I have a hate/tolerate relationship with so-called “programmer’s fonts”. Let me count the ways they suck, in no particular order:

0. Not fixed-width. Blech.
1. Too-narrow set width (ranging between condensed and crushed).
2. Inconsistent weight/color between alpha, numeric, and punctuation. The creator of Fira Code actually managed to make \ and / different weights!
3. Twee punctuation.
4. Failure to adequately distinguish 0O, l1, etc.
5. Dotted zero instead of slashed (so that 00 is staring at you; Hack takes this one step further, for an Eye-Of-Sauron effect).
6. Inconsistent centerline for special chars (^>~*+=-})]|\/#$%&@).
7. Special-char centerline inconsistent with digits.
8. - not same length as + and = (surprisingly common!).
9. Five-lobed asterisk, even worse when it’s upside-down.
10. Poor rendering either on or off high-DPI displays.
11. Special Dishonorable Mention to Monofur for having lower-case digits, seemingly-random centerlines, twee punctuation, and a generally obnoxious character design.

For a long time, I’ve been using Anonymous Pro, hand-edited to fix its centerline problem, but the new winner is Office Code Pro, which suffers only from a slightly-twee %, a slightly-italic $, a five-lobed *, and an ever-so-slight centerline offset for braces, parens, and the v-bar (most easily seen in the -{| combo).

It is hands-down the cleanest, most usable fixed-width font I’ve ever found, fixing almost every problem with its parent, Adobe’s free Source Code Pro. Pity the repo just has the compiled fonts rather than the source diffs, because I’d love to fork it and fix those last few niggling flaws.

A couple of days ago I stumbled across the German name for the Chinese dough-enhancing technique called Tangzhong: Mehlkochstück. That was amusing, especially since there were two other related German techniques that involved different ratios and temperatures (quellstück and brühstück), none of which had been translated into English.

Today, I stumbled across an article by the author of the BraveTart cookbook, insisting that the Japanese name for the technique was yukone. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since it doesn’t match the kanji used by any of the Japanese bread companies I found recipes from (at least one of which punned on the name with “Ii yu da ne!”).

Bonus: yudane bread-machine mix.

Her source initially seemed persuasive, however: a Japanese research paper involving using an MRI to examine bread structure with and without the “water roux” paste.

Unfortunately, the paper is in English, and does not include the kanji for “yukone”. My guess is 湯粉練 (“hot water” + “flour” + “to thicken into a paste”), but plugging that into Google returns absolutely nothing in Japanese, and just 湯粉 returns soups. The hiragana ゆこね doesn’t work, either.

So now I’m wondering if the paper’s phrasing “a process known as yukone in Japanese” just means “jargon invented by our research team”. This is supported by the article’s citations, which include a much more recent paper with the translated title: “Effect of Heated Gluten on Bread-making Qualities of Yudane Dough”.

Also, unlike the typical 5:1 water/flour ratio in tangzhong or 2:1 in yudane, they used a 1:1 ratio, which really is papier-mâché paste.

Update

It’s yugone, 湯捏ね = “hot water” + “kneading”. Still no references on Amazon Japan, but the handful of recipes I found with those kanji used the same 1:1 ratio as the research paper. Some of them used “yugone” for the technique and “yudane” for the resulting starter.

Anyway…

If you’re in a Japanese bakery, look for 湯種食パン (yudane shokupan):

The reason I miss the old “recommended for you” paginated, categorized list is that your new tag-tile system constantly throws up nonsense like this:

Bottom line, the behavior that your new tile system encourages is anti-browsing: if the picture on a tile isn’t something that I want, I won’t click on that category at all. For now, it’s still possible to get the old list view for new and upcoming releases, which you don’t (usually) have a tile for, but the URLs aren’t visible on the site any more.

I should also point out that the tile system makes it much harder to improve recommendations. Old and busted: for each item, click “I own it” or “Not interested”. New hotness:

1. click a tile
2. click “View All & Manage”
3. click “Edit Recommendations”
4. click “Remove” on an item
5. click either “I already own this item” or “I’m not interested in this item”
6. wait for the thumbnail image to load, because your next click might not register when the layout changes
7. click “Ok”.
8. Repeat steps 4-7 for each item from that tile, then scroll back to the top and click “Yournamehere’s Amazon” to get back to the tag-tiles screen.

This, in a word, is bullshit.

She may have some problems fitting in…

NSFW

Art by rokurobuna

I think you’ve gotten enough abuse this week over your stale computer hardware with terrible keyboards and nosebleed pricing, so I’ll abuse you over something else: com.apple.quarantine.

In the course of pretending you’re all about security, you’ve slapped this attribute on everything downloaded via the Safari browser, including all image files. This means that FuckWithPreview.app kinda-sorta-sandboxes them, and dragging the thumbnail into a Terminal window will give you a uselessspecial path rather than the image’s actual location.

Only Preview, though; everything else seems to behave as expected, and I’ve gotten in the habit of inoculating downloaded images before reviewing them, with: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *.*

What makes this particularly obnoxious is that this is the same Safari that still has this setting enabled by default for all users:

If you actually cared about security, this option would have been removed around ten years ago. I’m sure there are plenty of critical bugs pointing this out, all closed with “working as intended”.

I only care because when I open a few dozen images at once in Preview, instead of one window with lots of thumbnails, it opens two, with the second reserved for those bearing the Scarlet Q. Annoying and pointless.

Just stumbled across a hilariously-incorrect translation in the Pixiv tags file I’m using: 黒パン (kuro-pan) as “Rye_Bread”.

Google it, and you will in fact find pictures and recipes featuring dark rye and pumpernickel.

Pixiv it, and you’ll find black panties. 😄

The ‘Kiki at 17’ ad was cute, but this is just cool.

(art by snatti; much larger version at artstation)

Need a little touchup on the script still, but I merged together tag translations from two sources (1, 2) and cleaned up a lot of the cruft, ending up with 8,238 tags and (mostly-reasonable) translations. Next will probably be adding a uniq() function to cover duplicates created by the translations.

Of course, the moment I ran the script on this small set of images, it immediately barfed out 107 tags that weren’t on the list…

(Seriously, though, in all these years, no one had added translations for horn, saké, bento, white_hair, black_bra, long_hair, frilly_panties, or high_quality_panties? Most of the rest were series-related, at least)

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