On top of the the color variations available on their site, Tokyo Art Beat also have some different colors for their tees at Beams T.

PingMag takes a look at the funky yukata designs from Tsukikageya.

Designer Taeki Oh’s portfolio site includes info on his “Conceptual Drawing Table,” pictured above. Via JoshSpear.com.

Check out the new video for Digiki’s “Desktop Music,” off his BEAT VACATION album. It was made by Mumbleboy, and you’ll probably recognize a few faces within, since Takashi (Tokyo Fun Party), Marxy, and O.Lamm all show up.

My current workspace at home. I usually do most of my writing at Cafe Pause though. I took the picture for Matt Fraction’s Deskset Flickr group.

First it was Tokyo, and now Hitotoki sets its sights on The Big Apple. Submissions are now being accepted for “New York Tales from Curious Borough Dwellers,” so get to it!

Not only is Sonore a great little record label, they also have a rather nice podcast in the form of Radio Dondon — you can listen to it stream on their site, or subscribe to a feed.

You may have caught the recent Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0, created by Oliver Reichenstein at Tokyo-based Information Architects Japan. You can catch him at the next “Tokyo 2.0” web community event, happening August 7 at Fujimamas in Harajuku (19:00-22:00), where he’ll be giving a talk on the future of news.

I’ve been slow with my “This Week in Magazines” posts of late, so time to catch up. I’ll probably post another one in a couple of days. Please note that some of the following titles already have a newer issue out. Also, I picked up the following for Cafe Pause last week.

• TITLE (90) took us on a tour of the “Very Best of Waza-Ari Housing,” meaning small, cosy homes, not unlike the ones featured on that segment I did for last week’s episode of TOKYO EYE. There’s also a big feature on cars, which I pretty much skipped.
• The previous issue of BRUTUS (620) claimed “No Bike, No Life,” and that’s something I can definitely support. It was a really great issue for anyone with an interest in cycling, from personal accounts to round-ups of bikes. The issue also featured an illustration by Katsuhiro Otomo on a thick stock page.
• PEN (202) offered a great round-up of top web creators, with lots of work (sites) on evidence. The issue also included a guide to the city of Nagoya.
• Toshio Iwai is this month’s cover interview for the latest AXIS (128).
• CASA BRUTUS (89) celebrates “Le Corbusier: 120e Anniversaire!” with a detailed feature that covers pretty much everything you’d want to know about the man and his work. The issue also includes a report from this year’s edition of Art Basel.

For longtime readers, you know that my battle with Japanese is an ongoing one. I’ve gotten to a point where I can converse casually, but I still can’t use it in a professional manner, and more annoyingly, still can’t read more than headlines and the like. I’m constantly in and out of the books, but about a month or so a go, after a bit of a pep talk from a good friend, I decided to give it another big push, this time on the kanji front. The tool that’s really been helping me a lot are the Japanese kanji flashcards (I’m still just on volume 1) from White Rabbit Press. The reason I became aware of them was because the person behind the company, Max Hodges, attended PauseTalk a few times. I’ve tried using kanji cards in the past, but those other sets where nowhere near as nice as the White Rabbit Press ones. My favorite thing is that each card lists 6 words (usually commonly used ones) that use that kanji, which for me is just so much better for learning than just trying to memorize all the readings of a particular kanji. I can’t recommend these enough, and I’ll definitely be picking up volume 2 when I’m done with this first set.

I promise, this is the last photo I post today, taken while I was testing my new camera. This is an architectural office, located along Kanda River. They usually keep it open like this, making it look like a cafe. It was Craig Mod, of Chin Music Press, who showed me the place a few years back, and introduced me to some people there. Craig said that he did in fact mistake it for a cafe the first time he spotted it, and went in and sat down, waiting to make an order…

Yes, another shot taken today with my new camera, this time on Meiji street, down the hill from Ikebukuro station, heading towards Gokokuji.

Another shot taken today with my new camera, this time of Kanda River. It’s a from the spot where I took that huge photostitch I posted in the other post. I’m really enjoying shooting in widescreen mode as well.

Another photostitch experiment I did today with my new camera (this is actually made up of the first 4 pictures I took with it) is my favorite hangout these days, Minami-Ikebukuro park. You can see a larger version here. Recognize that bike on the right? Yup, that’s my MUJI bike.

I got a new camera today. My old one, a Canon PowerShot A95, had been giving me trouble for about a month now, often times not responding properly, and it finally stopped working completely a couple of days ago — the real sad thing is that I only realized it as I was being given a tour of Swatch Group Japan’s Nicolas G. Hayek Center in Ginza by one of the architects who contributed to the project, Keiji Ashizawa, including views from the top.

After doing some research, I settled on the new Canon IXY Digital 810 IS (the Japanese version of the Canon PowerShot SD850 IS). For a while I’d been thinking that my next camera would be a Lumix, especially for the Leica lens, but the Canon I ended up getting kept showing up highly recommended on review sites, and it seemed to offer all of the features I wanted. When I last bought a camera, I wanted something that offered a lot of manual functionality, but over the 2 and half years that I used the A95, I noticed that I pretty much never used the aperture or shutter speed controls. The only thing I’m really going to miss from my A95 was the LCD that you could flip open, which is how I always took shots. Surprisingly, Canon has eliminated that feature from the entire PowerShot line (only some of the more expensive prosumer models have it).

One of the nicest surprises is that this new camera can act as a great voice recorder, with no limit on length (just the size of your memory card). I tested it quickly, and it’s so much better than what I experienced with the iPod and iTalk combo, which means I might just start doing some Tokyo Boy podcasts again.

Another great feature I’ve been having a lot of fun with is the photostitch mode. What you see at the top of this post, a section of Kanda River, can be better viewed here.