Anthony's school had a day off on Monday, unlike other schools in Kyoto, so I took the opportunity to bring him to the Kyoto City Science Center for Youth, which is sort of like The Exploratorium in San Francisco, though much smaller. Because other schools were in session, we had the place essentially to ourselves.

This post looks at a few of the mirror-related exhibits....

The photos above were with an exhibit that had two mirrors that pivoted. Next to it was an exhibit with three mirrors, the third closing in like a door to make a triangle-shaped mirror room. [...]

Hah, just discovered something useful.... you can put an iPad (or iPhone, iTouch, and presumably other devices with capacitive-touch displays) in a zip-lock bag, and can interact with the multitouch right through it. Put in the iPad from the bottom, zip it up, and you should be good to go even in a downpour. This'll be convenient for when I use the mapping features on my iPhone while scootering, and to give added piece of mind while reading with the iPad while relaxing in the bath.

It'd also be useful to protect against particularly grimy hands, such as when entertaining [...]

I visited the gardens at the Shouzan Resort in north-west Kyoto the other day, and was blown away by the beauty of the fall colors. Unlike all the other places I've blogged about recently, it's not a temple or shrine... just a very well done private garden at a large restaurant/wedding/getaway complex (they use the word "resort", but that feels too extravagant a word for the non-garden parts, and not extravagant enough for the garden at this time of year).

As has been the case for the last few weeks, I don't have the energy for a proper writeup yet, [...]

I recently replaced a six-year-old low-end Dell monitor with an Eizo FlexScan SX2462W, a widescreen mid-level monitor with many good features for photo work. Having moved from this setup to one now with two widescreen monitors, I decided to put the extra monitor on its side, vertically, so that the long edge is up and down. (You can see it in this photo.)

So, now having one portrait-oriented monitor, I suddenly had no photos to use as its desktop background. Especially since it's the "extra" monitor, and by default will be unused unless I'm doing something particular with it, I [...]

Paul Barr is in Kyoto again, and we made a trip to the back gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns, behind their stone-carving workshop, as we did last year. Even after all the posts last year (enough to merit a "Nishimura Stonecarvers" category on my blog), including a 51-photo "overview" post, there was much left to explore at the gardens.

Unfortunately, despite our visit being 10 days earlier than last year's, the fall colors were mostly gone and the trees bare, and to make it worse, someone had just cleaned up all the photogenically-endearing leaves from the paths. But on the [...]