You had a good run of making interesting TV series. You can stop now. The Three Body Problem (aka China’s Battlefield Earth) is not worth your time or money.

Unless you adapt it about as faithfully as, say, Starship Troopers. That would work.

(via)

Google’s map hides the horrible truth!

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking your tongue.

At first glance, this item looks like it would be nice to have when your butter’s cold and your toast is hot:

But then I read the detailed description…

“It is a thing of beauty, and easy to use at home, as long as you have a drill.”

Also, most of the ones offered on Amazon by randomly-named companies (seriously, “Dhrbsx”?!?) are rather pricier than where I originally saw it, Lee Valley Tools.

Please fire the web designer who thinks there should be a maximum password length (16) on your site. There are only two possibilities for this stupidity:

1. you’re storing cleartext passwords rather than a hash.
2. your webclowns don’t realize that the length of a salted hash has no relationship to the length of a user’s password.

I’d prefer to believe #2, but since there’s a good chance of #1, I won’t be leaving a credit card on file…

When I upgraded to an iPhone 6 Plus (a year after it came out), I turned my old 4S into a full-time music player in the car. Every six months or so, it would restart and fail to play music until I unlocked the screen, which was a trivial nuisance. The fact that the car’s display didn’t have Japanese font support has always been the only actual issue with connecting an iPod in this car.

During our recent trip to Napa, it did something I hadn’t seen before: refuse to work until I authenticated it against Apple’s servers. I wasn’t going to put it on a random hotel wireless network (given how long ago Apple stopped providing security updates), so I simply didn’t have music in the car for a week until I got home and connected it to my old MacBook (which involved entering credentials on both sides, agreeing that they should be allowed to speak to each other, and reconfiguring all the sync options that had been reset).

(Why not hook the 6 Plus to the car? Because Apple keeps changing their APIs, and 2018 iOS is “not entirely compatible” with my 2011 car)

Had dinner at Galpão Gaucho Brazilian steakhouse recently. Next time I’ll bring a second stomach along so I can eat more.

Update

Now that we’re back from the weeklong tour of Napa and Livermore (mostly Napa), I’ve changed the above link to point to the actual location we ate at, not the one close to my office.

One thing that’s always bugged me about the opening credits of Vividbutt Observation is Wakaba-chan’s kendo scene.

She’s swinging her bokken more or less horizontally, which means she’s hitting with the flat of the blade (foreshortening distorts it, but at best it’s at 45° to the target). Much, much worse, the curvature of the blade says she’s holding it the normal way, but the edge is up, and she doesn’t look anything like Rurouni Kenshin (fortunately).