We were at the doctor’s office for a checkup on our little girl late last week, and I have a Greek class coming up – a tough class for which I figured I’d spend some time studying and preparing while waiting for the doctor. Unfortunately, I just discovered yet another of the thousand little details Google doesn’t think matter. I can’t study Greek on my phone here because Google refuses to ship (or allow users to install) a typeface that includes the polytonic Greek character set on Android. The default system font, Roboto (a poor clone of Helvetica), has accents but no breathing marks. This means that at least half the words in classical and Koine Greek are simply missing letters on any web page, and for that matter any app that doesn’t embed its own fonts.

This is not a make or break issue with the phone, but as my primary tool for mobile work in situations like this, it is quite frustrating. What is more frustrating is Google’s absolute unresponsiveness about this. There are many ways the issue could be fixed, none of them particularly complex or time-consuming (unless the folks working on android have made some really silly decisions and coupled the font deeply in the OS, which I don’t believe for a second). No, by all appearances the explanation for the still-open ticket is quite simple: Google doesn’t care. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Following up on yesterday’s thoughts on piracy: I ran across an example that perfectly illustrates the ways that the big content industries are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to profit and piracy.

Jaimie and I are big fans of Castle; it’s the only ongoing television show we actually watch. I was reading some discussion on this week’s episode this morning, and discovered that while ABC puts the video up on the website for streaming (good move!), they limit access to people in the United States (horrible move!). Read on, intrepid explorer →

I spent much of the day today working on a slightly older model HP Compac laptop.

To be as plain as I can: the keyboard was utterly atrocious. To say the keys are mushy is an understatement. To say the designers lacked a sense of aesthetic pleasure would only be slightly less obvious than to say that they had no concept of the value of ergonomics. Read on, intrepid explorer →