Oiso station lies near the south-western/Atami end of the Tokaido Line, making it a relatively convenient ride for anyone coming from Tokyo or Yokohama stations. For optimal pigeon watching time, I recommend getting there at around 6 or 7am. When you get there, the station exit faces the ocean ...

Tell me if this situation sounds familiar:

You're in meeting or conversation where you keep referring to websites or webpages, and then an hour or so later you follow up by emailing a ton of hyperlinks.

I've always thought there should be an app for that, and I ...

The Awa Odori dance festival in Tokushima is perhaps the largest and most famous in Japan, taking place every year in August. For those who can’t make the trip to Tokushima, the rendition of Awa Odori in Koenji, Tokyo, is far more accessible and every bit as lively. I ...

If you've studied a foreign language before, you may or may not have stumbled upon something called a "spaced repetition system." I like these systems a lot because they archive the words I know well and don't need to study, letting me focus only on words that I ...

With AOL announcing that Apple news blog TUAW.com (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) will sunset in a few days, I can't help but feel a little sad as a former contributer. But although my own input was rather limited in both time and volume, I took away some incredible ...

Over the years I've found nvALT to be a much leaner way to take notes than Evernote. A bundle of plain text files is so much nicer than that big fat application - especially on a older Macbook Air like mine. I don't really care for Evernote on my ...

I've used About.me pages for some time, but recently I've been quite annoyed with the menu bar at the top as well as the 'My Collections' part on the bottom ². I just need a simple page. And now that About.me has been junkified, I started ...

I was an Instagram holdout for years. But I recently gave in and opened an account to find that it's actually not the hellhole of kittens and food porn as I suspected. I mean it can be those things, of course, but it can also be a really wonderful ...

I haven't written about it much on this website, but if you've been following my photos over the past year on Flickr, Facebook, or more recently Instagram ¹, you've likely noticed that I've been rather obsessed with photographing kingfishers here in suburban Tokyo. I'll write ...

There are few applications that I've used as frequently over the past few years as Brett Terpstra's Marked app, now in its second version, Marked 2. In addition to the obvious function of previewing Markdown documents, which I author in TextMate ¹, Marked 2 has a few lesser ...

Once again, Dr. Drang makes us all looks like animals.

Seriously though, if you use Text Expander, and you should, this snippet is super useful.

I've messed about with many Pomodoro apps for time-boxing my work, but never really got into the flow with any of them. But I installed this Alfred extension a few weeks back and I really like it so far. Just trigger Alfred and type in '20' for twenty minutes ...

Japan, Koshigaya, June 29, 2014 - In their final FIVB Volleyball World League match of the season, Japan finally picked up their first win, beating Germany in Koshigaya 3-2 (25-22, 25-22, 14-25, 23-25, 17-15) at the Koshigaya City Gymnasium on Sunday. This was the fourth match of Japan against the Germans ...

Regular readers of The Bridge will remember that I’ve raved about the Notabli app before. It’s an app that lets parent save their children’s moments, in a space that’s private, shared with only friends and family members of your choosing. When I had my first kid ...

That's right folks. This is a blog post about blogging. How very 2004 of me. I apologize in advance, but stick with me here for a second.

In the past year or so we have seen a boat-load of new web publishing platforms emerge, typically with hipster typography and ...

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command ...

Occasionally the folks from Palo Alto-based Cooliris swing through Tokyo as part of efforts to promote their photo sharing service in Asia. Our readers may recall that we spoke with them back in March, when they were making good progress in China with an early partnerships with social service Renren ...

A part-time writing assignment that I took on a few years back was reporting on international volleyball matches here in Japan. Because I love sports, this is one of the most enjoyable gigs I've ever done. But there were some friction points that arose during my court-side writing process ...

Back in July we mentioned that Tokyo-based translation startup Gengo would be relocating its head office to Shibuya. Today we were lucky enough to have the company’s CTO Matthew Romaine give us a brief tour of the place, as well as provide some brief updates on how business is ...

Kyoto, Japan, November 20, 2013 - Both Brazil and the USA were winners on day one of the 2013 FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Grand Champions Cup in Kyoto, with victories over Iran and Japan respectively. Going into this match, the two teams had faced each other 64 times in international ...