#1 with a bullet to the back of the head: “ebook sales declining”.

Maybe charging 16% more for the Kindle edition than they do for the hardcover has something to do with it? Note that the paperback edition is no longer in print.

I don’t remember what specific book this was. It doesn’t matter, because when the publishers set the price, the Kindle edition is almost always more expensive than the paperback, and pricing it above the hardcover isn’t rare.

And if you look at the reviews, the Kindle editions from major publishers are frequently riddled with errors, and illustrations are often misplaced, mangled, or just plain missing.

…so I let it go.

Youtube link, because Sony doesn’t like embedding.

Also, new slogan: “Stand up for Hillary! She can’t do it alone!”.

In the following pictures, you see an elderly gentleman whose angry ranting about the destruction of his dock has suddenly been washed away by the sight of a 12-year-old 10-year-old girl. What is he saying?

1. You remind me of my granddaughter!
2. Damn, I'd like to see you all grown up!

The correct answer is 2: 「おお〜、8年後が楽しみじゃ」

The cane is a nice touch, don’t you think?

…but goodness, what a pretty cosplayer.

[Update: now on CPAN]

There are multiple competing algorithms for converting latitude/longitude locations into something easier for humans to work with. Some of them are proprietary, which makes them pretty useless offline or after that company goes out of business.

Google came up with a plausible rationale for inventing their own Open Location Code rather than adopting geohash or something similar. It’s Open Source up on Github, and they supply APIs for several common languages.

But not Perl. Naturally, I had to fix that, so here’s Geo::OLC (compressed tarball). It has a full test suite, a simple command-line tool, and a CGI script that generates a dynamic labeled grid for Google Earth. I think I’ve about got it cleaned up enough to put it on CPAN.

For amusement, the sample location I use in the POD documentation, 8Q6QMG93+742, is Tenka Gyoza in Osaka, which is exactly the sort of place that you’d have trouble finding with standard addressing methods. Actually, you’d have trouble finding it with Google Maps on your phone, as my sister learned.

I tried not to go overboard with Perlisms, but the code still ended up fairly compact, largely because most of the existing APIs were written while the formatting was still in flux, so they’re more generic than necessary.

[Update: turns out someone did write one, but it never made it to CPAN: Geo::OpenLocationCode. Looks like he converted one of the other APIs instead of writing it from scratch, so he inherited the same bug in recover_nearest.]

(via)

Once upon a time, there was a third-string idol group called Gal♥Doll. As you might expect from the name, it was a trio of pretty girls uglied up in Gal makeup and fashion. I found a few videos, which I won’t link because they’re terrible, but the only reason I know they exist in the first place is that AV actress Miharu Usa is promoted as a “former idol”. Very little digging (as in “reading to the bottom of the article”) was necessary to discover that Miharu was the “ace” of Gal♥Doll, Ryouka Nishinaga (center).

Honestly, if I’d seen this picture first, I wouldn’t have been interested enough to follow up on her, and the stills from her AV work are typically unappealing. Instead, what caught my eye was this (NSFW):

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