本物の韓国の焼肉 – Real Korean BBQ

焼肉は美味しくて体にいいから、大好き。野菜村と言うレストランは本物の韓国の焼肉のレストランだ。テーブルの真ん中に、肉が焼いている。次に、肉や味噌やキムチやモヤシをレタスに入れて、巻きを作る。超美味しいね。スープに野菜を入れるのもが好き。野菜の食べ放題があったので、たくさんを食べた。とても満腹だった。Google Translate: I like grilled meat because it is delicious and good for the body. The restaurant called vegetable village is a real Korean BBQ restaurant. Meat is burning in the middle of the table. Next, put the meat, miso, kimchi and moyashi in lettuce, and make a roll. It is super delicious. I also like to put vegetables in soup. I had all you could eat vegetables, so I ate a lot. I was very satisfied.
#赤坂 #Akasaka #やさい村 #VegetableVillage #焼肉 #Yakiniku #焼肉のレストラン #YakinikuRestaurant #日本語の練習 #JapanesePractice #食べ放題 #AllYouCanEat #Healthy #体にいい #満腹 #FullStomach

Location: やさい村 大地　　野菜食べ放題

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日光の神社とお寺 – Nikko Temples and Shrines

２００年間、徳川と言う家族は日本の支配者だった。彼たちは日光と言う町でたくさん神社とお寺を作った。このお寺は１６５３年で作って、徳川家光さんを祀るための神社だ。徳川時代に、徳川家光さんは３番目の将軍だった。全ての建物は美しね！ Google Translate: For 200 years, the family Tokugawa was a ruler of Japan. They made many shrines and temples in the town called Nikko. This temple was made in 1653 and it is a shrine to worship Tokugawa Iemitsu. In the Tokugawa period, Tokugawa Iemitsu was the third general. All the buildings are beautiful! #日光 #Nikko #東照宮 #ToshoguShrine #徳川将軍 #TokugawaShogun #徳川家光 #TokugawaIemitsu #紅葉 #AutumLeaves #日本の秋 #FallInJapan #🍁 #⛩ #神社 #Shrine #お寺 #Temple

Photo taken at: Nikkō Tōshō-gū

ホットゴッグと寿司のコスプレ – Hot dog and sushi halloween costumes

ハロウィンのためにあみちゃんとコスプレした。私たちは握り寿司になった。赤いは鮪、オレンジはサーモン。ピンタレストでコスプレのアイデアを見つけった。魚のストライプは絶縁テープ、そして海苔は黒いタオルだ。この写真で私の海苔は垂れていた。ちょっと恥ずかしい。そのホットドッグ人はおかしかった。彼の顔はとても真面目。 Google Translate: I made a cosplay with Ami for Halloween. We have become nigiri sushi. Red is cod, Orange is salmon. I found a cosplay idea with Pinterest. The fish stripes are insulating tape, and nori (seaweed wrap) is black towel. In this picture my nori was sagging. I was a little embarrassed. The hot dog people were funny. Their faces are very serious. #ハロウィン #Halloween #ハロウィンパーティー #HalloweenParty #コスプレ #Cosplay #寿司 #Sushi #寿司コスプレ #SushiCosplay #握り寿司 #Nigirizushi #ピンタレストでインスピレーション #PinterestInspired ＃ホットドッグ #HotDog #ホットドッグコスプレ #HotDogCostume #🌭 #🍣
Photo taken at: Aoyama-itchōme Station

The famous Shinkyo Bridge (“sacred bridge”) in Nikko

It costs 300 yen just to walk across, but I’m happy to support it. The autumn leaves were beautiful. 日光に有名神橋と言う橋がある。300円を払うので、乗れる。ちょっと高い、でも手伝うのが好き！紅葉は美しかった。#AutumLeaves #bridge #神橋 #紅葉 #Nikko #Shinkyou #WorldHeritageSite #æ©‹ #日光

Photo taken at: 日光二荒山神社 神橋

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iOS8 simulator – keyboard drawer behavior

Beware: As of iOS8, the on-screen keyboard doesn’t slide out when there’s a hardware keyboard connected.

The iOS Simulator simulates a hardware keyboard by default, so unless you turn off “Connect Hardware Keyboard” you’ll see very different behavior than the majority of your users.

iOS Simulator keyboard settings

Hardware keyboard enabled:

iOS Simulator hardware keyboard enabled

Hardware keyboard disabled:

iOS Simulator hardware keyboard disabled

 

Japan travel tips from a first-time gaijin

 

Shibuya Crossing at night

Shibuya Crossing at night

I’m back from 2 weeks in Japan.  Here are some tips that I wish I had known at the beginning of my trip.

WiFi

  • Free WiFi is rare. Airports will have free WiFi. Large train stations will have free WiFi in the hub area but not from the platforms.  I had problems getting paid WiFi to work from the platforms a few times.
  • Less than half of the hotels we stayed at had free WiFi in the room.  Some had free WiFi in the lobby though.  It’s very difficult to tell when booking a hotel whether “free WiFi” is in the room or just in the lobby.
  • More than half of hotels had free wired ethernet available in the room.  Highly recommended that you bring a compact wireless router.

Mobile data

  • We rented a Japanese SIM from Advanced Global Communications. Despite inquiring several weeks before our trip, they were sold out of WiFi hotspot devices, so we rented a SIM card and tethered.  You reserve your SIM or device online and either pick it up at the airport or have it shipped to your hotel.  The package includes a return mail envelope, and you drop it in the mail before you leave the country.
  • Had we known that public WiFi is so rare, we’d have rented one SIM card for each person.  Several times our group wanted to split up, but it was too painful to find each other later, so we stuck together.
  • Mobile providers advertise “unlimited” data, but you will be massively throttled if you go over 1GB in a 3 day period.  We were throttled on the 2nd day, and for the remainder of the trip we had 6Mb upstream and 0.01Mb downstream (literally).  Only Google Maps and Gmail worked at all on that slow of downstream.  Strangely, because upstream wasn’t throttled, uploading images and even movies to Facebook and Instagram worked well.  Facebook home feeds or web browsing were unusable though – just timed out after a couple minutes 80% of the time.

Cash

  • Vending machines, subway tickets, and ramen ticket dispensers take only cash.  Save your cash for these things, and pay using a credit card at convenience stores and hotels.
  • Every 7-Eleven location has an ATM where you can withdraw money.  The fees for me (Bank of America) were approximately $5 per transaction + 3% currency conversion fee.

Japan Rail Pass

  • A JR Rail Pass costs $445 for 2 weeks.  It *must* be purchased outside of Japan from a Japanese travel agent.  They give you a voucher, then you exchange the voucher inside of Japan at the airport train station for your pass.
  • The pass is good for the “JR” lines (trains).  If you’re bouncing around the huge Tokyo area you’ll more often be taking subways, which aren’t JR.
  • We traveled around Tokyo and from Tokyo to Kyoto via Shinkansen (bullet train, ~$150 each way).  The pass was slightly worse than break-even.  If you’re going to stick around Tokyo for your trip, the rail pass is likely not worth it.  If you’ll be traveling to Kyoto or farther, it’s probably worth it.

Hostels, Hotels, and reservations

  • Even the cheapest hostels and hotels are safe and clean.  Every part of Japan we saw was safe and clean.
  • If traveling in a group of 3 or more, a cheap hotel will be roughly the same price as a hostel, and you’ll likely sleep better than in a large room with strangers.
  • For a country obsessed with convenience, booking hostels/hotels/services in Japan is a pain.  Many places don’t have online reservation systems, instead you fill out a web request form and wait for someone to manually email you with an answer for whether they can accommodate you. After a few days of being frustrated by these email reservations, we started using HostelWorld and Hotels.com to book.
  • Hotels and hostels will fill up on Friday nights and weekends.  Book a couple days in advance for those nights.
  • Many special services like bath houses and river rafting won’t let you book less than 24 hours in advance, so plan your activities 2 days ahead.

Important phrases

  • arigatō – thank you
  • sumimasen – excuse me / pardon me
  • konichiwa – hello
  • sayonara – goodbye
  • daijoubu – I’m OK (if someone bumps you)
  • oishÄ« des – it’s delicious (thank the ramen cook after finishing your bowl)

Marching ants animated selection rectangle in CSS

Marching Ants is a common technique for showing a selection area in an image. The selection border has animated dashes to help distinguish between the selection and the image contents.

Marching ants in Photoshop

Marching ants in Photoshop

This is a CSS technique for a rectangular marching ants that has advantages over other common techniques:

  • The contents of the selected area don’t need to be opaque
  • Doesn’t require divs several divs for each edge of the animation

The CSS property border-image will do the heavy-lifting for us. Border-image is a strange beast because the name makes it sounds like an alternative to border-style (e.g. solid, dashed, dotted), but it’s really a 9-slice technique that even can fill the padding and content area with an image.

We’ll start with a 10px x 10px animated gif that is composed of nine tiles: 1×1 in the corners, 1×8 or 8×1 on the edges, and 8×8 in the center. The center tile is transparent so that we can let the area behind out element show through.

ants

Download

Our CSS will set border-image and specify that the slice is 1px from the edge and that the image should repeat instead of being stretched.

.selectionIndicator {
    border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 8 repeat repeat;
    -moz-border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 1 repeat repeat;
    -webkit-border-image: image-url('ants.gif') 1 repeat repeat;
}

The result is very close to what you see in Photoshop or other programs. It’s great for creating a cropping UI.

marching ants

Major caveat: border-image isn’t supported in IE <= 10.

Cross-editor coding style with EditorConfig

EditorConfig is a standard that helps developers define consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. Put a file in the root of your project called .editorconfig, and when someone opens a file in a supported text editor, the editor will adhere to the project’s style rules. There are EditorConfig plugins for pretty much every text editor. I use this plugin for SublimeText.

Drop an .editorconfig file in the root of your project:

# editorconfig.org
root = true

[*]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4
end_of_line = lf
charset = utf-8
trim_trailing_whitespace = true
insert_final_newline = true

[*.md]
trim_trailing_whitespace = false

You can install EditorConfig for Sublime with Package Control in just a few seconds.

editorconfig - SublimeText