Curry-a-go-go

Restaurant To Another World episode 2.3 delivers teens devouring burgers, and the legendary black dragon of death devouring new forms of curry. The food porn is up to snuff, and at least some of the closeup character art is well done. Happy Kuro with curry on her face is adorable.

Terminate and Stay, Resident

Logged into my Pi-hole and found it was now blocking 49% of all web requests. That was a little nuts, but all of the new traffic turned out to be Google analytics being called every 3 seconds from my new Windows 11 laptop.

The culprit (kill, kill, reboot, kill, kill) was HP’s Omen Gaming Hub. There’s no tray icon associated with this, and no hint that the application leaves shit running all the time on your system, reporting data at a quite unreasonable interval. plonk

Now, it’s possible (but unlikely; it persisted after multiple reboots) that it really only intended to report once, and was frustrated by my blocking, but even that reflects sloppy and insecure development practices; retrying a failed transaction every three seconds without any kind of backoff is a recipe for disaster when you ship something on every new computer you sell. “Ask me about taking down 1/3 of MCI’s west coast long distance service every time WebTV’s Oracle server crashed”.

Latest hilarious spam

As usual with most of the crap landing in my spam folder these days, this went to my cpan.org email address, and was sent through the spam-launderers at pobox.com:

Greetings, from The illuminati world elite empire. Bringing the poor, the needy and the talented to limelight of fame, riches, powers and security, get recognized in your business, political race, rise to the top in whatever you do, be protected spiritually and physically! All these you will achieve in a twinkle of an eye when you get initiated to the great Illuminati empire. Once you are initiated to the illuminati empire you will get numerous benefits and reward.

Yeah, because the Illuminati have always been about raising up poor and needy Perl hackers. And terrible grammar.

Interestingly, this is just an email pitch, with no embedded malware or links to sketchy web sites, just a gmail address to contact for more information.

…which doesn’t match the sender address, of course, which is in the .lu TLD.

(Komi-san is unrelated, but will finally debut on Netflix on Thursday)

Toast & Fry

I was actually enjoying the counter space freed up by the dramatic slightly-out-of-warranty failure of my DeLonghi Livenza convection toaster oven, but I did miss the ability to turn frozen pizzas and other common household objects into food, and Costco happened to have a deal on the Ninja Foodi Digital Air Fry Oven. This precise model isn’t on their web site, because the SKU is Costco-specific, but it appears to be identical to the SP101; I don’t see any difference in features. Two things about it that aren’t quite as useful as they initially appear:

1. it’s only 8 inches tall when in use.

2. it stores vertically when not in use to reclaim counter space.

The catch is that you need to leave several inches of open space behind it, especially if the outlet you’re plugging it into is directly behind, as mine is. The net result is that even in the storage position it chews up a full 11 inches of a standard 24-inch-deep kitchen counter. The old one took up space all the time, but you could at least store things on top of it. So, mixed blessing there.

First note: it’s quite loud in air-fry mode. To the point that it’s distracting from 20 feet away in the next room.

Second note: checking the table of suggested settings for frozen food, I find it interesting that they consider the Standard Unit of Pizza Rolls to be “50”. This is like the honest serving size of Fig Newtons, which is “one sleeve”. (classical reference)

Third note: it gets quite hot on top when in use. If you need a plate warmer, Ninja’s got you covered.

Does it work? So far, so good. It competently air-fried a frozen personal pan pizza in 10 minutes, which is a common task at my house. It also did a good job baking cheese-stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, so we’re two for two.

Laptop fingering

With more use, I think the difference I’m seeing with the fingerprint sensor is that Apple has programmed a slight delay into theirs, so that you can slide your fingertip into position, while the one on the Aero starts reading as soon as you touch it, and rejects the half-seen fingertip.

Also, it’s a pain in the ass to switch back and forth between Command-C/V and Control-C/V for cut-and-paste. It’s been a long time since I’ve had MacOS and Windows side-by-side on the desk; I’ve really only been using Windows for gaming for the past 15 years or so.

Retraining my Japanese text entry is going to be even harder; the input methods have basically nothing in common.

One thing I’m not going to port over directly is my command-line Japanese dictionary tool, which for historical reasons uses MongoDB as its database. In fairness, I wrote it 11.5 years ago, when I was using MongoDB at work, and just haven’t touched it since then (my laptop even had spinning disks inside it!). I made a stripped-down lookup tool using Sqlite, but that threw out a lot of the available data in order to create compact page-by-page vocabulary lists for my custom book-reading scripts.

Our Digital Future

Nope, Kannagi’s not streaming anywhere, and the DVDs are long out of print, and the only used DVD offer on Amazon is for $86. Quick, Robin, to the TorrentMobile!

…which seems to be missing an engine today, as my client struggles to connect with peers. I confess, my first response was “what did Apple break now?”.

WTF, Acronis?

Okay, I go to the Acronis web site, and what do I find? They’re pushing a conference called “Cyber Fit”, prominently featuring the co-founder of Reddit, an expert in cybering. Someone should really tell them that adding “Cyber” to everything is about as fresh and modern as advertising a Prodigy-compatible modem.

And, yes, services for individual home users is third on their list. Their primary interest is clearly selling to service providers and businesses now. It’s like they’re telling me up front that they’re not motivated to support me, with Cyber Protect Home Office playing third fiddle to Cyber Protect Cloud and Cyber Protect.

And, yes, they also sell Cyber Appliance, Cyber Backup, Cyber Disaster Recovery, and #CyberFit Tool; they really, really want to cyber with IT directors. It’s their kink.

Me, I just want reliable backup and recovery of my laptop. Everything else they want to cyber me with is something I don’t want.

Fuck it,

I’m going to try out Synology Active Backup for Business, which comes free with my NAS. It took about five seconds to install the client agent, and then I manually kicked off a full backup from the server, which quickly and successfully backed up 128 GB. The backup/restore portal looks nice, too, with an interactive browser that let me easily navigate to a specific file and download it to my Mac. If the incrementals are successful and the agent doesn’t chew up CPU and memory (always a possibility), then it’s going to work out great. If I ever travel again, I’ll have to see what ports it uses and try out remote backups.

Synology also has a free tool for backing up Microsoft 365 business accounts, which I’m considering using for one of my email domains. Mostly because it’s $30/user/year at the company store with my MS alumni discount, and I only need the one user.

Free to good home…

In an unusual twist, a pinups&nudes blog moved to new hosting before being shut down by their current provider, so there’s a convenient redirect to the new site: the new Overflowing Museum of Cheesecake. Looks like the complete archives made it over. The owner has been experimenting with ad networks and embedded videos for pay porn sites, but it hasn’t descended to the level where it’s hijacking clicks to load other sites; blocking ads and turning off Javascript just makes it faster, rather than being necessary for protection.

Card Kingdom results

Cards received at 10:15 AM Thursday, processed at 6:14 PM. Estimated price was $1,525.70 and the check (sent out Friday morning) is for $1,517.91, so they graded almost every card as near-mint. This bodes well for the next batch.

Aero gaming

I fired up No Man’s Sky on the new laptop as a quick performance test. It spun the fans up to high, which I couldn’t notice over the game music and background sounds, and ran surprisingly well. I didn’t load an old save, so there was no ready source of complex geometry to throw at it, just the basic starter exploration, and it handled that quite well. The bottom of the case got warm, but not even close to hot.

(it started me on a radioactive planet, so I had to hustle to get through the basics of acquiring materials to recharge my suit, air, and mining tool, and then find shelter during a storm while hunting down parts to fix my ship)

Fallout 4 stayed consistently over 30fps at 1280x800 on the “High” graphics settings. I stopped even looking at the fps counter after the first few minutes, and then completely forgot it was still on, because I hadn’t noticed any issues at all. The bottom-left of the case was warmer than with NMS, but mostly on the left side, and the fans quickly spun down after I exited.

Misc. laptop notes

Full-disk encryption is on by default, but one of the few meaningful differences between the Home and Pro versions of Win11 is whether you get the full Bitlocker experience (the other noteworthy features are Active Directory support and Remote Desktop server, as far as I can tell). The control panel did say that the recovery key was backed up to my MS account, and allowed me to also save a copy to my NAS. (it does not let you save it directly to your encrypted drive; I had to save to the NAS, and then store it in 1Password)

The fingerprint reader is either a smaller target than it appears to be, or a bit less reliable than the one Apple uses. It’s failed my finger three times in a row several times now, and falls back to PIN/password authentication when that happens. It could also be that it’s less generous than Apple’s, and effectively more secure as a result. I’m mostly interested in using it for 1Password, in any case.

The keyboard is as good as or better than my MacBook Air, which is fine for portable use. When I get serious about working on projects, I always connect a clattery mechanical keyboard.

(oddly enough, while I often use external keyboards with a laptop, I almost never use external monitors; I just got out of the habit a long time ago and never picked it back up)

Card sale update

I sent out a big batch of The Dark cards to Card Kingdom Tuesday, which they promise to pay $1,500 for, assuming their graders agree that my near-mint cards are actually near-mint. They’ve already sent a confirmation email that the cards have arrived, so depending on their turnaround, I could find out as soon as Monday.

Inspired by this possibility, I dug out more of the stuff I’d been about to throw away, and was surprised to find good-sized stacks of Legends, Antiquities, and Arabian Nights. The estimated value is, um, impressive, with several cards over $250 and a few over $1,000.

Yesterday morning, I opened up a box full of miscellaneous Illuminati: New World Order cards and found a near-mint Unlimited Mox Ruby and Gauntlet of Might. Now I have to go through everything, even the Jyhad and Mythos boxes!

It may take a while to sell everything off, just because I don’t want to risk them all in one UPS shipment.

🎶 “Mammaries light the corner of my eye…” 🎶

Still watching Kicked Out Of The Hero’s Party So I’m Shacking Up With A Busty Blonde Princess, and in episode 2, Our Retired Hero Guide is reunited with The Tsun Who Loved Him, and pretty much the entire episode is flashbacks documenting her quick and extremely thorough transformation into Very-Very-Dere, accompanied by frequent mutual blushing. I’d say “get a room”, but she’s already taken care of that by bullying him into letting her move in.

Since the point of this show is the clumsy romance between these two, having the first two episodes be their introductions works. I don’t know if they’re going to try to cover all of the first four novels, but that would be the obvious stopping place, resolving the fate of the entire Hero Party while getting these two to finally boink.

Given the genre conventions, it’s important to note that Our Couple first met five years ago, and both were already adults. They’re probably both 25-30, although Rit’s Amazing Rack is no more than 18.

(this is the only recognizable image I’ve seen for this series on Pixiv so far, and the text at the bottom suggests it’s official art, not fan-made, although perhaps the NSFW images in the set are not canon…)

(update: no, the descriptions for the set say it’s definitely fan-art)

HP Aero 13.3 with Windows 11

So, what’s the out-of-box experience on a brand-new laptop that shipped with Windows 11?

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I was kidding, honest!

After my laptop left Shanghai, its next stop was Incheon, South Korea. Fortunately, it just had a two-hour layover and then got back in the air, headed to Anchorage, where it’s sitting now. So, it didn’t stop for snacks in Japan, but then again, it probably couldn’t. Still.

Do it again, stupid!

I went back to my original Breath of the Wild save, which I ragequit after my Nth attempt to do the Rohta Chigah shrine. I didn’t have any problem solving the puzzles, it was the fact that it’s the only shrine in the game where you have to solve the final step in a limited amount of time, and you’re forced to redo all the previous steps if you fail. This takes several minutes each time, and there’s no real challenge once you’ve done them once, just tedium.

This time, I got it on the second try, so now I can finally experience the DLC content that was locked away behind it. I cheesed my way through Vah Ruta first, just to read Mipha’s diary.

Which reminded me that the final scene after defeating Ganon doesn’t make much sense:

spoiler

Card Sale

I think I’m going to try out Card Kingdom with some of the lesser (under-$100) cards, and if I like the results, send them the big ones a few at a time. If that goes well, I’ll do a bulk sale with them for the rest of the near-minty Legends and Dark cards, which are the only ones that seem to be worth anything (Fallen Empires was the first set where WotC actually printed enough that people weren’t camping the stores waiting for UPS trucks to arrive; coincidentally, it was pretty much the last set I bought any of).

I’m keeping the unopened starters and boosters of XXXenophile, though. And the three full sets, one of which has a lot of signed cards. 😁

Worse than smoking!

I was idly flipping through movies on Amazon, and accidentally double-clicked on Fletch (I like the movie, but I hadn’t been planning to watch it). One of the pre-movie warnings was:

OC: Outdated Cultural Depiction

Yeah, whatever, junior.

Toast!

My DeLonghi Livenza convection toaster oven lasted 16 months. The warranty was, of course, 12 months. Fortunately I was in the room when it made a very peculiar noise, started smelling of burnt plastic, and then killed itself off forever with a beep-beep-beep.

If you’d asked me yesterday if I would recommend this model, my answer would have been an emphatic yes. Now, not so much.

Restaurant to Another World #2.2

Lots of CGI and panned stills again, and there’s something wrong with the eyes on Adelheid and her maid. The food porn meets its usual standard, but the character art is definitely a step down from last season.

I thought it was a pity that the “no garlic please” vampires didn’t twig to the fact that the goddess they pray to was right there in the room with them, waiting tables. In fairness, I don’t think Kuro actually knows she has followers.

“It’s raining in Shanghai!”

UPS tracking for my new laptop now shows a delivery date of Wednesday the 13th, one week after the original estimate. It spent two days in Shanghai, but at least it didn’t make it to Japan before me!

(classical reference)

“For everything else, there’s MastercardMagic Cards”

While chucking out boxes of old trading-card-game cards that have been gathering dust in my closet for twenty years, I just happened to open a box that had about a dozen classic Magic: The Gathering cards that are collectively worth several thousand dollars. I’d wondered why I’d never been able to find them when we did the previous sell-off.

Anyway, that just paid for the new laptop and the new lens. Or will have paid for them, anyway, when I figure out the easiest way to sell them. Last time, I had a friend who’d sold all of his cards and vintage computer equipment on eBay, and I let him take care of unloading them. Since then, he’s moved to Georgia, so even if he’s willing to handle it, I’d have to first ship a carefully-insured package to him.

I don’t care about extracting the absolute best price, so if there’s a reputable company I can just sell them to online, that’ll work.

“Alexa, give me a unicorn chaser, stat!”

TIL that Amazon Music includes the Tim Curry solo album that features I do the rock, a song I associate with the classic Rocky Horror midnight-movie experience. I couldn’t make it all the way through, and had to request Zappa’s Be in my video to clear my head.

(we’ve secretly replaced the ‘related pictures’ with Folger’s Crystals Komi-san; let’s see if anyone notices)

Delay of Harem

The World’s End Harem show, set to premiere today, has rather abruptly been moved to a January release. Either the animators did a terrible job, or they did a really good job…

(episode 1 aired in Japan, but was not streamed with English subs, so someone may have to actually create a fansub rather than simply copying it)

Interspecies Reviewers, reviewed

One of the many manga series that got jerked around by Amazon (who also licensed the anime and suddenly dumped it when they belatedly realized it was about men fucking whores), I bought this on Kobo. Like the anime, this is light-hearted sexy fun.

The light novel, on the other hand, is clumsy pump-and-squirt porn written in first person mostly from the perspective of a character who only vaguely resembles the other two versions of Stunk. It’s pretty bad. (and note that it’s based on the manga, not the other way around)

More fun with Time Machine

I applied the recent Catalina security update this week, which involved a reboot. Surprisingly, the connection to the docking station did not reset this time, so it didn’t end up putting itself to sleep before the battery ran dry.

It did, however, slow down backups. Not because of the unnecessary garbage it’s (still) backing up, but because at boot it reverted to the “run backups really slowly in the background” setting, which can be fixed with:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

I like the fact that the name of this kernel variable contains no hint that it’s related to the performance of backupd.

Job title

Post-reorg, my never-used business cards are functionally obsolete, and the title on them was hopelessly generic anyway (“member of technical staff”). Should a post-Covid normal come to pass, I think I should get a new set printed, and see if I can get approval to use a title that better reflects my role and expertise.

I’m thinking “Self-Aware Perl Script”. 😁

Meet the new lens

I did not expect the new Sony lens to arrive with its own soft-sided carrying case, complete with handle, shoulder strap, and belt loop. Nice for storage, but a bit bulky for air travel, since I always keep computer and camera gear in my carry-on bags. Hypothetically speaking, I mean; it’s not like I have any travel plans right now…

Since it arrived after sundown Wednesday night, I didn’t get a chance to try it outdoors until after my first meeting of the morning, so I snapped a few quick shots of the backyard bloomers. As expected, working with an effective 150mm focal length made the framing a bit tight, and the depth of field at f/2.8 is extremely shallow, but the apodization filter really delivers on the “creamy out-of-focus area” feature.

Laptop in motion

Early this morning, it officially “left the facility” in Chongqing. Maybe by Monday it will finally show up somewhere else!

Dead Eyes

At the beginning of each photo shoot, every glamour model should ask herself, “what can I do better than a plastic doll?”. This shoot (NSFW! Javascript off!) featuring Korean model Zenny (신재은) is a classic example of not asking that question.

Lack of affordances

To my surprise, I just acquired a KitchenAid 5-cup food chopper. Surprised, because I didn’t order it, and it’s apparently an early seasonal gift from a family member who’s been in my kitchen, and should know that I own an electric food processor, a manual one, and a quite large array of sharp knives. Also that I haven’t been cooking much for a while now with nobody coming over.

It took me five minutes to figure out how to get the lid off without breaking the damn thing.

The catch is that even slight downward pressure on the lid locks it into place, because the part that extends over the handle is also the power/pulse switch. And there are no convenient arrows showing the direction to turn either the lid or the base, and the procedure in the documentation actually starts after you get the lid off. Even the video on the product page only shows you how to put the lid on.

Sure enough, there are a number of reviews on various sites from other people who were baffled by the opaque user interface.

The Bureau of Magical Hotties

I’ve made it through several more episodes, and Kimie Tsukakoshi remains the best reason to watch this show. Not just for her sleek hotness, but as the only one of the younger actors who’s keeping up with the grownups, particularly Christopher Sommers. I get the feeling Elizabeth Cullen could keep up, but so far her character is just weakly written; you could say she’s doing a good job in a bad job. I honestly don’t have a strong impression of the others yet (except that Rainbow Wedell is quite striking, despite the best efforts of the stylists); they’re just filling out the cast.

The world-building has some issues. They can’t seem to decide between “magical beings hiding in plain sight” and “parallel civilization that doesn’t understand the muggle world”, and it leads to numerous fridge moments and me fast-forwarding to the next scene.

The Department of Interface Redesign

There’s a lengthy discussion on MacRumors about Safari 15’s confusing and terrible new tabs, and I found it completely baffling… because I still run Catalina. I fired up Safari for the first time on my work Mac, which runs Bug Serf, and sure enough it’s a child so ugly even its mother will have trouble loving it. It was not designed, it was committed.

The Credit of Limited Usefulness

Amazon makes a big fuss about the benefits of selecting “Amazon day” shipping, offering a dollar or two in credit on digital purchases if you let them delay shipping your order and try to fit it into slightly fewer packages.

The catch is that the credit is applied to a book of their choice, so I now have 7 days to purchase Stranger in a Strange Land at $5 off, but only that one book. It’s not on any of my wish lists, it’s not one of my favorites, and I’ve already read both versions of it, so this “credit” will expire unused. I seem to remember that this used to be an actual credit that you could apply to any Kindle book, but someone chose to optimize the experience.

The Randomness of Everyday Essentials

Amazon, in what universe is rackmount Chromebook storage an “everyday essential”? I’m particularly intrigued by the $22 “protection plan”; come on, it’s a 3U shelf for a 19-inch rack, how much protection does it need?

The Tiniest of Pie Slices

MacRumors reports on a survey proclaiming that Apple is now the most popular brand of watch… among upper-income US teens… replacing Rolex. Exactly how many of these formerly-Rolex-wearing American teens exist?

(Komi is unrelated, and held hostage by Netflix for two weeks)

The Lateness of New Laptops

Early Monday, the status went from stuck-in-Customs to:

Your package is in transit. We’re updating plans to schedule your delivery.

Which would be great, but it hasn’t updated since. And that message had it still located in Chongqing, China. Which means that it didn’t make it onto a plane, and still hasn’t.

Check back tomorrow for an updated delivery date.

Again.

The Arrival of New Lenses

The lens, on the other hand, is definitely in the hands of FedEx, and will be in my hands sometime between 8am and 8pm, with a signature requirement that leaves me tied to the front door all day.

I’m not complaining about having to sign for a $1,000+ lens, I just wish they’d narrow down the window just a tiny bit.

The Randomness of Apple Upgrades

There is no way to deliberately update Apple Airpods to new firmware; it just happens, under conditions that can’t be arranged or predicted.

“…even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing…”

The Pharmacist of Rural Fantasyland

Meanwhile, Our Former Hero talks his way through the premise of the show, preparing for Slow Life, With Girl. Just the one, despite the huge tracts of land possessed by the cute adventurer-guild poster girl who’s obviously a bit smitten. The OP and ED make it clear that there won’t be any competition here, once they meet up next episode.

(no fan-art for this one yet, so here’s a maid on a skateboard)

It’s just a jump to the left

I downloaded the free trial of BackupLoupe to find out what the hundreds of megabytes of changes Apple was backing up every few hours actually contained. It took hours to fully analyze the 91 snapshots going back to November 2020, but it was worth it.

Number one with a bullet in its head: /private/var/db/diagnostics. The Persist and Special sub-directories are full of trace files. This is Apple just dropping turd files and never cleaning them up or recognizing that they are turds, and shouldn’t be backed up.

Number two would be ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/data/Docker.raw, if I used Docker more often; it’s up to 3.5 GB, and I hadn’t manually excluded it from TM. I only have a handful of utility containers on this machine, though, and I rarely update them, so it was only getting picked up maybe once a month.

Number three with a giant sigh is ~/.config/joplin-desktop/log.txt. The app never rotates the log, which logs every sync operation quite verbosely, so it goes back to when I first installed Joplin. Six months worth is about 96 MB, and because it’s a (fucking) log file, it changes any time the application is open, setting the minimum size for every backup. Bug filed.

(and promptly converted to an “enhancement request”, with a suggested solution that doesn’t accomplish jack shit…)

Kobo-ing

There are a number of manga series no longer available as Kindle ebooks, mostly because they contain naughty things. Some of them are still available in paperback, but even then there are some gaps. Yen Press sells on a number of platforms, though, and the one that doesn’t completely suck is Kobo, a piece of the Rakuten empire.

And by “doesn’t suck”, I mean that there are tools to strip the DRM from their books, back them up, and read them on the epub application of your choice, something that’s not true for the competing BookWalker service.

Kobo has their own line of dedicated ebook readers, including one that allows stylus markup of PDF files, but I haven’t used a dedicated reader for a few years now.

Sadly, the series I most want seems to be in licensing hell. Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs isn’t consistently available on any platform I’ve found. Kobo currently has books 6, 13, and 15, for instance, while Amazon has 11-15 in paperback only.

Looney Tunes

Former child actress Alyssa Milano, vaguely remembered for some TV shows and a movie or two, has declared, from inside her secure compound, that Now is the most dangerous time to be a woman in America.

Ya misspelled “Afghanistan”, honey-muffin. And whose fault was that?

Gosh, I’d love to open the windows, but…

…someone is power-washing a neighbor’s roof for the second day in a row. It’s tile, and the wrong side to install solar panels on, so I’m not sure why.

Whatever the reason, since it’s a two-story, I can’t open any of my first-floor windows without getting some unpleasant-smelling damp air coming in, and I have to turn up the music to mask the noise.

Overexplored territory

“Reincarnated in my own past as the girl next door, I try to fix me so that I don’t grow up to become such a loser that I end up being hit by a truck and reincarnated.”

Order status

New laptop still reportedly in Customs, new lens hasn’t shipped yet. Both still on target for Wednesday arrival.

Monday morning update

Laptop and lens are in the air!