That’s my answer to OhGizmo’s question, “Why weren’t they designed like this in the first place?”.

I can’t count the number of things wrong with this idea, although it’s refreshing to see that some of the commenters at Gizmodo gave it a shot.

Given an old ClarisWorks 4 Japanese document and a working copy of ClarisWorks 4 Japanese Edition, in theory you can just export it to Word, and the Japanese text will be translated correctly. If you are running on an Intel-based Mac, this won’t work. Actually, unless you can do a clean reinstall of CW4JP under a copy of Classic that has the Japanese language kit installed, it might not work at all.

AppleWorks 6, however, which is still available in stores and runs nicely under Rosetta, will. At least, with a little help.

1. Open the file myoldstuff in AppleWorks. Don't worry if the kanji turns to garbage, and even if it looks okay, don't bother trying to cut-and-paste into other documents. It won't work. You can view and print, and that's about it.
2. Save as RTF in, let's say, Desktop/myoldstuff.rtf.
3. Open the Terminal, and run this command:
   textutil -inputencoding x-mac-japanese
      -encoding UTF-8 -convert rtf Desktop/myoldstuff.rtf
4. Open the file in Word, and save as a Word Document. Optionally, fix the fonts and margins, which are almost certainly wrong now.

If your AppleWorks install is damaged or incomplete, it won’t be able to open CW4JP docs; you’ll have to reinstall. The English version bundled with PowerPC-based Macs for a long time works just fine, so if you’ve got one, you don’t need to buy the retail package. I use the copy that came with my PowerBook, which was automatically transferred to my new MacBook.

Note that DataViz MacLinkPlus, for all its virtues, hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with Japanese editions of the software formats it supports.

San Francisco is looking to invigorate its Japantown with an infusion of pop culture. I’ve been insisting for a while now that Otaku Tokyo is one of the few colorful themes left unlicensed for a major Las Vegas casino, so perhaps this will help show the money-men the power of kawaii.

Just for the record: I believe that my friend Hans Reiser did not commit murder, a crime he’s currently suspected of. I hope that his wife is found alive and well, and that their children are not forced to grow up without parents.

[Update: formally charged. I agree with the defense attorney that the police seem to be aggressively feeding the press. They’d constructed a compellingly sinister narrative and handed it out to reporters before charges were even filed. Sorry, guys; it’s supposed to be “trail by jury”, not “trial by a pack of j-school hacks”.]

My new MacBook is not the ideal machine for running Apple’s Aperture application, but it’s supported, and with 2GB of RAM, usable. At least, it would be if Aperture didn’t crash every five minutes on a brand new install of version 1.5, while just poking around with the supplied sample project.

I hope it will be more stable on my Quad-core G5, which is the ideal machine for this sort of application…

(or was, before the new Mac Pro came out; still, one can’t whine too much about the power of Last Year’s Computer, especially when it’s quite the screamer)

…just not in English, and not this song.

[link goes to full-length, heavily-compressed MP3; the resulting quality loss does not significantly alter the effect. The full album, which is mostly not at all like this, can be found here]

Anime-themed motivational-poster contest over at Riuva. Why not?

I went to all the trouble of doing this in Illustrator before I discovered that Despair.com has an online generator. No biggie.

Going through my Quarantine folder, I found something that had all the hallmarks of spam: a hotel reservation confirmation for a city I’ve never visited (Orlando), sent to an email address I would never have handed out for that purpose (_______@mac.com), with graphics and links coming both from the real site and elsewhere.

When I read the raw source of the message, though, I started wondering. All the Marriott links actually go to the Marriott web site. Everything is spelled correctly, with no attempt to hide spammy keywords. The headers all look legit. Even the links to elsewhere go to legitimate travel-related sites.

Then I remembered My Evil Twin, who, by the way, lives in Boca Raton. I guess the other Jay Greely and his lovely(-sounding) wife are off for a little R&R, and they mistyped their .Mac email address again.