Burning question: does anyone else wonder if this device will bring back the obsolete tech-slang term “glass ttys”? Judging from the users I’ve seen accidentally taking pictures and accidentally forwarding things to the wrong contacts, I figure it’s just a matter of time.

Dear 180.76.0.0/16 (aka Beijing Baidu Netcom Science and Technology Co., Ltd.), this blog is not Amazon, nor is it an open HTTP proxy, kthxbye.

[Tue May 14 04:05:16 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.180] File does not exist: /htdocs/GU10-SMD-4-5w-Cool-White/dp/B004BEC9QY
[Tue May 14 06:34:45 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.25] File does not exist: /htdocs/Agatha-Christies-Miss-Marple-Collection/dp/B00012SYQY
[Tue May 14 07:19:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.92] File does not exist: /htdocs/Watt-6400k-Energy-Saving-Light/dp/B003BF3TE0
[Tue May 14 07:49:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.25] File does not exist: /htdocs/Technote-Trumpet-Stand/dp/B002S0NN22
[Tue May 14 08:34:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.172] File does not exist: /htdocs/technology-expectancy-typically-maintenance-including/dp/B003VR9NV6
[Tue May 14 09:49:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.156] File does not exist: /htdocs/Satya-Champa-Incense-Sticks-Special/dp/B000SARC4O
[Tue May 14 10:19:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.177] File does not exist: /htdocs/Rockburn-foot-Moulded-Jacks-Guitar/dp/B000GG4B4O
[Tue May 14 11:04:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.12] File does not exist: /htdocs/Rifle-Pellet-Takes-targets-17cms/dp/B003Y21ATQ
[Tue May 14 11:19:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.62] File does not exist: /htdocs/Polypropylene-Rope-Blue-30m-6mm/dp/B000U5A0E6
[Tue May 14 11:49:24 2013] [error] [client 180.76.5.191] File does not exist: /htdocs/Plastic-Pirate-Crossbones-Bunting-Metres/dp/B000MSP80W

The Google translation of this is amusing, but easily understood: 墨すり小僧 (sumi-suri kozou) means “ink-rubbing apprentice”. However, there are several godan verbs that conjugate as “suri”, with meanings that include printing, shaving, frosting, rubbing, and… picking pockets. Kozou isn’t quite as versatile, but youngster/errand boy/apprentice still leaves you plenty of room to guess the wrong context.

Also, this 30-minute process shows you why a lot of people buy their calligraphy ink as bottles of liquid these days.

Why am I designing an artist’s chop for myself? Because, after assisting my Shinkendo instructor with getting proper seals made for the dojo, I found myself with fonts, templates, whimsy, and a web site that can turn an Illustrator file into a sturdy rubber seal. (they only ship domestically, but by some small coincidence, I’d recently updated my reshipping info at Tenso)

The font is Hakushu Tensho, the text reads 手掛 (“te-gakari” =“clue”), the color is Chinese Red, and the distressed effect is a quick Roughen/Expand/Simplify. The physical seal should be here sometime next week.

Side note: good fonts are pricy. I have a decent collection (read “shovelware CD”) of Japanese fonts from Dynaware, but Hakushu is one of the few foundries that makes a full line of professional old-fashioned fonts, and they charge professional prices. Fortunately, they offer free downloads of fonts containing just the grade-school kanji.

Actually buying their fonts is a bit tricky, because most places only sell them on CD, only take domestic credit cards, and only ship domestically. Amazon Japan does carry them, and if you’re lucky they’ll be in stock, but because font CDs are flagged as software, you have to use a reshipping service like Tenso. The only working source I’ve found for purchasing downloadable fonts is imagenavi; you have to be a bit creative fudging the address fields, but you can sign up for an account and use a non-Japanese credit card to buy things from them.

[Which reminds me: one of the many little adventures I had in Kyoto was helping my sister set up an account with Pizza-La so we could get dinner delivered to our hotel room. Worth the effort; I think we ordered the “Alsace-style Flambeed Onions and Bacon” pie three times. They actually have an English menu, but if you can’t read Japanese, placing an order is still tricky; she made it most of the way through the signup process with Chrome’s auto-translation, but got stuck when it insisted on having her enter her name in katakana.]

Words to live by, possibly even outside the context of producing a distressed look in Illustrator.

(and the infectious “snap to pixel grid” setting needs to die in a fire)

[Update: Wow, they really broke the actions support in CS5.x; simple operations do not work in the standard “accelerated” mode, and you can’t just tell the damn thing to always use step-by-step mode]

Evernote is an extremely useful cross-platform application, allowing you to keep lightly-formatted documents in sync across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. Heck, they even support Blackberry, Windows Phone, and Windows RT tablets, and if you’re masochistic enough to run a Linux desktop, you can at least run it in Chrome.

The basic product is free, and most of their money seems to come from an array of partnerships rather than the small monthly fee for premium use. The friends I know who use it mostly don’t even know there is a premium option; they just like the convenient syncing.

The feature that made premium useful for me was offline notebooks; my phone and laptop are usually online, but I tend to leave the wireless off on my Sony Android tablet unless I’m actively using it, because it drains the battery. However, it turns out that there’s another feature that is really, really useful, and that allows you to recover from an annoying issue in the iOS client.

I was using my iPhone to make a small change to a long note that was filled with images, and I wanted to remove some gratuitous formatting from a paragraph. When you pull up the formatting panel, there are two buttons side by side: “Simplify” and “Plain Text”. If you accidentally hit the second one, all formatting including embedded images is removed from the note, and there’s no undo. If your phone has a data connection, your change will sync up as soon as you close the note, and wipe out the good version everywhere else.

(technically, there is one level of undo, but most people don’t know that “shake the device” is the iOS gesture for “undo typing/delete”; I certainly never would have guessed it after two years with an iPhone and several more running apps on an iPod Touch, because 90% of apps that implement shake do something else with it, and it’s usually something stupid that I want to turn off. Coincidentally, a lot of people apparently would love to turn off “shake to undo”…)

Fortunately, one of the other features Evernote premium gives you is version history; if the good version was ever synced up, you can get it back… from the desktop or web clients, at least; this feature hasn’t been implemented in iOS yet. It’s also possible to use offline editing to modify the good version that’s cached on another device, and generate a sync conflict that preserves both versions.

If you don’t have premium, your only real option is generating a sync conflict by editing on another device before closing the note on the iOS device.

Why was I messing with the formatting in the first place? Because Evernote’s cross-platform nature often results in some really hideous font and text-size issues when you paste things in on the different clients. I have no idea what’s going to happen when I paste text into it.

This is the cover of Miko-Ama-Sister!, a serious exploration of religion in modern Japan, in which a scholarly young man probes the depths of Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity with the help of a shrine maiden and two nuns.

Nah, just kidding, it’s a porn novel.

More k-pop cuteness, from HelloVenus; must be something in the air: