Anime update

This season is a Wed/Thu/Fri schedule for me, with the only things I’m watching being Super-Pharmacist And Clingy Princess, the two-week delay of Komi-san, and Restaurant To Another World 2.

On the bright side, I got an advance copy of Richard Roberts’ new book, A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel. Need to read that tonight and give some feedback. Fortunately I recently learned what “sus” means, so it didn’t baffle me when it turned up in the first chapter.

Super-Pharmacist And Clingy Princess, episode 4

I could have done with less male nudity (this episode’s focus is “let’s save the local sauna”), but Rit and Nao shrink-wrapped in bath towels was adequate compensation. And I refuse to believe that Rit isn’t getting up early and arranging the view that Red wakes up to.

Bonus for Rit’s shy confession of why she was suddenly craving a particular beverage, and for Nao’s completely-unsubtle teasing about their relationship progress, or lack of same.

The Trouble With Komi-san, episode 2

So far, so good. I haven’t followed the source material, so this is all fresh to me. Fingers crossed that Komi gradually improves her communication skills over the season; it would get old fast if she doesn’t.

Fun with MS365

The Microsoft 365 service enforces a comprehensive list of rules on all user passwords, and will not take no for an answer. One of those rules is that the username cannot appear as a substring of the password, upper or lower case. So, a randomly-generated 24-character password like sQaHT88LCdx4Mq9z*fTUDTJv is rejected if the email address is j@example.com.

I understand the logic of avoiding “joe” passwords. The very first time I sent out excrutiatingly-polite change-your-password email, a Senior Researcher blew his top at the next faculty meeting. How dare this undergrad tell him what to do!! My manager looked at him and said, “the problem, mike, was that your password, mike, used to log in to all of our servers, mike, was trivial for any student to have guessed, mike.” He received no sympathy from the rest of the faculty.

Sure, block “mike” and “mikemike” and “jeepmike” and “mIkepass2”, etc, but it seems a tad extreme to completely ban a letter of the alphabet.

(zombie idols are unrelated)

Fun with Apple

So, let’s say you’re running iOS/iPadOS 14.8 and you don’t want the beta of 15.x.

Good: for the first time, you can install the 14.8.1 security update even on devices that support 15.x.

Bad: as an over-the-air update only. If you try to do it by connecting the device to your computer over USB, you can only upgrade to 15.x.

Which means that if you want a local pre-upgrade backup, you need to connect via USB, then disconnect and upgrade.

In other news, Safari 15.1 is out for Catalina and Big Sur, disabling the horrifying amateurish tab redesign.

Fun with Adobe

A big update to all the Creative Clown apps came out this week, which took quite a while to install. They really want you to auto-update, which is a terrible idea, but they’re pushing it so hard that you have to enable that option just to get it to transfer your saved settings from the old version of the apps. And then remember to shut it off again as soon as the updates finish.

In other Adobe news, the anime tie-in of the day is that the brush fonts used in the Demon Slayer series are now available in CC. Along with the first Adobe Original Japanese font in several years. Nice to see that they still have a few people in that department; I’d been wondering if it was all pretty much outsourced these days.

Interesting note: the new version of Photoshop no longer accepts the built-in graphics on my Macbook Air for GPU acceleration, insisting I need a driver upgrade. Which is a subtle way to say “install the beta of Big Sur or Monterey”. Nah, I’m good, thanks.

(unrelated, and a lot more fun than updating Photoshop and Illustrator)

Fun with Edge

I want every application to support this option. I’m getting really sick of having to remember to mash down all the modifier keys any time I want to paste text as just text:

Hard to read the gray text, but setting plain-text paste also enables an option to get rid of some background site-loading fuckery that’s even worse than just pasting rich-text. Baby steps, Microsoft.

---

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.

---