@analogrocker: ... hate to break it to you, but hamburgers in Japan are often cut with knives and eaten off of a plate with chopsticks. And with rice!

@ShariC: In Japan, yes people rub chopsticks out of habit, but you'd only really do that with disposable chopsticks, and if you are getting the disposable ones you're not in a place where the chef will be all that offended.

As sleek as this is, the one thing that's always bugged me about lego enclosures is that if it gets knocked over from a short height you have to rebuild the thing.

@heath: fannypacks, belt bags, and little waist purses to hold your wallet and cell phone are all the rage amongst the fashion forward tight-pantsed men in Tokyo these days.

@chris.herrera07: This problem is easily remedied by storing your knives in the block with the edge facing up. This way, pressure from gravity and rubbing against the block is mostly on the spine rather than the edge. Just be careful, as edge-up could be more dangerous.

Thanks for this post Kevin! I had just started sifting through LH's windows downloads when I saw this, and it was really helpful. Cut the time I spent setting up the fiancee's netbook to a fraction of what it would have been.

@auctoris: I totally agree with this - would definitely be some hurdles to widespread adoption. What's more, based on the online demo, multitouch is really only used for working with the OS. Within an application you are still limited to single touch manipulation of application functions (the paint program). That…

That's funny. In Japan there has been a certain mustering of calligraphers trying to restore the use of Chinese characters in every day writing, since youth there are so used to entering characters via keyboard or cell phone key pad, or having them manifested in an input editor like Microsoft IME.

@IverSanta: I've used the same trick, although I rub the blades down with a Qtip soaked in isopropyl alcohol instead of a long soak. Lasts for months!

I'm a big fan of the blow-the-hardboiled-egg-out-of-its-shell technique so popular on youtube. open holes on both ends of the egg, blow, egg comes out on its own. (wash eggs after please)

@Dreadnought:

I'd question the validity of this article. 1) It's a press release! Commissioned by an online auto-industry vertical search engine. 2) No reference to research methods or data in the article.