I was in two large Costcos this weekend, with their displays all set up for the holiday season. The only camcorder they stocked was the GoPro. Everything else was a digicam advertising 1080p HD video support, in one of the usual form factors. Up to 42x optical zoom, although for the most part the ISO rating didn’t go high enough to compensate for the f/6-ish aperture at the long end.

For all the trash talk about the iPhone killing off the digicam, it looks like the digicam killed the camcorder first.

Via the never-safe-for-work Sankaku Complex. It would be nice if they could skip the jarring tone shifts of the first one. Our Hero deserves a break, and his new home could use some more exploring. If they pick up after the end of the first series, I suspect they’ll try for something like Watt-Evans’ The Wizard and the War Machine.

[update: chapters two and four turn out to be twice as long as one and three, so the next update will be a little while. Teaser: 「女の子同士なのに、なんでどきどきしてるのよ」. It seems the yuri is strong in this one.]

Prologue is Marika’s duel with Kane and their discussion after, with the only significant changes being the descriptions of the crew backing up Marika; Schnitzer’s appearance is apparently quite different. Amusing note: the two girls Kane is flirting with are referred to as “long-hair” and “short-cut”. Oh, and this might not be Marika’s first mission; the last line has her looking back to her life as an ordinary schoolgirl six months ago.

Chapter one opens much the same as the anime, with a lot more background detail due to the lack of moving pictures. There’s more of a crowd in the café, and Marika is a bit clumsy navigating her way through it after taking their order, leading Kane to call her a bit of a dojikko, which Misa thinks could be a problem; however, with a tray full of drinks, she navigates the crowd smoothly.

In conversation, Misa is much more direct, and Marika is a bit wary when she claims to be an old friend of mom. Misa doesn’t ask something as simple as “have you ever been to space?” and Marika doesn’t chat about the school yacht club or the relay station:

Misa: “Do you like space?”
Marika: “Eh?”
Misa: “How about becoming a space pirate captain?”
Marika: “Huh?”
Misa (correcting herself): “Are you interested in becoming the captain of a space ship?”
Marika (laughs and nods in appreciation of recognition of her aspiration): “Space ship captain? If I could have a space ship of my own someday, I could go wherever in space I wanted.”
Misa: “It’s possible, for you”.

At the house, much the same (including sign/countersign), with a few interesting notes. First, dad’s full name is given as Gonzaemon Kato Yoshiro (ゴンザエモン加藤芳郎), and several times Ririka refers to him familiarly as Gonza (権左). She also shows Marika a holo of him that’s stored in her pendant, and looks chagrined when Marika looks at his smug face and says (roughly) “I didn’t think this was your type”.

After the history lesson and explanation that the letter of marque makes them legal privateers, Marika still firmly refuses to accept the job. Why? Because if she did, she’d be forcing her own children down the same path, before she’s even found a partner. Shocked, Misa asks Ririka if this is really her child. Visibly proud of her daughter, Ririka assures Marika that neither she nor Gonzaemon believed in forcing her down this path; it’s her decision, of her own free will.

Ririka then asks Kane why he’s been so quiet. Pretty reticent for someone so young, hmm? He mumbles about how delicious the food is, but she presses, and he answers, “how could an ordinary guy like me cut in between our scarier-than-the-captain Bloody Doctor and the legendary Captain Ririka”. Marika freaks, Ririka looks chagrined again:

Marika: “Wait. The famous legendary lady pirate Captain Ririka was you, mom?”
Ririka: “I did a lot of crazy things when I was young.”
Marika: “Seriously, mom, you went rampaging around as an embarassing cosplay space pirate?”
(Misa busts out laughing)
Ririka: IT WASN’T COSPLAY! The business depended on popular favor, so wearing a flashy costume was just Service.
Marika: “Service? What kind of service are you saying pirates do?”
Misa (still laughing): “These days space piracy is a service industry. Sorry I can’t give you the details right now; trade secret.”

On a side note, Misa is absolutely terrified of Ririka’s cooking, which makes it all the more amusing when she reports that Gonzaemon died of food poisoning. When they’re leaving, Misa thanks her for the food and comments that she’d never thought she’d say that to Ririka, who answers that Gonzaemon always loved her cooking…

[on to chapter two!]

This is the cover of the Japanese translation of a well-regarded American science fiction novel (with title and author crudely hidden). It is not the author’s most famous or controversial work, but even Hollywood knows about it.

[whoops, re-uploaded with the faint red English title also deleted…]

Details on nearly three million customers stolen. So, how’s that switch to renting your software by the month working out?

[Update: turns out the iPhone hotspot does not route traffic over the iPhone VPN; boo, hiss. I’ll need to rig up a wireless router behind an OpenVPN box to avoid the risk of tripping the region-detection]

The Kindle Paperwhite will not speak to a shared wireless connection hosted on my laptop. It will, however, speak to an iPhone’s built-in hotspot, and the iPhone has a VPN client compatible with HideMyAss VPN, allowing me to pretend that my shiny new second-generation Paperwhite is located in Japan and eligible to purchase and download Kindle books without violating the publishers’ geographic restrictions on ebook licensing.

With that out of the way, the standard DeDRM and KindleUnpack scripts trivially converted my new books into clean XHTML, which required about 60 lines of Perl to massage into input for Yomitori. Diffing the text of Asobi ni Iku Yo book 1 confirmed the accuracy of my new source.

Now if I can figure out the new inline footnote support, I can merge the vocabulary into the main book the way I do for the HTML output, and switch from dual PDFs to a single MOBI file. But that comes later; right now, the complete text of Miniskirt Space Pirates book 1 is waiting on my Kindles, without all the OCR errors I was wading through the last time.

What I want to know is, has some poor soul been maintaining epgparser all this time, or did they finally break free from Andrew’s giant hairy Perl script?

(and when I say “hairy”, I mean “had to run as root so it could newfs file systems, and no one could ever figure out why it needed 4GB of RAM and ran for 26 hours a day”)

The hardest part of getting my Japanese-novel-hacking scripts working on Windows was figuring out how to build the Text::MeCab Perl module. Strawberry Perl includes a complete development environment, but the supplied library file libmecab.lib simply didn’t work. I found some instructions on how to build MeCab from source with MinGW, but that was not a user-friendly install.

However, there were enough clues scattered around that I was able to figure out how to use the libmecab.DLL file that was hidden in another directory:

copy \Program Files\MeCab\sdk\mecab.h \strawberry\c\include
copy \Program Files\MeCab\bin\libmecab.dll \strawberry\perl\bin
cd \strawberry\perl\bin
pexports libmecab.dll > libmecab.def
dlltool -D libmecab.dll -l libmecab.a -d libmecab.def
move libmecab.a ..\..\c\lib
del libmecab.def
cpanm --interactive Text::MeCab

The interactive install is necessary because there’s no mecab-config shell script in the Windows distribution. The manual config is version: 0.996, compiler flags: -DWIN32, linker flags: -lmecab, encoding: utf-8.