Sadly, no. For some odd reason, Hindi and Devanagari don't appear as language options in that preference pane, so I chose Gujarati and made it first on the list. There was no change at all (using Gujarati language and its counterpart on gu.wikipedia.org as test cases). Still a bunch of question marks where something legible ought to be.

The ironic part is that the article name in the Gujarati Wikipedia shows up in Gujarati script in both the title bar and the list... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 8:43 PM on December 19, 2006

One can certainly imagine a more appealing order for the alphabet based on the shapes of the letters...

The Arabic alphabet is ordered pretty much on this principle. All the letters of similar shape are grouped together. You can compare and contrast it with, say, the Hebrew alphabet, to see how much it was changed.

Interestingly enough, Arabic letters have also been used as numbers, but usually according to the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 1:18 PM on December 18, 2006 marked best answer

I've restarted three times now, once after dragging the file into the Recycle Bin and then restoring it back, then again in safe mode to run ScanDisk (there was a boot sector that I repaired). Plus, I only copied and pasted the new entry, not all the old entries. I'm not sure if orthogonality and CKZ aren't recommending the same thing, but I'll look for one of these old-school disk utilities anyway. Is there any way to tell which ones do or don't directly read the allocation table in advance?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 8:42 AM on October 29, 2005

Thank you everyone for your answers. I tried Disk Investigator, and it worked perfectly! Apparently, some glitch inserted a bunch of binary characters at the end of the text file, and TED Notepad choked on them on trying to save it. Disk Investigator also gave me an "Invalid start cluster number" error when I tried to read the empty file. Fortunately(!), when I saved this morning's entry in a new file, it ended up very close to the data I was looking for. So once I got that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 4:43 PM on October 29, 2005

Questions: What is the exact error message for each application? When exactly does the error message occur? Does it occur at the same point in the process for each app?Does the Sony-provided software (sounds like you're talking about Click to DVD) successfully write working DVDs? Does the third-party software recognize the DVD drive?In Device Manager (IIRC, right-click My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager), is there an... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 9:01 AM on October 6, 2005

Oh yeah, and there's the solution I was never allowed to give customers when I was in tech support: try uninstalling Click to DVD, and any other Sony software that writes to the DVD drive.
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 9:10 AM on October 6, 2005

A question I forgot to ask before: can you burn CDs?

A curiousity - in device manager it says the drive is a DVD-ROM/CD-ROM SCSI AVX drive - which isn't true - but I have upgraded to current firmware

Aha! A driver issue! If Device Manager thinks you only have a DVD-ROM drive (i.e. not a DVD burner), then that could very well be why it won't write to that drive. Try uninstalling/reinstalling the driver (very simple in XP... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 8:24 AM on October 8, 2005

Document every possible assertion that you have made or could be called upon to make in court, especially the dimensions and weight of the shipment, and documentation from the OEMs on the dimensions and weight of the merchandise. That right there will kill the "some FedEx employee was responsible" defense. I'm sure FedEx would be more than happy to send you a letter on official letterhead confirming the routing history, tracking number, size and weight of the shipment. Definitely... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 7:42 PM on October 7, 2005

People like to associate with "their own kind", but that can be, and is, defined in many different ways. In Northern Ireland and India, for example, sectarian identity is far more important than in America. I remember seeing it mentioned, on some mostly-forgotten PBS documentary, that it's widely believed among people in Northern Ireland that Protestants and Catholics look different, and that one can tell the difference just by looking at them. Not once have I ever seen anything... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 10:24 AM on October 7, 2005

To build on the idea of upstate New York, northern New York (the part north of I-81 between Syracuse and Albany), especially the Adirondacks, are fairly quiet, sparsely populated, and out of the way, while not completely isolated in case of emergencies. There's no mass transit in most areas except Greyhound (frequently used by the Amish), but the towns there often have less than a thousand people in them and are less than a mile wide. The temperature frequently dips below zero, and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 4:20 PM on September 19, 2005 marked best answer

Off-topic, but Viceland doesn't seem to be terribly... erudite about race, slavery or history. Their "Dumb myths and smart facts about slavery" article has some "facts" that themselves leave a whole lot of context out, or are sometimes entirely misleading. For instance, Muslims are described as "kidnapp[ing]... poor, defenseless white kids—just like you!" during the Children's Crusade. For one thing, maybe the reader isn't white, and it's a little odd that the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 9:23 AM on September 19, 2005

It looks more like a sixth of India's population are Dalits, from what I can see. 1, 2 And they can vote. Not only that, but they benefit from affirmative action in legislatures and the bureaucracy. So yes, discrimination still exists in Indian civil society, but to say that invalidates Indian claims to democracy is akin to claiming that the U.S. isn't a democracy when we still have racial discrimination here.

If you really wanted to criticize India's internal... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 10:43 AM on July 21, 2005

How to disable the touchpad tapping feature on your Sony laptop. [Flash demo]

Sony also provides a handy troubleshooting procedure for this very problem on its support site.

To wit: * This issue may be caused by an installed printer that is not physically attached and powered on. Attach and power on the printer and then start the notebook.
* Touchpad driver updates may be found by going to the Sony® eSupport web... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 9:48 PM on June 22, 2005 marked best answer

Umm... Canadian ballet probably doesn't mean the same thing in Canada that it does in (some parts of) the U.S., does it? (For the record, I never heard this term until I came to Buffalo, even though I grew up in another border area. Even here, it's usually abbreviated to "the ballet", since there isn't an actual ballet this side of Toronto.)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 3:24 PM on October 22, 2004

As I recall, it was an acoustic piece, with these gorgeous three-part harmonies (two male, one female) and wistful lyrics about rural Canadian winters; the last line of the chorus went something like, "Port Anjumain, fifteen below". But I'm not sure of the number, and I have no idea how to spell the name of the town. I've been Googling like crazy for the last 40 minutes with no success. Does anyone out there remember anything more about this song?
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 8:28 PM on October 17, 2004

Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you all! And, sorry I haven't said thank you until now. I'm virtually certain now that I was thinking of the slow version with Young and Timmins. I didn't even know there were other versions! Awesome.
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 3:45 AM on October 21, 2004

Man, that is the most deceptive statistic I have ever seen. The casual, non-P2P-using reader will come away from that sentence thinking that 42% of everything available on KaZaa is kiddy porn, which is just ridiculous. It's so skewed toward that reading that it's hard to tell exactly what the study's actual findings were. Now if I mention my use of KaZaa Lite in passing to someone who just read that article, they'll think I'm a pedophile.* Thanks, Toronto Sun.

I... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 4:56 AM on March 16, 2004

One thing about Eudora: the US version is not Unicode-compatible, so if reading emails in non-Latin writing systems or with other Unicode symbols will ever be necessary, that's probably not your best choice. I switched to Mozilla Mail for that reason alone, once it became an issue for me. An added advantage to Mozilla: you can open the mail client, check your messages, and close the mail client window, and it will continue to auto-check for messages as long as any Mozilla window is open.
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 9:15 AM on January 12, 2004

Good answers, thanks to both Jimbob and marcusb. My friend is willing to get a laptop; I was just wondering what additional costs there would be. Just in case anyone is still paying attention, could this be done using Internet cafes or public WiFi networks? Would upload bandwidth (or something else) be a problem in these places? Other than those options, is there such a thing as a portable broadband connection? She is, after all, going on a tour, and therefore will be in various cities... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by skoosh at 12:03 PM on January 10, 2004