September 2026's AI and IT news, distilled into 6 stories for small and mid-sized businesses. GPT-6 Astra's arrival, lessons from RIZAP's shadow-AI data leak, and the digital/AI adoption subsidy deadline — the topics owners and managers should know.

A client asked us to analyze a 30-person daily schedule sheet in Power BI. The sheet turned out to be a wide, Excel-style layout far from BI-ready. Here's how we normalized it with Google Apps Script and connected it to Power BI, including the pitfalls we hit along the way.

Our 4-language blog ran into an issue where the Korean and Chinese homepage still showed Japanese text. Digging in, we found that Wix handles multilingual blog posts and site pages in fundamentally different ways. Here's how we diagnosed it, and how to fix it efficiently using the Translation Editor.

Our 4-language blog showed "76 pages not indexed" in Google Search Console, which was alarming at first. It turned out 51 were auto-generated hashtag pages needing no action — only 17 pages, including real articles, actually needed attention. Here's the investigation and how to manually request indexing for priority articles.

Claude comes in three flavors: Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code. They're the same Claude underneath, but differ in where they run and how much you can hand off. A plain-language guide to what each one does and when to use which.

Revisiting our Rakuten Item Search API and Amazon MWS posts from around 2020 and comparing them with today's SP-API design. Three shifts — async processing, exponential backoff, and price-floor protection — trace how a system's design grows up.

August 2026's AI and IT news, distilled into 6 stories for small and mid-sized businesses. EU AI labeling obligations begin, new AI agents from Microsoft and Google, a serious WordPress vulnerability, and more — the topics owners and managers should know.

On June 30, 2026, AWS announced availability changes for several services. From July 30, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Q Business and others can no longer be adopted by new customers. Here's the full list and how to check whether your company is affected.

The Lenovo IdeaPad C340 (15) can have its memory increased up to 20GB by upgrading (replacing) the memory. Here I explain how to choose the memory to add and how to install it. 1. Choosing the memory to add 2. Preparation before adding memory (tools) 3. How to add (replace) the memory 4. Checking after adding the memory 1. Choosing the memory to add Going to Crucial's site lets you find memory that suits your computer. If you tick "I agree to the terms of use" and click the

Price setting is an important factor in winning the Buy Box on Amazon. Amazon Seller Central also provides a tool that sets prices automatically. It's an extremely handy tool, so master it and get ahead of your rivals. What is "Automate Pricing"? Until now I'd been adjusting prices manually while watching my rivals' listing prices, but with this tool you can automatically adjust the price of target products in line with changes such as the Buy Box price. 1. You can create mu

Some people work as salaried employees while also investing in property and earning income from it. If you have rental income in addition to employment income, a final tax return is required in Japan. This explains the flow for preparing the statement of earnings and expenses when filing with e-Tax, and what to enter in each field. Starting the tax return Go to the National Tax Agency's tax return preparation corner and click "Start preparing." Since we want to submit via e-

gBizID is a shared authentication system in Japan that lets corporations and sole proprietors access multiple government services with a single ID and password. Accounts have no expiry date and require no annual renewal. (As of March 28, 2023) Please keep the gBizID account information you obtain safe. Types of gBizID gBizID has three account types: Prime, Member, and Entry. The government services you can use differ by account type. For details, see the "List of government s

I could never quite get on with the AWS Toolkit, so I'd turned it off and developed using the tools that appear on the right side of the Cloud9 screen — but it seems using the toolkit has finally become mandatory, and I can no longer turn it off. I was debugging on Cloud9, and got stuck right at the point of passing arguments to the program. Development environment Cloud9 ・Instance type: t2.micro ・EBS: 30GB (gp2) ・Development language: python3.9 How to pass arguments to a pro

A note on Linux commands zip -r <zip file name> <directory to zip>

When running BeautifulSoup on AWS Lambda with python3.9 as follows soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'lxml') I'm noting down how I dealt with the following error, for future reference. [ERROR] FeatureNotFound: Couldn't find a tree builder with the features you requested: lxml. Do you need to install a parser library? Fix 1: Installing lxml From the error message I thought installing the lxml parser would solve it, so I installed the lxml library pip install lxml -t . But th

Generally, you receive the withholding tax statement together with your December payslip. When making a furusato nozei (hometown tax) donation, knowing your income for that year is very important in order to donate right up to the limit. For example: deduction simulations and calculation methods offered by furusato nozei sites. To know the details of your income, looking at the withholding tax statement is the reliable way. What is a withholding tax statement? The withholdi

Even when you find a product to sell on Amazon and judge from your research that it should sell, you can't tell how much profit you'll make unless you know the fees for selling via FBA. With FBA, besides Amazon's referral fee there are fulfillment fees and others. The fees also change with the product's size and category. FBA fees can be found right away by using the "FBA Revenue Calculator." Accessing the FBA Revenue Calculator Anyone with an Amazon Seller account can acces

If you research for Rakuten point reselling but struggle to find good products — using a little IT skill can improve your Rakuten research dramatically. Looking at Rakuten Developers, you'll see there are many APIs. Among them, this article introduces how to use the "Rakuten Ichiba Item Search API," which is useful for Rakuten research. Signing in to Rakuten Developers Go to Rakuten Developers (https://webservice.rakuten.co.jp/) and sign in with your Rakuten member ID. Issui

A notice arrived from Amazon addressed to Amazon developers. It's an important reminder about Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS): MWS becomes unusable after March 31, 2024. The official announcement in July 2022 gave notice that all private MWS developers, including Amazon selling partners integrated with MWS, would ultimately lose access to MWS after specific dates from September 2023 onward. All MWS users must either migrate fully to the Selling Partner API (SP-API) or re

An important reminder about our existing integration with Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) has arrived. As previously notified, MWS becomes unusable after March 31, 2024. To avoid interruption to operations using MWS, within 90 days all MWS users must either migrate fully to the Selling Partner API (SP-API) or replace existing app functionality with third-party apps. As the required action, prepare for the final retirement of MWS access to the following MWS API sections,