Anatiferous blog | Move every zig.

Howdy! This is my (William Reading's) webpage. At the moment, I only have this blog script and my gallery up, but I hope to get more stuff on this page at some point, or so I thought when I created this site years ago. Updates and shiny new copy to eventually go here. If you'd like to contact me to point out that I've done something to break XHTML/CSS standards or heaven forbid--look at my Vita--drop me a line at my e-mail address bill +spam @ [ELEPHANT] aggienerds.org. Simply remove "+spam", the spaces and the pachyderm along with its brackets and that address will reach me. I'm also available on Jabber/GChat/AIM/MSN with the same address above.

(Warning: This post is slightly rambly)

This summer, I got a nice intern gift from Microsoft: A custom Zune with the Geniusaurus holding the ever-so-slightly creepy (and perhaps slightly infamous among MSFT Interns) brain balloons on the back. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Zune on my own given that I like my hardware to work on Mac OS X and Linux in addition to Windows. As has been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere, the closed extensions to de facto MTP standard don’t play well with the open-source implementations that let you use it on non-Windows operating systems with LibMTP. To boot, it doesn’t work with Microsoft’s own “PlaysForSure” DRM standard (which, incidentally, is just a flag judging by the fact that FairUse4WM can remove both).

While those two things were immediately obvious to me (and have decent workarounds, such as sync’ing music over the network and not using DRM’d music), the lack of support for Asian fonts took me by surprise. I understand that the Zune is a US-only product. I know that it came to market from inception to being on store shelves in less than nine months. I realize that adding in international fonts adds to the testing workload. But even so, I’ve been spoiled by having an iPod with proper internationalization for years and a sizable portion of my music has Japanese and Chinese metadata. Since sync’ing music is something that I only do on occasion, the Windows-only support hasn’t been as much of a pain point for me as the lack of internationalization.

As it turns out, Windows CE on the Zune already has international font support, so all that one needs to do is get the appropriate fonts onto the system partition: Asian Fonts on the Zune. Although it’s really easy to pop it out and plug in the drive using a ZIF connector, you can avoid that warranty-voiding fun by tricking the Zune software into thinking that there’s an update and dropping a few extra files onto the drive with a faux 1.5 update (actually 1.2 with extra stuff) and updating to 1.4.

The result? Mr. Sunshine is shining again.