Rubenerd

They’d have my vote, particularly for lumberjack fashion.

My latest entry to the Anime@UTS blog, which has nothing to do with anime whatsoever! If you want to comment, do so over there :D.

And now for something completely different!

So I was sitting here this afternoon thinking about what I should write for Music Monday, given I’d elected to do so again. I wasn’t short of inspiration, Nisemonogatari had just started the previous day and I’d been obsessed enough with Bakemonogatari to consider using the theme for that. Amagami SS was a series I never admitted to watching in polite company, but I did, and I could talk about the music from there.

Stretching and staring blankly at the ceiling as I often find myself doing when faced with an existential quandary, iTunes kicked in with a tune on random that suddenly plunged me into my childhood. Memories of large signs in characters I couldn’t understand, and friends long since lost to time. It was perfect!

Growing up in Singapore in the 1990s I was exposed to a lot of Japanese culture. Despite having brutally ruled the country during World War II, surveys of young Singaporeans repeatedly demonstrate they wish they were either “Western” or Japanese. They would have loved a friend of mine from the time, his mother was Australian and his father Japanese!

In exchange for taking this partner in crime to the German club (best cakes on the island, no joke!), his family would often invite me to the Japanese club. The unassuming building from the outside was a cavernous expanse of wonder, particularly to a young kid. Along with all the regular amenities such as tennis courts and amazing places to eat, they also had rooms catered to keep children occupied. Capsule machines, multicoloured carpet, game machines, walls upon walls of manga, giant TVs for playing Pokemon, DragonBallZ and other series I’d probably recognise now but didn’t at the time, board games.

And what would they be playing softly on the speakers as you entered the building? Lisa Ono. Ono Risa. Both! ;)

A native of Japan but born in Brazil, Lisa Ono is a singer and musician perhaps best known amongst young people for her appearances on advertisements on Japanese television, ironically enough. Her upbringing in Sao Paulo and time spent at her father’s jazz club exposed her to bossa nova, and at the age of 15 she started playing the guitar and singing. By 1989 she signed a record contract, and today tours the world.

Clearly inspired by other luminaries such as Astrud Gilberto, she brings her own distinct twist to the genre with a mix of Portuguese, English and Japanese lyrics. For those who know their jazz standards, her reinterpretations are subtle, but clever. And then out of the blue there’s Red Blouse, a tune that ranks among The Bird is The Word as a tune that’s thoroughly addictive for different reasons ;) .

I’ve been listening to Lisa for years, but whenever she comes up on random on my computers, phones and the like, I’m taken back to that lobby in my childhood, a time when I knew the afternoon would be fun and surrounded by lovely people in a world of fascinating Japanese culture. In a different time and place, that’s what the Anime@UTS club is to me now.

Second season of Amagami SS, Nisemonogatari… and I haven't even finished Penguindrum, Guilty Crown or the first season of Sherlock. #FirstWorldProblems!

Despite living in Sydney for now, as a DBS cardholder this story about compromised ATMs still made my blood chill!

Photo by the writer of Some things to Remember.

The backstory

For those who aren't already sick of the news, Robin Chan at The Straits Times summarises the situation:

At least 200 DBS Bank and POSB customers have been hit by an ATM fraud that has seen some $200,000 stolen from their accounts.

The stolen funds were withdrawn from ATMs in Malaysia, DBS said on Thursday.

This was done possibly using ‘cloned’ cards created by using data stolen at ATMs here, sources say, and is the largest such case of ATM fraud to hit DBS in recent years.

The stories from various sources are heavy on reactions, but light on details. I've seen the words hacking and skimming used, which suggests the ATMs themselves were modified, or extra devices were unscrupiously installed.

The reaction

DBS released a statement on the 05th:

SINGAPORE, 05 January 2012 – Yesterday, some customers informed the bank of unauthorised withdrawals made in Malaysia through their DBS/POSB ATM/Debit cards. [..] The average amount withdrawn was about S$1,000 per account. (The bank’s standard ATM/Debit card withdrawal limit is S$2,000 per day). [..] Investigations are underway.

Sure demonstrates the value of having a withdrawal limit. I'd have mine set even lower, if I could.

The following day, DBS posted a followup with more detail:

SINGAPORE, 06 January 2012 – While investigations are still underway, increasing evidence points to the unauthorised withdrawals as being part of a card skimming operation. Preliminary investigations at this stage reveal that two ATMs at Bugis street have possibly been compromised. We have identified the specific periods when the compromise could have taken place.

I'd noticed most ATMs in Singapore had those green, bulbous "fraudulent device inhibitors" installed on card slots years ago. Either they weren't installed on all machines, or they're not as tamper resistant as we thought they were. In any case, eep.

Needless to say, if you've noticed any suspicous activity on your DBS or POSB accounts, be sure to contact the bank ASAP! If I were in my old apartment there I'd go down the street to Liat Towers and sort it out because… oh wait, they closed that branch :P

The writers at the Brand New blog received followup from HP:

In 2008, HP asked marketing agency Moving Brands to propose new ideas for various elements of HP’s brand identity, including fonts, graphics, and logos.

HP is one of the world’s most valuable brands and has no plans to adopt the new logo proposed by Moving Brands. HP did implement some of the other design elements shown in the case study.

Old news, but I discussed HP's potential new logo at length in December last year, and I figured I should follow up on it. "Last year"… that phrase still sounds funny.

I'm relieved they're not changing their logo. HP may have lost the plot a bit in the consumer space of late, but I still hold out hope for them.

I've had a surprising number of emails and tweets from people asking about my move to SeaMonkey, so I've decided to write a few posts about how I tweaked it to work for me. This is the first, on messing around with the interface :).

Simplifying the interface

Despite its modern core based on Firefox, SeaMonkey's user interface is still derived largely from Netscape Communicator. It can be easily tweaked to resemble contemporary browsers such as Firefox and Chrome though if you prefer.

1. Right click the Navigation toolbar and choose Customise…
2. Click Use Small Icons
3. Choose Icons from the Show listbox.
4. Drag the Search button off the toolbar
5. Drag on the Search box
6. Boom!

If you're a Chrome user, you can skip step 5 and use SeaMonkey's shortcuts for search! You can either type "g [terms]" into the navigation box for a Google search, or enter any terms and choose the "Search Google for [terms]" that appears.

Modern theme

Aside from having retro appeal that you'd be a fool to not take advantage of, I think SeaMonkey Modern it still has real class, particularly in the mail application.

1. Go to the View menu
2. Choose SeaMonkey Modern under Apply Theme
3. Restart, boom!

Using userChrome.css

Many of the userChrome.css tricks I blogged about for Firefox back in 2010 work with SeaMonkey too. If you haven't made a userChrome.css file yet and really want to customise SeaMonkey to an extreme:

1. Open your SeaMonkey profile folder
2. Create a folder called chrome (ironically enough!)
3. Create a file within chrome called userChrome.css

Below is my file. I err on the side of minimalism, so you may want to adjust to your own tastes!

/* RENDER PRIMARY FONT MORE COMPACT */
* {
    font-size: 10px !important;
}
 
/* MONOSPACE FONT FOR LOCATION BOX */
#urlbar {
    font-family: monospace !important;
}
 
/* MERGE STOP AND RELOAD BUTTONS
   STOP MUST BE PLACED BEFORE RELOAD TO WORK */
#stop-button[disabled="true"],
#stop-button:not([disabled]) + #reload-button {
    display:none !important;
}
 
/* HIDE SUPERFLUOUS ELEMENTS */
.autocomplete-history-dropmarker,
.search-go-button,
#star-button,
.tabs-closebutton,
.tabs-newbutton,
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-dropmarker,
tooltip {
    display:none !important;
}

All done!

Part two I'll be tacking importing and extensions, stay tuned! ^_^

Felix Tanjono — a most agreeable acquaintance in primary school — and I were told of your escapades from your colleague Dr Watson when we were in primary school. At least one part of that sentence was entirely superfluous.

I will be watching your BBC series as soon as time permits good sir. I'll find my own way out, though tell me… how do I get past this stack of paper?

Rubenerd was offline intermittently for several hours again today. I'm contacting my web host asking what's going on, for now it seems everything is back to normal. Touch wood!

More than I've ever seen before, people are making New Year's resolutions for social media. Guess saving money, being a better person and losing weight are far too passé now ;).

Terrible graphic created by… me! Photo taken during the Family Fireworks on New Year’s Eve in Sydney 2011, bird is the Twitter logo. Also, the word.

Go on an information diet!

This meme seems to have the most traction of all the ones I've seen. More have tweeted and shared this story than… something cool people tweet and share. I wouldn't know what cool people do.

It does seems the irony is lost on some that the meme is being propogated to promote a hardcover book of the same title. Yes, to reduce our information intake, we need to read a book we otherwise wouldn't have read! Reminds me of those self-help books on how to make money and/or reduce clutter. I've got a great idea, don't buy books that will clutter up your house!

According to the author of the tome on various websites, the book discusses how to reduce our intake of pointless information, such as notifications from Facebook and other social networks. Sounds like attacking the symptoms rather than the cause of alleged time wastage, but that's just me.

In any event, I've seen this shared so many times, I've decided to pledge here to increase my information intake for 2012 instead. With SeaMonkey taking care of my RSS feeds and with my recently updated Twitter lists, I'm all set! And I didn't even need to buy a book to convince myself :)

Sharing less with fewer people

Ironically, I found this article on Mashable because @hanezawakirika shared it with all her followers on Twitter:

Did 2011 mark the high point of oversharing? That seems to be the lesson behind a couple of studies that examined the New Year’s resolutions of social media users.

If we're supposed to share less with fewer people, @hanezawakirika wouldn't have shared this article, so I wouldn't have found it, and I wouldn't know I was supposed to share less with fewer people!

My New Year’s Resolutions

So after reading these, I've decided to come up with a series of personalised New Year's resolutions. Here they are, in decending alphabetical order.

1. Be more assertive, and that starts with not making any silly New Year’s resolutions.

Thank you, thank you.

Found this screenshot on an old hard drive! I'm still using the same background on my Twitter profile today :)

I find the trend worrying that Google and Twitter are reducing the very simplicity that attracted people to their sites in the first place. I'd argue their 2007 site was more usable and accessible than their current iteration.