Chop Fooey

Mental Floss magazine, May-June 2009 issue, Page 19

This really makes me want to find out where Pu Pu Platter comes from and what is that "pow" in Kung Pow Chicken...

Ghost Character U+38F8

John D. Cook at The Endeavour wrote a piece about how to shorten URL by using unicode. In one particular example, the unicode happened to be 38F8 and this is what appeared:


http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=38F8

Although Unihan.org has catalogged this character into its database, there aren't additional linguistic information.

Characters likes these are known as "ghost characters", where they only exist basing on unicode algrithm but not used in linguistic sense.

Matter of fact, Unihan Grid Index has many of these:

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=3403

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=351B

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=360F

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=208D5

Friendface

I used this clip to test Flickr's video upload feature, where users can upload videos size up to 150 MB and 90 seconds in length. It was intro to Channel 4's The IT Crowd (season 3, episode 5) mocking the popular social networking site, Facebook.

Since the show's broadcast is only limited to UK, full episodes are not available on its website (unless users use an UK proxy). Channel4 did post bits and pieces of its show in YouTube.

The best resource I have found to download episodes is to use Vuze & PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian is especially useful for protecting users' privacy when downloading.

LG W1952TQ Monitor Drivers

I recently purchased a LG W1952TQ monitor to replace my aging 17" ViewSonic. This monitor was on sale at Fry's Electronics for $149.99, while Amazon.com was selling it for $189.89 and $159.99 at Newegg.com.



Although the monitor did come with a CD, I was surprised to find the actual driver files themselves are not available for download from LG's website. Unless the user would also install LG's forteManager 3.xx, which is just another bloatware.

lg_w1952tq.zip

In the linked zip file above, it contains three essential driver files for W1952TQ:

W9152.CAT
W1952.ICM
W1952.INF

Remember kids, a bloatware-free PC is a happy PC.