An edging return to anime
Here's a fifty second clip of the first episode of the 2018 season of Doctor Who, featuring Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, here seen just newly regenerated, and still coming to terms with who she now is. ^_^ (It's been appearing and taken down a fair bit; here's a mirror)
As a side note, if you're wanting to view images at full size, I'm now tending to include them in high resolution, and simply letting the browser scale down, where the full size image isn't too big (maybe up to a couple hundred K), as with the Pyongyang graphic novel example page. Maybe I should include a link to the same file, if it's easier to open a link than drag the image to the desktop or open it in a new window?
And on that note, perhaps the best photo to come out of 2018's Pride month. =:D
Finally watched A Wrinkle in Time - and I'm so very pleased I did. (It had that sense of a film I'd like, going just by the trailer. I missed its big screen debut, so simply pre-ordered it unseen) It's a story with such love, imagination, and scope. It does lack the cynicism a lot of people equate with authenticity, but I respect it all the more for what a positive tale it is.
I imagine everyone who's interested learned about it the same day, but anyway. =:) There'll be more Steven Universe starting July 2 2018, for five nights. =:D (If you're unfamiliar with SU, I'd recommend avoiding that promo, as there are some recent major events referenced which might fundamentally change the way you view one character in particular)
At long last, I've resumed learning Japanese, courtesy of the excellent Human Japanese apps (there are two, beginner and intermediate, available for iOS (separate iPhone and iPad versions), Android, macOS, and Windows). It's a long path, I know, but as the saying goes, the longest journey begins with a single step. =:)
Sort of relatedly, I tried giving Crunchyroll another try, on their basic free level, and gave up quickly after trying to start watching the first episode of Citrus, which looked moderately promising as a warm and cuddly tale of first love. For whatever reason known only unto manglement, I began with an ad (a promo for some violent combat anime - such targeted advertising), then a minute or so lead in, some of the opening titles, and then another ad, again for some combat-based anime they wanted to promote.. and then another ad, at which point I just tapped the home button and gave up on them. Agh! I fully appreciate they can't support free users without something like advertising, but: (a) why not select promos plausibly relevant to the show being watched? (Think of how trailers are selected for showing before a given film), (b) maybe don't drown the actual show out with the level of advertising? All that said, maybe it's all simply a not very subtle means of driving viewers to their paid offerings. Meanwhile, I bought the subtitled version of "Your Name." on iTunes the other day - the opening ten minutes do look most promising. ^_^ I might try it on the roomie sometime, but probably not for my first viewing - he tends to be more inclined toward American TV pacing, so this'd likely feel too slow for him.
.. wow. I knew it was well regarded, but all the same, such an emotionally rich storyline, and characters you're inexorably drawn to sympathise with. I shan't say too much about the plot - just that it involves two high school students, one living in Tokyo, another in the countryside, with consequently very different lives. One day, one of them wakes up in the other's body. Soon, they figure out that they're swapping over a few times a week, and, via their phones, agree not to disrupt each other's lives (much) - but that still leaves the bigger question of just what's going on. It winds up being quite an intense experience, I'd have to say, but one I'll wholeheartedly recommend. Oh, and the animation's gorgeous, too. (And FWIW, Rotten Tomatoes offers it 97%, and an audience rating of 94%; the Amazon reviews are glowing) BTW, if you like the poster design, there are high resolution versions available over here.
Heh! It would appear there's a live action Sonic the Hedgehog flick being produced by Paramount, and Jim Carrey's angling for the role of Robotnik. =:D
Most cool! The BBC's officially made all of the 1980s Computer Literacy Programme materials available, including all of Micro Live, even down to the listings offered at the time. Frustratingly, not through iPlayer, but a new bespoke site, making it less straightforward to download rather than stream. There doesn't appear to be any geoblocking, though - I was able to stream a little from the first episode of The Silicon Factor from both the UK and US - so you should all be able to watch any of it.
Well, now! I'd never known this.. anyone who's loved Babylon 5 likely knows the live action was all filmed, and thus suitable for HD transfer, but that all the effects assets have since been lost, requiring re-rendering everything from scratch - technically feasible, but expensive. However! "But at the end of each season we were required to transfer all digital assets direct to film, frame by frame, so Warners could have a version that could be used across all later formats. That version, with pristine CG and live action, has never seen the light of day." Consider signing the petition to let Warner know there's a willing audience for such a release. ( Here's a thread between JMS and Neil Gaiman, confirming the situation)
Is anyone else watching (or, more likely, have you seen) Gravity Falls? We're up to midway through s2, with the particularly (deservedly!) highly rated "Not What He Seems". Damn, I'm loving this show. =:D Brilliant opening theme, too. I'm rather disappointed there isn't an official "full length" version, TBH. I wonder if they've ever released any stems for a remix competition.. probably not, given it's a Disney production, but who knows?
So, the GDPR came into force recently; perhaps you noticed. =:) One noteworthy mention goes to USA Today, who came up with what they feel is a compliant version of their site, lacking tracking, Javascript, ads, and personalisation. You may notice it loads instantaneously, and has an exceptionally uncluttered design. Probably purely coincidental. =:)
Seventy years ago, the Manchester Baby - which can be considered to be the first electronic stored program computer - glowed into life, executing a seventeen instruction program, running through 3.5 million calculations in 52 minutes. Working that out as calculations per second per kilo, with it coming in at about a long ton, that's about 1.1 calcs/s/kg. By comparison, consider a current phone, like the iPhone X - if we estimate it as capable of, say, six billion calculations per second (fairly conservative, given there's the GPU in addition to the hexacore CPU, and indeed, the presence of vector instructions), and a weight of 174g, that's around 3e10, or thirty billion calculations per second ker kg. All that improvement, in seventy years. What will computing technology be like by 2080? O.o;
I feel lovelyangel did a superb job of capturing at least some of Pride in her entry. I'm all about wildlife - she's so good with people. ^_^
Yay! There's a new Studio Killers single available now! =:D It's not a headliner track as such, but it's so good to see (well, hear) them back again - hopefully this signals their return for much more. ^_^
If you're interested in the world of animation, you might like to check out the free Annecy edition of Animation World News. There's a lot in there.
Following Tumblr/Oath's GDPR shenanigans, wherein they broke all their RSS feeds by serving a "hey, consent or else" notice instead of the actual feed, if you're presenting a European IP address, I've created a few replacement feeds here, should anyone else want to subscribe to them:
determineddiary - the art's quite basic, but it's got a lot of heart. ^_^
pigeon_gazette - amusing randomness.
up_and_out_rss - it began as a sort of "Perry Bible Fellowship" four panel gag strip, before changing nature quite a lot midway through.
dragons_burn - updates only infrequently, but I remain following it.
finding_dee_rss - by the cartoonist behind a few other strips including Dandy & Company, this relates some of their life having transitioned from male to female, just - jazzed up somewhat, comic style. =:)
bluebun_art - occasional artwork postings by Bluebun. Sometimes furry, sometimes Steven Universe, sometimes anything else.
Another option for easy syndication, which I may well go through for all of them, but haven't yet, is one that someone's implemented using Reddit's API: the subscribe-by-reddit system. Send that bot a syndication request, and it'll create a new sub (if it doesn't already exist) for that feed. In turn, you can subscribe to any sub by appending .rss to (almost) any Reddit URL. On the other paw, I'll probably just use LJ for that - seems it's perfectly possible, just by using an URL of the form http://communityname.livejournal.com/data/rss. Hrrrm.. actually, maybe not - it didn't seem to be working within Vienna, but checking with Feed Validator showed a perfectly good feed, and indeed, they seem to be functioning on the site - but nope, they don't serve a reconstructed feed, but rather, a 302 pointing to the original feed URL. =:P
Another comic has joined my roster. ^_^; This time, the manga Alien Hand Syndrome. Regrettably, there's not too much to catch up on, as the artist's constantly struggling with carpal tunnel syndrome, brought on by hyperextensibility, so it's tended to average about one new page per month for most of its span. And, on the more cybernetic front, there's the intriguing Hey Kitty, telling the story of an anthro snow leopard android ("anthroid") who becomes able to ignore commands, thereby gaining her independence, in a world where such is very much not tolerated. There are a couple years of back work to catch up on, with new pages appearing weekly, so getting up to date won't take too long. (One nice point with the site itself is the "archive" page has thumbnails of every page, so if you've got a particular scene in mind, but can't remember exactly where it is, you're in a much better position to find it readily) It appears to build on a companion comic, Hey Fox, but that isn't required in order to follow what's going on.
So, WWDC 2018's keynote came and went. ^_^ Thankfully, no new iPad Pro, so I don't have to concern myself with trying to return the newcomer in favor of the Shiny New. =:) Which I'm genuinely relieved about, as it takes time to get a new system set up just the way you like - this one's mine now. Otherwise, it was a fairly low-key event, mostly about quite geeky details, though I did appreciate them highlighting the deprecation of "social media" badges in WebKit loading/rendering, and the initiation of the long inevitable war of attrition against browser fingerprinting. macOS Mojave certainly won't mark the end of Big Data's gathering of everyone's browsing habits, but it's a highly welcome step in the right direction, and hopefully, one which will be echoed elsewhere.
The LEGO AR playtime did look like fun, I admit. ^_^ Dark mode will please those who've been seeking it out for years; I'll likely remain mostly on the light side. =:) Still, it was interesting to see echoes of the Aperture UX making its way into the Finder, years later. =:/ The animoji customisation looks very nicely done indeed, down to not just "wear shades", but "select a style" and "choose the level of tint" - but, from what they showed, that's all only for the human bases? =:P Hopefully they'll extend that to the non-human options too - I'd love to appear in a FaceTime chat as my leporine self. ^_^ (I'd even accept having voice enabled for that)
I've given Mojave a quick spin, and at first glance, all looks good on Hazel - no surprises or glitches of any kind. And I'm thrilled to discover that Aperture continues to chug along happily. =:D Not even a 32-bit warning! (Apple's confirmed that Mojave will be the final macOS release to support 32-bit applications, following iOS' lead) And whilst I doubt anyone else is in SL here, but I've heard from a Reliable Source™ that we need not worry about the future of the Mac SL viewer. ^_^
And so it took about three days for me to decide it's about time I got a paid developer account again, with the intent of actually getting something up on the App Store. ^_^ If I can actually get off my tail and get into some iOS development, following an accidental prompt from austin_dern over on Mastodon, I think the first app might be a TinyMUCK client. Very niche, obviously, and not exactly aimed at building a retirement fund, but it feels like a project with sane scope - large enough to introduce me to practical development, UI included, but sufficiently modest to make it completable in less than a Half-Life 3 timescale. =:) I've now got Hazel on Mojave, and both the iPhone and iPad on iOS 12, having gingerly first ensured Hazel had a current Time Machine backup, and also backed ~/Library/Mail on another external drive. So far, I'm delighted to report things seem surprisingly solid - certainly, much better than 2017's wretchedly rocky beta journey. (Generally, I've found the betas fine, but there are always caveats and surprises - if not for one's own setup, then others') Aperture indeed works just as before, and the addition of News to macOS is surprisingly welcome - it's a good application, and one I'm likely to use rather more hereon.
Bah, humbug! Nope.. looks like Mojave b2 broke something related to USB camera devices. Now, when I connect the D500 and select Import, it doesn't bring up any thumbnails, and can't import anything. My workaround is, for now, using Photos to import the photos and then bounce them out to Aperture - not exactly elegant, but it works. I wonder if pulling the photos off via a card reader would behave differently, given that's a different class USB device.. trouble is, it's an XQD card (for speed; it permits writing as fast as the D500 can shoot, so rapid bursts are never slowed down), so I'd have to buy such a reader. I'll probably just leave it as is for now, and hope a future release fixes whatever changed, as there's much less need for a separate reader with the D500, given it finally offers USB3. Both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave are available as public betas now.
I found this article on the genesis of the transistor quite fascinating. It does cover the plain history, but also from the perspective of the actual people and motivations, making it a much more absorbing read than one might at first expect, especially on such a seemingly geeky topic. This part begins with as the first transistor was announced, quite a different beast to anything you'd find today, and indeed, more or less rendered obsolete a few years later, before it could really make much headway.
If you've got a few groats you could spare, Linkey will happily let you shop in their store - but none of the goods will reach you. Rather, everything's distributed to homeless shelters and rough sleepers in London and elsewhere in the UK. £5 will buy a set of women's underwear, £8.50 some thermal socks, and £19 a good sleeping bag.
Here's quite an insightful, long-form story on how few seasoned game developers there are, and goes into depth as to just why people tend to drop out of the industry entirely after a while. Perhaps needless to say, the answers aren't surprising. *sigh*
Here's a rather fun looking comics anthology Kickstarter, though having taken long enough to get around to posting this, it's since wrapped up, thankfully successfully: FTL, Y'All: Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive: "Six months from now, detailed schematics anonymously uploaded to the Internet will describe, with absolute precision, how to build a faster-than-light engine for $200 in easily-available parts. Space travel will be instantly-and chaotically-democratized. The entire cosmos is suddenly within reach of all humankind, without organization, authority, or limitation. This comics anthology is about what happens next."
Some researchers are pursuing what does look like a highly promising avenue of attacking breast cancer, essentially taking what white blood cells the patient's already producing, growing those, and reintroducing them to the donor, thereby attacking their specific cancer.
This is very, very cool, if you're nerdy. And if you're reading this, well.. =:) How about a homebrewed vector-based video game system? The Ocelot awaits! No longer do you have to suffer the indignity of raster-based Asteroids - now, you can enjoy Mattsteroids in genuine oscilloscope vectors, including sound. And there's Star Lynx, for space-based combat. ^_^
Here's a first attempt at photographing the rather complex David Bowie statue finally on view in Aylesbury market square. ^_^ Needless to say, I'm very pleased I was in a position to help with the Kickstarter to bring it about.
Here's an insightful piece from Assembly Four, who are behind Switter, the Mastodon instance dedicated to providing a safe social network for sex workers, in the light of SESTA/FOSTA's recent passage into US law. Unsurprisingly, its growth has been dramatic, fueled by the sudden disappearance of sites which had previously offered safe online venues to arrange connections. How bad are those laws? "Prostitution is the most dangerous job for women in the US, with a homicide rate of over 200 per 100,000. The next most dangerous job is a liquor store employee with a rate of 4 per 100,000." In this new legislative environment, sex workers are being forced back into street work and into the hands of pimps. "Johanna Breyer, interim executive director and co-founder of the Saint James Infirmary, a health clinic that supports sex workers in California’s Bay Area, told me that in the weekend following FOSTA, the infirmary’s mobile van outreach saw a dramatic increase of street-based sex workers in the Mission District. Breyer estimated that there were about double or triple the usual number of workers seeking assistance."
As for Mastodon, it's somewhat akin to hellbird, but with the major difference that it's not run by a company all about user stats to present to investors, and collecting all the data it can to sell on to try making some money out of people, but rather, each instance is run by people who simply want to do so. As such, each may only be home to a few hundred or thousand, making moderation an actually practical endeavor - and as you might expect, each instance tends to develop a local flavor, often based around a sort of theme, such as lgbt.io and photog.social or, for furries, the likes of meow.social, dragon.style, and chitter.xyz; they're all open to anyone, usually with quite similar, reasonable rules. Importantly, instances mesh together, making for a network ("fediverse") of a million or so folk - and if instances are seen by others as being havens to abusive sorts, admins have the ability to mute users, or, as a last resort, the entire instance.
Here's a rather fun looking Kickstarter (again, successfully wrapped up, having taken so long to get around to posting): Backbone, a pixel art noir adventure set in a furry retrofuturistic Vancouver, starring a raccoon gumshoe. ^_^
There is the possibility I'll be able to share artwork of my own again in the future, but that's probably some way off yet. But judging by how happy just exploring the possibilities with the iPad Pro and Pencil seems to make me, I'll be taking to it very readily. =:D It indeed works as well as the fruit company claims - accurate, with no lag, a display that updates at 120Hz when necessary, and fully laminated for no parallax, on top of a top-notch color palette. Simply playing around with the possibilities in Procreate is just so much fun! I'm not limited to just a 0.3mm tech pen, or a 2B pencil, but all manner of tip effects, and rather more easily erased, which I'll be doing plenty of in the coming months. ^_^
The rest of the tech bump is pretty welcome, of course - the iPad Air's still a great device, but going from 1GB to 4GB RAM does now mean very little swapping out of applications, and 10-bit H.265 4K decoding in VLC is now absolutely fine. (Hello Sense8!) I went with the smaller model, the 10.5", as the larger one's noticeably heavier, more like the original iPad, and on getting the Air, that lightness was (and is) so welcome when holding it in one hand. Having Touch ID's a pleasant addition, as it means I can now keep it secured much more conveniently than a passcode, and I dare say there'll be times when Apple Pay might come in helpful, probably more online than in person, given it's only US banks that seem to lag in offering NFC cards. The speakers are surprisingly good, managing a touch of actual bass, despite having no case depth to work with - and with four speakers, automatically rerouting with orientation to provide a correct stereo image. USB 3 (at last!) also makes for much faster file dropping.
While Teespring was happily pushing Pride Month on their front page, their actual behavior is quite different. I'll be leery of ordering from them again.
Does pushing public services into private hands result in improved efficiency? Well, no.
There was a good AMA with the CEO of SmugMug regarding their purchase of Flickr.
I'm not generally huge on card-based games, but I do quite like the look of Cultist Simulator. ^_^ The trailer certainly paints it appealingly. "Play as a seeker after unholy mysteries, in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Perhaps you're looking for knowledge, or power, or beauty, or revenge. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. In this roguelike narrative card game, what you find may transform you forever. Every choice you make, from moment to moment, doesn't just advance the narrative - it also shapes it. Become a scholar of the unseen arts. Search your dreams for sanity-twisting rituals. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Seize your place as the herald of a new age."
Razer just came out with a relatively affordable eGPU enclosure, the Core X, for $299. Not exactly free with the cornflakes, but nonetheless, an interesting option, given that permits you to use the card of your choice with the laptop of your choice, now including Macs as well, as of the latest macOS. The catch is you'll need a recent device, as communication is over Thunderbolt 3, given the bandwidth required. Unfortunately, on the Mac front, only AMD cards are supported at present, though I suppose Nvidia would be fine if booted into Windows 10. (I haven't been following what the underlying reasons there are) My MBP, sadly, doesn't qualify, with Thunderbolt 2, so that remains something for the next system. It'd be an interesting option - to have a highly capable laptop, but also with the option of tethering to a burly GPU as desired. Who knows? Maybe WWDC will hold some news of Nvidia support, given Apple's worked with both providers extensively in the past - indeed, Hazel's discrete GPU is a GT 750M. Anyway, MacWorld's review is up. It's quite a substantial device, with a 650W PSU, taking three-slot cards, and can charge a connected device at 100W. Amusingly, given the bandwidth afforded by the bus, it's even possible to daisychain them, if your needs are sufficiently pressing, to multiply the speedups in, say, video rendering.
So, Matt Groening has a new show coming out shortly c/o Netflix: Disenchantment, featuring quite a few familiar names in the voice cast. The first ten episodes of their twenty episode initial order debut on Aug 10, apparently. ^_^ I can't find a trailer at the moment, though - just a promo still or two.
One former Pixar animator explains, at length, how dysfunctional a company it was, with the Boys' Club mentality in full force in some quarters, most prominently in the now deposed John Lasseter.
Here's something of an insider's look at how the FBI's interest in Trump began.
An interesting political article in the New Yorker, which opens with: "One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite. Since Wilhelm was notably indiscreet, people always knew what he was saying behind their backs. Ferdinand had his revenge. After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.
Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia-the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered."
Good thing someone like that could never come to power again, eh?
California's edging a little closer to possibly ending DST, yay! It wouldn't be the only state to observe the same time zone year-round - Hawaii and Arizona are already there, and as the article also notes, a similar measure is moving forward in Florida as well.
I finally passed Hacker News' 500-point threshold for downvoting privileges! Muahahahaa, the power, the POWER! =:D What brought that about was a rather fascinating article on the optical scanning of old wax cylinder recordings to recover now lost indigenous American languages, the previously existing versions of which, if available, were of very low quality, given their physical condition.
The roomie went along the other day to an airshow in town. ^_^ I didn't get along myself, partially out of low spirits, partially out of their insistence on using the execrable PayPal as the payment processor. It did seem to be aimed somewhat more at people actively involved in the industry, rather than shows like RIAT, but by the sound of it, well worth getting along to, despite the ticket cost. And he brought back a nifty present! A heating pad, which can be heated in boiling water to impart the energy, and once you've left it to cool down again, it's this quite innocuous transparent gel. But, irritate the metal coin inside the pouch, presumably triggering crystallisation in a supersaturated solution, and it suddenly begins releasing that heat over around half an hour. =:D It's nothing magic - the packaging says the solution is purely sodium acetate. Once it's completely cooled off, it becomes a fudge-like texture and opaque, until recharged. I can definitely see that coming in very handy in my winter rabbiteering! (Aha! Wikipedia knows all)
Does anyone have any screen capture software recommendations, for macOS or Windows? I have a Vimeo On Demand stream I'd like to capture, but I'm finding QuickTime Player unreliable for long durations, sometimes glitching the audio - this is a bit over three hours in all. I do have all the parts, I think, but it'd be handy to have a solid option available. Not sure I'll ever actually need it again, but still. =:) Unfortunately, Vimeo really don't seem to want downloading to happen where they're not explicitly permitting it - even youtube-dl can't currently handle purchased Vimeo on Demand, though it's been able to in the past. (Now, it just fails with an insistence it's an embed-only video, and to provide it with the URL of the embedding page - except this is on the file's own Vimeo page)
Michael Palin's just finished filming an extensive travelogue in North Korea, due to air on Channel 5 sometime later in 2018. Ought to be good - he's one of the best hosts for conveying the realities of the locations he visits. Relatedly, I recently read through Guy Delisle's "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea", where he was working for a while as an animator stuck overseeing the final production of some animation - the budget had run out, so that's where they wound up. It's available on ComiXology, amongst other places.
On the TV front, I'm sort of trying to expand my willingness to be passively engaged in others' work. ^_^; I'm continuing to enjoy the hell out of Unikitty, which is - as was said of MLP:FiM - far better than it needed to be, and MLP, of course. I've gradually been getting into Sense8, which Ilove - naturally, I find it just as it's axed. =:P And continuing that theme, I picked up the first season of Cameron Esposito & Rhea Butler's gloriously gay "Take My Wife" - having got about halfway through the first episode, I picked up the second season as well. ^_^ (And that's all there is, as the producers SaySo then perished. Not that I'd even heard of them until they were done, but so it goes in Startup Land)
Finally, I got to see the recent Wonder Woman. ^_^ I'm rather conflicted, overall. I loved the introduction to her homeland, but beyond - absurd as it may sound, I felt it lost its authenticity thereon, with Themyscira seeming much more realistic than what followed. Perhaps that's just me? Nonetheless, I'm pleased I did finally get to see it. I'm still not a superhero sort (do there really have to be quite so many fight sequences?), but as they go, I'm sort of okay with it.
So, I enquired whether I could transfer the iTunes purchases from my UK account to my US account, and received a "no" - seems any kind of transfer isn't available, let alone between stores. =:P But, they did note that a device can be authorised for multiple accounts - the catch, of course, is that whilst you can switch stores, doing so starts a ninety day timer, and you can't switch again until that's run its course. However, that would seem to leave open the option of switching the UK account to being for the US store instead. The purchases would still be from two accounts, but that wouldn't really matter. I'll have to ponder the point. One might expect it'd be a simple enough process, just changing the affiliation of an account from one country to another, but it's not quite as straightforward as that, presumably due to rights issues, or maybe just inadequate planning - it had been the case that changing countries left behind your purchase history, so you had to ensure you had local copies of any TV or films before switching. (Here's a good pair of articles on one person's experience: at first, and following up) As of late 2017, though, it appears that's improving, but spottily - and anything that's not available in your new country won't be showing at all - so some (perhaps, by now, all?) of your purchases made in the account's old country will now show up as you'd expect.
Heh.. that could definitely get amusing. =:D I noticed someone point out: "If Democrats take the House back in November, their current ranking member of the Financial Services Committee becomes the chair of the committee, and has the power to subpoena Trump’s bank records.
That member is Maxine Waters. Vote."
I'm not really one for mineral water and suchlike (though I do keep sparkling water around, as a nice fizzy option without any sweeteners, natural or artificial), but one I tried recently was actually noteworthy: Aqua Carpatica. The effervescence isn't added, but naturally occurring, and the mouth feel is somewhat different to usual - very pleasant indeed. It's unfortunately rather expensive, priced around the level of a brand cola, but worth trying as a chilled treat on a warm day.
Here's another interesting Kickstarter, and one which is still live. =:D You may recall seeing, a few years ago, some lab work on imitating the remarkable ability of geckos to climb vertical walls with aplomb - they'd worked out precisely how that actually happens in nature. Now, they're bringing that tech to market in the form of hangars and hooks which can be affixed almost anywhere, and reused many times.
Finally, just for fun, here's the current state of my US iTunes films library - which might you want to see, were you/I visiting?
As a side note, if you're wanting to view images at full size, I'm now tending to include them in high resolution, and simply letting the browser scale down, where the full size image isn't too big (maybe up to a couple hundred K), as with the Pyongyang graphic novel example page. Maybe I should include a link to the same file, if it's easier to open a link than drag the image to the desktop or open it in a new window?
And on that note, perhaps the best photo to come out of 2018's Pride month. =:D
Finally watched A Wrinkle in Time - and I'm so very pleased I did. (It had that sense of a film I'd like, going just by the trailer. I missed its big screen debut, so simply pre-ordered it unseen) It's a story with such love, imagination, and scope. It does lack the cynicism a lot of people equate with authenticity, but I respect it all the more for what a positive tale it is.
I imagine everyone who's interested learned about it the same day, but anyway. =:) There'll be more Steven Universe starting July 2 2018, for five nights. =:D (If you're unfamiliar with SU, I'd recommend avoiding that promo, as there are some recent major events referenced which might fundamentally change the way you view one character in particular)
At long last, I've resumed learning Japanese, courtesy of the excellent Human Japanese apps (there are two, beginner and intermediate, available for iOS (separate iPhone and iPad versions), Android, macOS, and Windows). It's a long path, I know, but as the saying goes, the longest journey begins with a single step. =:)
Sort of relatedly, I tried giving Crunchyroll another try, on their basic free level, and gave up quickly after trying to start watching the first episode of Citrus, which looked moderately promising as a warm and cuddly tale of first love. For whatever reason known only unto manglement, I began with an ad (a promo for some violent combat anime - such targeted advertising), then a minute or so lead in, some of the opening titles, and then another ad, again for some combat-based anime they wanted to promote.. and then another ad, at which point I just tapped the home button and gave up on them. Agh! I fully appreciate they can't support free users without something like advertising, but: (a) why not select promos plausibly relevant to the show being watched? (Think of how trailers are selected for showing before a given film), (b) maybe don't drown the actual show out with the level of advertising? All that said, maybe it's all simply a not very subtle means of driving viewers to their paid offerings. Meanwhile, I bought the subtitled version of "Your Name." on iTunes the other day - the opening ten minutes do look most promising. ^_^ I might try it on the roomie sometime, but probably not for my first viewing - he tends to be more inclined toward American TV pacing, so this'd likely feel too slow for him.
.. wow. I knew it was well regarded, but all the same, such an emotionally rich storyline, and characters you're inexorably drawn to sympathise with. I shan't say too much about the plot - just that it involves two high school students, one living in Tokyo, another in the countryside, with consequently very different lives. One day, one of them wakes up in the other's body. Soon, they figure out that they're swapping over a few times a week, and, via their phones, agree not to disrupt each other's lives (much) - but that still leaves the bigger question of just what's going on. It winds up being quite an intense experience, I'd have to say, but one I'll wholeheartedly recommend. Oh, and the animation's gorgeous, too. (And FWIW, Rotten Tomatoes offers it 97%, and an audience rating of 94%; the Amazon reviews are glowing) BTW, if you like the poster design, there are high resolution versions available over here.
Heh! It would appear there's a live action Sonic the Hedgehog flick being produced by Paramount, and Jim Carrey's angling for the role of Robotnik. =:D
Most cool! The BBC's officially made all of the 1980s Computer Literacy Programme materials available, including all of Micro Live, even down to the listings offered at the time. Frustratingly, not through iPlayer, but a new bespoke site, making it less straightforward to download rather than stream. There doesn't appear to be any geoblocking, though - I was able to stream a little from the first episode of The Silicon Factor from both the UK and US - so you should all be able to watch any of it.
Well, now! I'd never known this.. anyone who's loved Babylon 5 likely knows the live action was all filmed, and thus suitable for HD transfer, but that all the effects assets have since been lost, requiring re-rendering everything from scratch - technically feasible, but expensive. However! "But at the end of each season we were required to transfer all digital assets direct to film, frame by frame, so Warners could have a version that could be used across all later formats. That version, with pristine CG and live action, has never seen the light of day." Consider signing the petition to let Warner know there's a willing audience for such a release. ( Here's a thread between JMS and Neil Gaiman, confirming the situation)
Is anyone else watching (or, more likely, have you seen) Gravity Falls? We're up to midway through s2, with the particularly (deservedly!) highly rated "Not What He Seems". Damn, I'm loving this show. =:D Brilliant opening theme, too. I'm rather disappointed there isn't an official "full length" version, TBH. I wonder if they've ever released any stems for a remix competition.. probably not, given it's a Disney production, but who knows?
So, the GDPR came into force recently; perhaps you noticed. =:) One noteworthy mention goes to USA Today, who came up with what they feel is a compliant version of their site, lacking tracking, Javascript, ads, and personalisation. You may notice it loads instantaneously, and has an exceptionally uncluttered design. Probably purely coincidental. =:)
Seventy years ago, the Manchester Baby - which can be considered to be the first electronic stored program computer - glowed into life, executing a seventeen instruction program, running through 3.5 million calculations in 52 minutes. Working that out as calculations per second per kilo, with it coming in at about a long ton, that's about 1.1 calcs/s/kg. By comparison, consider a current phone, like the iPhone X - if we estimate it as capable of, say, six billion calculations per second (fairly conservative, given there's the GPU in addition to the hexacore CPU, and indeed, the presence of vector instructions), and a weight of 174g, that's around 3e10, or thirty billion calculations per second ker kg. All that improvement, in seventy years. What will computing technology be like by 2080? O.o;
I feel lovelyangel did a superb job of capturing at least some of Pride in her entry. I'm all about wildlife - she's so good with people. ^_^
Yay! There's a new Studio Killers single available now! =:D It's not a headliner track as such, but it's so good to see (well, hear) them back again - hopefully this signals their return for much more. ^_^
If you're interested in the world of animation, you might like to check out the free Annecy edition of Animation World News. There's a lot in there.
Following Tumblr/Oath's GDPR shenanigans, wherein they broke all their RSS feeds by serving a "hey, consent or else" notice instead of the actual feed, if you're presenting a European IP address, I've created a few replacement feeds here, should anyone else want to subscribe to them:
determineddiary - the art's quite basic, but it's got a lot of heart. ^_^
pigeon_gazette - amusing randomness.
up_and_out_rss - it began as a sort of "Perry Bible Fellowship" four panel gag strip, before changing nature quite a lot midway through.
dragons_burn - updates only infrequently, but I remain following it.
finding_dee_rss - by the cartoonist behind a few other strips including Dandy & Company, this relates some of their life having transitioned from male to female, just - jazzed up somewhat, comic style. =:)
bluebun_art - occasional artwork postings by Bluebun. Sometimes furry, sometimes Steven Universe, sometimes anything else.
Another option for easy syndication, which I may well go through for all of them, but haven't yet, is one that someone's implemented using Reddit's API: the subscribe-by-reddit system. Send that bot a syndication request, and it'll create a new sub (if it doesn't already exist) for that feed. In turn, you can subscribe to any sub by appending .rss to (almost) any Reddit URL. On the other paw, I'll probably just use LJ for that - seems it's perfectly possible, just by using an URL of the form http://communityname.livejournal.com/data/rss. Hrrrm.. actually, maybe not - it didn't seem to be working within Vienna, but checking with Feed Validator showed a perfectly good feed, and indeed, they seem to be functioning on the site - but nope, they don't serve a reconstructed feed, but rather, a 302 pointing to the original feed URL. =:P
Another comic has joined my roster. ^_^; This time, the manga Alien Hand Syndrome. Regrettably, there's not too much to catch up on, as the artist's constantly struggling with carpal tunnel syndrome, brought on by hyperextensibility, so it's tended to average about one new page per month for most of its span. And, on the more cybernetic front, there's the intriguing Hey Kitty, telling the story of an anthro snow leopard android ("anthroid") who becomes able to ignore commands, thereby gaining her independence, in a world where such is very much not tolerated. There are a couple years of back work to catch up on, with new pages appearing weekly, so getting up to date won't take too long. (One nice point with the site itself is the "archive" page has thumbnails of every page, so if you've got a particular scene in mind, but can't remember exactly where it is, you're in a much better position to find it readily) It appears to build on a companion comic, Hey Fox, but that isn't required in order to follow what's going on.
So, WWDC 2018's keynote came and went. ^_^ Thankfully, no new iPad Pro, so I don't have to concern myself with trying to return the newcomer in favor of the Shiny New. =:) Which I'm genuinely relieved about, as it takes time to get a new system set up just the way you like - this one's mine now. Otherwise, it was a fairly low-key event, mostly about quite geeky details, though I did appreciate them highlighting the deprecation of "social media" badges in WebKit loading/rendering, and the initiation of the long inevitable war of attrition against browser fingerprinting. macOS Mojave certainly won't mark the end of Big Data's gathering of everyone's browsing habits, but it's a highly welcome step in the right direction, and hopefully, one which will be echoed elsewhere.
The LEGO AR playtime did look like fun, I admit. ^_^ Dark mode will please those who've been seeking it out for years; I'll likely remain mostly on the light side. =:) Still, it was interesting to see echoes of the Aperture UX making its way into the Finder, years later. =:/ The animoji customisation looks very nicely done indeed, down to not just "wear shades", but "select a style" and "choose the level of tint" - but, from what they showed, that's all only for the human bases? =:P Hopefully they'll extend that to the non-human options too - I'd love to appear in a FaceTime chat as my leporine self. ^_^ (I'd even accept having voice enabled for that)
I've given Mojave a quick spin, and at first glance, all looks good on Hazel - no surprises or glitches of any kind. And I'm thrilled to discover that Aperture continues to chug along happily. =:D Not even a 32-bit warning! (Apple's confirmed that Mojave will be the final macOS release to support 32-bit applications, following iOS' lead) And whilst I doubt anyone else is in SL here, but I've heard from a Reliable Source™ that we need not worry about the future of the Mac SL viewer. ^_^
And so it took about three days for me to decide it's about time I got a paid developer account again, with the intent of actually getting something up on the App Store. ^_^ If I can actually get off my tail and get into some iOS development, following an accidental prompt from austin_dern over on Mastodon, I think the first app might be a TinyMUCK client. Very niche, obviously, and not exactly aimed at building a retirement fund, but it feels like a project with sane scope - large enough to introduce me to practical development, UI included, but sufficiently modest to make it completable in less than a Half-Life 3 timescale. =:) I've now got Hazel on Mojave, and both the iPhone and iPad on iOS 12, having gingerly first ensured Hazel had a current Time Machine backup, and also backed ~/Library/Mail on another external drive. So far, I'm delighted to report things seem surprisingly solid - certainly, much better than 2017's wretchedly rocky beta journey. (Generally, I've found the betas fine, but there are always caveats and surprises - if not for one's own setup, then others') Aperture indeed works just as before, and the addition of News to macOS is surprisingly welcome - it's a good application, and one I'm likely to use rather more hereon.
Bah, humbug! Nope.. looks like Mojave b2 broke something related to USB camera devices. Now, when I connect the D500 and select Import, it doesn't bring up any thumbnails, and can't import anything. My workaround is, for now, using Photos to import the photos and then bounce them out to Aperture - not exactly elegant, but it works. I wonder if pulling the photos off via a card reader would behave differently, given that's a different class USB device.. trouble is, it's an XQD card (for speed; it permits writing as fast as the D500 can shoot, so rapid bursts are never slowed down), so I'd have to buy such a reader. I'll probably just leave it as is for now, and hope a future release fixes whatever changed, as there's much less need for a separate reader with the D500, given it finally offers USB3. Both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave are available as public betas now.
I found this article on the genesis of the transistor quite fascinating. It does cover the plain history, but also from the perspective of the actual people and motivations, making it a much more absorbing read than one might at first expect, especially on such a seemingly geeky topic. This part begins with as the first transistor was announced, quite a different beast to anything you'd find today, and indeed, more or less rendered obsolete a few years later, before it could really make much headway.
If you've got a few groats you could spare, Linkey will happily let you shop in their store - but none of the goods will reach you. Rather, everything's distributed to homeless shelters and rough sleepers in London and elsewhere in the UK. £5 will buy a set of women's underwear, £8.50 some thermal socks, and £19 a good sleeping bag.
Here's quite an insightful, long-form story on how few seasoned game developers there are, and goes into depth as to just why people tend to drop out of the industry entirely after a while. Perhaps needless to say, the answers aren't surprising. *sigh*
Here's a rather fun looking comics anthology Kickstarter, though having taken long enough to get around to posting this, it's since wrapped up, thankfully successfully: FTL, Y'All: Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive: "Six months from now, detailed schematics anonymously uploaded to the Internet will describe, with absolute precision, how to build a faster-than-light engine for $200 in easily-available parts. Space travel will be instantly-and chaotically-democratized. The entire cosmos is suddenly within reach of all humankind, without organization, authority, or limitation. This comics anthology is about what happens next."
Some researchers are pursuing what does look like a highly promising avenue of attacking breast cancer, essentially taking what white blood cells the patient's already producing, growing those, and reintroducing them to the donor, thereby attacking their specific cancer.
This is very, very cool, if you're nerdy. And if you're reading this, well.. =:) How about a homebrewed vector-based video game system? The Ocelot awaits! No longer do you have to suffer the indignity of raster-based Asteroids - now, you can enjoy Mattsteroids in genuine oscilloscope vectors, including sound. And there's Star Lynx, for space-based combat. ^_^
Here's a first attempt at photographing the rather complex David Bowie statue finally on view in Aylesbury market square. ^_^ Needless to say, I'm very pleased I was in a position to help with the Kickstarter to bring it about.
Here's an insightful piece from Assembly Four, who are behind Switter, the Mastodon instance dedicated to providing a safe social network for sex workers, in the light of SESTA/FOSTA's recent passage into US law. Unsurprisingly, its growth has been dramatic, fueled by the sudden disappearance of sites which had previously offered safe online venues to arrange connections. How bad are those laws? "Prostitution is the most dangerous job for women in the US, with a homicide rate of over 200 per 100,000. The next most dangerous job is a liquor store employee with a rate of 4 per 100,000." In this new legislative environment, sex workers are being forced back into street work and into the hands of pimps. "Johanna Breyer, interim executive director and co-founder of the Saint James Infirmary, a health clinic that supports sex workers in California’s Bay Area, told me that in the weekend following FOSTA, the infirmary’s mobile van outreach saw a dramatic increase of street-based sex workers in the Mission District. Breyer estimated that there were about double or triple the usual number of workers seeking assistance."
As for Mastodon, it's somewhat akin to hellbird, but with the major difference that it's not run by a company all about user stats to present to investors, and collecting all the data it can to sell on to try making some money out of people, but rather, each instance is run by people who simply want to do so. As such, each may only be home to a few hundred or thousand, making moderation an actually practical endeavor - and as you might expect, each instance tends to develop a local flavor, often based around a sort of theme, such as lgbt.io and photog.social or, for furries, the likes of meow.social, dragon.style, and chitter.xyz; they're all open to anyone, usually with quite similar, reasonable rules. Importantly, instances mesh together, making for a network ("fediverse") of a million or so folk - and if instances are seen by others as being havens to abusive sorts, admins have the ability to mute users, or, as a last resort, the entire instance.
Here's a rather fun looking Kickstarter (again, successfully wrapped up, having taken so long to get around to posting): Backbone, a pixel art noir adventure set in a furry retrofuturistic Vancouver, starring a raccoon gumshoe. ^_^
There is the possibility I'll be able to share artwork of my own again in the future, but that's probably some way off yet. But judging by how happy just exploring the possibilities with the iPad Pro and Pencil seems to make me, I'll be taking to it very readily. =:D It indeed works as well as the fruit company claims - accurate, with no lag, a display that updates at 120Hz when necessary, and fully laminated for no parallax, on top of a top-notch color palette. Simply playing around with the possibilities in Procreate is just so much fun! I'm not limited to just a 0.3mm tech pen, or a 2B pencil, but all manner of tip effects, and rather more easily erased, which I'll be doing plenty of in the coming months. ^_^
The rest of the tech bump is pretty welcome, of course - the iPad Air's still a great device, but going from 1GB to 4GB RAM does now mean very little swapping out of applications, and 10-bit H.265 4K decoding in VLC is now absolutely fine. (Hello Sense8!) I went with the smaller model, the 10.5", as the larger one's noticeably heavier, more like the original iPad, and on getting the Air, that lightness was (and is) so welcome when holding it in one hand. Having Touch ID's a pleasant addition, as it means I can now keep it secured much more conveniently than a passcode, and I dare say there'll be times when Apple Pay might come in helpful, probably more online than in person, given it's only US banks that seem to lag in offering NFC cards. The speakers are surprisingly good, managing a touch of actual bass, despite having no case depth to work with - and with four speakers, automatically rerouting with orientation to provide a correct stereo image. USB 3 (at last!) also makes for much faster file dropping.
While Teespring was happily pushing Pride Month on their front page, their actual behavior is quite different. I'll be leery of ordering from them again.
Does pushing public services into private hands result in improved efficiency? Well, no.
There was a good AMA with the CEO of SmugMug regarding their purchase of Flickr.
I'm not generally huge on card-based games, but I do quite like the look of Cultist Simulator. ^_^ The trailer certainly paints it appealingly. "Play as a seeker after unholy mysteries, in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Perhaps you're looking for knowledge, or power, or beauty, or revenge. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. In this roguelike narrative card game, what you find may transform you forever. Every choice you make, from moment to moment, doesn't just advance the narrative - it also shapes it. Become a scholar of the unseen arts. Search your dreams for sanity-twisting rituals. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Seize your place as the herald of a new age."
Razer just came out with a relatively affordable eGPU enclosure, the Core X, for $299. Not exactly free with the cornflakes, but nonetheless, an interesting option, given that permits you to use the card of your choice with the laptop of your choice, now including Macs as well, as of the latest macOS. The catch is you'll need a recent device, as communication is over Thunderbolt 3, given the bandwidth required. Unfortunately, on the Mac front, only AMD cards are supported at present, though I suppose Nvidia would be fine if booted into Windows 10. (I haven't been following what the underlying reasons there are) My MBP, sadly, doesn't qualify, with Thunderbolt 2, so that remains something for the next system. It'd be an interesting option - to have a highly capable laptop, but also with the option of tethering to a burly GPU as desired. Who knows? Maybe WWDC will hold some news of Nvidia support, given Apple's worked with both providers extensively in the past - indeed, Hazel's discrete GPU is a GT 750M. Anyway, MacWorld's review is up. It's quite a substantial device, with a 650W PSU, taking three-slot cards, and can charge a connected device at 100W. Amusingly, given the bandwidth afforded by the bus, it's even possible to daisychain them, if your needs are sufficiently pressing, to multiply the speedups in, say, video rendering.
So, Matt Groening has a new show coming out shortly c/o Netflix: Disenchantment, featuring quite a few familiar names in the voice cast. The first ten episodes of their twenty episode initial order debut on Aug 10, apparently. ^_^ I can't find a trailer at the moment, though - just a promo still or two.
One former Pixar animator explains, at length, how dysfunctional a company it was, with the Boys' Club mentality in full force in some quarters, most prominently in the now deposed John Lasseter.
Here's something of an insider's look at how the FBI's interest in Trump began.
An interesting political article in the New Yorker, which opens with: "One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite. Since Wilhelm was notably indiscreet, people always knew what he was saying behind their backs. Ferdinand had his revenge. After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.
Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia-the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered."
Good thing someone like that could never come to power again, eh?
California's edging a little closer to possibly ending DST, yay! It wouldn't be the only state to observe the same time zone year-round - Hawaii and Arizona are already there, and as the article also notes, a similar measure is moving forward in Florida as well.
I finally passed Hacker News' 500-point threshold for downvoting privileges! Muahahahaa, the power, the POWER! =:D What brought that about was a rather fascinating article on the optical scanning of old wax cylinder recordings to recover now lost indigenous American languages, the previously existing versions of which, if available, were of very low quality, given their physical condition.
The roomie went along the other day to an airshow in town. ^_^ I didn't get along myself, partially out of low spirits, partially out of their insistence on using the execrable PayPal as the payment processor. It did seem to be aimed somewhat more at people actively involved in the industry, rather than shows like RIAT, but by the sound of it, well worth getting along to, despite the ticket cost. And he brought back a nifty present! A heating pad, which can be heated in boiling water to impart the energy, and once you've left it to cool down again, it's this quite innocuous transparent gel. But, irritate the metal coin inside the pouch, presumably triggering crystallisation in a supersaturated solution, and it suddenly begins releasing that heat over around half an hour. =:D It's nothing magic - the packaging says the solution is purely sodium acetate. Once it's completely cooled off, it becomes a fudge-like texture and opaque, until recharged. I can definitely see that coming in very handy in my winter rabbiteering! (Aha! Wikipedia knows all)
Does anyone have any screen capture software recommendations, for macOS or Windows? I have a Vimeo On Demand stream I'd like to capture, but I'm finding QuickTime Player unreliable for long durations, sometimes glitching the audio - this is a bit over three hours in all. I do have all the parts, I think, but it'd be handy to have a solid option available. Not sure I'll ever actually need it again, but still. =:) Unfortunately, Vimeo really don't seem to want downloading to happen where they're not explicitly permitting it - even youtube-dl can't currently handle purchased Vimeo on Demand, though it's been able to in the past. (Now, it just fails with an insistence it's an embed-only video, and to provide it with the URL of the embedding page - except this is on the file's own Vimeo page)
Michael Palin's just finished filming an extensive travelogue in North Korea, due to air on Channel 5 sometime later in 2018. Ought to be good - he's one of the best hosts for conveying the realities of the locations he visits. Relatedly, I recently read through Guy Delisle's "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea", where he was working for a while as an animator stuck overseeing the final production of some animation - the budget had run out, so that's where they wound up. It's available on ComiXology, amongst other places.
On the TV front, I'm sort of trying to expand my willingness to be passively engaged in others' work. ^_^; I'm continuing to enjoy the hell out of Unikitty, which is - as was said of MLP:FiM - far better than it needed to be, and MLP, of course. I've gradually been getting into Sense8, which Ilove - naturally, I find it just as it's axed. =:P And continuing that theme, I picked up the first season of Cameron Esposito & Rhea Butler's gloriously gay "Take My Wife" - having got about halfway through the first episode, I picked up the second season as well. ^_^ (And that's all there is, as the producers SaySo then perished. Not that I'd even heard of them until they were done, but so it goes in Startup Land)
Finally, I got to see the recent Wonder Woman. ^_^ I'm rather conflicted, overall. I loved the introduction to her homeland, but beyond - absurd as it may sound, I felt it lost its authenticity thereon, with Themyscira seeming much more realistic than what followed. Perhaps that's just me? Nonetheless, I'm pleased I did finally get to see it. I'm still not a superhero sort (do there really have to be quite so many fight sequences?), but as they go, I'm sort of okay with it.
So, I enquired whether I could transfer the iTunes purchases from my UK account to my US account, and received a "no" - seems any kind of transfer isn't available, let alone between stores. =:P But, they did note that a device can be authorised for multiple accounts - the catch, of course, is that whilst you can switch stores, doing so starts a ninety day timer, and you can't switch again until that's run its course. However, that would seem to leave open the option of switching the UK account to being for the US store instead. The purchases would still be from two accounts, but that wouldn't really matter. I'll have to ponder the point. One might expect it'd be a simple enough process, just changing the affiliation of an account from one country to another, but it's not quite as straightforward as that, presumably due to rights issues, or maybe just inadequate planning - it had been the case that changing countries left behind your purchase history, so you had to ensure you had local copies of any TV or films before switching. (Here's a good pair of articles on one person's experience: at first, and following up) As of late 2017, though, it appears that's improving, but spottily - and anything that's not available in your new country won't be showing at all - so some (perhaps, by now, all?) of your purchases made in the account's old country will now show up as you'd expect.
Heh.. that could definitely get amusing. =:D I noticed someone point out: "If Democrats take the House back in November, their current ranking member of the Financial Services Committee becomes the chair of the committee, and has the power to subpoena Trump’s bank records.
That member is Maxine Waters. Vote."
I'm not really one for mineral water and suchlike (though I do keep sparkling water around, as a nice fizzy option without any sweeteners, natural or artificial), but one I tried recently was actually noteworthy: Aqua Carpatica. The effervescence isn't added, but naturally occurring, and the mouth feel is somewhat different to usual - very pleasant indeed. It's unfortunately rather expensive, priced around the level of a brand cola, but worth trying as a chilled treat on a warm day.
Here's another interesting Kickstarter, and one which is still live. =:D You may recall seeing, a few years ago, some lab work on imitating the remarkable ability of geckos to climb vertical walls with aplomb - they'd worked out precisely how that actually happens in nature. Now, they're bringing that tech to market in the form of hangars and hooks which can be affixed almost anywhere, and reused many times.
Finally, just for fun, here's the current state of my US iTunes films library - which might you want to see, were you/I visiting?