An alarm clock that won’t stop until you put your weight on it for a few seconds:

This wouldn’t have worked for me in college. I had an incredibly loud, obnoxious alarm clock that had no snooze button, which I kept on the first floor, with the switch wrapped in duct tape. When it went off, hitting “snooze” meant I had to get up, walk downstairs, unwrap it, manually adjust the alarm time, rewrap it, walk back upstairs, and go back to bed.

I generally managed to do this four or five times before actually starting the day.

Seems there’s a trivial denial of service attack against GPG via the keyservers, and the fix is… well, there really isn’t one:

“​…the SKS software was written in an obscure language by a PhD student for his thesis. And because of that, according to Hansen, ‘there is literally no one in the keyserver community who feels qualified to do a serious overhaul on the codebase.’”

…there was a spinoff manga featuring her adventures before the gate opened.

…at a generously-drawn age 14.

File under peculiar the fact that while Amazon is swimming in a sea of rapidly-translated dumpster-fire light novels, Gate is nowhere to be found. If you want to read it in English, there’s a mostly-complete fan translation of the first novel series, but not the eight-volume side stories or the new “season 2” series, because the only group that’s interested can’t find a Chinese translation to work from.

Someone briefly licensed the manga, but abandoned it after releasing the first volume.

I suppose it was inevitable that I’d get around to this as a theme…

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Around 9.5 years ago, I bought the Japanese DVD release of Otoko-tachi no Yamato, ripped it, and added a set of soft-subs I found online. There were a few minor rough spots in the translation, but it was good enough.

I recently bought the Bluray release of the film and ripped it, only to discover that there are just enough differences to render my existing subs unusable. Applying a constant offset in VLC wasn’t sufficient; it seems there are some subtle differences between the releases that will require real cleanup. For more fun, the three different subs I found on subtitledb.org just now were all missing the last third of the movie.

I’m not going to get around to it any time soon, sadly.

For anyone who really, really wants a legitimage copy and can handle Region B discs, there’s a German import on Amazon Canada with English subtitles.

Don’t you think?

(via)

New version of PDF::Cairo uploaded to CPAN and Github. Mostly bug fixes uncovered by automated testing on Linux/BSD distros that have really old libraries, but also new autosize() and extents() text methods, as well as the hello-my-name-is script example (still fiddling with the command-line option processing on that one…).

Fear the cute ones!

Besides the sheer cuteness, this picture is notable for including an amusing conceptual tag, 伊丹ホイホイ = “Itami (Our Hero) trap”, from the popular “Gokiburi Hoi-hoi” cockroach trap.

This is the only acceptable kind of trap in anime.