Category: Bits

But sometimes it takes a long, long time.  I signed up for the NPR classical music newsletter one year ago, and the item that keeps popping regularly is their Tiny Desk concert series.  As the name implies, it’s a short concert of three our four songs by a single artist.

A few weeks ago, the newsletter advertised a Tiny Desk Concert with Yo Yo Ma who was making the rounds with his third recording of the Bach Cello Suites. I finally just got around to checking it out.  It’s been a year of drip, drip, drip advertising, but NPR is finally back in my podcast feed.

Postscript, word of mouth also works, I just watched Grosse Pointe Blank after my buddy told me about it in 2008.  And yes, a decade later it was indeed great fun.

We’ll see how long this lasts, but I came across two apps this past weekend. 

The new app was Duolingo, via a recommendation on the Hello Internet Podcast.  Its a fun gamify way to learn a language, and so far its been interesting to test myself against the system for Chinese.  Over the past few years I’ve spent a bit of effort doing flashcards on Pleco, the excellent Chinese dictionary, but I keep running out of steam because individual words is but just a part of the language.

It seems that I am just advanced enough that I won’t get a ton out of Duolingo, but plowing through their available lessons for those quick breaks over the next couple weeks till I finish them all up will certainly be more productive than Facebook.  Hopefully this will kickstart me back into some sort of regular chinese practice.

When I went on a walking kick a few years ago, I settled on using the Pacer app, until life got in the way and I became sedentary again.  I re-downloaded and it seems that the developers have not done anything to ruin it and added a nice 7 minute workout routine, aping the official Johnson and Johnson 7 minute workout app.  We’ll see where this goes, between jump roping, calisthenics, martial arts, and just plain walking around I need to get moving again.  At least this is a good tracking tool to start.

In the end I’ve always wanted to be able to read the mother tongue and I know I need to exercise.  It may well be another phase that quickly peters out, but hopefully it will be different this time, a little bit at a time.

I’ve been looking around a bit about chinese-english online dictionaries and www.nciku.com seems like one of the best. It seems to have some trouble doing some searches cause their servers are overloaded, but you can search with english or chinese text, pinyin, and even drawing in characters. The definitions come out pretty thoroughly and include audio and stroke order animations and a rudimentary character composition chart (which is the weakest feature of the bunch). Throw in easy to manage vocab lists and a lot of sample conversations and stuff and it’s one hell of a package.

Plus it’s all for free at the moment. The other site of note is skritter but it’s a pay site and not as much a dictionary.  In the end, I’ll most likely default to flashcards on quarter size index cards, but it’s amazing what online stuff is coming out now….and once phone and touchscreen apps become mature it will be a sea change in how this stuff is taught.

Free!  But not as easy….

I’ve always been interested in open and legally free software. So between my mom’s visit to Houston and getting serious about studying for my architecture registration exams, I wasted the better part of the weekend installing Linux and various free software programs onto my computer. The most painful to install was Linux. Installing the new operating system was not a problem – the painful part was creating the separate partition on the hard disk on which I could install Linux. The partitioning software (provided with the Linux installation software) was pretty easy to use, it was just really painful to defragment my hard drive multiple times with different defrag preferences until it finally defraged in a way where I could partition the hard drive. Trying to set up my dual-monitor (or any drivers) was not much fun either. And in the end, Ubuntu is does not really boot up any faster than good old Windows XP.

Fortunately, the other software programs, Open Office, GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP, the Photoshop replacement), Inkspace (Vector editor Illustrator replacement), and Scribus (book layout InDesign replacement) were all quite easy to install. I mean, install in Windows. I tried installing them in Ubuntu Linux, but none of them seemed to have a GUI installation package and I was sick of messing around in the Unix terminal. In any case, after playing around with these programs in Windows, I realized that I doubt I would ever get around to using any of these programs just due to the the hassle of learning how to use them.

In the end, I got the impression that free software will always have a major problem – in general they are clones of the “standard”. As such, they don’t really present much of a feature upgrade (if at all) and people have enough trouble learning the “standard” interface that they aren’t really excited about spending time to learn the alternative, even if its free. If I was in an office, I would say that my time is valuable enough that it would be worth purchasing a license of Adobe CSx instead of wasting the company’s time to learn the new program.

The exception that may prove the rule is Open Office. I haven’t messed with it much, but I have already ported over my Word and Excel Documents over to Open Office. I was using MS Office 2003 and the current version of Open Office emulates that interface almost perfectly. I’ve heard that Microsoft has messed with the UI of current version of MS Office and if that’s true I think I’ll just stick with what I know – Open Office. I don’t know how much one can emulate the UI of another company’s product, but if these other free image editors can get their UI much closer to the Adobe CS Standard, I’d seriously think about jumping over.

I still might try to learn GIMP, Inkspace and Scribus, but now that I’m about to start my Architecture Registration Exams, I think I have a better use for my time than learning redundant software interfaces just for the conceptual pleasure of running on a all open-source rig.