“Keeping colleges closed this fall is far more likely to stop the spread of communism than it is to stop the spread of COVID.”

— CJ Pearson

Dear Apple,


With regards to Safari 5’s new Reader mode (whose availability is subject to unknown and quite whimsical heuristics):

  1. Palatino is rarely appropriate for online reading. Most serif faces not specifically designed for screen use should be avoided, in fact; sub-pixel anti-aliasing only buys you so much.
  2. Setting body text fully justified is inevitably a bad idea online. Not only does Safari lack hyphenation, but proper hyphenation is language-dependent anyway. More to the point, the fixed column size in Reader creates rivers of white space in many documents, even for users who don't increase the text size. Those who do are doomed to unreadable crap.
  3. Even if Safari did support hyphenation, you should still avoid justification, because the screen resolution simply isn't fine enough to do it well. Not even the magic pixie dust in the pixels of the new iPhone display give sufficient resolution to produce both crisp Palatino and evenly justified columns. There's a reason that 1200dpi is considered low for printing actual books.
  4. Open up the stylesheet; hiding it inside the Safari bundle forces people to choose between invalidating your code signatures and putting up with your poor design choices.
  5. Allow the new Extensions code to load into Reader pages.

While I’m here, every version of Safari has suffered from the problem that right-clicking a link disables all mouseover events on that page until you click somewhere else. Even the builtin cursor change on mouseover is disabled. This remains true in this latest major revision. Has no one else ever told you about it?

How to motivate soldiers


[Update: Bumped to the top (more precisely, recreated, since bumping hoses the navigation links), since the original videos disappeared almost immediately, and I just found another source for the show they came from. No short clips, and their embedding code doesn’t seem to let you specify the starting offset, but their simple link code does.]

South Korea has nothing to fear from the North. Not so long as their army knows what they’re fighting for…

[Broken Youtube link replaced with dailymotion; starts at 4:50]

Bonus clip of Yoona being a little too embarrassed to do a sexy solo dance routine, until the entire audience begs for more.

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Well, of course!


What else would they be?

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Dear Amazon,


In general, I am such a happy Amazon customer that it pains me to say this: “fuck you and that obnoxious pop-up-every-N-seconds Sprint ad”. Yours is one of the few sites where I have permitted Flash to function, because you generally use it in manners compatible with my wishes. Popping up a large ad every time I try to read the details of a product, and forcing me to dismiss it by moving the mouse, is Bad Form.

I note that it is exceptionally difficult to offer direct feedback to you regarding such things (asking me to clickthrough on an embedded Flash ad is not an acceptable means of soliciting feedback on it), so consider this a public notice that I am now blocking an assortment of URLs on g-ecx.images-amazon.com in order to restore functionality to your site.

Oh, and Sprint? Die in a fire. “will not buy”

Taking the Hello!Project out of the girl


Perhaps the greatest sin of the Hello!Project costume designers is that their young victims graduate with no awareness of their handicap. This has led to many post-H!P fashion disasters, of which this is not atypical.

Maki Goto, despite cutting all ties with H!P and signing with a much better record company, remains scarred by her long association with the agency. Take, for instance, the recent promo pic for her web site:

Maki Goto, WTF?

I am delighted to report, however, that she seems to have found at least a partial solution to the problem, now that it has come to her attention (NSFW):

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Pennies from Sony


One of the first things I did when I got home with my shiny new Sony Alpha 850 camera was try to find out if it could honestly deliver on its 24 megapixel resolution. The image is 6048x4032, but does it actually resolve?

First off, is it physically possible? If you break out an optics textbook and do the math on a full-frame 24x36mm sensor, it is possible to keep the circle of confusion below the pixel size at apertures wider than about f/8. With a terrific lens. And a tripod. And a cable release. And mirror lockup. And no wind.

Mind you, the actual measured lines per inch matters far less to me than the fact that it’s a full-frame DSLR that takes all my old Minolta lenses; I’d have been perfectly happy with a 12-megapixel full-frame body, but since 24 is what’s available…

I didn’t feel like breaking out my big tripod or my good lights, so I settled for getting into the ballpark: a decent lens (Tamron 90/2.8 Macro) at 100% magnification, a sturdy table-top tripod, cable release, mirror lockup, indoors, available light. ISO 100, f/8, 6-second exposure. Developed from RAW using Sony’s app, resized and cropped in Photoshop with no other modifications.

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Apparently she supports Ogg Vorbis...


Ubuntu Magazine in Japan has decided that penguins are the wrong mascot for the market, and replaced them with junior idols. This month’s centerfold is 12.

Haruka Fukuhara, Ubuntu-tan

[and, yes, I’m using “centerfold” loosely; the photos themselves are wholesome and innocent (more so than you’d expect from the generally quite creepy U-15 market), it’s just the placement that’s new. They’ve launched a new bi-monthly Linux magazine where one of the main attractions is pictures of young girls.]

My new favorite Melon Kinenbi song...


I’d never heard this one before, but it showed up on URA MELON (now available on the US iTunes store; they really are getting better about releasing stuff internationally). No video, but someone has uploaded it to Youtube as the soundtrack to a really awful low-res still photo. The title is Fuwafuwafuu, or “Fluffy…”.

For a band that Hello!Project had no real interest in promoting, they certainly let them record a wide range of material. And they gave them the single goofiest video in the history of the agency…

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“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”