Rants from Vas

If you’ve actually visited the web page, you’ll see a new link in the sidebar – To Arcade. I’ve put up a few translations of Japanese game service menus and test programs. Tell me what you think. Also, I’m open to suggestions for more candidates for translation. Incidentally, I’ve changed the look of the site […]

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 “Tiger” has been released. As usual, it’s feature-packed, and goes faster than the previous release on the same hardware. And as usual, Apple has deprecated and dropped several legacy features. It seems with every release, there’s a little less of NeXTstep hiding under the covers. In Leopard, Input Managers are […]

I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog ever since I started wasting time with it, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. However, there was something that bothered me: despite serving UTF-8 to the browser, the actual database table collation being used was latin1_swedish_ci. Now the way WordPress was getting away with […]

Well, since everyone else seems to have an opinion on it, I may as well, too. First up, I wouldn’t buy one, for a number of reasons: I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it. I like being able to use […]

Tonight, my wife and I decided to get out of the house for a bit. So we drove to Highpoint and walked around level one looking at the menus on display outside the eateries. We decided to eat at La Porchetta, as it’s quite good value, and I felt like eating a veal parmigiana. We […]

I just read an excellent article on Apple’s current iPod/iPhone strategyby Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster. Definitely worth a read – the current trend is very worrying.

Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser. Take its text rendering, […]

After reading this and this about the new Apple keyboard, I got the itch to write, so here are my random musings. I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based […]

I’m talking about my new car. I got a tenth-generation Toyota Corolla Conquest hatch in Aztec Blue (this is called an Auris in Europe and Asia – I’m not sure what it’s called in the Americas). It’s almost funny. Ford and Holden are placing more emphasis on their smaller cars (Focus, Epica, Astra, etc.) but […]

Well, it looks like Ford is going to stop making engines in Geelong in favour of importing cleaner engines from other Ford subsidiaries. In all honesty, I’m not sad to see them go. If they can’t take the heat, they can get out. I do feel for the six hundred workers who will lose their […]