October 2011

Aligned with my interests...


Ahem. Idol All-star Swimsuit Tournament, 2009.

Nikkan Sports has quite a few photo galleries that may be of interest. Some of them may even feature sports. They “protect” the pictures with the usual stupid disable-right-click Javascript, which will keep them from being downloaded for a fraction of a second.

California blinks, Amazon reinstates affiliates


I never actually made any money off of being an affiliate, but I know that a lot of people depended on it, and now that California has backed down on their tortured redefinition of “nexus” (pending federal clarification on how sales tax collection should work), they’re back in business.

Mail.app: scarily efficient at doing IMAP wrong


For the past several releases, Mail.app has had a problem where it creates multiple offline drafts of a message that stick around after the message is sent successfully. Usually, I just clean them out when I spot them, no big deal.

Today it happened with a message that contained a number of rather large binary attachments (~30 megabytes), which I was sending to my Sony Tablet as a test. The test went fine at the office, but when I got home and plugged my computer in, the Internet went away.

Mail.app was frantically trying to upload four copies of the huge draft message to my IMAP server, and completely saturating my uplink. The only way to fix it was to force-quit Mail and empty out the contents of the .OfflineCache directory for that account. This was, of course, not the first solution I tried. Grrr.

Begun, the IR Wars have


Sick of nitwits playing with a TV-B-Gone, or maybe you don’t think it goes far enough? Jam the IR spectrum to disable all remotes.

Hipster street cred


  1. Occupy Wall Street (read: “skip classes; someone else is paying for it anyway”).

  2. Select generic slogan that would be just as meaningful applied to Congress, unions, or any local school board (“no more corruption”).

  3. Use Google Translate to convert idiomatic English into ungrammatical Chinese that means something entirely different (“not corrupted any more”), and scrawl the resulting Hanzi characters onto a poster with a marker.

  4. Feel proud of this dubious accomplishment.

Dear Amazon,


I just finished reading book 9 of the Destroyer series on my Kindle. From inside the book, I clicked to go to the Kindle Store, and my recommendations were:

  • Six Easy Pieces, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman
  • Bad Astronomy, by Philip Plait
  • Genius, by James Gleick
  • The Faith Healers, by James Randi
  • The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Pale Blue Dot, and Billions & Billions, Carl Sagan
  • Japanese Hot Pots, by Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat
  • The Destroyer volumes 7, 6, 12, 3, 11, 17, 40, 31, 36, 37, 27, 44, 35, 34, 43, 30, 42, 26, 45, 39, 33, 20, 25, 49, 48, 46, 32, 38, 29, 47, 41, 28, 55, 50, 53, 52, 51, 57, 54, 56, and five more un-numbered books related to the same series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir.

All praise for filling the list with things I’m actually interested in, but do you think maybe you overdid it a bit on the Destroyer novels, especially since the one I’m most likely to want right now isn’t on the list at all?

At a guess, the metadata simply isn’t up to the task of identifying series relationships, and I’m seeing the usual “you just bought a nice watch, so you must be interested in buying a dozen more nice watches” problem.

Also, while I’m pleased that I finally have my Kindle recommendations straightened out, I sigh in despair at the weeks of Android-app-recommendation cleanup I face after buying some apps for my Sony Tablet.

[Update: it seems book 10 is the only one in the first fifty or so that isn’t available for Kindle yet.]

Setuid bits at half mast


Dennis Ritchie has died.

"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
    -- dmr@alice.UUCP

Questioning Siri


I said, “Find me a picture of Seven of Nine”.

Siri passed the request on to Google, who came back with this:

Sevens of Nine

That’ll do. (source)

What's J Watching?


Shrinkwrap spacesuits and cockpit-service.

True


From the comments on Macintouch:

"How much other Lion functionality depends on guessing that if you wave the rod with the star a crystal bridge will span the chasm?"

Working around the limitations...


Siri has a bit of a problem with foreign names.

Siri can't find Ai Shinozaki, or can she?

I don't want to know how they handle streaming...


Live-action Ranma 1/2 cast photos


Still “no thanks”, except maybe for pictures of the actress playing Kasumi.

Pics and short video clip.

OWS, the gift that keeps on giving...


…unless you’re, y’know, actually homeless, instead of being a contributor to the new society:

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday --- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.

Don't be a serial-comma killer


The Times says:

"...highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector"

(via Zhinxy)

Found on a map of Osaka...


I respect this maid cafe’s name. Quick review by Danny Choo (as the first destination on a whistle-stop tour of an otaku-centric corner of Denden Town).

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”