Every curious how Japanese people with their unbelievably complicated writing system manage to enter text on a cell phone? Wonder no more! Willy (who apparently has good taste in video games) shows us all how, in Japanese Input on Cellphones and Japanese Input on Cellphones 2.

In case you’re wondering how far technology has progressed since Super Mario Brothers: Piano Version, the answer is Super Mario Brothers: HUMAN BEATBOX FLUTE VERSION!

(oh, and they invented YouTube in the meantime as well)

Recently I’ve been using Skype and have been quite impressed, especially with how effortlessly it glides through any firewalls and NATs that it finds in its way, almost as if they don’t even exist. I was even more impressed by “Vanilla Skype”, a presentation (part 1, part 2) that details the Herculean efforts that the developers of Skype went to to encrypt and obfuscate the workings of their client and network, and the truly Super-Herculean efforts of a pair of hackers who have circumvented all the encryption and booby traps and figured it all out anyway!

The presentation was given at REcon 2006, a computer security conference. There’s probably other equally interesting stuff in the rest of the proceedings.

We went to a restaurant called “Machu Picchu” in East Haven. I ordered a steak, and was presented with this:

That’s a steak with two fried eggs on top, sitting on a mountain of rice and french fries, with a hunk of fried cheese, some fried plantains, salad, and finally just almost as a garnish, a HOT DOG.

Jenny’s “potato stew” was almost as surprising:

It was cold! Sliced potatoes! With sauce! What!??