Found this in my junkmail folder. It must be really important to be sent to me in California, so I’m sharing it with you as well:

Dear Member,

Due to the adverse weather conditions, please be advised that the swimming pool at Royal Russell School will be closed to members on Saturday 3 March. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards

Vicky Rees
Administration Assistant
020 8657 4433
www.royalrussell.co.uk

This is a real boarding school about an hour south of London, and the email went to my me.com email address, so it looks like I have yet another evil twin who doesn’t know his iCloud email address, quite a bit younger than the one in Boca Raton or the one in County Cork.

Or, “y’know, her” (and friends). I kept seeing fan-art of this visually striking warrior babe with an odd face-mask and a penchant for thigh-high stockings. Thanks to the 50% off Steam sale on NieR: Automata, I now know that her name is 2B, her mission is slaughtering mechanical mooks, and her panties are air-cooled.

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Jumanji is still in over 2,500 theaters, and the Bluray pre-release (March 20) is #2 on Amazon in both the Comedy and Action/Adventure categories, and #7 in Movies/TV (any format).

To make this one a bit of a challenge, I set some ground rules:

1. no pervy crotch or ass shots.
2. exclude age-inappropriate activities.
3. include Hot Dark Girl Rei with her Kickass Scarf.

It wasn’t easy…

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I am deeply saddened to find no Funko Pop figurines of Pinky, Froppy, or Ruby Roundhouse. How can I keep my office safe without them?

Update

Well, when this comes out, I should be protected from any hostile force. Even idiot managers.

One thing that’s always bugged me about the opening credits of Vividbutt Observation is Wakaba-chan’s kendo scene.

She’s swinging her bokken more or less horizontally, which means she’s hitting with the flat of the blade (foreshortening distorts it, but at best it’s at 45° to the target). Much, much worse, the curvature of the blade says she’s holding it the normal way, but the edge is up, and she doesn’t look anything like Rurouni Kenshin (fortunately).

Had dinner at Galpão Gaucho Brazilian steakhouse recently. Next time I’ll bring a second stomach along so I can eat more.

Update

Now that we’re back from the weeklong tour of Napa and Livermore (mostly Napa), I’ve changed the above link to point to the actual location we ate at, not the one close to my office.

When I upgraded to an iPhone 6 Plus (a year after it came out), I turned my old 4S into a full-time music player in the car. Every six months or so, it would restart and fail to play music until I unlocked the screen, which was a trivial nuisance. The fact that the car’s display didn’t have Japanese font support has always been the only actual issue with connecting an iPod in this car.

During our recent trip to Napa, it did something I hadn’t seen before: refuse to work until I authenticated it against Apple’s servers. I wasn’t going to put it on a random hotel wireless network (given how long ago Apple stopped providing security updates), so I simply didn’t have music in the car for a week until I got home and connected it to my old MacBook (which involved entering credentials on both sides, agreeing that they should be allowed to speak to each other, and reconfiguring all the sync options that had been reset).

(Why not hook the 6 Plus to the car? Because Apple keeps changing their APIs, and 2018 iOS is “not entirely compatible” with my 2011 car)

Please fire the web designer who thinks there should be a maximum password length (16) on your site. There are only two possibilities for this stupidity:

1. you’re storing cleartext passwords rather than a hash.
2. your webclowns don’t realize that the length of a salted hash has no relationship to the length of a user’s password.

I’d prefer to believe #2, but since there’s a good chance of #1, I won’t be leaving a credit card on file…

At first glance, this item looks like it would be nice to have when your butter’s cold and your toast is hot:

But then I read the detailed description…

“It is a thing of beauty, and easy to use at home, as long as you have a drill.”

Also, most of the ones offered on Amazon by randomly-named companies (seriously, “Dhrbsx”?!?) are rather pricier than where I originally saw it, Lee Valley Tools.

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking your tongue.

(via)

Google’s map hides the horrible truth!

You had a good run of making interesting TV series. You can stop now. The Three Body Problem (aka China’s Battlefield Earth) is not worth your time or money.

Unless you adapt it about as faithfully as, say, Starship Troopers. That would work.

If I were a British TV producer, I’d feel insulted…

Just picked up the smaller Orbi bundle at Costco. This is the SKU they’ve added recently (RBK22-100NAS) that only has two units (“router” and “satellite”, both with ethernet backhaul); I didn’t really need a 3-pack of the original model, just one on each floor.

The hardest part of the setup was switching off the builtin NAT and running it in AP mode; you can’t do it from the iOS app. The second hardest was discovering that the app artificially limits you to short passwords; the web GUI will let you enter up to 63 characters, as expected for WPA2-PSK.

Preliminary results look good. I may tweak the placement of the units (I just grabbed the first available power and ethernet, since the old wireless is still running), and turn on the optional beamforming, etc. At the very least, I should get better performance on my front porch.

I figure it’ll take me a few days to find all my wireless devices and switch them over. :-)

Update

The optional beamforming is off by default for a reason. It apparently has disconnect issues.

…spokesbullies like David Hoggführer and Sinead O’Castro make it look a lot like the past.

Or just the latest example of “this is how you get more Trump”.

More VividCheek Occupation, but not too much more, IYKWIMAITYD.

Bonus Rei chibis:

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If you think that the true essence of Italian pizza is “overwhelming raw garlic flavor”, then this is the sauce for you. If you actually like pizza, though, avoid it like the vile crap it is. I didn’t want to just throw it away, so I cut it half-and-half with Ragu jarred pizza sauce, and it was still way too garlicky.