Presenting some random guy’s download from Project Gutenberg as if it were the Kindle edition of an in-copyright book by a respected translator is not acceptable. I can’t safely order anything from your listing of Jay Rubin’s translation of Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, because there are clearly several different books here. Even the featured editorial review refers to someone else’s translation. Worse, the page changes slightly each time I reload it, apparently due to different indexing on different servers.

If I ignore the official link from his author page, and search by his name or by its ISBN, I find the real book here. But if I trust your listings, I’m screwed.

(yes, I sent in feedback; hopefully someone will clean up the mess)

I have recently developed some sympathy for 19th-Century cartographers. In 1815, Japan was a rather mysterious place, and making a detailed map with romanized placenames can’t have been easy.

Sidzd was apparently Settsu Province.

Map detail extracted from this item at the Library of Congress’ American Memory site. (you’ll need JPEG2000 and MrSID decoders to work with the largest available images; yes, they chose encumbered, poorly-supported formats to store everything…)

Imagine that you’re reading something in a foreign language that you’ve been studying for a while, and you hit an unfamiliar word. You know how to pronounce it, so you can often tell if it’s a place or a person’s name, and you’re pretty sure how many words you’re looking at, so if you need to look them up, you can.

When studying Japanese, the most frustrating thing about trying to graduate from reading “student material” to “real stuff” is not being able to do that. You’re reading along, feeling pretty good about yourself, and you run smack into a wall of kanji. Maybe it’s someone’s name, maybe it’s a city you’d recognize if you could pronounce it, or maybe it’s something like 厳重機密保持体制.

Taken individually, you know most or all of the characters, but together, wtf? Is it safe to skip over and work out from context, or do you need to carefully look up each character, crossing your fingers and hoping that it’s a straightforward collection of two-character nouns (which it is, by the way; literally “strictly-classified-preservation-system”, or, more loosely, “seriously top-secret”). Every time you stop to look something like this up, you lose continuity, and instead of reading, you’re deciphering.

I am far from the first person to notice this, and there are some well-developed tools for helping you read a Japanese web site, of which perhaps the best-known is Rikai. I don’t use it. I will occasionally use the built-in pop-up J-E dictionary on my Mac, which is a simpler version of the same thing, but what I really want to do is read books and short stories.

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PDF version 1.5 doesn’t work for metadata (apparently because it compresses objects to reduce the output size); save as 1.3 for it to be parsed correctly, and you’ll still need to set the filename to the title you want displayed in the main book listing, even though the device actually parses it out of the file to display on the detail page. Blech.

You can insert the metadata with pdftk as per bloovis, or some other tools (the full version of Adobe Acrobat works great, but is not exactly free…). LaTeX users can use a sledgehammer to swat this fly with the hyperref package, but you’ll need to use dvipdfmx -V3 to downrev the PDF output to 1.3.

Sony got their PDF software from Adobe (for the DRM, mostly), so their Readers don’t have this problem. Sadly, this means that a file generated for the Kindle will display much slower on the Sony, since the object-compression is quite useful.

“Shut up, kid; that’s the way I tell it.”

There’s a fresh manga adaptation of the original Dirty Pair SF novels running in Japan (via The Leaning Tower of Damocles). I will cheerfully confess that I didn’t like the illustration style used for the novels, but I’m not sure this is an improvement. I’ll take the Eighties anime & comic versions, please; these are a bit over the top.

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Gelaskins makes very nice, colorful skins (with high-quality 3M materials) for a wide assortment of gadgets, and if they don’t currently support yours, you can measure it and make a custom order for the same price. I liked the idea, I just didn’t really like any of the pictures. Fortunately, they let you upload your own, or use any image that you have rights to.

I’ve taken a few photos that I’m quite happy with, so I went searching through my Aperture archives to find one that would work. To my surprise, the image I ended up liking the most was a test shot.

Right after I bought my latest camera body, the Sony Alpha 850, I went up to San Francisco to spend a day trying it out at the Asian Art Museum and Golden Gate Park.

I spent a lot of time fiddling with the silliest and most glorious lens Minolta ever made, the 135mm STF, which I was delighted to dust off after several years where its long focal length made it difficult to use with APS-sized sensors. Out at the park, though, I pulled out an old standby, the long-discontinued Minolta 70-210mm f4. This is a consumer-grade lens, but made back when that meant “serious amateur”, not “cheapest plastic crap we can throw into a bundle”. It’s a terrific walkaround lens, despite its striking resemblance to a 24-ounce canned beverage.

One of the photos I shot while walking around the Japanese Tea Garden in the park jumped out at me as perfect for a laptop skin and wallpaper. [210mm, f4, 1/250, ISO 640]

This is a public braindump, to help out anyone who might want to parse Japanese text without being sufficiently fluent in Japanese to read technical documentation. Our weapon of choice will be the morphological analysis tool MeCab, and for sanity’s sake, we’ll do everything in UTF8-encoded Unicode.

The goal will be to take a plain text file containing Japanese text, one paragraph per line, and extract every word in its dictionary form, with the correct reading, with little or no manual intervention.

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I am compelled to make the following observations about the first novel in the Asobi ni iku yo! series.

1. The series title is given a wonderful Engrish translation as furigana: “Us It goes to play in Your house”.

2. The compound noun 食料合成機 (literally “food synthesis machine”) has the following pronunciation as furigana: ソイレント・グリーン.

For the kana-impaired, instead of shokuryou-gouseiki, it’s to be read as soirento gureen. Not having seen the anime (yet), I do not know if this joke was carried over.