Shaka

The day we put an end to senseless dress shirt packaging traditions is the day I regain my faith in humanity.

by fti

Hace algo más de un año que renovamos la Guía de Orden de Lectura del Mundodisco al nuevo formato. Tras la traducción de algunas novelas al castellano, y tras la mudanza de ZonaFandom a la Fancueva, tocaba actualizar la Guía de nuevo y publicarla en todo su esplendor, aprovechando nuestro nuevo diseño.

Ahora se muestran las traducciones de ‘El Atlético Invisible’, ‘La Corona de Hielo’, ‘Vestiré de Medianoche’ y ‘Snuff’. También hemos eliminado la rumoreada ‘Rising Taxes’, de la que Pratchett habló en 2007 y de la que nunca más se supo.

De paso os contaré un poco de la historia de cómo ha ido creciendo esta guía, porque tenemos más influencia en ella de la que parece. La guía la creó Krzysztof Kietzman para la web L-Space, en un formato bastante cutre, visto en perspectiva, con colores chillones que te daban -5 a la cordura.

Como se ofrecía con licencia CC, preparé una nueva versión más vistosa para ZonaFandom, y añadí algunos elementos que consideraba que faltaban en la original, así como novelas que se habían ido publicando. De repente, la versión en castellano estaba más actualizada que la original, y estéticamente era mejor aunque sólo por lo horrible que era la original.

La versión de ZonaFandom de la guía desencadenó la creación del nuevo diseño

El caso es que Krzysztof me confesó que había visto la versión en castellano de la Guía, y decidió que la suya necesitaba un lavado de cara. Así se gestó el nuevo diseño, que me parece precioso, y al que finalmente pasé la versión en castellano, cerrando el ciclo.

Os dejo las dos versiones, una más limpia, sólo con los títulos traducidos, y otra con los textos originales de las novelas en inglés (versión completa).

Por cierto, qué bien quedan los colores de esta guía con los “colores corporativos” de la Fancueva. Parecen destinados a estar juntos…

Actualizado: He corregido algunas erratas que se han indicado en los comentarios, y ya de paso he añadido otros libros del Mundodisco que debían aparecer: ‘Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook’, ‘The World of Poo’ y ‘The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day’. No he incluido ‘Raising Steam’, anunciada por Pratchett como probable próxima 40ª novela del Mundodisco.

Actualizado 2: Corregido otro error, ahora ‘Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook’ está vinculado a ‘Mascarada’ como corresponde.

En la Fancueva Especial Terry Pratchett Saga de Rincewind y los Magos Saga de las Brujas Saga de la Muerte Saga de la Guardia Saga de las Antiguas Civilizaciones Saga de novelas juveniles y Tiffany Dolorido Saga de la Revolución Industrial y Moist von Lipwig

by Andrew

Como todos los segundos martes de mes, Microsoft lanza su ronda de parches para todos sus sistemas operativos Windows y Windows Server con soporte. Y hay veces que estas actualizaciones tienen un comportamiento potencialmente no deseado.

Es el caso. Una actualización, de numeración KB2823324, provoca que Windows 7 no sea capaz de iniciarse. El mensaje de error que se mostrará tendrá un ID de suceso 51 o distintas numeraciones de error (0xc000021a). Adicionalmente el antivirus Kaspersky también dejará de funcionar. Si tienes configurado tu sistema para que instale automáticamente las actualizaciones de Windows Update probablemente ya la tendrás instalada; si es el caso, os explicamos cómo arreglar vuestro equipo.

Es importante saber dónde comprobar si tenemos la actualización instalada o no. Para ello seguiremos los siguientes pasos:

• Abrimos el menú de Inicio
• Abrimos el panel de control
• Hacemos clic en “Programas”
• Hacemos clic en “Ver actualizaciones instaladas”

En la lista que aparece deberemos buscar la actualización con la numeración que indiqué en el segundo párrafo.

Si habéis instalado la actualización pero no habéis reiniciado el equipo

En el caso de que hayáis instalado la actualización pero no hayáis reiniciado el equipo, estaréis a tiempo de repararlo. Para ello:

• Abrimos el menú de Inicio
• Abrimos el Panel de Control
• Hacemos clic en “Programas”
• Hacemos clic en “Ver actualizaciones instaladas”
• Buscamos la actualización con numeración KB2823324
• Pulsamos en el botón “Desinstalar”

Si queréis utilizar un único comando dentro de una interfaz de línea de comandos, será el siguiente el que hay que escribir:

Wusa.exe /uninstall /kb:2823324 /quiet /norestart

Si ya habéis reiniciado vuestro equipo

En este caso nos estaremos enfrentando a un equipo que no podemos iniciar, de manera que no podemos utilizar ese sistema para poder repararlo. Deberemos acudir a un disco de recuperación de Windows 7 o, si no lo hemos creado, a un disco de instalación del sistema operativo (o a las herramientas de recuperación que el fabricante haya dejado en una partición de vuestro disco duro).

Otra posible opción es intentar iniciar el equipo manteniendo pulsado el botón F8 para acceder a las herramientas de recuperación del sistema. Este método funcionará siempre que conozcamos la contraseña local del sistema.

Una vez lleguemos a la ventana de la imagen, simplemente pulsamos en “Restaurar Sistema“ y marcamos el último punto de restauración (cada vez que se instalan actualizaciones se crean puntos de restauración automáticamente).

Por otra parte, podemos ejecutar dos comandos desde el sistema, si no funciona Restaurar Sistema, no lo tenemos activado o hemos eliminado los puntos de restauración. En las mismas herramientas de recuperación, pulsamos en el último enlace y escribimos los siguientes comandos:

dism /image:C:\ /get-packages

dism /image:C:\ /remove-package /PackageName:Package_for_KB2823324~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.1.1

Como es de esperar, de todos modos, Microsoft está investigando el problema, y además la actualización afectada ya no se distribuye mediante Windows Update.

Más información | Microsoft

Dance like everyone is watching and you’re wearing something embarrassing.

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If you don't have any interest in Facebook apps (and, let's face it, many of them are suspect or just plain spammy), Facebook offers an option that works like a kill switch to keep Facebook apps and other websites from sharing or accessing your information: Turn off Platform.

Facebook Platform is the way games, applications, and websites are integrated with Facebook. It allows sharing of your information not just for the apps or sites you visit, but also allows your friends' Facebook apps to access your private data.

Although you can control app information sharing on an individual basis on Facebook, as we recommend in our guide to Facebook privacy, turning off Platform is the surest way to keep your Facebook information from being shared to any apps or sites.

Doing this, however, also means you won't be able to log into websites or apps using Facebook, and friends won't be able to share information with you through apps. Here's the warning Facebook gives about turning off Platform:

If you get too many CityVille notifications as it is, don't use any Facebook apps, and don't use it to log into other sites, you can turn off Platform by going to your Facebook privacy settings, then clicking the Edit button in the "Apps you use" section.

Sophos' Naked Security blog offers more details on managing your app privacy settings in the link below.

How to stop your friends' Facebook apps from accessing *your* private information | Nacked Security

Photo remixed from an original by Craig Myran Photography.

That’s no moon…

Also, we’ve been adding some great features to our new project Forekast.com since launch, and there are many more to come! For a list of some of the improvements go here. Thanks!

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Chrome World Wide Maze es un experimento de Chrome que nos permite jugar al laberinto con nuestra web favorita, la cual renderiza en 3D y la convierte en un nivel en el que tendremos que mover la pelota y llegar al final antes de que se acabe el tiempo.Una de las cosas buenas que tiene usar Chrome es que de vez en cuando los ingenieros de Google sacan un invento de los suyos, como una prueba de concepto de lo que se puede hacer en un navegador. Uno de estos conceptos es Chrome World Wide Maze, un juego del laberinto en el que podremos jugar en la web que queramos.

Aunque la idea parezca simple está bastante bien ejecutado. Entramos a World Wide Maze con Chrome y allí veremos como conecta con el juego. La idea recuerda a Super Monkey Ball ya que controlamos una pelota por un labertinto. Esta pelota la vemos en 3a persona y la tendremos que guiar hasta el final. Como método de control tenemos tanto el teclado como la posibilidad de usar un teléfono móvil.

Una vez entramos en el juego se nos requerirá conectar nuestro teléfono iPhone o Android, en el que sincronizaremos las pestañas. No hay que olvidar que es necesario tener el mismo email tanto en el navegador del PC como en el del teléfono. De esta manera ya nuestro móvil se convierte en el controlador y veremos una vista de pájaro del laberinto. Introducimos nuestra web en el buscador y nos la convertirá a 3D, con pasillos elevados y pasos subterráneos dividiendo en capas las diferentes secciones.

Una vez dentro de la web podremos utilizar nuestro teléfono como mando, pero en mi experiencia no iba muy bien y la respuesta no era instantánea. También podremos jugar con el teclado como toda la vida. El objetivo es llegar al final antes de que se acabe el tiempo. Y cabe decir que cuanto más cosas tenga la web esta se convertirá en un laberinto más complicado que si usamos la página base de Google.

Chrome World Wide Maze no necesita unos grandes requerimientos de sistema y lo podremos jugar tanto en PC como en Mac. En PC será necesario Windows Vista o Windows 7, un Pentium 4 a 2.4 GHz o superior o un AMD 2400xp o superior, 1GB de RAM, 256MB de VRAM y una conexión de 768 Kbps. Para Mac un procesador de doble núcleo y 256MB de RAM y OSX 10.6 o superior.

Si queremos usar un teléfono como mando tendrá que ser un iPhone con iOS 5.0 o superior o Android con 4.0 o superior. Y si queréis probar niveles, el de ALT1040 es bastante fácil.

This Month in Photo of the Day: National Geographic Magazine Features

In Japan the nighttime viewing of cherry blossoms in spring, like these at Kyoto’s Hirano Shrine, is a special event. "The cherries' only fault: the crowds that gather when they bloom," wrote Saigyo, a 12th-century poet.

See more pictures from the March 2013 feature story "Night Gardens."

Watch a time-lapse sequence of a night-blooming water lily »
Go behind the scenes in a Q&A with Diane Cook and Len Jenshel »
Download cherry blossom wallpapers »

A typographical character is simply a printed symbol—this includes letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The ? is called a question mark; ( and ) are called parentheses; and ; is known as the semicolon. But you know that already, and I suspect you’re beginning to wonder how one could possibly wring drops of “fascinating” from the dry towel of typography. And that’s fair. But did you know the division sign has a name? What about the mysterious origins of the paragraph sign? Where did the % sign come from? ¿Why on Earth do Spanish-speakers put those upside-down question marks at the beginning of their sentences? Read on!

10 The Pilcrow—¶

The pilcrow, also less elegantly called the “paragraph mark,” serves a number of purposes, most of which involve denoting the presence or location of a paragraph in one way or another. Most commonly, it’s used in word processing programs to indicate a “carriage return” “control character;” that is to say, a non-permanent mark showing where a paragraph ends. There is disagreement over the origin of the name; The Oxford English Dictionary, for one, likes to think it comes from a string of corruptions of the word “paragraph.” I prefer to side with the Oxford Universal Dictionary, which suggests that the sign itself looks a lot like a featherless crow—a “pulled crow.” The symbol itself derives from the letter C—you can still see it in there—which stood for the Latin “capitulum,” or “chapter.” The two lines that ended up vertically crossing the C were a sort of editorial note from the writer.

The pilcrow was used in the Middle Ages, in an earlier form, as a way of marking a new train of thought before the paragraph became the standard way of accomplishing this. Now, among its myriad uses are in academic writing (when citing from an HTML page), legal texts (when citing a specific paragraph), and in proofreading (an indication that a paragraph should be split in two).

9 The Ampersand—&

The ampersand is a logogram used to mean “and.” The symbol itself is based on a shorthand version of the Latin word for “and”—et—and in certain fonts, you can still clearly see an ‘e’ and a ‘t’ linked together (Adobe Caslon, for instance). The word ampersand has a somewhat unusual origin—it’s a corruption of the hard-to-parse, multilingual (English and Latin) phrase “& per se and,” which means “& by itself is ‘and.’” Confused? Don’t worry—that’s only natural. All it means is: “The symbol &, all by its little self, simply means and.” And where did this phrase come from? Well, in the early 1800s, & was considered the 27th letter of the English alphabet, and since saying “X, Y, Z, and” would be confusing, “and per se and” was said instead. It doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to fathom how this could quickly turn into ampersand, which it did by around 1837.

Because people like to make up urban legends based on everything, including stodgy ol’ typographical marks, there’s a vicious rumor floating around that French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère used the mark so much that it eventually got called “Ampere’s and.” Don’t believe it for a second. In the end we’re left with a pretty little symbol that has more than a few variants.

8 Interrobang—!?, ?!, or ‽

What?! You’ve never heard of the interrobang!? Really? Well, now you have, so all is forgiven. An interrobang is described as a “nonstandard punctuation mark” (it’s part of the punctuation counterculture), used to end sentences where you really want both the exclamation point and the question mark. While the use of both marks side by side had been prevalent for some time, it wasn’t until 1962 when an advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter decided that enough was enough—no longer would he withstand the tyranny of two separate punctuation marks when one would suffice. He asked readers to suggest names—rejecting such fine ideas as rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest—and ultimately settled upon interrobang, a combination of the Latin root “interro” (think “interrogate”), and “bang,” which is printer’s slang for the exclamation mark. The word is used to describe both the two side by side (!? or ?!), or the combined symbol ?.

7 At Sign—@

What we know as @ has a lot of different monikers—including “at sign,” “at symbol,” “ampersat,” and “apetail”—but is unusual in that it doesn’t have a widely-accepted name in English. In Spanish, it is known as an arroba, and in French the arobase. @ has two primary usages—its original one, used in commerce to mean “at the rate of,” and more recently, “directed at” (primarily in email and in social media like Twitter). It has been claimed (by Italian professor Giorgio Stabile) that the symbol is actually over 500 years old, to represent an “amphora”—a unit of capacity used in commerce. It first made its way onto a typewriter as early as 1885, and has since found its way into our hearts.

A couple of fun facts:

- The Spanish arroba was a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds.
- The names for @ in other languages often derive from the idea that it looks like an animal. To wit: apenstaartje (Dutch for “monkey’s tail); papacy (Greek for “little duck); dalphaengi (Korean for “snail”); sobachka (Russian for “little dog”).

6 Guillemets—« »

Guillemets are what the French use instead of quotation marks. In addition to the physical differences, the usage differs as well—generally, guillemets open and close entire conversations or exchanges, rather than individual utterances. Amusingly, the guillemet is named after a French printer named Guillaume Le Bé from the 16th century; “Guillemet” is a diminutive of “Guillaume.” One can only assume that French people call our quotation marks “Willies,” “li’l Bills,” or “Mini Williams.”

5 Obelus—÷

The Obelus, more commonly known as “the division sign” for reasons I can’t fathom, comes from an Ancient Greek word for a sharpened stick or other similar pointy object. It shares its roots with the word “obelisk.” The obelus was once used to denote sections of writing that were considered incorrect or suspicious; in other words, it would have been perfect for Wikipedia editors. It was first used to mean “division” in 1659 by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn. While still used frequently in the US and in Britain, it is not commonly used to mean division in most of the rest of the world.

4 Inverted ? and !—¿ and ¡

In Spanish, when a sentence ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, it also starts with an inverted one. ¿Porque? Well, I’ll tell you porque. In 1754, the Spanish Royal Academy decided that the Spanish language had a dire problem: when you start reading a sentence, you often have no way of telling if it’s a question or not until you get to the very end.

Consider the sentence vas a ir a la tienda? (Are you going to go to the store?). Up until you get to the question mark, you are totally in the dark—is it a question, or simply a declarative sentence stating “you are going to go to the store”? In English, we have ways of indicating that a question is coming, so that proper inflection can be used, as well as to help with comprehension. In Spanish, you used to need contextual clues to help you out before the Royal Academy had its way. They also decided that the exclamation point would be lonely, so they advocated for its inverted use as well.

Though the language was slow to adopt this new convention, it is now a fully integrated part of the language. A few interesting usage notes:

- Short, unambiguous questions are often written without the inverted mark—Quien eres?
- In digital communication, the inverted mark is frequently left off (emails, instant messaging, texts).
- Some authors refuse to use inverted marks.
- Writers can get playful with the marks, including starting a sentence with a ¡ and ending it with a ?.
- ¿ can be used in the middle of a sentence if the whole sentence is not a question, but rather the final clause.
- Note that ¿ and ¡ are positioned differently than ? and !; they hang below the line.

3 Ditto mark

File this under “things we use all the time but don’t know their name.” Ditto marks are those quotation-looking-guys you use to save your tired wrist from a few more seconds of writing, indicating that what’s directly above should be repeated. Though one might suspect (“one” being “me” before I researched it) that the word ditto may have been related to the Latin root “di” (meaning “two”, as in when you say “ditto” you mean “me too!”), it in fact derives from an early (c. 1620) form of the Italian word for “to say.” Originally, it was used to avoid needless repetition when writing a series of dates in the same month.

A “ditto mark” is a type of “iteration mark.” Other languages have their own, notably Chinese, Japanese, and Ancient Egyptian. It’s tough to fathom why Ancient Egyptian scribes might have needed a way to cut down on chiseling elaborate drawings into rock.

2 Percent Sign—%

Take a look at the percent sign. Look at each of the three individual marks—a circle, a line, a circle. Remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of a certain number, with the digits rearranged and realigned? A very important number? Maybe . . . the number 100?

The % sign, of course, means that the preceding number should be understood as being divided by one hundred—”per cent.” The slash mark used to be straight across, with zeroes above and beneath, but it gradually became slanted—leading to what D.E. Smith, in 1925, called the “solidus form” of the percent sign. The solidus, aka slash, virgule, fraction bar, and other names, is this sign: /.

Because there is disagreement about everything, there is disagreement over whether there should be a space between the number and the % sign, over whether it should be per cent or percent, and when you should use the % symbol and when you should instead write out the word.

1 Upper Case and Lower Case letters

Once I learned the origins of the terms “upper case” and “lower case,” it seemed so obvious. I mused: does everyone know this but me? What else are my friends and family keeping from me? Instead, though, I decided to convince myself that legions of Listversers were in the dark like me, too embarrassed to say anything. Take comfort, fellow readers, for you may remain anonymous in your ignorance.

Now then: in the early days of printing, when each letter was set individually, the letters were kept in cases. The capital letters were kept in—you guessed it—the “upper case,” less convenient to the printer because of how relatively few capital letters are used, while the lower case letters were kept in the more accessible—wait for it—”lower case.” It’s as simple as that, really. This usage of the terms dates back to 1588.

Fun facts about cases:
- The use of two cases in a written language is called “bicameral script.” Languages with only one case are called “unicase.”
- So what were lower-case letters called before they used cases at all? Well, we have other words to describe them—Upper-case letters are called majuscules (and, of course, capitals), and lower-case letters are called minuscule. Note the spelling difference with the word miniscule.

The post 10 Fascinating Typographical Origins appeared first on Listverse.

This Month in Photo of the Day: National Geographic Magazine Features

Constantly trailed by his own flying saucers, a king bird of paradise clings to a vine in the New Guinea rain forest. His vivid colors and bizarre tail feathers evolved from millennia of competition for female favor.

See more pictures from the December 2012 feature story "Paradise Found."

Watch Tim Laman capture a stunning tree-top shot »
Download bird wallpapers »