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Monday and Friday were both public holidays in Japan creating a pair of consecutive three-day weekends. Unfortunately, typhoon season meant it was pretty disappointing weather-wise. The notable exception was Sunday when the sun was out, the skies clear and the humidity low. We took the opportunity to visit not one but two parks with the kids.
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We broke up the park visits with a swing by Butcher’s Table, a gourmet hamburger restaurant that the kids have eyed hungrily every time I’ve taken them by it. In addition to indoor seating, they also do takeaway and we grabbed a Cajun chicken burger, a Butcher’s burger and two Kids Burgers. The Cajun chicken burger left a bit to be desired but the other burgers were all great. The only real problem was the size. I was especially surprised at the size of the Kids Burgers, each was easily enough for an adult and I’m now very tempted, as embarrassing as it might be, to order them for Eri and me the next time we feel like real burgers.
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I was going to call the week ‘Silver Week’ but after a quick glance at Wikipedia’s entry I realised that wouldn’t be correct. Silver Week refers to a rare occurrence where a week in September will have three consecutive holidays. Since the holidays here were on Monday and Friday that doesn’t technically qualify. Instead we’ll have to wait til 2026.
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I finished watching The Case Against Adnan Syed the day the Maryland court granted the motion to vacate his conviction (ABC). The four-episode documentary started off strong but it really began to feel like it was dragging mid-way through the third episode. Perhaps that was because I knew what happened.
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Still no message from Apple about the iPhone 14 Pro Max. I’ve come close to cancelling it a couple more times, the most recent of which was upon discovering that Steam Decks are now available for order in Japan via Komodo. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately from the perspective of my wallet), it appears those reservations won’t start being filled until the end of the year.
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Apropos of nothing, I was reminded of Mike Ginn’s classic 2013 tweet: ‘My “Not involved in human trafficking” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.’ Of course, Know Your Meme has a short history to bring you up to speed.
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After writing about using ShortFlow to create a Lock Screen widget for Swarm check-ins, Brandon dazzled me with the custom widget he created with Launcher that used the actual Swarm logo. With his help, I found the correct combination of ‘monochrome’ and ‘invert’ to get a Swarm icon with a transparent background working but it was exceptionally fiddly. If it sounds like something you nevertheless want to try your luck at, you should also grab this shortcut so that you can download and save high-resolution iOS app icons from the App Store.
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Beth Orton has a new album out and while I know it would be more supportive to link to that, I found myself drawn instead to her 1999 album, Central Reservation, and in particular its title track (Apple Music).
