steam Cleaner

December 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Recently, my wife has been interested in getting one of those high powered steam cleaners. It all started when she saw an ad for a “sample cleaning” whereby someone comes to your house and demonstrates the power of their product by cleaning your kitchen and bathroom for just 1,000 yen ($10). In this case, the product [...]

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

Self-Service Supermarket Checkouts in Japan

December 22nd, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

England has always seemed to be quite advanced when it comes to supermarket technology. They had long, spacious, barcode-reading checkouts when I was 17 and worked in the frozen section of Waitrose. It wasn’t many years later before they introduced hand-held, customer-carried barcode readers so shoppers could check prices for themselves. People buying less then ten items have been [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #6 - Wildcards

December 12th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part six of my Google Speed-Search series. In this lesson, we’ll use wildcards to speed up our searches.
A wildcard in Google is represented by an asterisk (*) and used instead of a single word. Consider this search:
“Mount Fuji is * high”
This phrase search forces Google to return web pages with the exact phrase above, [...]

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

My 80 iGoogle Japan Feeds

December 9th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Since I started JapanSoc, I’ve been adding Japan-related blogs to my iGoogle page, and you can see in the screenshot that there are a whopping 80 of these blogs that I’m currently subscribed to.
Subscribing… Blogs… Feeds… What does it all mean?
Some of you are probably already confused. What is iGoogle? How do you subscribe to a [...]

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #5 - Case Sensitivity

December 8th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Here’s part five of my Google Speed-Search series. This post answers the question, is a Google search case sensitive?
What difference does case make?
Some search engines will return different results depending on whether you use upper or lower case characters. So, for example, if you type apple you’d get results for the fruit or technology giant. If you [...]

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #4 - Stop Words

December 1st, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In this fourth part of my Google Speed-Search series, we’ll take a look at stop words - words that Google ignores.
What words does Google ignore? 
There doesn’t seem to be a public list of Google stop words available (although I did find this), but words like the, is, are, that, on, in and with are very likely to be [...]

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 - Negation

November 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

This is the third part in my Google Speed-Search series. Here are the first two parts if you missed them:

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches
Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

Remove unwanted results with negation 
This lesson introduces negation, i.e. using a minus sign (-) to specify terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. This [...]

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #2 - Boolean

November 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In Google Speed-Search Lesson #1, I showed you how to do phrase searches. In this lesson, we’ll look at basic Boolean, i.e. using uppercase AND and OR in our searches.
Let’s imagine you’re British and you want to find websites about Father Christmas, you might start with this:
Father Christmas
What you’re really telling Google is to search [...]

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Google Speed-Search Lesson #1 - Phrase Searches

November 23rd, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When I was in Secondary school, my math teacher gave us a peculiar exercise for homework. She wanted us to memorize the alphabet backwards before the next lesson. Not surprisingly, when that lesson came, there were only two of us in the class who had actually made the effort to remember our ABCs in reverse order. Thanks [...]

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

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