I went to Tokyo with my GF’s family over the New Year. It was, in a word, OFF THE CHAIN. The above is a stall in Akihabara, which defies everything I know about retail shopping. In a bin, hanging out like so many gnarly street fruits, are op-amps, AVRs, weird eeproms, name it. It was crazy. And there were streets of these. As if that wasn’t enough:

That store just sold stuff with threads. If it had cut threads, you could buy it there. If it did not, you couldn’t. Why not? I got some bags of clear polycarbonate metric machine screws, cause hey, you never know when you might need THOSE.

Obligatory picture of 5G, one of the worlds most awesome synthesizer stores. This is the tech bench. You can tell because it looks like a messy-ass tech bench.

Tags: Cool Tools, Hardware