Late sleepers of the world, arise! As someone who prefers to wake up some time around 10:00 or 11:00, this is a site I totally support…

(via Presurfer)

More fun with hilariously mangled bootleg DVDs: check out the nonsensical subtitles and blurbs found on a bootleg version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And via BoingBoing, a column by blogger Jon Rahoi on Chinese bootleg DVDs, featuring some great photos of the insane Engrish that shows up on them.

An article about useless clutter on web sites— on a site with a uselessly cluttered design. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said…

(via J-Walk)

For the Windows-using instant messaging addicts out there, the new free version of Trillian has been released at long last. I’ve been trying it out, and it’s quite an improvement over version 0.74.

Among other things, the new version finally supports Unicode, which is one of the biggest annoyances I had with the old version. I got so annoyed with the messages about users sending characters that I couldn’t display– with the new version, those seem to be gone for good. Plus, it means I can type fancy special characters like ♫ and ♥, not to mention the occasional word in 日本語 or Русский… (Interestingly enough, MSN Messenger and GAIM properly handle Unicode as well, but the official AIM client still can’t. Go figure!)

Now I’m just curious how the file transfers work, but to really evaluate that I’d have to try it with someone on another subnet… if file transferring is compatible with either GAIM or the official AIM client, though, I’m definitely recommending it.

There is one new feature I can’t stand– but it can easily be turned off. That would be the feature that creates hotlinks for any word with a corresponding Wikipedia entry. And the option to turn it off is Preferences → Message Windows → Underline words with encyclopedia entries in green. Some people might find this particular feature useful… me, I just find it annoying and clutter-inducing, and I’m glad it can be turned off.

A seemingly useless but potentially useful fact about Windows file names: In Windows 2000 and XP, file names cannot start with the characters “con.”– that is, the word con followed by a period. See for yourself: try renaming a file to, say, “con.huge.co.txt” and watch what happens.

This technically held true in other versions of Windows as well, except for one minor catch: Because of the way that the DOS-based versions of Windows (95, 98 and ME) stored filenames, it was possible to have a file whose name started in “con.” if and only if there were a space, a non-ASCII character, or more than eight characters in the name. Even those names, however, are no longer legal in 2K/XP.

I discovered this while trying to migrate someone’s documents over from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. A number of the files were notes for a Constitutional Law course, with names along the lines of “Con. Law 1.doc”. It took me the longest time to figure out why those files wouldn’t copy to the Win2K machine– and then it dawned on me that it might have something to do with the fact that “CON” is a reserved filename in Windows. Indeed, my hunch turned out to be entirely correct; that was exactly the reason that the files wouldn’t copy!

Of course, now I’ve got to find a machine that’s not running Windows 2000 or above that has support for USB drives so I can rename them… -_-

Just edited to add: Oh, of course! The PowerMacs in the music building! I’ll have to go there tomorrow, I guess…