NYC’s Chinatown Fair: Video Games Arcade
I suggest checking out this great post The Last Arcade in Chinatown from Scouting NY. It tells the story of the last arcade still operating in New York’s Chinatown district:
At #8 Mott street, Chinatown Fair has only two reviews, but a respectable 4-star rating. The place has been there since the 50’s, and once featured a “World Famous Dancing & Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Chicken.” Go read the post to find out what that means!
Create your own 豆瓣 RSS feed for Google Reader!
Douban (豆瓣) is a popular Chinese user-submitted review community site. Unfortunately, most of the content is locked up to browsing, as only a few feeds are supported. If you want the latest comments, book/music/movie reviews, or individual author/comment thread feeds, you’re golden. But, what if you want a feed of activity on some tag, such as Japanese movies? Then you’re out of luck.
How do I get my feed?
Paste in a Douban tag URL (it will look like movie.douban.com/tag/2010) here, and click run. Then you will have a custom feed, you can click on “Get as RSS” and import that link into Google Reader:
What will it look like?
The feed will look like this:
What’s behind the scenes?
I’ve setup a simple solution to use Yahoo Pipes to scrape tag pages and produce beautiful RSS. I’ve created this Douban Movies Tags RSS, which you can input a URL to a tag page, such as 电影标签：2010, and get back an RSS feed you can subscribe to in Google Reader. The Yahoo Pipe is simple, and looks like this:
Yahoo will automatically periodically update the data and produce new feed items. I haven’t tested it on the other two sub-Doubans, the music/book reviews, so if you have some specific problem let me know!
New Apple store in Beijing, China
There’s an Apple Store coming to Beijing. The three-story building is being designed by US architect Ben Wood, who runs an architecture firm called Studio Shanghai:
Beijing’s second official Apple store will be built on Qianmen Street, just blocks away from Tianamen Square. It will open this fall.
Torrents in China
Using Bittorrent (BT) in China is quite a bit more difficult than in the US. Popular trackers, such as the ubiquitous PirateBay are blocked. Torrent sites are blocked. Torrent software such as uTorrent does not appear to discriminate against geographically distant peers.
Currently in Shanghai, I’m downloading a torrent with 500 seeds and another 500 peers on uTorrent. Most of these came from decentralized systems (DHT, Peer Exchange) and not from a tracker:
Name Seeds Peers Downloaded [DHT] 198 170 0 [Peer Exchange] 523 587 0 mightynova (timed out) 6 7 30
The speed is also nothing to write home about, at 10 KB/s, about 120x slower than my 1.1MB/s I get on Verizon FIOS back in NYC:
According to Speakeasy’s speed test, the connection here gets 123 KB/s down, so it’s not that I’m hitting the cap, yet! If you’ve got hints, let me know.
iPhone Chinese-English dictionary
Qǐngwèn is an application for iPod Touch and iPhones which allows quick and easy Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary lookups. Take a look at Karan Misra’s site which has more information about the free application. Here’s some screenshots of my own:
The thing I like most is that you can type a word, in either English, Chinese, or pinyin, and get back the right translations and context that word can be used in. Once you’ve translated from English to Chinese, you can also use the search features to find other words containing said character. It’s a great application!
Note that Qingwen uses a modified version of CC-CEDICT as its dictionary.