Finally, a reason for the Chubby Elf series to exist:

So Ai Shinozaki can cosplay her (site not safe for work or Javascript):

…without the “chubby” part…

NSFW

Drinks I won’t buy again…

Before I bought my SodaStream, I was a regular consumer of the Sparkling Ice pink grapefruit drink. It was always a hassle to find an adequate supply in stock locally, largely due to the same problem Snapple has: shipping mixed cases to push flavors that don’t sell.

Recently, they released a bunch of branded Starburst flavors. I bought a few, and I regret doing so, because they tasted like melted creamsicles.

Accessibility Lite

So I sent feedback to the author of Typeface, and he already had a beta update that increases contrast. Good: I can now read the nearly-black-on-nearly-white tinyfonts in the sidebar, and usually tell the difference between the dark-gray inactive tiny dot and the blue active tiny dot. Not so good: the nearly-black not-in-font placeholder characters are basically impossible to distinguish from the black preview characters. So, baby steps.

He also asked what I meant about wanting more detailed views, so I fired up FEX for some screenshots that demonstrate the difference between visualizing fonts and managing them. We’ll see what comes out of that.

File under amusing that while the normal state of font activation is two slightly-different tiny dots, hovering the mouse over the dot changes it to a larger distinctive icon showing the state you can toggle it to (minus-sign if it’s currently active, sunburst if it’s currently inactive). There’s also a padlock to indicate system fonts that can’t be deactivated, which you almost never want to see, and can filter out by the obvious method of Option-Right-Clicking on the “Font Book” collection in the sidebar and selecting “Add inverse to filters” (or manually typing the equally-obvious “#!//font-book” in the search bar).

Chibis-A-Go-Go, episode 8

Our Severely Chibi-Whipped Hero almost loses a chance at another rare slime while negotiating with appeasing his mistresses. Then Our Hot Adventure Gals show up, putting him right back in the doghouse, and Hot Naginata Gal offers private tutoring. Gosh, she seems a bit disappointed when he invites Crush-chan, and then her pals want in as well, even the one who isn’t taking the entrance exam.

As if that weren’t dangerous enough, they run into a helldoggie that shouldn’t be on this level, and as soon as they barely manage a victory, its master shows up and curb-stomps them. With everyone about to die in a slow-motion overtalky battle, Our Hero frantically reviews everything he’s got left and finds a trump card: Chibi Devil True Form (powered by his rapidly-dwindling HP).

Our Cute Chibi Hot Busty Devil’s life-draining accelerated puberty unlocks powers well beyond her official rank, leaving the villain baffled. And dead. Her personality hasn’t changed, though, so she demands praise before reverting to chibi form and letting Our Hero live to sub another day.

The helldoggie drops a premium crystal that Our Rich Mage-Maiden quietly states isn’t the one she’s looking for, so we’ll call that something like foreshadowing. Being all Rich Gals, they don’t care about the money from the crystal, and they award the big prize to Our Hero as well: a servant card of the defeated villain.

This should be worth orders of magnitude more than the crystal, but the girls don’t care about that either, and, impulsive as ever, he summons the mighty villain from the card and gets…

Verdict: so much for getting any info on Crush-chan’s missing Dad, and now the villain from the credits has become Our Kinda-Gay Chibi Devil Shota. Yeah, Our Hero regrets the summons.

(maybe he could hand off Snatch-cleaning duties to his new shota)

Cheer Gals, episode 7

Our Cheer Mercenaries are bummed about not getting any orders, until they receive a special request: join the cheerleaders for a losing high school baseball team as they take on Their Rivals, who just happen to be the team from Genki & Wheels’ school. Tropes go wild in this infodump-heavy cheer battle that impresses the roving reporter more than it does the crowd. (note: it must suck to have games scheduled during summer vacation)

Verdict: let’s just call this the summer slump episode, and hope it gets better next week, when Wheels tries out her legs.

Font-manager update

FontBase (even with an “awesome” subscription) is limited to very basic functionality. Worse, it has a two-years-and-counting bug where it will just stop working on a Mac until you completely wipe its configuration and start over (rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/FontBase"). So that’s a big no-can-do.

Typeface, the Mac-only app that directly imports from FontExplorer X Pro, makes extensive use of tiny gray fonts, with the sidebar putting them on a slightly-lighter-gray background, so a giant go-fuck-yourself from 20-year-old app designers with perfect vision. It also uses tiny low-saturation color dots to indicate font-activation status, so that’s a double go-fuck-yourself.

And its focus is very visual as opposed to technical. The only view option is to see large numbers of fonts presented as rendered preview strings. Not, say, a nice tabular layout containing useful information about the fonts you have. And if the font doesn’t have the characters you ask it to preview, it renders them in a default font in (wait for it…) gray. That isn’t even a “preview”.

Sigh. I really, really miss FontExplorer X Pro…

Red Cat Ramen, episode 7

This week’s lessons: be very nice to the cranky-looking old lady, but go ahead and tell off the jerkwad CEO who tries to buy you out. Also, tigers shouldn’t try to eat half a watermelon in one go; something-something red-stained muzzle.

The real drama, though, is that Human-chan is starting to feel a little hurt that Waitress Cat is still not fully accepting her as family.

Cosplay Harem, episode 7

Our Hot Teacher is made of pure awesome. And I’m not just saying that because she’s willing to carve up anyone who threatens to reveal her naughty cosplay past. And as if that’s not enough, she gets a late-night fan-service call from Hot Elf of The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pantsu, who refuses to believe that she threw away her “masterpiece” costume. Foreshadow me harder!

Verdict: I expected her to be my favorite character. I was not disappointed. There were definite LoLs.

Quest For Fur, episode 6

I have no idea what just happened, but I guess we won? Most of the characters I didn’t care about died, anyway. Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting Gandalf The White to be played by a smirking bishie catboy.

Verdict: why do I feel like this was just the prologue, and the actual story starts next week?

Dungeon People, episode 6

Our Miss Clay finally finds a reason to doubt some of her dad’s advice. In fairness, it was really bad advice. Anyway, now that they know how not to burn water, she and Our Dungon Belle can share a friendly meal. Then Our Gal In Black puts on the last suit she’ll ever wear, and we find out exactly why high-level female armor is so skimpy.

Verdict: still fun.

Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead

Pete mentioned an app called Zed, which bills itself as “a high-performance, multiplayer code editor”.

By high-performance, they mean that it needs to leverage your GPU to function at acceptable speeds at the challenging task of displaying a text file.

By multiplayer, they mean real-time collaborative editing with anyone in the world who you can trust to not wipe your hard drive. Because they can:

Since sharing a project gives them access to your local file system, you should not share projects with people you do not trust; they could potentially do some nasty things.

Down the road, they say, they may implement some form of security or sandboxing, because adding it later always works out. They use standard connection encryption, but they’re a bit cagey about exactly how bytes flow between your laptop, their cloud servers, and someone else’s laptop. Which means I should probably give the folks in IT a heads-up, since we all know there’s that one guy who’ll download anything that looks cool and shiny and mentions “AI” and “the cloud”, and there goes our IP.

Oh, yeah, they go there:

Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box, and you can use GPT-4 to generate or refactor code by pressing ctrl-enter and typing a natural language prompt.

I’d say more, but the web site was designed by 20-year-olds with perfect vision, and my eyes are already tired.

uc2p update

I went with Poetry for packaging everything up; it took very little to get it working, including bundling the fonts and making the code locate them. This freed me up to focus on ripping out all of the useless broken bits of Reportlab’s FontFinder class and replacing it with something that allows the user to sensibly select fonts at runtime. This also led me to review some new entries on Programming Fonts (TL/DR: I’m sticking to IO Terminal).

Speaking of which, I rebuilt IO Terminal from the latest version of Iosevka; there’s a lot of active development on it, enough so that I was 8 major revisions behind. I didn’t play with any of the new variants that are available, just rebuilt from tip-of-tree.

…and take it over completely. Patch time!

(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

It would be really nice if DNS worked. Here we are, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and I’ve still got to periodically run a command-line tool to flush stale DNS entries that prevent simple functionality like, say, connecting to Gmail’s IMAP servers. (sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder, that is)

Of course, with how often iCloud mail randomly goes offline, maybe you just don’t know if email breaks…

Totally different show…

Every time I see mention of this season’s Pseudo Harem, I find myself thinking it would be better as a hentai titled Sudo Harem, involving one of those brainwashing smartphone apps that constantly turn up in consent-free fan-art and games.

(classical reference)

It lives…kinda!

Monotype killed off FontExplorer X Pro so completely that the final version they shipped crashes constantly on the last two releases of MacOS. The primary long-time competitor, Suitcase, went full-on with mandatory monthly subscriptions and The Cloud, which, fuck ’em.

A popular cross-platform alternative (with no support at all for legacy font formats), Fontbase, is free for basic use, but charges $3/month for… slightly-less-basic use. I don’t think anyone involved has ever had a large collection of fonts, or even been in the same room with a copy of Font Explorer X Pro. In fact, the only current non-monthly-fee alternative that does have a useful feature set is Typeface, which is… Mac-only.

(FontAgent doesn’t have a monthly fee, but also hasn’t actually implemented some features fully, like “being able to correctly count the number of glyphs in a font”)

Anyway, if you have a license and find a copy of FontExplorer X Pro 7.3.0, and you’re very quick, you can get the Preferences window open and shut off all attempts to connect to servers for updates, the store, etc. It still doesn’t actually work under Sonoma, but you can export all your configs and collections, and manually import them into another font manager. If you can live with the Mac-only thing, Typeface will import everything directly, including all the organization you may have done.

(okay, the connection between poor font-management and collecting the whole set of Molesting Magical Girls heroines in their “SM Big Thanksgiving” form is weak, but so am I)

And I’m thinking about font managers because…

Since Reportlab only handles Type 1 and TrueType, I needed to sort through all my fixed-width fonts and figure out which ones were compatible, so I could test uc2p with a decent variety. I wanted to gather up all the coding fonts I collected and tested several years ago, and they’re all in FEX, which has been crashing since I upgraded to a non-Intel Mac running the current MacOS.

At this point, I’ve pretty much decided that I’ll bundle IO Terminal with the script to guarantee that anyone who downloads it will have at least one known working font, but I’d like to list alternatives, and file some bugs for the problems I’ve seen.

Chibi Life, episode 7

The most surprising thing to happen this week is that Crush-chan did not explode, despite her clear displeasure at her man hanging out in the dungeon with Our Hot Adventure Gals, all of whom are starting to develop a special tingle around Our Action Hero. Yes, even Hot Naginata Gal, and she’s self-aware enough to know what she’s feeling about a boy at least two years younger, although her friends haven’t figured it out yet.

He remains completely oblivious, of course, and even his realization that Crush-chan is the platonic ideal of “his type” isn’t enough to get her out of the friendzone when she hints that maybe he could consider himself close enough to her to finally use her first name. He dismisses the concept of her being jealous that he’s close to other girls as absurd, and focuses on what’s important: how to placate the chibis after skipping a day.

No chibis this week, but we got a new ED song set to stills of the light-novel covers. (note the impressive cleavage on Our Chibi Valkyrie, one of the things they toned down for the anime character designs)

Verdict: first Crush-chan casually gets him to admit he’s been in the dungeon, then she silently accepts being dismissed as just the childhood friend next door, and maintains a frosty silence as each new revelation comes out, all while keeping up a cheerful facade in front of the gang. This chick is damaged, and if this keeps up there’ll be blood on the walls. Next week, a wild villain appears!

(maybe someone should explain to him that that’s not what the “platonic” in “platonic ideal” means…)

Cheer Life, episode 6

“Okay, now that we’re at the hot-springs resort, we need to put on our costumes and go looking for people to cheer for to make videos!”

“No, Smoochy, you need to get into the bath and start selling Blurays.”

Yes, it’s that well-worn trope about winning an onsen vacation for the whole group in a raffle (tickets donated by the record store owner last week), but instead of changing into yukata and heading for the bath, they go out on the town, to cheer!

As for the bathing, hope you liked Smoochy’s painted-on travel outfit, because apparently this is the only hot spring in Japan where girls wear red cocktail dresses into the bath. It’s like it was supposed to be fan-service, including Parkour Gal being shy about stripping in front of others, but someone chickened out at the last minute.

Anyway, an assortment of plot points are sprinkled on the water, including a very mild yuri tease, and Our Pom-Poms formally announce on their new channel that you can call them up if you need a cheer, anytime anywhere. In any realistic universe, they’d show up at a deserted parking lot and never be heard from again.

Verdict: it appears this will not follow the standard underdog sports story. Even when they meet up with the “rival team”, they’re not actually competing in any way; Wheels Gal even promises to join their team once she gets her muscle tone back. That just leaves the cheesecake, and if this is how they do the hot-springs episode, there’s not much hope for a seaside episode with gainaxing beach volleyball.

(which reminds me that they can all be summarized with one word each: Smoochy, Parkour, Princess, Yoga, Genki, and Wheels)

uc2p: cutting over

For many years, my dotfiles included the following aliases:

dlpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -2rGL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -GL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

Cruftily overriding auto-duplexing and European default paper sizes are exactly the sort of things that people don’t want to type every time. -M for media size was another. When Apple ditched PostScript for good, I had to add GhostScript’s ps2pdf - to the pipeline, too. But as of today, it’s just:

dlpr () {
    uc2p -2rL66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    uc2p -L66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

(I made gaudy headers the default, since I always use them anyway, and I haven’t actually written a “simple” style yet)

Not ready for distribution, yet, since Reportlab’s font-handling is a mess. The API for loading custom fonts is awkward, but I could make it work… except that for some reason the font-search functionality is storing all the metadata as byte arrays rather than UTF-8 strings, and it’s failing to reliably extract simple characteristics like “bold” and “italic”. For now I’ve just hard-coded it to use my IO Terminal fonts for everything.

Gate manga, volumes 13-15

Amazon took two weeks to let me know that a series I’d already bought twelve of had three new ones: 13, 14, 15.

(this recommendation is a lot more useful than their relentless promotion of The Little Big Book Of Chatting Up Kids About Sex)

Speaking of Amazon…

…the “four-star styles recommended for you” section keeps getting worse. These were all from one set:

more...

Ramen Life, episode 6

Human-chan’s really become a part of the cat-family.

Cosplay Life, episode 6

Okay, Our Potato is allowed to get shouty under those very specific circumstances. His teenage-boy cred is dropping fast, though: he managed to reject the half-naked tsuntail when she went for him as herself, but when she tries waifuplay, he rejects her because the character is a dream he shares with many other men (99.9% of whom would be thrilled to take turns…). I refuse to accept that there was enough blood reaching his brain to come up with that explanation.

As for his photography lesson with the experienced otaku sherpa, I have seen many fan photographers whose work would be improved immensely by listening to these few simple rules. At the one group shoot I attended, I was the only one actually talking to the model and giving her feedback and suggestions, and it was like a revelation from on high to the others. These were people who hired amateur models for shoots at least once a month, and they were treating them like furniture to be arranged in the room.

Anyway, Potato gets to hear how An Erotic Cosplay Legend has vanished from the scene, Our Heroine runs over Our Hot Teacher in the halls, and then drama strikes: they’ll lose their clubroom unless they can quickly establish official status, which means… finding a faculty advisor. Who could possibly fill that role? Perhaps we can find inspiration by checking the ED animation that’s been telegraphing it for weeks…

Verdict: the writers definitely know the scene, and the artists definitely love the girls. And Our Heroine likes the naughty doujin comics he gave her so much that she’s started doing light bondage poses.

(now we just need to get the fan-artists on board…)

Furless Life, episode 5

This week, Our Orchestra maneuvers in the dark. Badly.

I really hope we get out of this arc soon and onto the whole “exploring the world to find a place she belongs” thing, because I don’t care what happens to these people.

Verdict: good thing Daddy Cat taught Belle how to fight in high heels, eh?

(intended environment for Belle’s formal uniform)

Dungeon Life, episode 5

This week, Our Clever Thief discovers the real reason she was hired: Our Dungeon Mistress was lonely and needed a friend. Of course, we already knew that.

Unrelated,

The Molesting Magical Girls twitter account has switched Leoparde into attract mode:

“Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battlestation enscript replacement”.

Back in the day, when OSU had licenses for Adobe TranScript to drive all the laser printers on campus, I was pretty much the only person who really understood how it worked. So much so that after I left for California, the Physics department’s sysadmin gave me an account on his servers to help him get a new version to work.

Somewhere along the line, Adobe stopped actively supporting PostScript (having given up the rights in order to make it a public standard), and TranScript went away, taking with it the extremely useful enscript text-to-PostScript utility.

Which was reimplemented a-bit-too-faithfully by GNU folks, and then crufted up with useless garbage. Mind you, full compatibility already made it pretty crufty, because the original Knew Way Too Much about how Unix PostScript printer management worked in the late Eighties and early Nineties. What GNU-enscript hasn’t done is keep up with the times: the last release was 12 years ago.

No features. No fixes. No Unicode. No OpenType fonts. No PDF output.

That last bit was particularly grating for me, because a few releases back, Apple abandoned PostScript rendering completely, so the only convenient way to print decades of documents is by shoving them through GhostScript’s ps2pdf, which works, if you’re comfortable with their history of not taking security seriously (grumblegrumble getoffamylawn).

[yes, the free Acrobat Reader still exists, and handles PostScript, but it’s slow to launch and crufted up with Adobe’s attempts at revenue extraction; I have the full Acrobat Pro from the Adobe CC suite, and it’s even slower and cruftier]

I just wanted Unicode text, set in any available fixed-width font, neatly paginated with page numbering and headers/footers, written directly to a PDF file. There are a number of open-source tools that advertise some of these capabilities, but all the ones I’ve tried suck to some degree. Writing my own has been an idea gathering dust in my note-taking apps for several years, but after completing my rewrite of longpass in Python, I decided to finally take a stab at it.

First up, the name: I’ve kept track of all the text-to-pdf tools I came across, brainstormed to find something better, then googled to see which ones had unfortunate connotations. TL/DR: I’m not happy with it, but uc2p is at least short, inoffensive, and fairly unique, so that’s been the working name of the project.

Second, the code. Porting the box and paper modules from PDF::Cairo gave me flexible layout and styling, and after abandoning ReportLab’s Platypus subsystem in favor of the lower-level PDFgen, I was quickly able to knock together some prototypes over the past few days.

The code (~1,200 lines, including libraries) needs a cleanup pass and a real config file for styles, but here’s a sample page of output in the classic -2rGL66 style (two-up, rotated, gaudy headers, 66 lines/page).

By the way, at least with later versions of Adobe’s enscript and with the GNU clone, that -L 66 doesn’t actually do anything useful; -l auto-resizes the font to put exactly 66 lines on each page or column, but it’s incompatible with any page headers or footers. It was kind of an accident that -2rGL66 ever worked as expected; IIRC, it got broken by a margin change in the template in Adobe’s version, and that was faithfully copied by GNU.

What -L N actually does is ensure that no more than N lines will appear on a page. So you could leave the bottom half of the page blank by setting -L 30, for no good reason. My new script, on the other hand, always fits exactly N lines into the space.

Anyway, I’m abandoning drop-in compatibility, so I’m currently going through the various options, giving sensible single-letter abbreviations to the most common ones and moving the rest to a catchall -O opt1=val -O opt2 .... Which will match the structure of the config file where I define layout styles.

Just for fun, a few people out there still have extremely stale web sites, so it’s possible to see what options the Adobe version had in 1992. I love that multi-column printing was under -v, and that there were two completely different one-character options for “send email after job prints” (-w and -m).

And of course everything related to “job burst pages”, something that I haven’t seen in so long that I forgot it was a thing.

Unrelated,

“Dear Amazon, why are you so forcefully recommending a book on talking to small children about sex? I’m pretty sure I’ve never bought anything that would make that relevant for me, or I’d have already gotten a knock on the door from federal agents…”

No anime ’til Thursday

Red Cat, Cosplay, Furless, Dungeon People, Chibis, and Cheer are not pre-empted by Olympics coverage. Also Elseworld Fail, for those still watching the tale of the catgirl and her novelist.

Good tree, bad tree

The little tree that was underneath the huge (~10-inch diameter, ~50 feet long) fallen branch survived! My arborist and his crew showed up Monday afternoon and cleaned things up.

The bad news is that they have to come back and take out another branch on the big tree (as big or bigger) before it falls toward my house. It probably wouldn’t hit the house, but it would do serious damage to my landscaping, and possibly also to the patio.

I’m having him evaluate the health of all the trees on the side lot, just in case.

The downside of ghost kitchens…

There’s a restaurant I can order bao delivered from, and they’re pretty good. They also sell several flavors of rice bowl, pan-fried potstickers, and steamed dumplings; those are not so good. TL/DR: they’re a ghost kitchen hosted in an Italian restaurant, so pretty much all they know about Chinese food is how to warm it up; this is sufficient for bao shipped to them frozen, but the one time I ordered the “pan-fried” potstickers, they weren’t even steamed well.

(now, ghost kittens, on the other hand…)

I searched for “belfast”, but…

…Google mostly returned keyword matches on ‘northern’ and/or ‘ireland’ instead. This was not useful.

Meanwhile, in a nearby PDF file…

I added a few more boxes to the prototype script, recreating the classic look. Since I support every paper size known to Adobe, I stress-tested the scaling by rendering it on 4x6 photo paper. Credit-card size was a bit too far; the body font ended up at 1.25pt. 😁

Since Platypus isn’t useful to me, I have to write all the line-wrapping and text layout myself, and the only real wrinkle there is ensuring I correctly handle double-width CJK characters when wrapping; I’m not concerned about the language-specific issues of breaking words and strings; this is classic “wrap at column N no matter what” style.

For this particular application, I don’t think I need the really-precise metrics that I developed for PDF::Cairo, which involved pre-rendering test strings in each font and seeing the height and width of what actually gets painted onto the page, but if I do more with Reportlab, I’ll probably need to tinker with reportlab.graphics.renderPM (Cairo) and Pillow’s getbbox().