Author Archives: Michael Gakuran

Watermarking images

By Michael Gakuran | Published September 19, 2008
Protecting images (or at least attempting to). That’s been my most recent mission in dabblings with digital media. I umm-ed and ahh-ed about doing it for a while, but decided to go ahead with it as I seem to be using more and more of my own photography and images lately. Hopefully I’ve done it […]
Posted in Design & Web | Leave a comment

Panty Vending Machines

By Michael Gakuran | Published September 12, 2008
Underwear! In vending machines! I’d heard the stories for years, at how select dodgy locations in Akihabara and other districts are home to the peculiarity of vending machines that dispense underwear. Particularly infamous are the tales of the machines that dispense *used* underwear…
Posted in Japan | 39 Comments

CD Rental in Japan

By Michael Gakuran | Published August 21, 2008
Most people probably know and accept that copying rented media is illegal in the same way downloading music and films is. So it seems highly laudable that stores would start *renting* media. But in Japan, that’s just the case…
Posted in Japan | 6 Comments

Absence – in Japan

By Michael Gakuran | Published August 19, 2008
I should probably just explain my prolonged absence recently – I’ve been back in Japan! I’m here until early September and have been going to all manner of places, including up to Akita International University (AIU) and hitch-hiking back down to Kumamoto where I’m staying with a host family.
Posted in Journal | 6 Comments

Ricoh GX100

By Michael Gakuran | Published June 21, 2008
So I finally succumbed and bought a new camera in preparation for my next adventure in Japan. I very had nearly forsaken my photographic preferences for a Point and Shoot camera, but luckily at the last minute I found the wonder of the Ricoh GX100.
Posted in Photography | 7 Comments

Japanese csv database

By Michael Gakuran | Published June 7, 2008
Things have been pretty busy on Knowing Nothing recently. Finally, after many trials and tribulations, I succeeded in adding a sidebar widget which allows you to display quotes. It’s the ‘Quotes Collection’ plugin from Srini’s WordPress Laboratory. You can see it in action, modified slightly by me, displaying a random word from a rather swollen […]
Posted in Design & Web | 8 Comments

Spider art and plucking

By Michael Gakuran | Published May 30, 2008
In a recent post about my attempts at some high-energy Spiderman Para Para, I mentioned one of the two artists, Hayoung Joo, was doing artwork based on the spider theme. We became better acquainted last week when I was summoned to her studio to once again lend my hand ‘in the name of art’. But […]
Posted in Journal | 3 Comments

Hume’s Moral Philosophy

By Michael Gakuran | Published May 23, 2008
In his ‘Treatise’, Hume targets rationalism and is most noted for saying that ‘reason is the slave of the passions’ and challenging the thought held that morality is discovered by the use of reason. Hume is an empiricist, and his ideas about the passions are said to have influenced Kant in his rationalist argument for […]
Posted in Philosophy | 4 Comments