Also overpriced and underpowered, but isn’t that always the way for sexy young things?

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The oddly-named band Bump of Chicken has had a number of hits in Japan, with their songs being used in commercials, games, anime, and, of course, my reading class. Not all of it is to my taste, but I liked the latest one enough to pick up the album last time I was in Kinokuniya.

The designer was an asshole. The front, back, and spine are snow white, with lightly embossed text. Until you get it out of the shrink-wrap, it’s almost impossible to tell that there is text on the cover, much less figure out what it says.

But the fun doesn’t end there. A while back, I complained about the moron who decided to print the liner notes for Aya Matsuura’s latest album in 6-point gothic kanji, including one illegible song that had white text on a light-gray, color-halftoned background. The halftoning made sure that you couldn’t even scan it and blow it up to a reasonable size; the text just disappeared into the dots.

The person responsible for the liner notes in Present from you avoided the halftone trap by printing the lyrics on a nice, clean white background. In 6-point metallic silver ink. Unless you’re under carefully-diffused lighting, you can’t even get an entire line of text to show up clearly at the same time, and the eyestrain from reading 6-point reflective type is insane.

The only good news is that metallic silver is a spot ink, not a process color, so if my scanner can cope with the reflections, I can blow it up to a decent size and hack the contrast into something legible.

Reading Sayumi‘s mind, I hear: Mommy, please let me come home. I don’t like it here any more. I promise I’ll finish school and clean up after my pets and marry a nice salaryman, just pleasepleaseplease get me out of this contract.

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What moron decided that browsing the iTunes Store should involve a “svipp” sound every time a new page loads or you switch tabs? Including the act of leaving the store to go back to your music?

[Update: …and as mysteriously as it arrived, the sound has gone away again…]

Fans of Japanese music often scour the net looking for printed lyrics. Many of the sites that host them “protect” their content from being reprinted elsewhere, usually with lame Javascript hacks.

The oft-reviled uta-net.com goes high-tech, wrapping lyrics in a Flash app. I’d never looked into the specifics of their method, because everything I was looking for was available somewhere else, but today I had a song from 1968 that was obscure enough that they were the best choice.

I’m a fairly clever fellow, says I, so surely I can use one of the many free SWF-decoding tools to crack this open, even if it’s compressed and obfuscated. So I downloaded the Flash-encoded lyrics, and, just on a whim, opened them up as a text file. I found this:

I like buttons.

I know you think buttons and cables and ports are all bad things, and should be hidden from the user whenever possible, but you’re going too far again. The new Macbook Pro that you can’t plug two even slightly oversized USB cords into, even on the 17-inch model that has acres of free space along the one side you permit ports to appear on? Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.

And the new Shuffle that can’t be controlled without the supplied button-starved remote control that apparently has difficulty registering its array of clicks-and-holds when operated with sweaty fingers? Yeah, that’s looking pretty stupid too.

Now, I have to admit that you’re not alone in your hatred for visible controls. See that picture up above? Way back when, the retailer almost begged me to take it off his hands, because no one had ever bought one, and since they’d been discontinued, he couldn’t get it out of the store fast enough. Customers walked in, looked at the sea of buttons, and bought something else.

I, on the other hand, walked in, looked at the device, and said “Look, look! Logically different operations on different buttons! It must be mine!”.

So, let me see if I’ve got this straight: the new iPod Shuffle has no controls at all, making it usable only with the supplied earbuds or your in-ear headphones that cost as much as the player; the interface on the new remote includes double-click to go forward, triple-click to go back, and press-and-hold until it speaks the name of a playlist; and it’s smaller than most of the flash drives that people are constantly losing.

I ask because my beloved 2nd-generation Shuffle has shown some signs of near-future failure, and it sounds like I should grab another one as soon as the clearance sales start, before this new widget is all that’s on the shelves.

[not that that would leave me pod-less; I’ve yet to have one fail completely, so I’ve still got a 30GB, a 60GB, and a Mini that all use the old-style remote control, which I find best for car use. I’ve also got a Touch (for apps) and a Nano (a gift), and someday need to sync them all up with a machine that has my complete music library.]

This is good dip. I’m sure it has applications beyond spreading on crackers (preferably Pepperidge Farm Harvest Wheat), but so far it hasn’t lasted long enough to test this theory.