Apparently, when translating their Pokémon game from Japanese to English, Nintendo changed a question in an in-game personality test that asked you what you would do if you farted. In the English-language version, you merely broke a rotten egg. What, do they think kids in the U.S. don't fart? Or that they don't enjoy fart jokes. Allow me to...

About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it. First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports. 8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is...

If you missed it on Saturday and Sunday night, you have a few more chances left. Set your DVR to record Seattle Symphony from Benaroya Hall: Brahms, Kernis and Kodály on one of its handful of repeat airings this week (the next one is tonight at 6pm on KCTS-HD). According to the story in the Seattle Times, it includes close-ups of nearly e...

As I noted some time ago, it's hard to get programmers excited about power management. What's worse, programs that do take the effort to care about power management often do it rudely, hijacking your computer and preventing you from going into standby or hibernation, instead preferring to drain your battery until the computer just dies from lack ...

It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Consider: From: X To: Group Y Question blah blah blah. A day or two later: From: X To: Group Y Resending due to no response. ------- Original Message ------- From: X To: Group Y Question blah blah blah. You didn't get a response because ...

It depends on what you mean by default. As we saw earlier, the convention for Windows header files is that if you don't specify a particular version, then you get the most recent version. The shell common controls header file follows this convention, so if you include the Windows XP version of , you get functions, messages, and structures de...

This past weekend, a group of us attended a subscription concert performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis at Benaroya Hall. We collectively hold a block of seats, and it's a mix of regulars and rotating guests. Our seats are close to the stage, made even closer by the hall reconfiguration to accommodate the choir and soloists; we were effectively ...

Okay, so there are all these different ways you can specify what version of the Windows header files you want.† Let's take them in order. The symbol is the earliest one. That's the symbol that 16-bit Windows used to control the versioning of its header files, and its use carried forward into the 32-bit header files, presumably from t...

Taiwanese Bluetooth technology company Bluetake has an odd picture on their front page. It's three women drinking alcohol, with plenty more bottles in front of them. Not a single Bluetooth device in sight. Maybe Bluetooth just makes alcohol taste better. (Yes, I know it's a stock photo, but what's with the alcohol?)

It tells you which printing you have.