Catshanghai

In this earlier post I complained about the stress of living in a place where I am “doomed to waste time understanding and being understood.”
This is still an issue or I would not choose to resurrect such a gloomy old blog post. The difference these days is that I am enjoying my summer holidays. [...]

I have started using a VOIP service called Rebtel , which offers cheaper and more convenient Internet based phonecalls than Skype or Gizmo5, which I wrote about last year. See this post.
Rebtel lets you make calls between China and the UK landlines for 1.9 US cents a minute plus 1 jiao a minute for [...]

My favourite piece of software at the moment is Evernote, because it is a ubiquitous tool that lets me grab notes from webpages, from my cellphone and desktop. I wrote about it here.
The service is still in beta, but the latest version has given me more space (200mb) and it lets me tag multiple notes. [...]

Yesterday we were celebrating the virtues of Twitter as a news flash tool for natural disasters.
The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate.
Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent post about [...]

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising.
Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas.
The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the worst-hit areas [...]

According to Danwei there was a 7.8 earthquake in Sichuan this afternoon near Chengdu, but news of the event was broken by Twitter. The Telegraph has just reported that more than 100 people have been injured, and that 4 children died when a school collapsed in Chongqing. (Monday 7:58pm).
Robert Scoble also blogged that Twitter scooped [...]

I’ve just been checking out Indochino’s online tailoring website.

Indochino is a Canadian company with offices in Vancouver and Shanghai. It runs a website that sells made to measure suits over the Internet for as little as $199, which can be a great bargain if you don’t mind waiting for your suit to to arrive from [...]

How many business cards have you collected since you came to Shanghai?
My wallet should be bulging with cash. Instead it is full of rubbish and business cards or mingpians as they are called in China. Every shop, restaurant and individual will present you with their name card in an elaborate two handed exchange ritual copied [...]

My video did not get as many hits as Sarah Silverman singing expletives about Matt Damon, but my rough Youtube movie about the Shanghai flash mob has been viewed more than 12 000 times since I uploaded it on Saturday.It feels good to be the number one video on Youtube for travel and events,  even if [...]

doubleTwist is DVD Jon’s latest venture into his fight against media digital rights management. He gained notereity nine years ago when he broke copy protection on DVDs.
doubleTwist is a Windows download that removes copy protection from music purchased from the Itunes Store. It converts files from protected AAC into MP3s that can be played on [...]