Hey guys

Did you hear about Bitcoin before ? No ? To keep things simple: it’s a digital currency, not backed by a central bank or whatever government, but by a robust P2P network.

To get started, you can either:

• “mine” bitcoins: solve the previous chainblock to validate the transactions, .. and win some new bitcoins (very hard now)
• join a mining pool, to share the effort and win very little but very often
• exchange currencies to/from bitcoins (fastest way to get bitcoins, but the exchange rates vary very much and you have to wire “IRL money” to the market)

Some people want bitcoins for their savings, some people exchange bitcoins on markets for benefit. With bitcoins you can already buy web hosting and VPN access, web developing and design, but also “material” like art, clothing, food and so on (overview on the Bitcoin wiki). There is one sex toy seller, but very little and mainly US (no onahole spotted).

Bitcoin transactions are done from {some cryptographic address} to {some cryptographic address}: new Bitcoin addresses can be generated at will, and can’t be backtraced to a specific person or IP without access to your hard drive (and if the wallet file is unencrypted). This makes it very convenient to preserve privacy for fast and reliable worldwide service and that’s why I accept Bitcoin donations (look on the right, just below the “Recent comments”). But how much do you want to donate, if it’s to help me buy one onahole ? That’s what lead us to the main point:

My price script now converts prices into Bitcoin too, for each onahole and for each vendor.

USD / BTC exchange rate is updated every 24 hours, values are updated depending on the vendor (30 days for J-List, 6 days for NLS and 1 day for Amazon). Should give an insight of the price without overloading the servers, if you want to track bitcoin prices in real time, just follow Mt.Gox charts

Next idea is somewhat tricky: an interactive “shopping list”. We’ll see if I can bring this together tomorrow Could be fun to use.

Introducing a new rating system

I had it on my mind for some time now, but looking at ToyDemon’s source code gave me a concrete example of microdata usage. Reading Google’s support pages and experimenting did the rest, spent a couple of hours on this.

With the HTML5 meter tag, 4 criteria are considered with a rank from 0.0 to 10.0. The overall rating is the total average divided by 2, which gives us the very standard 1.0 – 5.0 rating. This one will be converted and showed as stars in the Google result pages, something nice This rating system makes it easier for third-party software to extract my ratings for each products, unlike my “hearts in image”.

By the way: maybe PHP developers here will be interested in the PHP code behind the old rating system, so here’s the source code with generation script. For the new rating system I just use a new “gen.php” because I’m lazy, helps me to quickly and accurately write the HTML 5 code for each product. And here it is.

Changes will be seen by Google in a few hours or days only, so don’t worry if it doesn’t work yet

Ah, something else: the meter tag isn’t supported everywhere yet. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and their derivatives support it perfectly. Don’t know how it comes out on iPhone/iPad, but the Android browser 4.1.2 doesn’t (just use Firefox Mobile or Opera Mini). And what about Internet Explorer ? Even Internet Explorer 10 doesn’t. Just use a real browser and leave IE alone.

See ya

Earlier today I had some fun on Twitter with @ToysHeartShop trying to figure out how to translate “sujiman kupa” in English I still rely on Google Translate to transcript my romanji into hiragana, I guess it’s “more than nothing”. For days now I try to remember and correctly write “a”, “i” and “u” in hiragana, still a long way to go until I can read what’s on the onahole package (could be interesting). Learning kanji ? LOL no, I better rely on writing hiragana on keyboard and then just pressing the spacebar, computer transcripts this into kanji all alone

Well I don’t have a Japanese keyboard yet, so I made hiragana and katakana charts, in two fonts.

(click for full size)

Have fun

(sorry Dakaarts, just testing if the template still works)

Hello everybodies

I had some fun making a slide show and exporting it as video. No, it’s not Office Powerpoint ! It’s…  LibreOffice Impress BTW the music is public domain, you can find it complete here.