So the Camry Hybrid crossed 6,000 miles yesterday, just in time for me to drop it off for its first service. Average mileage over that period settled down to a pleasant 38.2 miles/gallon on Regular. My only complaint at the moment is that when the service-me-now timer goes off, the convenient in-dash display of range, mileage, etc, is overridden; you can get it back for a few seconds, and scroll through the different displays, but it always reverts to MAINT REQUIRED. I could find no way to reset the timer; I could add a dozen categories of new timers, but not clear one that’s already gone off.

For amusement, while I was waiting at the dealership, I sat behind the wheel of a Prius 4-door hatchback. Well, the idea was amusing, anyway; the actual experience was distinctly uncomfortable. Nice storage space with the rear seats down, though.

But what’s it for?

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The Kindle has generally excellent support for reading PDF files, but absolutely terrible support for displaying embedded metadata. If FOO5419.pdf contains properly-specified Title and Author fields, it will appear on your Kindle as, you guessed it, FOO5419. It might show the Author on the right-hand side of the screen, and it might show Title and Author on the detail screen, but likely not.

It will work if you generate PDF version 1.3 with a self-contained Info dictionary (that is, “/Title(My Book)”, but not “13 0 obj (My Book) … /Title 13 0 R”). It will work if you do an append-only update to a v1.3 file in Adobe Acrobat Pro. It will work if you do a rewrite of a v1.3 file with pdftk.

What should work, for all PDF files, is an append-only update that uses only v1.3-ish features to create a self-contained Info dictionary. I hadn’t hacked PDF by hand since 1993, but I dusted off my reference manuals and wrote a script that correctly implements the spec.

It doesn’t work on a Kindle. Acrobat sees my data, Mac OS X Preview sees it, pdftk sees it, and every other tool I’ve tried agrees that my script generates valid PDF files with updated metadata. However, if I use my tool and then ask pdftk to convert the append-only update into a rewrite, the Kindle can see it (but only if it started out as v1.3).

I therefore declare their parser busted. The actual PDF viewer works fine, but whatever cheesy hack they’re using to quickly scan for metadata, it ain’t the good cheese.

Finally got sick of constantly dealing with the variety of encoding schemes used for Japanese text files. I still convert everything to UTF-8 before any serious use, but for just looking at a random downloaded file, I wanted to eliminate a step.

less supports input filters with the LESSOPEN environment variable, but you need something to put into it. Turns out the Perl Encode::Guess module works nicely for this, and now I no longer care if a file is JIS, ShiftJIS, CP932, EUC-JP, or UTF-8. Code below the fold.

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PDF version 1.5 doesn’t work for metadata (apparently because it compresses objects to reduce the output size); save as 1.3 for it to be parsed correctly, and you’ll still need to set the filename to the title you want displayed in the main book listing, even though the device actually parses it out of the file to display on the detail page. Blech.

You can insert the metadata with pdftk as per bloovis, or some other tools (the full version of Adobe Acrobat works great, but is not exactly free…). LaTeX users can use a sledgehammer to swat this fly with the hyperref package, but you’ll need to use dvipdfmx -V3 to downrev the PDF output to 1.3.

Sony got their PDF software from Adobe (for the DRM, mostly), so their Readers don’t have this problem. Sadly, this means that a file generated for the Kindle will display much slower on the Sony, since the object-compression is quite useful.

Many years ago, I was working setup at a trade show, and the network guy asked me to run down to the other end of the conference hall and check out a piece of equipment for him. When I got there, he called me on the radio and asked me what color the blinkenlights were.

“Oh, you didn’t know I’m partially color-blind.”

Today, Dan Kaminsky has released a new iPhone/Android app that does real-time color filtering to allow you to compensate for these problems. I don’t have any compatible devices at the moment, but they seem to have matured enough that it will be worth buying one soon, and this will be a must-buy app.

Fontographer 5.0 is out. I knew they’d done a cleanup release after acquiring the old code, but I hadn’t expected the FontLab folks to do major new development on it.

In this well-linked news, a team of researchers has reported success at curing erectile dysfunction with shockwaves. When describing how much force is being applied to the penis, they chose a very revealing comparison:

"These are very, very low energy shock waves," Vardi said. Each shockwave applied roughly 100 bar of pressure — some 20 times the air pressure in a bottle of champagne, but less than the pressure exerted by a woman in stiletto heels who weighs 132 lbs. (60 kg).

Apparently medical research is now being performed in full dominatrix gear. Who knew?