I’ve been buying this organic bread recently. I’m not a big organic guy (could you guess?) but it’s low-carb and yet doesn’t taste like cardboard. Several times, however, the bread has gone moldy within a day or two. Yuck. So I took some back to the store all indignant about how I only just bought this bread and now its moldy. The clerk explained it to me—heh, it’s organic—no preservatives, get it? Oh, that’s what preservatives do. I will never question civilization again.
— Alex TabarrokBeauty School Dropout...
From Costumes, Inc., we have this little gem:
"Go Grease Lightening with costumes from Grease."
Dear Apple,
[update: don’t ask me how the kanji open-quote got turned into an accented a; it’s an ecto/MovableType thing that happens occasionally]
Unlike Windows (any version), Mac OS X correctly keeps track of keyboard layouts, even going so far as to ask the user about possibly non-standard layouts. Except in the Kotoeri input method, where it insists that all keyboards share the same layout, so that my English external keyboard is assumed to have the same layout as my laptop’s built-in Japanese keyboard, forcing me to guess where you hid the ‘「’ key (blackslash, by the way).
[filed as problem# 6770720] [updated 4/15 and marked as a duplicate of bug# 5647954]
You're gonna need stitches...
Found in a photo-tour of an abandoned love hotel in Japan:
"Young people looking to sew their wild oats..."
[as a side note, I’m always amazed at the sheer volume of material left behind in abandoned buildings and towns in Japan, even after their locations have become common knowledge]
Hello!Project Telepathy Project
Koharu says, “I’m only fifteen, so maybe I’m missing something here. Why does the photographer keep leaving the room ‘for some me time’?”
Just for H!P fans...
Someone had a top-ten poll online for Hello!Project members. Since all the cool kids are doing it, I quickly clicked my way through and picked a set. The auto-generated pictures are ordered 1-10, but I didn’t obsess over the order, I just tried to pick a group. Most of the ones who fell just outside the top ten were in the “too darn young no matter how pretty they are” category.
It’s no coincidence that 9 of my 10 were “graduated” during the recent agency house-cleaning; star-pimp Tsunku is focusing his efforts on catching them (very) young and refreshing the brand. I, on the other hand, find women more interesting than girls, and appreciate fully-developed personalities and talents as well as bodies. His most spectacular meltdown to date (still quite mellow by US child-star standards) was a girl who started at 12; the new kids are a lot younger.
So, the list:
Self-inflicted Kybard
During my brief vacation, which involved flying to the midwest to see family and catch a really bad cold, I ordered a new laptop. It’s a Mac, of course, because Windows is simply less functional for people like me. I ordered it online from Apple, so that I could get the precise hardware configuration I wanted: 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM hard drive, and the Japanese keyboard.
Oh, my, the Japanese keyboard. This is going to take some getting used to:
The worst thing about it is that it doesn’t work under Windows. Even a fully-updated Vista Ultimate install insists on treating it as a standard US keyboard layout, and none of the registry hacks or driver overrides you’ll find through Google will help. You know how MacOS X will ask you to press a few keys to help it figure out what kind of special keyboard you’ve attached? Windows doesn’t do that. This is true even for external USB keyboards made for the Japanese market. Apparently the only way to get it to work is to make sure you overrode the keyboard layout during the initial install of Vista/XP. Maybe.
The second-worst thing would be the absence of a “\” key. For historical reasons, the “¥” key replaced it on Japanese keyboards, and you have to type Option-¥ to get “\”.
Third-worst would be the massive slowdown in my typing speed for non-alphanumeric characters, which are in places my fingers don’t know how to find.
Nice things include the 英数 and かな keys adjacent to the spacebar. These handle the input-mode switching, replacing the usual Command-Space toggle. 英数 switches to English/numeric input, かな to kana input. I’m still using the romaji-style kana input, of course, even though this keyboard has a true kana layout printed on it; that’s a project for, well, “never”.
Also, the Control key is where god intended it to be.
Apart from the keyboard, there are no real downsides to the machine. I’m doing a clean migration to get rid of years of cruft, which helps. I think I’ve got all the finicky licensed apps moved over (Aperture and Photoshop adore their new home), and the bulk of the data. I need to reinstall a crapload of Perl libraries and random bits of code, data, and configs, but I’ve got basic functionality. The old MacBook is still under AppleCare for a few more months, so in a week or two I’ll revert it to the factory RAM and hard drive and send it in for some minor repairs I’ve been putting off.
NFSing a Leopard user
Saved for future reference, since I don’t do it very often…
- From another admin account, open System Preferences, click Accounts.
- Control-click the username, select Advanced Options.
- Change the UID and optionally the GID.
- From a root shell, chown -R the user's files.
- If you changed the GID, run:
dseditgroup -o edit -a $USER -t user $OLDGROUP - If you want to add more local groups to match your NFS server, run:
dseditgroup -o create -r $DESC -i $GID $GROUP
