You really should proofread your Amazon listings:

Unrelated, if you like K-cups…

…Costco will have the Keurig K-Supreme Plus C on sale for $99 on Wednesday the 14th (online and probably in most warehouses). It looks like a solid upgrade from my Elite, with a better reservoir design and a possibly-better grounds-watering system, but I’ll likely pass, simply because I really only use it for my once-a-day liquid pie, and have mostly been drinking the output of the Nespresso in between cans of Diet Pepsi. The Elite should last me at least another five years at that rate.

On that note, a strong espresso pod plus 90 grams of crushed ice plus a healthy dose of sweetener (in my case, concentrated Splenda syrup), poured into the Barista Recipe Maker foam-as-a-service device and set to the “Iced Frappé” mode produces a 12-ounce glass entirely filled with delicious and quite stable coffee foam, with the remaining ice chunks at the bottom.

The FAAS has a setting for “Iced Nitro” that produces almost as much foam, but it’s not as stable, and quickly turns back into liquid. No other milk frothing device I’ve seen appears to be capable of handling ice at all, while this one will handle full cubes (which my fridge-door crusher sometimes lets through).

Related to unrelated…

…Costco also has a Nespresso Vertuo Next bundle for $169 that has at least $100 worth of extra goodies in it. Downside: the Next has been widely panned online due to quality-control issues, but oddly enough, it’s the same thing that people complain about in pretty much every Keurig review I’ve seen, even my original Elite, namely water going everywhere except into the coffee cup.

So, take that with a crystal of Folgers.

The Spidershot Channel and the B Ark That Couldn’t

Kumoko: “Let me show you its features!”

B Ark: Oh, look, a new character whose only personality trait is that she’s the victim of racial discrimination. Why was she added to an already-uninteresting plotline?

(elf maid is unrelated)

Dragon Maid filler

The second season doesn’t start until July, but Crunchyroll has started running some new short-shorts.

The death of remote control

Logitech’s Harmony series were pretty much the last remotes standing, but now they’re gone. They’re apparently promising to keep the servers running indefinitely (because while the products remain functional, you need the servers to change your configuration), and keep supporting new components, but yeah, they’re just going to stop working one day. Pity, really, since there doesn’t seem to be an adequate replacement; Amazon’s FireTV will try to control connected components, but I’ve found it so limited and unreliable that I turned it off completely. If the Harmony stops working, I’ll have to go back to having three or four remotes sitting out on the coffee table, like our primitive ancestors did.

(delivery girl is unrelated)

Miku who?

I’ve noticed that when I like a picture of Hatsune Miku, it tends to be one of the ones where I have to read the caption or tags to realize it’s her.

Avenue Q

Are the characters in Avenue Q horrible people because they’re New Yorkers, or because they’re Liberals?

Also, has the show been destroyed by cancel culture yet? It’s chock full of -isms that are officially verboten in Our Modern Era.

Combatants Will Be Loud And Boring

I did not expect anything from the KonoSuba author’s first attempt at an isekai story, and I did not get anything. Except a lot of shouting, which the creators seem to think makes terrible dialogue funnier. Kind of like Archer, in that way.

Coma For Slime

Episode 1 of the 4-koma-based spinoff of The Adventures of SuperSlime delivered the one thing I required of it: a better look at the upgraded goblin girls of RimuruVille. Other than that, the attempt to paper over the seams between the vignettes made it nearly incoherent.

(technically not a trap!)

Revenge!

Cute dead girls doing cute dead things to rebuild their cute dead career. Surprisingly sober way to start things off, given the previous wackiness.

Tomorrow: The Return of SpiderSpider and The B Ark

They took a week off between cours. I almost didn’t notice.

(spider is unrelated)

Isekai right back at ya

“Reborn in another world that was uninspired and derivative, I got tired of winning every battle and used my OP ability to destroy it, and now I’ve been reborn in my original world as my grandfather, so to prevent a paradox that will destroy every universe everywhere, I’ve got to sleep with my own grandma, ewwww!”

DS9 would have been more fun…

…if Odo had used his hammy Chef Louis voice from The Little Mermaid.

Nice try, Twitter…

“Hey kids, comics!”

The complete, official version of Buck Godot: The Gallimaufry is now available for purchase.

Filed a Joplin bug

Leading digits cut off on ordered lists. Kind of annoying, but the root of the problem is that they’re using a very naive webview in all clients that has no padding, so even when things aren’t being cut off, they’re right up against the edge of the window. I’ve been manually starting each note with a DIV that sets:

font-family: monospace; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.3em; padding-left: 16px

Photo Deathmatch: 81 pics enter, 1 pic leaves

I never made more than a cursory pass over the pictures from our 2019 Japan trip. As we’re absolutely-positively-definitely going in November, I thought now would be a good time to sort through all 1,050 of them.

I decided to be very aggressive about the weeding process, using the more-or-less standard stars/flags/keywords that are supported in Lightroom:

1. First pass, just take out the trash: reject anything that’s out of focus, severely over/under-exposed, random misclicks, etc. If you stop to think about salvaging it, keep it. (998 left)

2. Give every remaining picture 4 stars, then set the filters to show only pictures with exactly 4 stars.

3. Second pass, downrank 2/3 of the pictures to 1 star. Keep going until you hit that number. (330 left)

4. Go away for an hour/day/week, then downrank 2/3 to 2 stars. (110 left; “I am here”)

5. Go away for an hour/day/week, then downrank 2/3 to 3 stars. (~36 left)

6. Go away for an hour/day/week, then uprank 1/3 to 5 stars. (~12 left)

7. Any pictures that are interesting for other reasons can be flagged or tagged with a keyword at any step, but don’t spend significant time on them. This allows you to quickly handle things that are interesting but not necessarily good.

Acid Reign

My Pinky FunkoPOP has finally shipped. Y’know, the one I ordered in July that got delayed repeatedly, taking so long that I went ahead and bought the limited-edition version from a marketplace dealer. At least I saved $2.21 by pre-ordering it…

Maybe someday I should catch up on the actual show; I think the last one I watched was the hot springs episode where she was delightfully shameless when the little kid ended up peeking over the wall.

NSFW

Sync, Sync, Reboot

Or at least “reformat”. I’m still writing in StandardNotes for now, and while my sync bug is still open, it did trigger a code change to the backend sync server to handle conflict resolution better. I don’t know when that will be live on their official service, but they’re working on the problem. I’m tempted to dig into their sync algorithm a bit to see how it works under the hood, but it’s a Rails app, and I’m not a big fan of Ruby (seriously, is it really used for anything but Rails and Puppet?).

If I switch to hosting it myself, I’ll probably take at least a quick peek under the hood, so I have a better understanding of its quirks.

My current protection methods (switch to a different document at the end of an editing session and wait a few seconds before opening that document on another platform) seem to be adequate for now, which makes my #1 annoyance with the iPad app the gratuitous quote-smartening it does. I’m passing everything through BBedit occasionally to clean that up; at least it’s not inserting invisible garbage non-breaking spaces the way Synology’s Notes app does.

(#2 would be the “hide sidebar” button that’s an arrow literally overlapping your text, making it a small target where being slightly off means you pull up the on-screen keyboard instead; #3 is the fact that it uses a proportional font even in the basic text-only editor, without even a choice of size)

Light Noveling

[I stashed this away to use after the epilogue, but it was in one of my other synced-notepad apps, and I just tripped over it]

One of the common characteristics of light novels is that they’re sparse, with dialogue that can go on for pages without a single he-said/she-said, punctuated by shallow-but-clever wordplay and exposition overloaded with prenominal phrases that literally translate into prose so purple it could make Doc Smith blush.

It’s really easy to spot in translations, especially ones done by fans, who often get tripped up trying to convert a lengthy adjectival phrase from “over-there-standing yellow-hat-wearing-not man” to “the man who’s standing over there, not wearing a yellow hat”. Often the verb ends up attached to the wrong noun, mixing up object and subject. Seriously, go read a few translations of the Bump Of Chicken song “Hana no na”, which is absolutely stuffed with prenominal expressions, many of them chained.

Character descriptions are often thrown into the middle of the dialogue this way, in a way that maps poorly into the standard, “…he said excitedly” form. It comes out more like, “The still-trapped-in-the-intersection Koutarou shouted.”

Your life is racist, my racism is life

I don’t know who this obnoxious transdouchebag is, but he’s clearly less self-aware than Joe Biden on a good day. He just demoted every woman of color in the world who dates a white man to “minority sex servant” and property. And he thinks he’s being anti-racist. More evidence that the anti- in anti-racist and anti-fascist is like the in- in inflammable.

(via Ace)

Variant Nespresso sleeve-holder grid

Once I’d filled up three of my 3x5 sleeve holders, I realized that since they’re slightly narrower than they are tall, I had just enough room to do 6 columns of 3 rows on the 3D45; the extra 6mm hadn’t left much room for the skirt around the perimeter, so I’d cut it to 5 and gone vertical. New version.

The only change I’d consider making is adding some screw-holes on one side, so you could connect two of them front-to-back to support the sleeves at two points without printing something much taller. They’re plenty stable horizontally, so I wouldn’t screw them down or in parallel. I could also double the height, but they work fine now, and the fully-loaded 3x5 version is easy to just pick up and move around with one hand.

Or I could just stop buying coffee until I use some of these up… 😁

Cake or Death?

No, wait, I meant “cheesecake or succubus?”. I’d say that the first ~3,300 words of Virginia’s story is solid enough to start posting, which is 14 snippets. I’ll likely limit them to 1/day while I see where it’s going, because I’ve had to go back and tinker with some of the early bits, and I’m considering them done once they hit the blog.

Or is it time to bring back more cheesecake, especially the 3D kind? My chock-full-o-chicks folder is getting really, really big, to the tune of 52,000 images taking up 10 gigabytes.

The themed ones take a while to do, while the champloos are mostly just picking out a decent mix of relatively-safe and not-so-safe images, then running a script.

I am resisting the temptation to start a third story in this universe right now based on something the Old Man said. I am intrigued by the concept of a Chooser Of The Slain whose selection criteria for heroes involves love, sacrifice, and parenting skills. I’m thinking she’s a bit of an oddball.

Drip, drip, drip

When I started spiking my liquid pie with a shot of espresso and foamed milk, I finally got around to printing this replacement drip tray for the Essenza Mini. Even my tallest 21-ounce mug fits under it, and the coffee just manages to land inside with all of them.

The one flaw it has is that the top is just an array of small holes, without a larger one to place directly under the spot that gets the most drips (and also to hook your finger into to pull it off for cleaning). Rather than modify that STL file, I redid it from scratch in OpenSCAD, and here it is.

The code’s a bit of a mess at the moment, because this kind of hole distribution takes a bit of work in OpenSCAD. Rectangular or hex grids of an object are an easy one-liner with BOSL’s grid2d() module, but while there’s a whole bunch of math-dinking on the subject of efficiently packing circles inside circles, there doesn’t seem to be much on radially distributing them with even spacing. I settled for calculating the number of concentric circles of circles that would fill the space and using zring() to space them out. Not perfect, but good enough for coffee work, and I took advantage of the slight irregularity in the pattern to carve out room for the hole that was the point of the exercise, so it ends up looking almost deliberate. (shhhhh! don’t tell!)

Perhaps I’ll revisit that sometime and do the math for a completely consistent, symmetric hole distribution. I should just need to calculate the right parameters to feed into zring(), including the offset angle between adjacent rings.

Great Red Spot update

Speaking of liquid pie, it’s now a Mocha Latte/Red-eye/Chocolate Macchiato (with Peet’s Nerissimo as this morning’s espresso add-in). Adding 3 grams of cocoa powder to the 60ml of milk in the foam-as-a-service device is 6 calories of decadence.

SRC update

I’m still using ESR’s whimsical SRC source-control system for single-directory collections of config files. I think I’m responsible for about a third of all the bugs filed against it, and one of them was just fixed this week. It was one of those annoying little corner cases where he’d done the right thing in every single instance except one.

Iosevka Termanal update time!

I need to remake my custom version of Iosevka sometime soon. It’s up to version 5.0.6, and I last built my variant at 3.4.6, all the way back in August. Hopefully the build system hasn’t changed too much, and I can reapply my changes fairly quickly.

Want.

I would buy an entire album of Amelia Watson rapping Doctor Seuss. Also ringtones. I’ve been listening to them both on repeat on my rare outings to stores.

Anime fatigue

In last week’s episode of The Amazing Spiderspider, the B Ark hit warp 9 to precisely define the duelling timelines and try to make us feel angst over the fate of Some Guy. This came at the expense of reducing the coherence of Adventures In Spiderville.

As a result, I haven’t watched this week’s episode yet.

For bespoke noodles…

…artisanal ramen broth. From Yamasa USA, who sells this stuff in 80-ounce plastic jugs. At least they didn’t call it small-batch-craft-brewed-hand-pressed or some such nonsense, but no matter how much descriptive linguists wave their hands, either words have meanings or up is down and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Makes me want to call them all serial killers sometimes, if usage defines meaning.

Things you never want to see in Production…

I happened to follow a link to Tassimo’s US site. No, I’m not interested in Yet Another Coffee System, even though Amazon is once again unable to deliver my monthly liquid-pie supply (good thing I’ve got 70 k-cups left…). This is what I found:

Oopsie. Wonder how long it’s been that way?

Pod-stacking

It’s a good thing Nespresso’s marketing plan doesn’t involve selling their branded coffee pods on retail shelves, because the sleeves are just plain annoying. They don’t stand upright without custom supports, they don’t stand out on a shelf if they’re stored flat, and even if you do store them flat, they’re slippery little suckers that will not stay neatly stacked.

There’s also the problem that there are far too many varieties to stock for all but the most determined specialty store; even without trying hard, I have 21 different varieties, most in multiples. Peet’s and Illy each only sell 5 (with one of them a decaf), both in the same excellently-designed retail packaging by a company called JDE, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, who also makes the L’OR brand of pods.

Most of the commercial and 3D-printable holders either showcase the distinctive sleeves or the unsleeved, jewel-like pods. I just wanted to be able to store the damn things without them sliding off each other, so I made this 3x5 grid, designed to print at 0.3mm layer height and 0.4mm line width, without infill or supports. It fits on my Dremel 3D45 with room to spare, and prints in exactly 2.5 hours.

It’s just snug enough to store them vertically or horizontally while still allowing them to slide freely in and out, which also means that you need to dial in your Z-height pretty well or apply appropriate elephant’s-foot compensation.

OpenSCAD source:

// Nespresso Original sleeve storage grid

include <BOSL/constants.scad>
use <BOSL/shapes.scad>
use <BOSL/transforms.scad>

/* [Basic Parameters] */
columns = 3;
rows = 5;
height = 12;

divider = 1.2;
border = 2.4;

/* [Sleeve Size] */
sleeve_h = 39;
sleeve_w = 38;

/* [Curve Rendering] */
$fs = 0.5; $fa = 0.5;

w = sleeve_w * columns + divider * (columns - 1) + 2 * border;
h = sleeve_h * rows + divider * (rows - 1) + 2 * border;
grid=[sleeve_w + divider, sleeve_h + divider];
difference() {
    cuboid([w, h, height], fillet=divider, edges=EDGES_Z_ALL, align=V_TOP);
    down(0.01)
        grid2d(cols=columns, rows=rows, spacing=grid)
            cuboid([sleeve_w, sleeve_h, height+0.02], align=V_TOP);
}

Once, there was an Outback

Now, there’s nothing left but a Bag O’ Crab. Seriously, that’s what replaced the Outback Steakhouse in Salinas.

Seems kinda cheesy to me.

Amazon Prime Choices

I just can’t make up my mind here…

Adventures in Gaslighting

Courtesy of Ace of Spades, two examples of the ever-encroaching arrogance of a fraction of a percent of the privileged 1%, gaslighting the bejeezus out of the entire world. If the trans community wants to know what’s keeping people from accepting them, this is it:

NSFSS

(that’s “Not Safe For SuperStraights”, because these assclowns have redefined straight to mean “straight men willing to suck dick”, perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of “Bi Erasure” in the modern LBTQROFLMAOWTFBBQ community; see also SuperLesbian, for “lesbians unwilling to suck dick”)

Nobody hates them as much as they hate themselves.

Unrelated,

Something I left out in yesterday’s glamour photography rant: do not use wide-angle lenses at close range. I don’t care how flat a Japanese girl’s ass is, perspective distortion gives her monstrous thighs, calves, and feet. Just cram the underwear into her crack like everyone else does if you need to pretend she’s got back.