Words fail me. Windmills. Solar panels. Greenhouses. Only people with advanced degrees could come up with such a stupid bridge design.

(via Gizmodo, whose writer seems to be about as technically adept as the designers themselves)

Evil men often
held Dejah Thoris for weeks;
did they get any?

Warlord John Carter,
always present when villains
say “As you know, Bob”.

Barsoom’s nude beauties:
inadequately described,
yet worth dying for.

"I'm going to write out a log entry every time I see this sort of packet, and put it at WARNING level. This will help me solve a serious problem!"
    -- Anonymous Developer

1,000 packets/second later on N devices…

Since a new version of the free-as-in-fork LibreOffice package was just released, I thought I’d take a look and see if it’s gotten any easier to import formatted text.

The answer: “kinda”.

Good: It imports simple HTML and CSS.

Bad: …into a special “HTML” document type that must be exported to disk in ODT format, and then reopened. Otherwise, all formatting not available for web use will either disappear from all menus and dialog boxes, silently fail, or be deleted when you save (generally the result of pasting from another document).

[note that the Mac version crashed half a dozen times as I was exploring these behaviors, but it usually managed to open the documents on the second try]

Sadly, furigana are not considered compatible with HTML, so they’re stripped on import, making it rather a moot point that you can’t edit them in HTML mode. The only way to import text marked up with furigana is to generate a real XML-formatted, Zip-archived ODT file.

I am not as impressed with your clever prose as you are:

"Fukagawa is a neighborhood in Tokyo’s Koto ward, just 3km east of the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Station, and across the Sumida River. Like most wards in the east of the city, it is not a place where wealth is overly evident, but neither is want. While by no means a sleepy hollow, it has none of the pent-up-ness of the central business districts, or the brittle proud-of-itself chic of the city’s shopping meccas only a few stops west."

One of these sentences contains information. The rest say a lot about the writer, but nothing at all about Tokyo.

Just spent a merry, no wait, hellish few hours fighting to get a LaTeX distribution up and running for the sole purpose of running a single script that uses it to convert marked-up Japanese text to PDF in convenient ebook sizes.

I failed. Or, more precisely, I got all the way to a DVI file that could be displayed quite nicely on screen, with all the kanji and furigana intact, but then the PDF converter that was part of the same TeX package that had generated it started barfing all over my screen, and I refused to spend more time on the project. I simply have no desire to navigate the layers and layers and layers of crap that TeX has acquired in its hacked-together support for modern fonts and encodings.

Honestly, if I want to generate cleanly-formatted Japanese text as a PDF, with furigana and vertical layout and custom page sizes, it takes 10,000 times less effort to spit out bog-standard HTML+CSS and feed it to Microsoft Word.

[Note to the MS-allergic: performing the equivalent import into OpenOffice is possible, but not reasonable. Getting basic unstyled plaintext+furigana wasn’t too bad, but anything more complicated would be an exercise in tedious XML debugging.]

[Update: gave it another go, and eventually discovered that running dvipdfmx with KPATHSEA_DEBUG=-1 in the environment returned a completely different search path than the kpsewhich tool used. Copying share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf.ptex to etc/texmf/texmf.cnf made all the problems go away. At least until the next time I upgrade something in MacPorts that recursively depends on something that obsoletes a recursive dependency of pTeX and hoses half my tools.

And, no, I can’t use the self-contained and centrally-managed TeX Live distribution (or the matching GUI-enabled MacTeX). That was the first hour I wasted. Its version of pTeX is apparently incompatible with one of the style files I needed.]

When evaluating submissions to the Mac App store, you really should check to see if a limited-functionality app also happens to include a limited-creativity ripoff of one of your own icons. Like Screen Grabber, which made a few light edits to your Grab app icon.

Note that this was not one of those “let’s stuff the store with crap on opening day” apps. No, this one was approved two days ago.

Just a quick FYI, but you might want to have a chat with the folks who supply your Kindle wireless coverage map.