After a decent experience with buying glasses from Zenni, I decided to pick up a pair of dedicated computer glasses, with blue-blocking lenses and a prescription optimized for “arm’s length”.

I picked a pair of $7 frames, blue-blocking lenses, and their mid-range coating, and adjusted my distance prescription by rounding up the NV-ADD to .0/.5 and adding half of that to the SPH value. With shipping, they came to $45, and arrived in a week.

They work great.

It hasn’t yet reached the scale of Kancolle, the holy grail of shipgirls, but the mobile game and money-sink GranBlue Fantasy is a quite healthy source of cheesecake. And the anime spinoff is on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime, with a second season in the works.

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I suspect Yūno Ohara 大原 優乃 (twitter, blog) has gone partially blind from the number of camera flashes aimed her way since she turned eighteen. Many of her fans are probably going blind, too…

Note that I finally got around to updating my scripts to handle resizing landscape-orientation pics automatically, so I’ll be including more of them in future 2D and 3D cheesecake sets.

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This is the crest of my samurai clan.

(via)

The cats at Cat Café Nekokaigi are a bit less organized about their cuddling, but they provided a pleasant, calming experience during our vacation, and we learned about the seductive powers of bonito flakes. Pics later.

In the middle of my vacation, this song got stuck in my head somehow. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the usual problem of a muzak version playing somewhere, although I suppose it could have been a reaction to two completely different retail chains abusing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Yodobashi Camera, which I already knew about, and Daikoku Drug Store, which I discovered while stocking up on Felbinac).

Someone should really remake this with vocaloids…

There is no way to report a delivery failure on your web site. Your so-called help page, Find a missing package that shows as delivered basically says “look around, maybe it will turn up”, and “wait 36 hours, just in case”.

What it does not say is what to do after 36 hours.

I had three packages scheduled for delivery on Sunday. Two of them were oversized, and were brought to my front door, at precisely the time recorded on the USPS tracking page. The third, purportedly delivered at the same time into the locked mailbox across the street, wasn’t there.

The USPS web site has a form for reporting missing packages, but it only promises that they’ll respond to the ticket in a few days. And, sure enough, all I got was a voicemail saying “hey, our driver scanned it as delivered into your mailbox, so if you don’t see it, tell Amazon it was lost”. He left a callback number, but didn’t answer, and his voicemail is full. No surprise there.

Going back to the Amazon help page, it turns out that if you scroll down from the useless help message and redundant video, there’s a ‘Contact Us’ button that opens a chat session with someone in India. He didn’t seem surprised to learn that USPS lost a package, refunded it, and threw in an extra $5 for the inconvenience.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it ended up in someone else’s mailbox, but because people do things like go to work, I can’t just go door-to-door asking about it and expect results. Nothing expensive or time-critical, just Yet Another Reason I wish Amazon didn’t use USPS.

Even though I ended up having to work while in Japan, I didn’t pack my work laptop, a 15-inch MacBook Pro with all kinds of corporate IP goodness on it. I just took my little 12-inch MacBook, with all kinds of personal goodness on it. So I backed it up three times, encrypted the SSD with Filevault, and took along an encrypted backup drive that I stored in a separate bag.

In theory, between modern CPUs and modern SSDs, the penalty for full-disk encryption should be pretty small. This is sadly untrue for the 12-inch MacBook, even with a Core i7; I could cope with the N% I/O slowdown, but it rippled through the system, causing other things to either slow down or get a touch flaky. The most visible culprit was kernel_task chewing up a lot of CPU, which generally indicates thermal throttling, but the temperature sensors reported all-is-well, so I’m guessing something about Filevault was setting it off. APFS was also getting really sluggish after a few days, requiring reboots.

Now that I’m safely home and more or less caught up on life, I made three backups and turned Filevault off. Currently the system’s grinding away rebuilding the Spotlight indexes (cache-like stuff is skipped in the encryption/decryption process), and kernel_task is nowhere in sight.

I feel sorry for fan artists who want to draw Grea but can’t figure out how to attach dat phat tail, particularly when making NSFW images (which is why there are so few in this set…).

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