Today’s ACLU Top 40 Flashback:

It seems the font bug I ran into when making calendars has opened a can of worms. PDF::API2 is only lightly maintained these days, but there’s active development on the fork PDF::Builder, and the dev saw my bug report, cloned it into his project, and started poking around. Original module author Alfred Reibenschuh chimed in, and after some back-and-forth, it looks like the glyph-mapping code pretty much needs to be ripped out and rewritten from scratch.

I have a hunch I’ll be tasked with producing a CJK test case, which means I’ll need to collect some Chinese, Chinese, and Korean samples.

They said this. They really did.

NSFC

Fuck you, ACLU, with a rusty coat hanger.

Update: Keep digging, Trump needs more votes!

The batshit-crazy is strong in this one…

This may be the most imaginary oppression in the history of imaginary oppressions.

tee-hee

Best reaction so far.

Part of my vacation planning is building up map bookmarks to share with my sister, so we can go off on separate adventures and easily meet up later. I have a bunch of old Google Earth/Maps bookmarks from previous trips and planning. I also have a bunch of Apple Maps bookmarks from recent planning. (why? Because Google no longer supports the standalone Google Earth app, and wants you to run it in Chrome, which logs you into your Google account so they can track you across the Internet)

Google lets you export any number of saved places to an XML file. Apple lets you share one bookmark at a time to specific applications, but only as a URL pointing to maps.apple.com. For more fun, on a Mac your bookmarks are stored as an opaque binary blob in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Maps/Data/Library/Maps/GeoBookmarks.plist, along with a cached copy of their data about the location. You can reorder this list inside the desktop Maps app, but that order will not be respected on iOS.

Extracting 35 bookmarks meant creating 35 notes in a supported app, then copy-pasting them into a text file and extracting the “q” (name) and “ll” (lat/lon) fields.

Seriously, Apple?

Update

For future reference, to convert KML to straightforward CSV using togeojson and jq:

togeojson $kmlfile  | jq -r '
	.features[]|select(.geometry.type == "Point")
	| select(.properties.name)
	| [([.geometry.coordinates[1],.geometry.coordinates[0]]
		| join(",")),.properties.name,.properties.description]
	| @csv'

Update

So, you can get your Apple Maps bookmarks as a CSV file, but only by using Apple’s privacy page to request a copy of all data Apple has on you, and waiting about 5 days for them to package it up.

(via)

Endro! has produced relatively little fan-art so far. Perhaps it’s simply flying under the radar; I don’t recall any mention of it before Don’s. Cute and fluffy, without adaptation baggage, and entertaining enough that I watched the latest one as soon as it came out on Crunchyroll.

So far Mei seems like the least-unlikely waifu candidate: she’s a magic-card-collecting otaku with stockings, garters, and a skirt slit up to there with bonus pantsu window, and she cooks. Fai has huge tracts of land, but a disturbing tendency to vigorously gnaw on things when she’s hungry, which is always. Seira is a cute, responsible bookworm, but suffers from A-cup angst, poor housekeeping skills, is ashamed she needs glasses, and is mildly delusional. Yusha is improbably lucky and severely delusional. Mao-chan is, of course, a loli with destiny issues, while Princess Rona is fixated on her heroine ifyouknowwhatimeanandithinkyoudo. Unnamed Teacher is the only adult female so far, and dresses for sexcess, but she’s a bit of a lolicon.

more...

Are you sure this is for toddlers?

These two recommendations really go together…

No, not that kind of “progressive”, the Wondermarkian sort, also called a continuous calendar. Every time he creates one of these in Illustrator and posts it, I save it away with the idea of knocking together a Perl script to generate my own. It only took 4 years for me to get around to it…

Let’s see if I can make a sensible download page for these:

• US Letter paper
  • 6-page: Sun, Mon
  • (wide): Sun, Mon
  • 2-page: Sun, Mon
  • (wide): Sun, Mon
  • 1-page: Sun, Mon
• A4 paper
  • 6-page: Sun, Mon
  • (wide): Sun, Mon
  • 2-page: Sun, Mon
  • (wide): Sun, Mon
  • 1-page: Sun, Mon
• 11x17 paper
  • 6-page: Sun, Mon
  • 2-page: Sun, Mon
  • 1-page: Sun, Mon

The script needs some cleanup before I inflict it on the world (most likely as a web form). Also better font-handling; not only is there a hilarious bug in the header auto-sizing, but there are baseline issues with many (mostly CJK) fonts that make it tricky to position the numbers. I also need to make the locale-handling friendlier; the Perl DateTime module automagically pulls in month and day-of-week names for any language supported by locale(1), but specifying them as ja_JP, ko_KR, ru_RU, etc is “less than user-friendly”, and you have to switch to an appropriate font.

Sadly, the obvious free choice for a font that supports pretty much any language would be Noto, but its CJK fonts don’t work with PDF::API2.

One feature that’s still in progress is custom colors and text for specific dates. The idea is to feed it a custom list of holidays, birthdays, etc. Since I’m still working on text placement, right now it just sets foreground and background colors, which was enough for marking up a one-page, one-month vacation calendar for our upcoming Japan trip: red for flights, orange for shinkansen trips, blue for flea market days, and yellow background for “oh, crap, it’s Golden Week”.

Update

…and I’ve fixed the silly font sizing/positioning bugs and re-uploaded. Part of my problem was that I was fighting some silly fonts, and the epicycles required to position them vertically were screwing with the non-silly fonts. I still have a fudge factor in the script, but now it’s based on identifying the silliness (capheight or ascender >= bbox ymax).

Just noticed…

Trello’s calendar add-on works this way, but with just a subtle shading change as you move between months (along with the gray-on-gray text thing, which never fails to annoy me).