Have you always wanted to share the silly fun of Sailor Moon with your geeklings? Now's your chance! 23 episodes of the original, newly re-dubbed anime are now available online through Viz Media and Hulu.

If you suffered through the Sailor Moon DiC dub in the 90s, you'll find things are different now. In Viz's new dub, character names now match the manga. Sorry, Serena! The voice acting seems to be higher quality, with an admirable effort at matching the animated mouth movements without rushing the dialogue too much to fit the words in. Usagi is appropriately cute and whiny without being grating; my five-year-old commented more than once, "Sailor Moon is hilarious!"

The opening and ending songs, as well as the background and transformation music, remain unchanged and undubbed, which made me happy as an anime watcher who prefers subs over dubs. (I'm a sub snob.)

¹ This article is a bit of an experiment. Never covered manga and related on Pipedot before. If you're interested in this topic, speak up; if you're not I probably won't submit similar articles since they're not really my cup of tea.

You might be familiar with Enigmail, the popular add-on to the Thunderbird email program that allows public-key encryption of email. If you haven't heard of it, it's worth investigating - Enigmail is an important upgrade to your email experience. And if you're already using it then you should upgrade, because several encryption flaws were found, and have recently been patched.

An Enigmail user who reported one of the encryption failures in version 1.7 on the project's support forum described the situation as "the biggest imaginable catastrophe."

"I am currently preparing a crypto class for journalists next week to teach them how to use safe email," the user wrote. "HOW am I going to explain that? A system tells the user in a separate window as well as in a menu line that everything will be encrypted but then it simply FORGOT to ENCRYPT and, ooops, their report will be intercepted and their source will be tortured?"

That's a bit hyperbolic perhaps. But it's still a good time to keep your encryption up to date. Unless you agree with security researcher Matthew Green, who thinks PGP sucks and it's time for it to die.

The Tiobe Index this month shows both C++ and Java languages are less popular than they've ever been, though they're still popular.

"Java and C++ are at an all-time low in the Tiobe index since its start in the year 2001. This doesn't necessarily mean that Java and C++ are on their way out. There is still a huge demand for these programming languages," Tiobe says. Based on a formula that analyzes searches on languages on a number of sites, Java's rating in the September index was 14.14 percent; C++ had a rating of 4.67 percent. Overall, Java ranked second in popularity, while C++ came in fourth.

That doesn't mean they're not still popular languages, and it doesn't mean they're not in demand. But the statistics do show their influence waning as newer and more focused programming languages gain in popularity to address domain-specific programming challenges, like Swift for Apple products, or Ruby [Ed note: for what?]. As usual, C#, PHP, and Python remain in high interest by the programming community. The Tiobe index itself is here.

Well, can't blame the guy for asking. Over at ITWorld, Paul Venezia wonders, "Is it time to split Linux distros in two?"

You can take a Linux installation of nearly any distribution and turn it into a server, then back into a workstation by installing and uninstalling various packages. The OS core remains the same, and the stability and performance will be roughly the same, assuming you tune they system along the way. Those two workloads are very different, however, and as computing power continues to increase, the workloads are diverging even more.

Maybe it's time Linux is split in two. I suggested this possibility last week when discussing systemd (or that FreeBSD could see higher server adoption), but it's more than systemd coming into play here. It's from the bootloader all the way up. The more we see Linux distributions trying to offer chimera-like operating systems that can be a server or a desktop at a whim, the more we tend to see the dilution of both. You can run stock Debian Jessie on your laptop or on a 64-way server. Does it not make sense to concentrate all efforts on one or the other?

There's quite a bit more to his argument than these two paragraphs so read on before pointing out that Linux distros are already mostly divided into server and desktop focuses.

Windows Phone; Windows 7, 8, 9; Windows RT; Windows CE; and not to mention all the different variations of Windows boxed OSes (Pro, Basic, Home, and so on): there have been a lot of different products that bear the name Windows, and someone has probably decided it's time to simplify.

The idea would be that, in the mind of the consumer, Windows is just Windows, and that all of these different names and flavors are just confusing ("Why is it called Windows Phone if it can't run my Windows programs?"). Getting rid of all that complexity and returning to the old way - where Windows is synonymous with personal computing - would certainly be a coup for Microsoft. But just as it shot itself in the foot with Windows RT, consolidating on just "Windows" could be fiscal suicide if Microsoft's various operating systems don't indeed come together as one harmonious platform.

The folks at ExtremeTech have noticed a shift in nomenclature and marketing focus these days, as several products have simply discussed Windows, with no emphasis on anything other than that single word. The challenge here is that what marketing wants can't be delivered by the technical teams behind all those different versions of Windows operating systems, as they are not just different codebases, but extremely different code bases.

The tech press is tripping over itself today in breathless anticipation of the Apple event later today, in which it is largely expected Apple will announce a new, large screen iphone and potentially the famed iwatch. Techradar has a good roundup of the rumors and The Telegraph condenses it into an easy summary if you'd like to study up on the rumors before tuning into the event. From the Telegraph:

Apple's new mobile phone, the iPhone 6, will actually be two products: one with a 4.7in screen and a larger 5.5in model. Read all the latest rumours on the devices here and see our gallery of "leaked" images and artistic impressions here.

We will also see the launch of the "iWatch". The major technology companies (and several small ones) are fighting for a share of the rapidly expanding smartwatch market at the moment, and Apple is expected to stake its own claim today. The wrist-worn device is expected to play music, receive calls and send emails. Read all the latest rumours about the device here.

Or, you could just wait for Apple to do whatever they're going to do, and then come back here to comment on it. In either case, happy reading.

Last November CheapAir became the first airline to accept Bitcoin and then later, the first to let travelers book hotel rooms and Amtrak train seats with the digital currency. Since then its Bitcoin sales have topped $1.5 million, an amount that exceeded the company's initial expectations, Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir, tells Forbes.com.

CheapAir decided to expand its array of digital currencies that it supports after receiving requests from the developers, Klee says. He is less sure of their momentum, given their smaller user base, but Klee is willing to take a flyer.

"In general I am very supportive of alternative currencies and the technology is very promising." Like many company executive Klee is delighted with the cost savings digital currencies offer companies like CheapAir.

Philips has beaten the competition to market with the first batch of Android-based televisions. Philips and kind are all hoping to sell you a television to which you have no need to attach any other devices, but that's no guarantee.

Previous Philips TVs lagged behind the competition in terms of streaming services, but that won't be an issue with the Android sets. You should be able to download all your favourite on demand and catch up services directly from the Google Play store, including BBC iPlayer, 4OD, Demand 5 and Netflix. 4K streaming content is supported, as the Android TVs all have HEVC codec support.

With access to Google Play, there are other possibilities too. One enterprising journalist installed a torrent downloader, found a 4K film trailer online and downloaded it to the TV, without having to jump on a computer or transfer the file from another device first.

Spotify Connect and OnLive Gaming are also on board the Philips 4K package. How the market reacts to this latest round of "innovation" will determine the future for more than one gadget-maker out there.

Emily Oster covers an old topic that's still controversial:

Many medical studies show positive health effects from higher vitamin levels. The only problem? These studies often can't tease out the effect of the vitamins from the effect of other factors, such as generally healthy living. Studies that attempt to do this typically show no impact from vitamin use - or only a very tiny one on a small subset of people. The truth is that for most people, vitamin supplementation is simply a waste of time.

[Author note: The article avoids what I'd consider the main question: since these studies are not exactly new, why does my doctor still recommend a multivitamin every time I visit? And what other things does our society universally accept that might be pointless?]

I haven't posted a progress report in a while, and I wouldn't expect everyone to follow the mailing list, so here's a short list of the latest features of the site.

Journals
Journals are now enabled for all user accounts! Similar to the venerable Slashcode journal, the Pipedot version allows you to write your extended thoughts and post them in the familiar story-like form - complete with comments and community moderation. An example journal story can be found here.

Feed Page
If you where previously using the root of your user page (e.g. http://bryan.pipedot.org/) to display your feed page, you will need to instead append "/feed/" to the end of your shortcuts (i.e. http://bryan.pipedot.org/feed/) Sorry for the inconvenience.

Message ID
Originally, I adopted a similar system as Slashcode, where each object gets an auto-incrementing integer. However, this global increment is just not usable in terms of a distributed system. And so, after rewriting a large chunk of the site, objects are now given a unique ID that looks more like a Message-ID from Email and Usenet messages.

This change had an unintended side effect of making some links a bit long and kinda ugly. For example, a link to a comment can be 55 characters long (e.g. http://pipedot.org/comment/1392545397_bryan_pipedot_org) Which leads me to the next item...

Short Codes
All items (stories, comments, polls, etc...) on this site are now assigned a short code similar to those seen on Twitter (t.co), Google (goo.gl), bit.ly, and others - except that it's built into the site and automatic.

For example, the full URL of a poll could be rather long:
http://pipedot.org/poll/2014-05-19/when-dystopia-comes-it-will-look-like

But it can be shortened to:
http://pipedot.org/3XC

These links are useful for character limited services, such as Twitter posts, as well as any other scenario where a shorter link would be appreciated. Also, like other link shortener services, you can tack a "+" on to the end of the short link to get statistics on who has clicked it.

After a few people mentioned the ugliness of the Message ID style links, I realized that short codes could also work in place of the long Message ID. Therefore, even the unshortened links are again shorter. (e.g. http://pipedot.org/comment/2S4B)

SoylentNews Federation
I thought the SoylentNews federation would be a cool mini-project. Combine the efforts of two nearly identical sites while improving the resiliency of both. If you missed it (the feature was online for less than a day) the idea was to combine all stories and posts from both sites into one feed. However, I seem to have greatly underestimated the disdain for such a function. Because I'm not overly fond of receiving that many threats and hate mails in a single day, I've simply turned it off and removed all references to SoylentNews in the code.

Gravatars
Pipecode has long supported a profile picture. This feature allows you to show off your mugshot on your user page and various other places. Of course, thus far, only 4 people had managed to find and update their picture. To help prevent a missing image when viewing a profile, I've added Gravatar support to automatically populate profile images. If you do not have a Gravatar, you can still manually update your profile image with the old method. You can also disable Gravatar updates to your picture by unchecking the Gravatar option on your profile settings page.

Retina Images
Nearly all images, icons, and logos on the site now support "retina" displays. So if you are blessed by a device with an incredibly high DPI screen, the graphics here should all look especially crisp.