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Chinese Dictionary on iPhone

October 8, 2008 by wroolie Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was showing my iPhone to a colleague when I started playing with the settings and found out that it was even cooler than I had thought.

One of the most difficult aspects of trying to read Chinese is looking up characters in the dictionary. If you recognize a character and know how it sounds, you can look it up via the pinyin romanization. However, 9 times out of 10, you don’t know what it sounds like. So, you have to look determine what the character’s radical is and check that radical in the radical index. That will then tell you where in the dictionary to look for your specific word. It takes ages.

Most Chinese-English dictionaries I’ve had have a very worn our radical page. iphone 144

I downloaded some dictionaries for my iPhone a while back to have a play with them. The dictionaries were cool, but it still relied on me entering text via the online keyboard. I never checked the international settings and found that I can set up more than one keyboard on the device. I could also select to enter Pinyin or draw actual characters.

Now I can draw a character into the dictionary program (I’m using Slovo-Ed at the moment) and immediately see a list of characters which look like the one I’m trying to draw. It is really, really cool.

Seriously, if you have every used a Chinese-English dictionary, you will know how much of a time saver this would be!

Filed Under: Chinese, Languages

Kenny and Carl

October 3, 2008 by wroolie Leave a Comment

My best friend growing up was Ted Falagan. We met in the fourth grade and he was my best friend all the way through high school. There was nobody I was more close to (outside my own family) in my formative years. We were into sci-fi, comic books, movies, and television.

He has been making movies as long as I can remember. We used to make little films on a bulky camcorder around our houses growing up. He’s still making movies in San Diego (with a troupe of actors called the Fault Line Players), but now he’s doing it professionally.

One of the nice things about the internet age is that I can see my friend’s movies online even when I am on the other side of the world. While his films regularly appear in film festivals around the states, some of them have recently been put up on Youtube. Most of them can be found here and here.

Here’s one of my favourite movies available at the moment, although there are other good ones:

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Rants

2008 Baseball is over (for me)

October 2, 2008 by wroolie Leave a Comment

The baseball playoffs have already started. It seems like the San Diego Padres have been in them so frequently lately that I expect to watch some playoffs in early October.

But this year, they didn’t do to well (an understatement) and the season is over.

The big highlight of the year for me was a few Sundays ago when Chris Young took a perfect game into 8 2/3 innings against the Nationals. It was a day game so I could watch it live in the evening here. It was very exciting and very close. I was also heartbreaking when he was homered off of.

Oh well, next year.

Filed Under: Living in the UK

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