Give me money!

Someone once offered to donate money for iPodBackup. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that my scholarship is being delayed I’m wishing I had set up a donations thing before.

Now everyone who was just itching to throw cash my way can do so safely and easily! Just click the Amazon Thingie™ here (and on all my software pages) to pay via credit card or whatever else Amazon accepts.

I’m not honestly expecting much out of this, but maybe you guys will surprise me.

Firefox resources

Firefox 1.0 is out! Congrats to all the developers who worked long and hard to create the best browser out there. For all the Firefox newbies, here is a collection of excellent resources:

For those of you who think the default Firefox theme is ugly, I recommend that you try out Aronnax’s themes. I use “GrApple (Default).” Also, if you think the default widgets are ugly, try my own Firefoxy.

There is also a hack to give Firefox Safari-style tabs. I don’t know whether or not the tabs play nicely with Aronnax’s themes.

Be sure to check out great Firefox extensions like Adblock (blocks ads), Web Developer (adds a toolbar with useful features for web designers), Sage (an RSS reader), and downTHEMall! (an automated porn image downloader).

There are also custom builds of Firefox optimized for G4 and G5 processors.

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寄せ鍋更新

I put out iPodBackup 1.1.5 today. Now I’ve officially delved into the realm of bloatware: You can choose a chime to be played after the sync finishes. It’s the new killer app!

This is one of the most addictive games ever. It’s hip to be square.

I did some shopping at Akihabara, a.k.a. Electric Town, today. I got an electronic dictionary that does Japanese, English, and Chinese. I also found a Playstation controller-to-USB adapter and a cheap controller, so now I can play emulated SNES games as they were meant to be played. Now I just have to find a DDR pad so I can make a fool of myself with StepMania.

Here is something beautiful. Now for something ugly: I paid good money to go to a baseball game tomorrow. It’s been raining all day, and it will almost certainly be raining tomorrow. But is there any way to find out if the game is cancelled? Actually, there is: Wake up at 8am and haul my ass out to Ginza (travel time > 1hr) and see with my own damn eyeballs.

The good news is that classes should be cancelled Monday, and I’m skipping to see a concert Tuesday, and Wednesday is a national holiday. Mmmmm, that’s karma.

Pizza Hut can kiss my ass, right after U-Haul’s done

I went in on some pizza with a bunch of guys from my dorm, and now Pizza Hut Japan is on my shitlist right beneath Keio and U-Haul.

• I was able to order online. That’s good.
• They have interesting toppings, like one with different toppings in each quadrant. For example, the “Delicious 4″ consists of the following independent Flavor Sectors™: Basil Italiano, Super Supreme, Idaho Special, and Meat Paradise. The limited availability special we got also came with potato wedges, corn salad, and ice cream. That’s good.
• They took 2 hours just to get out the freakin’ door. That’s bad.
• The special I mentioned above cost ¥3,550 for the “Large” size. That’s about US$32. That’s bad.
• The “Large” size is a little bit bigger than an American “Medium.” That’s bad.
• The pizza itself was good, once it got here. That’s good.
• They forgot our corn salad. That’s bad.
• They were out of the muskmelon ice cream. That’s bad.
• The delivery guy just stood there, stupified, when he saw that I wasn’t Japanese. He might have just been braindead. That’s bad.

All in all, I’m extremely unimpressed. Especially after going to a Japanese McDonalds, which is like heaven compared to American McDonalds, this was quite a disappointment. We’ll be giving Domino’s a shot next time. They really need to bring back the Noid.

On an unrelated topic, I just put out Firefoxy, a drag-and-drop tool for applying Kevin Gerich’s fancy Firefox widgets. If you like Firefox but don’t like its ugly widgets, this is the easiest way to fix them.

Reminds me of Animal House… er, Farm

Classes finally started here at Keio. The good news is that they’re letting me skip the pointless required courses and take only regular Japanese undergrad courses. The bad news is that the registration system is the most ass-backwards, unnecessarily complicated, shoot-me-in-the-nuts frustrating system ever. There are a dozen forms to fill out, get stamped, and turn in on time or else. They also require a sacrifice of yak’s blood.

I just put out iPodBackup 1.1.1, which just has some minor fixes. I also posted two English-to-Japanese song translations that I’d been sitting on for a while. Enjoy.

Rock you like a hurricane

This song rocks harder than anything in the world. If you don’t feel like punching something after listening to it, you may just have no testicles.

iPodBackup 1.1b4 is now out. Hopefully the crash-on-launch on dual processor machines is fixed. It’s not my fault, I swear! It was the Platypus!

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Updates!

I’ve released iPodBackup 1.0.1 and 1.1b. 1.0.1 fixes a problem that probably everyone had, so if iPodBackup didn’t work for you before it probably does now. 1.1b is a beta release with the capability to backup to disk images. See the iPodBackup page for more info.

Also released today is Firefox 0.9.3. If you’ve never tried Firefox, now’s the time!

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A modicum of legitimacy

I’m now officially listed on MacUpdate! Hooray for iPodBackup.

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iPodBackup is born

I just finished a piece chronicling my newfound expertise in rsync and shell scripts. If you’re looking for a way to make backups automatically happen when a drive mounts, this is for you. Specifically, I now have my home folder automatically sync to my iPod upon mount. Even if you aren’t looking for that, you might learn something. The potential applications of this are almost mind-boggling. Almost. So close.

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