Latest reviews

Em geral bem gostoso e com boas ideias. Só não recomendo o hamburguer de shiitake, que tem um gosto enjoado, mas o Quinoa Solar Vegano é delicioso! O bolinhos de feijoada e o quibe também são uma boa recomendação.

Cuidado porque nem tudo é vegano (mas tudo é ovo-lacto), então é sempre bom perguntar antes.

O preço é um pouco alto (mas talvez esperado pra um lugar vegetariano de frente pra praia da Barra). As porções, a primeira vista, parecem pequenas mas de alguma forma te deixam bem cheio e satisfeito.

Recomendo fortemente, principalmente pra apresentar o vegetarianismo pro seu amigo omnívoro que acha que você só come alface.

Les Cousins is a mixture of French bakery and café. They sell a variety of pastry, including savoury dishes like pizza or pies that you can take home and heat up in the oven. But they are also a café with great cappuccino bowls and different sweets to accompany them.

Due to the mixture of bakery and café, it is not the most cozy café I have ever been to, but personally I like watching the people going in and out. And did I mention that they have great coffee and sweets? They also always have a broad newspaper selection available. And in summer they also have a terrace where you can enjoy the sun and watch Avenue Cartier.

Seriously. I can’t stress just how delicious the okonomiyaki is! I went with a non-vegan Japanese family and they all enjoyed it as well and seemed surprised with how it is similar to the original. I can’t say for myself since I have not tried the original okonomiyaki recipe.

We also tried the fake meat skewers, which were delicious. The food is a bit on the oily side, but if you don’t mind that, you’ll love it like I did.

Be aware that the establishment is not fully vegan so, when in doubt, ask. Vegan restaurants in Japan are visited by foreigners en masse, which means there’s a good chance the waiter will speak English. If not, well, better work on that vegan-survival-Japanese.

This coffee shop, near Waseda University in Tokyo, has a unique atmosphere, centered around veganism and the constructed language Esperanto. Its intended goal is to introduce veganism to Esperanto-speakers, Esperanto to vegans and both ideas to everyone else!

It’s not crowded at all, probably because neither veganism or Esperanto are well-known in Japan. The good thing is that means you’ll likely have a more intimate vibe.

The food is pretty delicious, cheap (!) and it comes in pretty sizeable portions (Japanese portions are notoriously small). Also, the owner is very kind and loves to chat, if you feel like it.

One of the available meals at SOJO (Own work. License: CC-BY-SA.)

The one thing that could improve is the menu: there aren’t many options, and since it’s a tiny shop run by only one man, that might continue to be the case for the time being.

Disclaimer: I’m both a vegan and an Esperanto-speaker, so my take is probably somewhat biased, but if you look around, other reviewers share similar opinions.

More Perfect is an spin-off of the popular Radiolab podcast that specifically focuses on US Supreme Court Decisions, from well-known cases like Citizens United vs. FEC to more obscure but highly consequential cases like Baker v. Carr. In the casual tone typical for Radiolab, each episode brings together many voices on a given case: plaintiffs, legal scholars, historians, activists, and so on. Jad Abumrad, the show’s host, tends to ask flippant questions along the lines of “How does this even make sense?”, channeling a bit of the everyman who knows little about the legal system.

If you’re thinking this premise makes for a dry program, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The court’s decisions have impacted the lives of millions, and the show succeeds in making that impact understandable, from parents fighting to keep their adopted daughter to civil rights activists mourning the loss of voting rights achievements through the landmark Shelby v. Holder case.

I have listened to a handful of episodes so far, and have very much enjoyed them. If I have one criticism, it is that the show can be a bit myopic at times, very much focused on looking at an issue from both sides (e.g., Edward Blum’s test case litigation, which is advancing a conservative agenda through the courts), without providing sufficient societal context: what is the likely impact of this litigation going to be? Who is driving this agenda? Who is benefiting from it? Naturally, some episodes do a better job at this than others.

Still, I recommend the podcast to anyone who cares about the US legal and political context; it provides valuable background about the court cases that made the news, the ones that made the history books, and the ones that didn’t (but should have).

Tobira is one of the most often recommended Japanese textbooks for pre-intermediate learners in communities like /r/LearnJapanese for good reason. It is a great book with very useful grammar explanations and examples which themselves use grammar points previously learned. The essays contained in the book are interesting and not overly difficult.

Also, the accompanying official website offers extra resources like audio and even pre-made Anki decks! It’s very convenient, and it would be even better if the decks contained example sentences as well instead of isolated words.

This book definitely does not hold your hand with English translations and it feels like a shock to many students who recently finished Genki II, and rightly so. But if you bear with the initial discomfort, you’ll see your Japanese visibly improving.

I have only two main problems with it: the grammar notes section is way too far away from the reading material, which is a nuisance. Also, the vocabulary list sometimes contains words that are too basic and some more complex expressions used in the texts don’t make it into these lists for some reason. Apart from that, it’s a great book and I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon it. Don’t let the lack of English scare you, embrace it!

To be upfront: Firefox Focus[1] for iOS is not a full-featured browser. And it doesn’t aim to be. It has no bookmarks, no tabs and doesn’t store your browsing history. When you close it and re-open it after a while, it will have forgotten all your logged in websites. And it also isn’t a browser in the sense that even though it is called “Firefox”, it is using Apple’s WebKit engine to render websites, not the Firefox engine. (This last point is not a voluntary decision, as Apple does not allow third-party browser engines on iOS.)

However, just because it is not a full-featured browser, it is perfect to quickly look something up on the go: It is fast, uncluttered and dead simple to use. It blocks trackers and ads, greatly speeding up page loading times especially on slow connections (although it can be a bit overzealous on some websites). And because it forgets by design, it preserves your privacy (both against the pervasive tracking on the Internet as well as against someone who looks through your phone).

At first, I was pretty sceptical about the concept - but now I have to say that more likely than not I will tap on Firefox instead of Safari when I just want to quickly look at some website on my iPhone. Sometimes I would still wish for simple bookmarks, but maybe it is a good thing that wishes like those remain unfulfilled: they would compromise its simplicity and thus its value.

[1]: Or “Firefox Klar”, as it is called in the German-speaking countries where it is by default even a bit more private.

I got the charger on time for 30 euros. Unfortunately, after a few weeks it stopped to charge my MacBook.

We were looking for a quick thing to watch on Amazon Prime Video last night and Robot Trains has always been a recommended show for me (really my 6 year old).

We gave it a try. Immediately I could tell it was not worth our time (12 minute episodes).

Pointless violence (the trains are fighting in anime type ways), pointless conflict, the dialog was the worst form of Star Trek technical filler because that’s pretty much the entirety of the dialog.

All in all, I’m sorry we watched it.

DeepL is a machine-learning based online translator, similar to Google Translate and others: You enter text in the box on the left and it will output the text translated to another language in the box on the right. In my experience (mainly translating between English, German and/or French) it provides very, very impressive and definitely far better results than any other automated translator I have tested. The translation is almost always very understandable and often nearly flawless.

They also provide a (paid) API if you want to use DeepL translations in your own products.

Only downsides (and why it only gets four stars):

• It only supports relatively few European languages compared to Google Translate (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish; in particular no Chinese or other Asian languages).
• It cannot translate whole webpages, you always need to copy-&-paste the specific text you want to translate.
• While it is the best automated translator on the market, it is still not as good as a human translator.