We wanted to be able to watch YouTube on the living-room TV, so I bought an Amazon Fire TV. Living in Kyoto, I bought the Japan-market version that they warn can be used only within Japan. Fair enough.

However, in the process of trying to get it set up, I discovered some important restrictions that they fail to disclose:

An Amazon account is required for most things to work. Not a problem for us, obviously, but would be if we were gifting it to someone.

Then, to install the YouTube app on the device, so you can watch YouTube videos [...]

Lightroom allows for a variety of metadata for each photo or video... capture date, caption, keywords, etc., and plugins can add further, custom fields, but sometimes what's offered by Lightroom or existing plugins just doesn't fulfill one's own specific needs. Luckily, it's actually fairly easy to make your very own Lightroom plugin to add your own metadata fields. In this post, I'll show you how.

It's fairly quick and simple. It will take far longer to read this post about how to do it than it takes to actually do it.

The kind of fields we can add this way [...]

I've recently started futzing with video on my bike rides, having posted a few on "Lovely Bicycle Ride Revisiting Uji Countryside Photographed Five Years Ago" the other day, including this fast descent down some twisty mountains and into the flats.

I had some trouble getting Garmin software (VIRB Edit, Garmin BaseCamp, and Garmin Connect) to work with my GPX files, or as Garmin has lately taken to re-brand in their own silly name, "G-Metrix" data files.

When trying to import GPX files, I'd get a terse, frustrating "Failed to read file" or "... is not a valid GPX file and [...]

I enjoy reliving a bicycle ride by reviewing the statistics on Strava, seeing how well I did on certain stretches of road compared to how I've done before, or perhaps how I compare to my friends.

In the Strava universe, sections of road are broken up into "segments", and if your ride traverses a segment, you'll get info about how you and others have done on it. If your ride transverses lots of segments, you'll get a lot of info.

Segments can be created by any Strava user at any time, which on one hand is really great and flexible, [...]

I've so many things that I want to write about lately, but just no time as I help my mom recover from a stroke. But I ran into something so frustrating that I just have to rant a bit....

I worked for Yahoo! from 1997 to 2004, and as such it has a special place in my heart despite how it's deteriorated over the years. Knowing how it's deteriorated, though, didn't prepare me for what I ran into recently when trying to create a Yahoo! account for my mom.

I recently set my folks up with a new TV, a [...]