I brought my Wii with me when I returned from Japan to Australia. Unfortunately, unlike laptop power supplies, this one can only be used on 110 volts. For a while I borrowed a friend’s transformer but he eventually asked for it back, and anyway, it’s probably an inefficient way to do things.
Today I finally got around to ordering an Aussie power supply from Nintendo. I was expecting it to be expensive, but it was only $35! I even told the bloke that the reason I needed one was because it was a foreign console, and he wasn’t concerned.
Now my only real problem is that it doesn’t work on PAL-only TVs. But who has one of those these days?
Edit: To top off the experience, they played me remixed tunes from Zelda and Donkey Kong while I was on hold :)
If any clothing manufacturers are reading this, please don’t stitch tags into your garments. Do they serve any purpose other than to be itchy and ugly? Let me justify that they are ugly by saying I just removed one from my scarf. And behold, it said:
COLD GENTLE MACHINE WASH
WASH SEPARATELY
TURN INSIDE OUT BEFORE WASHING
DO NOT BLEACH [...]
Clearly as little thought went into writing this tag as went into affixing it so firmly to a prominent and highly visible part of my scarf. There must be another way to convey the rest of the information.
Just as essential to remove are stickers on kitchen ware, and just as frustrating, too. If you must stroke your ego by having yet another instance of your logo on your polished stainless steel bowl, at least use a glue that doesn’t require steel wool to remove.
… although not as thoroughly as I’d like to. I’m keeping it, but not without resentment.
Photopress was a promising gallery plug-in, but has been unmaintaned for ages. I heard about people having problems with permalinks, so before upgrading my blog I wrote some SQL to migrate the old images over to the new built-in gallery of Wordpress. After a solid and very frustrating couple of days hacking SQL I have it working reasonably well. It can bake all the Photopress links and tags in a blog to not require the plugin at all. It also goes half-way towards creating proper galleries: new image posts are created and tagged as attachments so they show up in the new media browser. However they lack metadata, so they don’t quite display the image.
I’ve had a gut full of it, but if anyone else wants to hack on it, here it is. Just read the instructions very carefully first.
I had an old maths teacher who told us that she used to do calculations based on number plates while driving. We all thought that was terribly nerdy. Over the last few years I’ve started to be amused at some of the words that can be read in plates, but today it happened: there were two cars parked next to each other; one had the number plate TCP nnn and other other WEB nnn. When I caught myself smiling at this I felt a little piece of my cool slipping away – and I already had a reputation as something of a geek.
In fact there are loads of amusing nerdy number plates out there, mostly based on protocol names and file extensions. It makes life just that little bit more fun.
Edit: Also, I was warmed to read last night that a fourth elemental component of circuitry, the memristor, has been discovered. Lovely.