[Update: Thanks, guys; the check is in the mail. More new-camera-porn here.]

Now that you’re releasing a 24+ megapixel full-frame 35mm CMOS sensor, don’t you feel a little stupid for making some of your high-end Zeiss lenses for the Alpha line APS-C-only? I doubt you’ve actually sold many of them, given the price and scarce distribution, but still, you had to know that full-frame was a requirement for a serious player in the DSLR market, and your recent announcements show that you’re not just keeping the low end of the old Minolta lineup.

Just to be clear on this: if you put that sensor into a body that’s the equivalent of Minolta’s 7 or 9 series (pleasepleaseplease a 9!), you’ve got a customer here already waiting in line.

For the past few weeks, my mother has been calling to say, “we sent you a monkey for Christmas, has it arrived yet?”. Each time, she seemed disappointed that I didn’t have my monkey.

Last night, it arrived. The Powertraveller Powermonkey-explorer universal charger. It’s an external battery for extending the charge on your gadgets, and it comes with a bunch of adapter tips for different phones and toys, a charger with a set of international plugs, and a small solar panel for charging off-grid.

The only additional adapter tip I’ll need to buy is for the DS-lite, which isn’t quite a standard mini-USB. Can’t have my kanji practice tool dying on me!

Now available from Amazon.

So I bought the second-generation Sony Reader. Thinner, faster, crisper screen, cleaned-up UI, USB2 mass storage for easy import, and some other improvements over the previous one. It still has serious limitations, and in a year or two it will be outclassed at half the price, but I actually have a real use for a book-sized e-ink reader right now: I’m finally going to Japan, and we’ll be playing tourist.

My plan is to dump any and all interesting information onto the Reader, and not have to keep track of travel books, maps, etc. It has native support for TXT, PDF, PNG, and JPG, and there are free tools for converting and resizing many other formats.

Letter and A4-sized PDFs are generally hard to read, but I have lots of experience creating my own custom-sized stuff with PDF::API2::Lite, so that’s no trouble at all. The PDF viewer has no zoom, but the picture viewer does, so I’ll be dusting off my GhostScript-based pdf2png script for maps and other one-page documents that need to be zoomed.

I’ll write up a detailed review soon, but so far there’s only one real annoyance: very limited kanji support. None at all in the book menus, which didn’t surprise me, and silent failure in the PDF viewer, which did. Basically, any embedded font in a PDF file is limited to 512 characters; if it has more, characters in that font simply won’t appear in the document at all.

The English Wikipedia and similar sites tend to work fine, because a single document will only have a few words in Japanese. That’s fine for the trip, but now that I’ve got the thing, I want to put some reference material on it. I have a script that pulls data from EDICT and KANJIDIC and generates a PDF kanji dictionary with useful vocabulary, but I can’t use it on the Reader.

…unless I embed multiple copies of the same font, and keep track of how many characters I’ve used from each one. This turns out to be trivial with PDF::API2::Lite, but it does significantly increase the size of the output file, and I can’t clean it up in Acrobat Distiller, because that application correctly collapses the duplicates down to one embedded font.

I haven’t checked to see if the native Librie format handles font-embedding properly. I’ll have to install the free Windows software at some point and give it a try.

[Update: I couldn’t persuade Distiller to leave the multiple copies of the font alone, because OpenType CID fonts apparently embed a unique ID in several places. FontForge was perfectly happy to convert it to a non-CID TrueType font, and then I only had to rename one string to create distinct fonts for embedding. My test PDF works fine on the Reader now.]

Our product is no longer a secret. Most of the tech blogs and news sites have something up today, although the quality of information varies. I won’t be commenting on it here much.

Sony’s first Minolta-compatible SLR was the A100, which was a rebadged and slightly improved Minolta 5D. They’ve now shown off prototypes equivalent to the old 7-series and 9-series bodies, which is good news for people like me with a significant investment in Minolta glass.

About six months ago, The Former Employer With Whom I Signed A Non-Disparagement Agreement decided to close their field offices and consolidate everything at the main office in Kirkland. Some folks were asked to relocate, some were laid off immediately, and a Lucky Few were asked to stay around for a while to manage the transition.

I fell into the third group, with the promise of a reasonable quantity of extra cash should I complete my tasks to their satisfaction. This cash was in fact received on schedule, so I have no immediate plans to test their tolerance for disparagement.

We said our goodbyes at the end of 2006, and I spent the first week of 2007 in Las Vegas, courtesy of a “three-free-nights” offer at the Luxor. While I was out there, Ooma, the company many former co-workers had already fled to, called me up to arrange interviews. I went in on the 10th, went back to meet the CEO on the 15th, accepted their offer on the 16th, flew home to Ohio to quickly see my family on the 19th, and started work today.

What do we do at Ooma? Can’t tell you. Ask again in (can’t tell you).

I finally stopped in at a Sony store and checked out the Reader. The display is wonderful for reading (although I’d like to see kanji with furigana), the form factor is just right, and I estimate the battery would last through five complete novels worth of page-turning, but the control layout is clumsy, the UI is a mess, and it’s slooooooooow.

Waking it from sleep is quick, but obviously uses a trickle of power. A cold boot took nearly two minutes, and every UI operation takes nearly a second. Not just “navigate to sub-menu, redrawing entire screen”, but “move the pointer down from option 1 to option 2”. The real reason it has ten numbered buttons across the bottom of the screen is so you can avoid the ten second delay of moving the pointer from choice 1 to choice 10.

I love the screen, though. I didn’t have the patience to find out if you can shut off full justification for books, which looks awful in portrait mode, especially if you increase the font size. I also didn’t spend enough time with it to find out if you can reprogram one of those buttons to switch between portait and landscape modes; doing it through the menus involves six full-page redraws, so it’s not something you want to do often. And, of course, there’s no support for searching, which makes it useless for any kind of reference material.

In a few years, these things should be incredible, and worthwhile at twice the price. Today, not so much. Some of the limitations are technical (I suspect that moving the navigation pointer requires a full redraw), but the controls and UI are Sony’s fault.

On second thought, forget Sony. “Dear Apple…”