[Update 5/20: the beta driver broke under MacOS X 10.5.7. A reinstall briefly worked, but then stopped. This tip fixed it for me.]

[Update: one additional negative added]

Samsung’s been adding DisplayLink USB monitor support to their digital picture frames for a while, but none of those work with a Mac. DisplayLink has a reference driver, but Samsung added their own protocol for determining whether it should come up as a monitor or a flash drive when plugged in, which requires their driver.

Most of the other USB mini-monitors are either insanely overpriced, in very limited supply, or both. Samsung is slowly rolling out a dedicated mini-monitor, the U70, and DisplayLink’s latest MacOS X reference driver supports it. Sadly, the only importer I’ve found it at is geekstuff4u, which charges nearly twice what Amazon Japan does.

Amazon Japan won’t ship gadgets to the US, but I set up my Tenso reshipping account for just this sort of thing. Since someone else at work also wanted one, I ordered two. Tenso ships EMS, which charges by weight at a fairly steep rate, so they’re still overpriced, but a full $70 cheaper than geekstuff4u. That’s $70 each.

When Samsung brings them to the US for real, they’ll probably run about $90, but as a toy-loving early-adopting technogeek, my per-unit total came to $112 (including sales tax, free shipping to Tenso, and international shipping and handling).

Pros: compact 7” widescreen LCD display (800x480), decent brightness and color, works in portrait or landscape modes, great Mac support, runs on USB power (optional second USB plug if your machine doesn’t put out enough power with just one). Works great for video, chat clients, Photoshop palettes, status windows, etc.

Cons: picture-frame-style stand is not particularly stable in landscape mode (press photos are mildly deceptive about this…), no supplied carrying case.

I happened to have a little padded case that’s just the right size to transport it, so my only real complaint is about the stand, and I can solve that by using the Kensington security slot on the back as the mounting point for a second leg.

Is it worth it? Yes, if you want a little extra screen space that doesn’t require a power cord. I’ll find it extremely useful for running Photoshop and Aperture on my laptop. Large external displays are nice, but for some reason I never like using one with the laptop. I like the small side display, though.

[Update] Another con I just noticed: significantly higher CPU use when you watch video on it. Dragging an h264 DVD-rip from the main display to the little Samsung chews up a full core on my 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo. On the main display, QuickTime uses 20% of a core and WindowServer another 4%; on the U70, QuickTime uses 100%, WindowServer uses 20%, and DisplayLinkManager yet another 20%. This causes the fans to spin up to about 4800rpm, increasing the noise significantly.

Vegan Soy Jerky:

Really, if you’re going to eat something that isn’t meat, you’ll enjoy the experience a lot more if you don’t extrude it into a pretend-meat product.

Me? I’d rather have the meat. This looks promising…

I understand that your musical career has had a great deal of success in Japan as well as your native Korea (as it should; you’re quite talented), but you seem to have picked up a few things from the Japanese that are best avoided.

more...

Report-processing FAIL:

You are receiving this email because our reports indicate that you have sent users directly to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca or www.endless.com through paid search advertisements that were displayed to users who searched on keywords which you bid upon and purchased in search engine keyword auctions.

Um, no, I haven’t. It would never have occurred to me to try, and I wouldn’t have expected it to work very well. Did you maybe get your report query backwards and send this to all the associates who didn’t pull this trick? Or just to everyone, on the assumption that 94.72% will just ignore it?

1. 10% packet loss on my DSL line.
2. Three hours diagnosing the problem so that I could convince tech support it wasn't my equipment. And, yes, I even had a spare DSL modem lying around.
3. At least four hours spent on the phone with support at various levels, mostly spent listening to Muzak and repeating parts of item #2.
4. Being told that it will be 11 days before someone can physically come out and check the lines, since resetting the DSLAM didn't fix it.
5. Discovering that every other service provider in the area (cable, wireless, etc) has at least a 5-day lead time, and juicy up-front costs for the required gear.

[Update update: I’ve made a small change to add the full JMnedict name dictionary; a lot of things that used to be in Edict/JMdict have been moved over to this much-larger secondary dictionary, and I finally got around to integrating it. The English translations aren’t searchable yet, mostly because I need to rework the form and add the kanji dictionary to Xapian as well, so that I have J↔E, N↔E, and K↔E.]

One downside of moving a lot of stuff onto my new shared-hosting account is that I have to give up a lot of control over what’s running. Not only do I have to work through an Apache .htaccess file instead of reconfiguring the server directly, but I can’t run my own servers on their machine.

So, goodbye Sphinx search engine, hello Xapian (thanks, Pixy). While it suffers from a lack of documentation between “baby’s first search” and “211-page C++ API document”, it has a lot to offer, and doesn’t require a server. One thing it has is a full-featured query parser, so you can create searches like “pos:noun usage:common lunch -keyword:vulgar” to get common lunch-related nouns that don’t include sexual slang (such as the poorly-attributed usage of ekiben as a sexual position). That allows me to use the same tagging for the E-J searches that I use in Sqlite for the J-E searches. [note: everything’s just filed under “keyword:” in this first pass, and the valid values are the same as the advanced-search checkboxes]

I need a full-text search to do English-Japanese, because the JMdict data isn’t really designed for it. There are hooks in the XML schema, but they’re not used yet. As a result, my search results are a bit half-assed, which makes the new query support useful for refining the results. I can also split out the French, German, and Russian glosses into their own correctly-stemmed searches; with Sphinx, there was one primary body field to search, so all the glosses were lumped together. With a small code change, I can tag each gloss with the correct ISO language code and index them correctly.

The new version is now live on jgreely.net/dict, which means I should be able to move that domain over to the shared-hosting account soon.

Once I figured out how to use Xapian (through the Search::Xapian Perl module, of course), replacing Sphinx and adding the keyword support took a few minutes and maybe half a page of code, total. In theory, I could use it for the J-E searches as well, but I’d lose the ability to put wildcards anywhere in the search string, which comes in handy when I’m trying to track down obscure or obsolete words.

One thing I haven’t figured out is why I can’t use add_term with kanji arguments; both Xapian and Perl are working entirely in Unicode, but passing non-ASCII arguments to add_term throws an error. The workaround is to set the stemmer to “none” and use index_text, and that’s fast enough that I don’t need to worry about it right now.

The most annoying thing about the Xapian documentation is how well-hidden the prefix support is. The details aren’t in the API at all; you can learn how to add them to a term generator or query parser, but the really useful explanation is over in the Omega docs.

Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “Earth Day” 2009:

I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first. People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing.

(via The National Review)

Kusumi: “…and I’m too sexy for my hat, Too sexy for my hat, what do you think about that?”

more...