“Thailand has become the world centre of penis reattachment surgery…”
— latest news from Bangkok (no, really)Dear Maki Goto,
Hello!Project dressed you funny, and they were really pushing a slut look that didn’t flatter you. Avex’s wardrobe and makeup artists? Kill them. Kill them all. Make them suffer.
Dear Free Software Foundation,
Way to win hearts and minds, you spoiled little children.
In every Apple retail store is a so-called "Genius Bar" -- a technical support station, the purpose of which is to offer help and support for Apple products.
You can use Apple's helpful online booking system (no registration required) to reserve time slots at the Genius Bar. There are currently 217 Apple stores in seven countries, giving us plenty of slots to book. We want as many people as possible to book slots this Friday and Saturday. Why not book more than one? Having lots of slots booked will get Apple's attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework.
Head over to your local Apple Store at your designated time. Be sure to get a business card from your Genius first and then politely ask them the questions. For each question, give them a score between 1 and 32, with 1 being a really bad answer, and 32 being an answer that really showed insight into the restrictive practices of the iPhone.
In other words, “we’re not Apple customers, and we’re not even going to pretend to be; we just want to fuck up a real customer’s day and annoy people who’d rather be solving actual problems”. This is right up there with Barlow’s asshatted dancing protest outside the Republican National Convention in 2004.
Miko Moe: yes, it's porn
My latest order from Amazon Japan arrived today, and one of the things I threw in was the Miko Moe comic it recommended to me a while back. In case you missed that post, here’s the cover again:
The only way that this is not representative of the actual comic is that the girls are large-breasted and sexually aggressive. Our Hero is a teenage boy helping out at the shrine, and he gets some action in every chapter. It looks like the bluette is Miss Right, but at the moment she’s Miss Alittletootight. Fortunately, the other girls are, um, “filling in”.
[note that I’m not shocked that it’s porn; I was expecting it to at least be ecchi, and wouldn’t have complained if it had been a yuri-fest. I just have to wait until I get home tonight to really look it over.]
Sony Reader firmware update, finally!
[Update: sample picture of a PDF with kanji and furigana below the fold]
Quite a while ago, Sony promised to update their e-ink reader (the 505 model, at least; owners of the original 500 are SOL) to support Adobe Digital Editions (emerging DRM ebook standard), as well as fix a lot of bugs and in general support the product. People have been wondering if it would ever happen, or if it would be a new model. The recent UK release of the 505 was a head-scratcher as well, since it came without any announcement about the overdue update.
It took a while, but it’s here (more precisely, it’s linked from here; there’s no direct download link). Lots of other improvements, including SDHC compatibility and… (wait for it)… kanji in PDF files! You still need to use one of the hacks to see Chinese and Japanese text in text files and menus, but now that there’s a real firmware installer for the 505, you can recover from bad hacks.
Looks good so far.
[Update: the PDF reflow works pretty well for straightforward text-heavy PDFs with sensible internal layout. That is, the order the text was generated in the PDF file is the order it will appear; it doesn’t understand “columns” as such. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Word equation editor violates this constraint, and furigana in Word is implemented as an equation. Net result: Japanese PDFs may turn into crap when you ask the reader to reflow them, so you should format them for its page size.
This also means that graphics-heavy PDF files can’t be resized at all. Maps and complex diagrams must be converted to JPG to be useful, because the PDF viewer still doesn’t scroll, and the resize button is always a reflow button now.
Generally, the UI is much faster (except the date-entry screen, which is glacial), and page-turning is slightly faster. The only EPUB-format document I’ve tried turned out to be very graphics-heavy, which basically locked up the device during rendering. I haven’t tried an SDHC card, but people are reporting very mixed results. I’m loving the kanji support in PDFs, and look forward to trying an updated version of the Unicode font hack to get kanji working in text files as well.]
Ah, the classics
Dear PocketMac,
Blow me.
“Hi, I’m a badly-written installer for a small utility that does only one thing, and does it poorly. You’re stuck with me, though, so I can fuck up your machine as much as I want and make you spend half an hour getting your environment back the way you like it.”
“PS: this update might fix your problem. Or not. But I’m going to make you reboot just to find out. Nyah nyah.”
"Germans?" "Forget it, he's rolling."
Barack Obama, July 16, 2008, as seen on CNN:
Throughout our history, America's confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor, to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Americans have adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world.
