Turned on the TV for the first time in a few days, only to find that Dish Network has replaced TV Japan with something called “Family Gekijyo”, which looks like utter crap. I scrolled through several days of listings, and found a whole lot of ancient cartoons and not much else. And I don’t mean good ancient cartoons.

They’re still charging me $25/month for it. Or, rather, they were until I logged in and canceled it just now.

Now to decide if I might as well cancel the whole thing. I don’t like surprises, and there was very little worth watching anyway. Time to investigate TV Japan’s new streaming service, dLibrary Japan, I suppose…

On a related note, the SyFy Krypton series isn’t very good, but at least in the latest episode the male lead does more than pout and brood. Still, no one in the cast is giving me a reason to care if they live, die, breed, or get bottled. Dark Matter had better acting and better eye candy.

On an unrelated note, the Bluray release of Testament of Sister New Devil headlights highlights just how ridiculous that series was. I hadn’t seen the OVA before, but that just turned it up a notch. Honestly, Maria-chan is the only one whose figure isn’t udderly ridiculous (until she transforms at the end and joins the rest of the “more cowbell” club).

dLibrary Japan Update

Started the free trial. Selection is currently weak (mostly historical dramas and ‘comedy’ shows), but a lot better than “Family Gekijyo”, and much less expensive. No idea how good their streaming servers are yet, and they don’t seem to have a FireTV version of their app yet, so I have to watch on a smaller screen for now.

I’ve been wanting to watch Doctor-X anyway…

Unrelated, “gosh I wish I could update the config on my Harmony Hub; if only their servers were up”.

I may finally break down and see if I can get a FireTV registered to my Amazon Japan account and stream with Prime. Hopefully it doesn’t require a full-time VPN, and just connecting ‘from Japan’ once will do. Haven’t checked to see if they enforce a billing-address requirement for streaming, or if it just works like the Kindle where you need to have appeared to come from a Japanese address at least once.

Worst case, my sister will be frequently visiting Tokyo as part of her new job…

Something different: cheesecake girls with a pulse. Not a representative sample, just some pleasant diversions that got saved to my laptop over the past few months…

Important Reminder:

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Who knew the NRA was filled with female Iranian muslim vegan animal-rights-activist [update: refugee, too] bodybuilders?

…at Galpão Gaucho in Cupertino with my sister. They’re new, so I’m willing to cut them some slack for not being as awesome as the one in Napa, but they need to up their game. And train all the servers to look at everyone’s yes/no card, not just the first one they see at the table. About half of them passed me by because they saw that my sister wasn’t ready for more meat yet, despite my card being clearly visible at the edge of the table.

We also hit the Daiso and Marukai in the same shopping center before dinner. Always a good time. (if you know the area, they took over the old Elephant Bar)

We, um, had to change the subject after a few quick passes on gun control and the Florida spokespuppets, but that was the only land-mine pot-hole in the conversational highway.

If you think that the true essence of Italian pizza is “overwhelming raw garlic flavor”, then this is the sauce for you. If you actually like pizza, though, avoid it like the vile crap it is. I didn’t want to just throw it away, so I cut it half-and-half with Ragu jarred pizza sauce, and it was still way too garlicky.

More VividCheek Occupation, but not too much more, IYKWIMAITYD.

Bonus Rei chibis:

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…spokesbullies like David Hoggführer and Sinead O’Castro make it look a lot like the past.

Or just the latest example of “this is how you get more Trump”.

Just picked up the smaller Orbi bundle at Costco. This is the SKU they’ve added recently (RBK22-100NAS) that only has two units (“router” and “satellite”, both with ethernet backhaul); I didn’t really need a 3-pack of the original model, just one on each floor.

The hardest part of the setup was switching off the builtin NAT and running it in AP mode; you can’t do it from the iOS app. The second hardest was discovering that the app artificially limits you to short passwords; the web GUI will let you enter up to 63 characters, as expected for WPA2-PSK.

Preliminary results look good. I may tweak the placement of the units (I just grabbed the first available power and ethernet, since the old wireless is still running), and turn on the optional beamforming, etc. At the very least, I should get better performance on my front porch.

I figure it’ll take me a few days to find all my wireless devices and switch them over. :-)

Update

The optional beamforming is off by default for a reason. It apparently has disconnect issues.