Harry Dresden is a rather unconventional wizard, in a rather decent set of urban fantasy/detective novels. He has no significant connection to Japan, and indeed his magic is very strongly Western in origin.

So where did the glowing runes on his staff come from?

The paperback edition of Dead Beat doesn’t seem to name the cover artist anywhere, but whoever it was decided that the English loanword マトリックス (“matrix”) made a dandy set of runes.

[oh, and I just noticed that Amazon has a new “Amapedia” site…]

This is a remarkably useful gadget that’s paid for itself several times in the past month. What it does: connect an IDE or SATA drive via USB2 without putting it in an enclosure. It’s faster to work with the bare drive when you just need to grab some data from a failed machine or scrub a disk before reuse or service.

The Microsoft Basic Mouse is USB.

The Microsoft Basic Keyboard is PS/2.

This is not obvious in certain online stores, and is a damn nuisance when you buy machines that have no PS/2 ports.

Usually when you buy a luxury item for half the usual price, there’s a good chance it’s a knockoff or a scam. So, when someone starts selling large quantities of $3,000 poodles for half price, what are you really getting?

In Japan, you get sheep.

The sad thing is that thousands of buyers were fleeced before a celebrity brought her new dog on TV and wondered why it didn’t bark or eat dog food.

[update: hoax/joke/tabloid nonsense]

…shot down by a definitive quote. In Hand Maid May, the genius cyberdoll who applies rigorous logic to all actions (including how much salt to add while cooking) is named Kei, and unlike the title character, gets a -san from everyone. Kei-san = 計算 = “calculation”.

Except the creator came right out and said that she was named after Robot Detective K, who isn’t nearly as photogenic.

He also said that May comes from maid, Mami from mommy, Sara from The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, and Rena from actress Rena Tanaka (This one, not this one).

[…and on an unrelated note, I had no idea that someone was planning a TV spinoff of The Terminator, called The Sarah Connor Chronicles.]

…dogs are howling in pain from the sound of her voice.

Kusumi Koharu can’t sing. Here’s proof. There’s plenty more where that came from, but it should be watched with the sound off, because while she’s a really, really cute teenage girl who can bounce around cheerfully with the other girls in Morning Musume, she’s painful to listen to.

It’s not that all of the other girls in the Hello!Project empire were chosen for their vocal talent; the majority will never “graduate” to a solo career, and you’ll only hear them solo individual lines in a group performance (sorry, Tsuji, but with Kago‘s permanent departure from the organization, your career is screwed). It’s just that Koharu stands out for pushing the cute/voiceless trend to a new extreme.

Although from the audition video, at least one of the two Chinese girls who were just added to the group might actually be a worse singer…

[oh, and the ED from her anime is sung by another H!P group, °C-ute, some of whose members will eventually become teenagers…]

Slot-loading optical drives suck, especially when they refuse to eject a disc that shouldn’t be allowed into the hands of J Random Technician down at the Apple Store (or anywhere else, really).

For future reference, if you really, really need to crack open a MacBook Pro and peel the optical drive open, the nice folks at Other World Computing have you covered.

Be sure to pick up a Torx size 7 and a Philips size 000 before starting, and keep very careful track of which screws came from where. And don’t forget to plug the keyboard back in before you seal it back up.

I needed to put a Mac Mini in someone’s house.

But it had to run Windows XP.

Headless.

And restart automatically after losing power.

The headless part was handled by our master solderer, following the instructions from the nice folks at Mythic Beasts. They also explain the power-on problem, but don’t provide a direct Windows solution.

To make a long google short, download WPCRS120.EXE from Japan, run it, run the included installer, reboot, run wpcrset.exe, set {Bus 0, Device 31, Function 0, Register A4} to 0, and reboot again.

Before each of the required reboots, you’ll see this:

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