Foreign Languages & PDAs: Stream of Kensciousness

ShuBook e-book reader app mostly shines with Chess Fundamentals ePub e-book

2012-02-08T22:27:00.009-05:00

I wrote my first blog entry on e-book reader apps back when I was using iOS 4. Under iOS 5, I observed loss of functionality in some e-book reader apps. I installed ShuBook as a potential substitute for Stanza, which initially fatally crashed under iOS 5 (though a final Stanza upgrade was eventually released, which worked under iOS 5).

Each e-book reader app has its advantages and disadvantages. Developers make different decisions about how to render elements of an ePub book, which will be very clear in the examples below. Under iOS 5.0.1, ShuBook 1.4.2 (an older version, to which I'm sticking for now) mostly does a nice job rendering the public domain e-book of Chess Fundamentals, written by World Chess Champion José Raúl Capablanca. The up-to-date version of ShuBook may very well display this e-book in the exact same fashion, but I have no plans to test that.

Amazon sells several Kindle versions of this freely available e-book, but perhaps they added meaningful value in some way to the Kindle editions. I downloaded mine for free using OverDrive to connect to my library's website, which had a link to public domain books. I opened the e-book successively in Stanza, iBooks, ShuBook, and OverDrive. I initially had a problem with OverDrive, but deleting the app and downloading it again got it working again).

The print book has embedded chess diagrams, an example of which is shown here:

Both Stanza and iBooks simply mimic the original book's placement of those diagrams, though they use surprisingly small diagram images:

My (22nd edition) print book's page is around 4 times the size of the iPod screen. As is clear above, on the iPod it is not so easy to see those diagrams, which were of poor quality even in the print book.

OverDrive puts each diagram on an entire page, but squished to the degree of being essentially useless:

ShuBook (Shū is the Pinyin spelling for the Chinese word for book) also presents each diagram as an entire page image, but done the way it should be. To enhance the text, I used these settings, which I think are all changes from the defaults:

Font Name: Arial, which is sans serif, feels easier to read given that I also use:
Font Size: extra small
Text Alignment: left (justify works badly for many of the chess moves in the text on the iPod)

I was disappointed, however, to discover that ShuBook lost some text right after the Example 14 diagram, which would appear to be a direct consequence of its superior handling of images. The text is complete in ShuBook on the iPad, where this e-book is even more of a pleasure to read with the larger screen size, but this blog's focus remains the iPod Touch.

Here are Stanza, iBooks, and OverDrive properly rendering the moves:

Now, here is ShuBook missing the moves "1. BxKt QxB.":

For the time being I will keep a copy of the e-book in all 4 of these apps, and intend to continue documenting other differences I find.

Shubook may be similarly helpful for other ePub format e-books having similarly small images embedded between text, though there is an apparent risk of losing some text.

No e-book reader, of course, will ever suffer from show-through of text on the other side of a printed page!
(...unless they are simply displaying scanned images of a print book, that is.)

The pronunciation of jaune (yellow) in French

2012-02-05T23:30:00.001-05:00

A Frenchman mentioned to me today that the au vowel sound in jaune (yellow) is often mispronounced, even by native French speakers, like an English "aw" sound (as in awning), when it should be pronounced like an English long o sound (as in lone). I realized that I have been making this same mistake for years, possibly influenced by a misplaced expectation for the sound to be like the one in the English word jaundice, which shares the same first four letters.

However, there are many French words wherein the au vowel sound is pronounced like an English long o sound, e.g.:

au (to the)
chaud (hot)
gaufre (waffle)
haut (high)

so it seems clear to me that the vowel sound in jaune should be pronounced similarly.

This Frenchman said that many people from the Marseille region in France use this "mistaken" pronunciation, although he would classify it more as a regional variant. Personally, I will try to break my longstanding "mistake", since I prefer to emulate standard Parisian French, and I will make enough other mistakes trying to do so!

iPod: from 3rd to 4th generation under iOS 5.0.1

2012-02-04T07:00:00.093-05:00

A while back, my 3rd generation iPod crashed so hard under iOS 4.3.5 that it "lost its mind". I used PC iTunes 10.5.0.142 to load iOS 5.0.1 onto its wiped-clean "mind", but its longstanding port hardware problem soon thereafter became so serious that I could no longer charge it without precariously holding the cable just right (for the entire charging period, something I wasn't about to do).

I got a 4th generation iPod which was initially at iOS 4.3.3, and got errors when trying to reload it with iOS 5.0.1. The Apple error message's first recommendation was to update PC iTunes, which I did, bringing it to 10.5.1. It seems logical enough that Apple might require the latest version of iTunes for such operations. I was then able to bring the iPod up to iOS 5.0.1.

In PC iTunes, I then attempted to Restore from Backup. There were two backups, one from my initial activation of the 4th generation device (and therefore not useful), and another of the 3rd generation one from 6 days earlier. Attempts to restore from the second (chronologically earlier) backup failed, reporting that the backup session failed.

More recently I had been doing backups to iCloud, and two of those backups were there. The first had virtually no data from my activation of the new iPod minutes earlier and was therefore not of interest. The earlier one was from 2 days earlier (from the 3rd generation iPod), and I began restoring from that. Ah, the beauty of the iOS 5 backup over WiFi, which takes place when you are charging at an outlet. You always have to charge; backup is a perfect thing to occur alongside.

The iPod reported that some items could not be downloaded, but that I could restore them if I had them on my (PC) iTunes by doing a sync operation. The following apps were not restored from the iCloud backup because they were no longer available in the App Store (Could there be any other reason why an app wouldn't have been restored?), but I still had them in my PC iTunes:

CED
Go To There
InstaPaper Free

My outgoing 3rd generation iPod still had some battery charge (I had been conserving the remaining charge with Airplane Mode, turning it off, turning the brightness down all the way), so I could visually compare if any other apps were missing after the PC iTunes sync.

PC iTunes lists the device, presumably purely cosmetically, as a 3rd generation iPod.

I did a certain amount of work resetting app configurations and restoring data from servers associated with the apps.

Assorted impressions of the 4th generation iPod:

Great to have cameras. I had recently been at the scene of an accident with my camera-less 3rd generation iPod, and stayed as one of the witnesses for the police who eventually came. If I had had this back then, I would have snapped pictures which would clearly have shown the policeman that the errant driver was in the wrong lane at the time of the accident. Fortunately I believe enough witnesses corroborated that anyway. You can also use the front-facing camera to use the iPod as a pseudo-mirror.
The addition of a microphone changed (downgraded) what Apple included as earphones (my blog entry).
The power button was moved to a more awkward position away from the top edge, making turning it on/off and taking screenshots (press power button + home button) clumsier. Maybe the new placement was needed because of the cameras or other hardware issues.
Volume buttons were similarly moved to a more awkward position away from the side edge.
The 3rd generation iPod's screen always looked great to me, but the Retina display of the 4th generation iPod is even sharper. My Opera Mini browser's saved Speed Dial images looked worse than they had on the old iPod, but simply recreating them fixed that. I had the initial impression that I needed the screen brightness to be slightly higher for the new iPod than for the old, but I'm no longer sure about that.

The following links from a Google search for "restore from icloud" were of the most use to me:

http://gigaom.com/apple/ios-101-set-up-and-restore-from-icloud-backup/

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4859

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766

http://heresthethingblog.com/2011/10/18/restore-iphone-ipad-icloud-backup/

http://heresthethingblog.com/2011/07/21/wipe-iphone-android-phone/

Chinese translation: tea; chess

2012-02-03T22:27:00.002-05:00

These are a few examples I happened upon in casual conversations with native Chinese speakers.

On one occasion, Mr. A mentioned "red tea", which puzzled some other folks who were also present. He was referring to 紅茶 (hóng chá), whose two characters indeed represent "red" and "tea", respectively. However, in English we call the same drink black tea. I could see the color of the tea being considered red (it's typically not black, really), but context trumps piecemeal translational validity, so he would have done better to say either "black tea" or just "tea".

On a separate occasion, when referring to chess, Mr. B called it "international chess". In China it's called 国际象棋 (guójì xiàngqí; 國際象棋 in traditional Chinese characters) where the first two characters represent "international" (probably in all other contexts) and the last two characters represent the game called "Chinese chess" in English.

Chess is known by a different name in Taiwan: 西洋棋 (xīyángqí). The first two characters represent "Western", while the last character represents any "chess-like" game (Go, incidentally, is 圍棋 wéiqí in Chinese; the first character represents "to surround", which I gather is what you seek to do to your opponent's stones in the game). I tried to clarify for Mr. B that in the English language context it doesn't make sense to call the game "international chess" and that he should just refer to it as "chess". When I subsequently contrasted Chinese chess vs chess, I called the latter "Western chess" to further distinguish it. Although I was perhaps influenced by the Taiwan name for chess, I was thinking along the common idea of describing Chinese things as from the East and, e.g., American things as from the West, e.g., Eastern religions vs Western religions.

Wikipedia Mobile app

2012-01-18T18:29:00.004-05:00

Well, if you were trying to access Wikipedia's "standard" (non-mobile) site from a web browser today, you were out of luck, as shown above and detailed here. If you used the (free) Wikipedia Mobile iOS app (or, it seems, accessed the Wikipedia mobile site), however, you could continue to get Wikipedia information:

Regardless of whether you agree with their decision to blackout their browser-accessed pages today, I encourage you to consider the value they provide, and if you are financially able, to contribute. Personally, I value the fact that they provide a great deal of useful text information adorned with a minimum of images, that they cover some topics (e.g., random items from pop culture -- Hot Wheels (TV Series), anyone?) that are not found in more conventional information repositories, and they do not run ads.

Chinese character triples having matching Pinyin endings including tones

2011-12-31T13:04:00.001-05:00

Not sure if I'll stumble across any others like the following, but I heard this word used on a Taiwan show recently, and found its triple Pinyin "rhyme" interesting:

jìyìlì 記憶力 (faculty of) memory

The Pleco Chinese dictionary app, with its Wild search capability, could perhaps come up with more, but as with my earlier Chinese character pairings having matching Pinyin letters but different tones post, I find these things interesting when I come across them in daily life, rather than through calculated research.

Flashlight apps

2011-12-28T00:24:00.007-05:00

Despite not having the blinding power of the iPhone's LED flash, a flashlight app on the iPod effectively illuminates the back panel of a PC CPU unit when I'm crawling on the floor, provides useful spot lighting at night in a car having relatively weak interior lighting, and illuminates enough of a dark room when I don't want to turn on a room light.

I have long used John Haney SW's free Flashlight app, which is currently at version ~~5.1 (15)~~ 5.2 (as of 2/1/12). When the app cold starts, there is a brief company splash screen, followed briefly by the % brightness indicator, after which you can have a pure white display at maximum brightness (at least the way I've configured mine):

I often set the iPod to sleep shortly after using this app, so until I saw some Apple App Store reviews mentioning it, I had not really noticed how my iPod's normal brightness didn't return after quitting the app. That is to say, Flashlight overrides what is set in Settings > Brightness (Version 5.2 has an option to prevent this override for iOS 5.0 or later; I personally prefer the override.). I normally keep the iPod at about the "B" level of brightness (right around the B in the Brightness heading), which, versus a higher level, lengthens battery charge life:

I often lower the Flashlight app's % brightness to a similar level before quitting the app. The app's instructions point out that you can lock and unlock the device to restore your normal brightness setting (or double-press the Home button, then single-press the Home button), which would be more precise than my manual brightness approximation technique.

I usually keep 3 screen possibilities configured, between pairs of which I can "swipe" sideways to switch:

white
red (which I believe is the color least disturbing for one's eyes in the dark)
black (allowing rapid darkening of the display)

You can explore the additional entertainment-oriented screen options, but the app's utility to me is as a lighting tool. I will mention, however, that a strobe effect is available, which might be useful sometime(?).

Version 5.2 also added a way to show photos, but I had no success with it in a brief period of testing, and I reverted to 5.1, which I felt after a cold start had a slightly shorter delay before the flashlight effect comes on -- I want the app for light, as fast as possible!

I recently also installed the iHandy Flashlight Mini app (currently at version 1.0.3), which has an S.O.S. option. Unlike John Haney SW's app, this flashlight app does not commandeer the iPod's brightness setting. If you weren't already using the highest brightness setting on the iPod, you might want to do so before starting this app.

Below is a screenshot of it running an ad for another one of their products, iHandy Flashlight Free, which I tried out months ago but deleted in favor of John Haney SW's app. A review in Apple's App Store correctly points out that the ads are not shown in the preview pictures provided by the company.

The ad at the bottom is still displayed when you are using the flashlight functionality. That detracts from the feel of the app, even if it has very limited effect on the illumination. John Haney SW's app runs ads, but not smack-dab in the flashlight functionality.

This app also has a strobe function which functions somewhat differently from that in John Haney SW's app.

The compass function does not seem to be available on the iPod. That may only operate on an iPhone.

If you have more than one iHandy app (up-to-date versions, that is), e.g., the iHandy level app, the upper right corner's icon allows you to switch directly between them without launching them from the Home Screen.

I continue to prefer John Haney SW's flashlight app, but you never know when you'll need to signal S.O.S....

Interestingly, on 1/4/12, Adam C. Engst commented that "Apple is rejecting flashlight apps because there are too many in the App Store already", which seems both plausible and a good thing for consumers.

Gender of spoken pronouns in Chinese

2011-12-23T16:32:00.005-05:00

In English there is a clear spoken difference between he and she (and also between him and her), but the sound for both (tā) is the same in Chinese. In Chinese, pronouns also don't change if they are used as subjects or objects, so he=him and she=her.

On one occasion I was talking with a native Chinese speaker, Ms. A (甲小姐; jiǎ xiǎojiě). My understanding was that all of the persons she mentioned were also native Chinese speakers.

Ms. A was telling me about Ms. B (乙小姐; yǐ xiǎojiě), who had been entertaining her friend Ms. C (丙小姐; bǐng xiǎojiě) at home when Mr. D (丁先生; dīng xiānsheng) called. It seemed that Ms. B might have been interested in the possibility of exploring a relationship with Mr. D. However, he seemed to have become less enthusiastic about such a possibility after he learned that Ms. B's friend was there -- someone whose gender could not be determined from what Ms. B said over the phone, because 他 (tā) sounds the same both for a male and for a female (even when the female-only 她 (tā) is used for women -- which is only some of the time, in my experience).

On another occasion I was speaking with a native Chinese speaker with whom I periodically use a mixture of Chinese and English. This person was mentioning a transgendered person, and started with something like, "我不知道應該用 he 還是 she."
("Wǒ bù zhīdào yīnggāi yòng he háishi she."; "I don't know if I should use he or she.")

I said with a smile, "用 tā 吧!"
("Yòng tā ba!"; "Use the-Chinese-pronoun-with-the-sound-tā-from-which-gender-cannot-be-determined!")

Opera Mini vs iOS 5 Safari

2011-12-17T16:17:00.028-05:00

This entry is originally being written to compare Opera Mini 6.5.1 (1/16/12: I upgraded to 6.5.2 and have noticed no problems with it.) with iOS 5.0.1 Safari, primarily on an iPod, although some non-iPod comments may be included. This entry will likely get updates, either unadvertised or advertised-with-dates, over time. I mostly read text while browsing the web on my iPod, which is probably one reason why Opera Mini works so well for me. I have little to say about images and videos in Opera Mini.

My earlier blog entry about Opera Mini 6/6.0.1 vs iOS 4 Safari.

The free Opera Mini web browser is an alternative to Apple's Safari browser, with various pluses and minuses. Wikipedia has a decent article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_mini, which also links to the interesting http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-web-content-authoring-guidelines/. A list of technical specifications can be found at: www.opera.com/mobile/specs/. Version 6.5.1 was released on 11/14/11, with some fixes for 6.5, which was released a little while earlier. Version 6.5.2 was released 1/11/12.

Opera Mini has long been my primary browser for my iPod (and later, iPad, too). An iPod is typically connected to the Internet less often than an iPhone, so some of the following items (e.g., Saved Pages) are more significant for iPod users like myself.

PROS:

Opera Mini does not automatically reload a page when you tap the back arrow to return to it, at least if you return within "some" period of time (about whose duration I cannot be more specific). Thus, if you are reading a page which has multiple links to other pages, e.g., Google News, then tap to read an article, returning to the original page will often not invoke (frequently pointless and time-wasting) reloading, unlike in Safari. Also, if you load pages into different tabs while you have Internet access, but later lose that access, you can sometimes still read those pages, even without having stored them as Saved Pages. If you switch back to or restart Opera Mini, it does not attempt to reload pages fresh from the Internet; if it still "remembers" them (which apparently is not always), it gives you back what it last had for their content. Interestingly, Google News now seems to reload on rare occasions, which I do not remember happening previously; that could be because of changes in Opera Mini and/or at Google News. Available RAM issues mentioned below may still be applicable.
Unlike in Safari, you don't have to switch away from the current tab to open new pages, because you can open links in background tabs (tap-hold, then tap on "Open in New Tab"). This is helpful while, e.g., reading through all headlines in Google News, allowing you to open all stories you'd like to read in background tabs. Available RAM issues mentioned below may still be applicable.
Unlike Safari, Opera Mini allows saving of static copies of web pages on the iPod, letting you read or reread them later even without wireless Internet access. That can be useful to save pages for recipes, technical reference, humorous articles, or for any other reason, e.g., because you don't have time to read them right away. Safari's Reading List saves URLs (across all iOS devices sharing the same Apple ID), but still requires an Internet connection to view those pages.
At least 15 (someone else can test for the maximum number...) tabs are possible in Opera Mini, exceeding Safari's limit of 8. RAM constrains the total number of tabs effectively usable. "The page has been cleared to save memory." message is what you are left with content-wise on a tab when you run low on available RAM.
Using Single Column View ensures that, because of its size, text will be pleasantly readable in portrait mode, at least for me. http://www.thechessmind.net/ is a chess blog which I often read. In Safari, I normally need to "spread" or switch to landscape mode to make the text more legible, but the text has always been fine to read right away in portrait mode in Opera Mini.
If you make an account on Opera's servers, you can use Opera Link to determine at what frequency to save both your (up to 9) Speed Dial targets and your bookmarks there, for future restore (e.g., in case of a serious crash) or for sharing on another device(s), including on a pc. Automatic syncing is possible, but I prefer to sync bookmarks manually, which avoids attempts to connect to Opera's servers when you know (or perhaps, even when you don't know) that you lack wireless Internet access. Opera Link can also be used at any time on any Opera Mini instance device, so it is not linked inextricably to an Apple ID like iOS 5 Safari's Reading List. Although I didn't test this, it appears that if you use desktop Opera, there is supposedly an Opera Mini folder for bookmarks, which is the extent of the bookmarks that get synced with Opera Link.
The location box now has a star which is a shortcut to bookmark a URL; this portion of the star's functionality is actually only achieving parity with Safari. You can also still bookmark a URL the older, slower, but more functional way as well. The star's bonus is that if you are viewing a previously-bookmarked page, the star is yellow, indicating its already-bookmarked status. This can help you avoid unintentional duplicate bookmarks, though maybe you'd want to bookmark a URL in more than one bookmark folder. A drawback of using the star shortcut to bookmark a URL is that you do not have the option of using something other than the web page's HTML title as the bookmark's title. One news site that I frequently use often doesn't include useful page titles, so I would want to edit in something useful if I were to bookmark such a page. Since bookmark names are limited to less than the width of the iPod screen, I also might want to edit out words with no real identifying value from some page titles when creating a Bookmarks -- I need to be able to identify each by the short text.
After being forcibly ejected from RAM (by the user), Opera Mini starts up with the page data it previously had. This does mean, however, that you cannot close multiple tabs at once, which I consider a favorable trade in functionality.
Opera Mini's x cancel button is bigger than Safari's, and is spaced farther away from other things you wouldn't want to hit. Better for those times when you've inadvertently tapped on a link which is still loading, but in whose content you actually have no interest.

CONS:

Opera Mini does not provide end-to-end encryption. If you want to avoid putting your sensitive data in their company's hands, don't use Opera Mini for anything requiring credentials or anything to which you're concerned about them having potential access. (I blogged this using Safari on my iPad, and made subsequent small edits using Safari on my iPod.)
There is a short startup delay as it makes the connection to the Opera proxy servers ("calls home"), and apparently also retrieves your local settings.
Presumably because of the Opera proxy server, has extreme difficulties using maps.google.com effectively; I strongly advise using Safari for that. Even Safari cannot yield copyable text, though.
On rare occasions, my initial attempt to bring up a page doesn't succeed, which I imagine is an Opera proxy server issue.
Opera's proxy servers may lead to this side effect:
Going to, e.g.:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/05/26/dumb.doctors.office.ep/
prompts you with:
It looks like you are from outside the U.S. Would you like to make International your default edition? Yes | No Close
which I chose to simply ignore.
Records of chess games using figurine notation in ChessBase website articles like http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7882 are not, for all practical purposes, readable in Opera Mini, which does not render figurine notation properly. For this particular game, Alejandro Ramirez the annotator apparently used (non-figurine) algebraic notation for his handwritten notes, but copied and pasted in figurine notation from complementary analysis generated by a computer chess program.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

Only Safari can Add to Home Screen, using apple-touch-icon.png when available (not favicon.ico, as it turns out; according to http://www.webmasterworld.com/html/3560399.htm). Opera Mini's Speed Dial is a substitute, which I actually find more helpful because all 9 are in the same place. If you were to bookmark multiple pages in Safari, that would create additional icons on your Home Screen which are less likely to all be in the same location.
When using Single Column View, some items which might typically (as viewed, e.g., while not using Single Column View, or in Safari) be unobstrusive on the side of a web page may appear, sometimes as a large clump, at the top or bottom. I have gotten used to that, and simply swipe to get past the clump, if it's at the top, to get to the real content, e.g., on http://www.thechessmind.net/. This conveniently means that I typically don't even have to see any advertising which ends up in a bottom clump.
Find in Page: The Done button means done with searching; search happens as you type. Can search repeatedly in a page. Safari can find in page also, although it's probably somewhat less intuitive; see, e.g.: http://www.tipb.com/2010/09/16/ios-42-features-find-text-safari-web-page/
If a tab's pages started from the Start Page, you can return directly to the Start Page (the first page viewed in that tab) by tapping the O ("Opera") button, then tapping Start Page. If a tab's pages never included the Start Page (because the tab was created with "Open in New Tab"), there is no access to it within that tab.
9/4/11: Power-User settings are available by going to config: in the location bar, as described further on http://www.guruslodge.com/bmobile-phones-tutorial-and-solution-centerb/operamini-secret-codes/, which I just discovered. Changes likely survive Opera Mini crashes. For my own usage, I turned off the Phonenumber detection, which I suspect is probably only of use if (a) you have an iPhone (which I don't), and want to call such a number immediately, or (b) you normally use iOS assistance to add new contacts (which I don't, for reasons mentioned here).
On an iPad under iOS 5.0.1, I updated Opera Mini 6.0.1 to 6.5.1 on two separate occasions (I reverted to 6.0.1 after the first time), but could no longer save pages. In between those two attempts, I was surprised to see 6.5.1 successfully save pages on an iPod running iOS 5.0.1. I decided to sacrifice my iPad's Opera Mini saved pages, delete the 6.0.1 entirely, and download a fresh Opera Mini 6.5.1 (3rd installation), which allowed me to save pages.
Opera Mini's Single Column View trumps Safari's Reader, in my opinion. Particularly on the iPod, why wait to have something drawn (or partially drawn) before you can activate Reader, when all the while you can see that the text will be too small to read (without the Reader enhancement)? Just go directly to the readable version, all the time, with Opera Mini's Single Column View. I once saw a page with ads in the middle of the article and the Reader rendition ended at the ad. I can't reproduce that now with the same page, but regardless, I prefer to maximize my chances of getting all the text the first time, legibly, as fast as possible.
When using tap-hold ("Long-click" in the Opera Mini help) to select text, Opera Mini selects the word closest to your position and displays a beginning and end marker, each of which you can drag to change the text selected. When done, you tap Select and choose from Copy/Search/Search With...(and Go to Address... if the selection is a single word). As far as I have been able to tell, Safari does the same kind of initial selection in mobile sites, but the choice (no need to tap an additional Select) is Copy (and Define if the selection is a single word). For non-mobile sites, Safari selects the paragraph closest to your position and displays 4 markers (top, bottom, left, right) which you can drag to change the text selected. I'm not sure if I've ever needed to do anything but Copy after selecting text; if I do, I'll try to add that detail. Opera Mini may also behave differently when not using Single Column View, but that is left as an exercise for the reader; I always use Single Column View.
The Single Column View option no longer exists under Settings on the iPad, if it was actually there in earlier versions, which I can no longer remember.

Gender of nouns in French and Spanish

2011-12-12T23:15:00.001-05:00

In French and Spanish, nouns (I'm excluding pronouns here), including inanimate objects, have a gender associated with them, unlike in English. In English one does not say that the chair is feminine or that the pencil is masculine, but one does so in French (la chaise; le crayon) and in Spanish (la silla; el lápiz).

In a French class years ago, one English sentence assigned for translation into French included "casbah". That word had become rather more well-known from the Rock the Casbah song by The Clash. That being pre-World Wide Web times, we students rummaged through assorted paper dictionaries, and it seems that I, along with every other student, came up with nothing. It further seemed that we all followed our instincts (which in retrospect seem to have had no logical underlying rationale), and gave it a masculine gender ("le casbah"), only to all simultaneously groan while correcting each other's translations as the professor told us (with a wry smile of satisfaction?) that it was la casbah (feminine).

In French some word endings normally indicate a particular gender. Words ending in -ette, for instance, are almost always feminine. However, I will never forget that le squelette (skeleton) is masculine, having read in Harper's Grammar of French (a very nice book!) years ago that it is one of the rare exceptions.

In French some nouns have different meanings in a masculine versus a feminine form. Tour can be masculine or feminine. One meaning of le tour is turn; one meaning of la tour is tower. I'm not sure if there are similar such words in Spanish, though I think I will ask a native speaker soon....

Update an app but retain option to revert to older version

2011-12-04T11:17:00.009-05:00

Data you save for an app might not be able to be restored (it really depends on how the app stores data) if you restore the app using this technique. If that data is valuable enough, you may be obliged to never revert from the update of such an app. Your need to continue using your already-saved data may force you to accept any changes in behavior of an app's new version, even if you could revert the app itself.

The following steps using PC iTunes over USB cable enabled me to revert to Opera Mini browser 6.0.1 after a quick, disappointing test of 6.5.1 on an iPad running iOS 5.0.1, and should work the same way on an iPod.

The following presumes the iOS device is normally using iCloud backup, and also that Opera Link was previously used to save bookmarks and Speed Dial targets. Other apps may have other customization steps akin to Opera Link.

Disable backup to iCloud on device (I overlooked this precautionary step in my test).
Disable backup to iCloud on device within PC iTunes (if needed).
Backup device via USB cable to PC iTunes.
Update app on iOS device over wireless.
Test updated app on iOS device.
12/7/11: If you are going to test the app for an extended time, DO NOT leave the app on the device when syncing the device with PC iTunes before completing testing, because the sync will wipe out your old version of the app in PC iTunes. If you are saving any data with the new version of the app, you're going to have to give it all up should you need to delete the app for this scenario. I overlooked this when I was testing 6.5.1 on my iPod, so I lost my 6.0.1 version in PC iTunes, but fortunately 6.5.1 turned out to be a superior replacement.
If you prefer the older version of your app, delete the updated app from iOS device, then manually copy the older version back to the iOS device within PC iTunes.
Use Opera Link to restore bookmarks and Speed Dial targets (the latter will get up-to-date page images).
Disable Opera Link (unless you normally keep it enabled).
Move the (restored) Opera Mini icon to your desired Home Screen location.
Re-enable backup to iCloud on device.
Re-enable backup to iCloud on device within PC iTunes if needed.

Remember that PC iTunes can save (specific versions of) apps even if they later get removed from the App Store. Some apps are removed because they are replaced by a newer version, and some get totally removed (often enough without explanation). I haven't tested, but something like the above likely works from iCloud backup, except perhaps for apps removed from the App Store.

iOS third party apps you may not wish to update

2011-12-03T22:06:00.016-05:00

(Last updated, in whole or in part, on 2/3/12, when I was using iOS 5.0.1. Intended to be updated over time.)

Newer versions of apps sometimes function worse than their predecessors. Sometimes existing functionality is taken away or is changed in an undesirable way (sometimes breaking entirely).

Below are apps for which I consider or have reason (e.g., App Store reviews) to suspect that a non-current version(s) worked better. Having been burned in the past, in the App Store app's Updates section I long ago stopped using the Update All button in favor of updating apps individually. If this list grows too large for me to remember easily, it will be handy for me to check against when updating apps, to reduce the chance of updating an app for which I prefer an older version.

If an older version of an app works well, and there is no compelling or interesting new functionality offered in its newer version(s), I would not likely bother with much testing of newer versions. If someone using a newer version of any app listed below finds my comments about functionality to be incorrect, I would welcome a comment to that effect, which could prompt me to do additional testing and potentially revise this list.

If you made a backup of the iOS device to PC iTunes before updating an app on the iOS device, deleting the new version of the app (e.g., if you don't like it) from the iOS device, then using PC iTunes you should be able to get the older version back via either direct copy or sync (my Opera Mini 6.5.1 test on an iPad). If you don't take such precautions, you could be locked into the new version.

I haven't investigated to what degree iCloud backup can be similarly helpful (as PC iTunes) for such things, but my understanding is that if the App Store no longer has an app, you will not be able to get it back from there. I have 3 free apps which are no longer in the App Store, but which I can still restore to my iOS devices from PC iTunes:

CED (Chinese English dictionary which speaks pronunciation)
Go To There (retrieves and formats public transportation information)
Instapaper Free (I never used this, but my understanding is that it saves stuff to read later, and was dealt a serious blow by Apple's addition of Reading List to Safari in iOS 5)

iOS 5:

Flashlight 5.1 (my blog entry) This is the app from John Haney Software, which became Apps from Outer Space when 5.2 was released. 5.2 seems to have a slightly longer delay before the flashlight effect, which is a net negative since I want bright light as soon as possible. I expect I'd still choose 5.2 over other flashlight apps, but I plan to stick with my 5.1.
How to Tie a Tie Free Some App Store reviews suggest that version 4.1 may now hammer you frequently to rate it, and provides a pre-written 5-star review for you to approve. No, I haven't rated it, but I also haven't truly used it to tie a tie, either, despite having loaded it quite some months ago, and only ever knowing one lame-looking knot. I don't need to be browbeaten to rate this app.
Mercury Web Browser Lite (my blog entry) 5.1 didn't show ads on the iPod.
5.2 does show ads, though not continuously. I would probably not have upgraded, but I was dealing with a version problem with a different app when I synced with PC iTunes, and I hadn't paid enough attention to this app, which I use relatively rarely.
5.2.1: The company's write-up in the App Store says "Remove ads for iPhone version". A review claims that 5.2.1 also took away User Agent spoofing, which can be pretty useful.
I bought the paid version, which still has the User Agent spoofing. The developers have done good work, certainly worth 99 cents!
ShuBook 1.4.2 appears to be markedly preferable to later versions. Some App Store reviews slammed version 2.0.
Stick with Speedtest.net 2.1.1 (my blog entry). Some App Store reviews for 2.1.2 and 2.1.3 have made me leery of updating. The app works fine for me already, and supposedly there are some new legal agreement issues.
Stick with The Weather Channel 4.1.1 (my blog entry). Some App Store reviews for the subsequent version have made me leery of updating. It sounds as if the ads have gotten more and more in your face (flashing, it seems) without meaningful gains in functionality.

iOS 4 (I'm only listing a couple of apps and am unlikely to add more, since I'm in the iOS 5 world now):

Stick with OverDrive Media Console 2.3.2 (my blog entry). Version 2.3.3 apparently introduced a bug that prevents download of e-books to the iPod under iOS 4.3.5. It may even wipe out existing e-books, but I cannot confirm that.
(Version 2.3.3 can, however, download e-books to the iPod under iOS 5.)
Stick with Stanza 3.1 (my blog entry). Version 3.2 of Stanza doesn't work under iOS 4.
(Version 3.2 is needed under iOS 5, which would not run 3.1.)

Google Music

2011-11-25T16:40:00.010-05:00

Google has launched its cloud-based service for music streaming. You can download their free Music Manager software (I used version 1.0.22.3409) to your computer, then use a (free) Google account to upload your computer's existing library of music to their servers, up to 20,000 songs.

With Internet access, you can then play your songs from a browser on a computer, on selected Android devices (which likely provide the best experience), or from a browser on an iOS 4 or higher device: http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1114577&topic=1663424.

Under iOS 5.0.1, I use Safari, which worked best in my testing, and I bookmarked the site in Safari's Reading List, to be shared across any iOS device having my Apple ID. Using Camera Roll on a 4th generation iPod, which includes the possibility of playing video (which includes an audio component, which would naturally compete), stops music that is playing. Some other apps like Mail, which don't have native, primary audio components, could be used without interrupting the music.

I tried two browsers I rarely use, Late Browser Mobile (1.0) and Sleipnir Mobile (1.4.8), to see if they might be repurposed as music-playing apps. They were apparently limited to playing a single song once (continuous play would not work), and unlike Safari, they stopped playing music as soon as you tried to switch to another app (with a double press of the Home button).

With no Passcode set on an iOS device, you can set Auto-Lock to never, which is optimal for using Google Music.

However, if you have a Passcode set on your iPod, the Auto-Lock can be set for at most 5 minutes, severely limiting your options for using Google Music. The maximum analogous iPad option is 15 minutes.

Apparently, Safari must be open in the foreground and the iPod active (i.e., not in sleep mode) for much or all of the time that you are using Google Music in order to play multiple tracks continuously. If the iPod goes to sleep mode, it still loads the next track, but you must wake the iPod to play the track.

If you want to replay the same track continuously, Safari need not be in the foreground, and the track will keep playing even if the iPod goes into sleep mode. Perhaps only folks like me, who years ago recorded the same song continuously on both sides of a cassette tape to play on auto-reverse tape decks, can really enjoy Google Music on an iPod (A version of 茉莉花, plus The Art of Noise's Moments in Love from The Best of the Art of Noise, inspired me to make such tapes.).

I had previously ripped my CDs at 320 kbps (highest quality) onto my PC, primarily for use with my Microsoft Zune. The Zune provided a very helpful introduction to podcasts and mp3 usage, but I use it less and less over time. The ripping process for those CDs was long and laborious. Not particularly needing music on my iPod, I never felt like repeating it for PC iTunes, or cared enough to look into how to make those mp3 files usable in PC iTunes (particularly if such required making another copy of each song for PC iTunes). Google's Music Manager allows me to leverage my existing mp3 library with a bulk upload operation for use with my iOS devices. With my slow Internet access, it took me about two weeks (mostly overnight) to upload around 3200 songs and podcasts.

If you lost all the media (e.g., iOS device, personal computer, CDs) on which you have your music collection (e.g., because of a natural disaster), your Google Music backup should still be available. The rules (as of 12/5/11, anyway) allow you to download 320 kbps mp3 files of your music: http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?&answer=1701736. I load only some of my songs onto my iPod, but upload all of them to Google Music as a remote backup, and for occasional web browser listening.

The iPod speaker can be fairly tinny sounding, but I am not a serious connoisseur of audio quality. I generally don't like wearing earbuds, so any time I can reasonably listen to stuff without them is good with me.

My slow Internet access could be a significant factor for some of the following symptoms which I experienced on an iPod or on an iPad:

There is a delay before each streamed track begins.
A track might not initially start playing. Hitting pause and/or play sometimes starts it playing.
A track might abruptly stop playing. Sometimes it will restart by itself.
When playing multiple tracks, a track might abruptly stop playing, and the next track might start.
If you switch from playing one track to playing another (in my experience, switching between tracks of different artists), the album artwork display may get updated before the streamed track, such that hitting play for the second track actually plays the first track. Hitting pause, then play, corrected that.

When I checked, Google Music was offering some freebies (you must provide a valid credit card, though), so I grabbed Cheap Trick's I Want You to Want Me, Five for Fighting's Superman (It's not Easy), and Men At Work's Who Can It Be Now?, all of which I've liked for some time. The Dave Matthews Band's Live On Lakeside album was also free, so I thought I'd give that a whirl as well.

11/28/11:
Even with better wireless Internet access than I normally have, it's really seemed like if you want to hear one song play all the way through on an iPod, you have a decent but not 100% guaranteed shot at that, and your chances get worse if you want more than that. Google Music is okay with me since I rarely have a particular need to listen to music on my iPod, but it may not be worth the effort for many folks.

Differing functionality of in-ear headphones (earbuds)

2011-11-24T16:43:00.001-05:00

Regarding iPod audio playback capabilities, I have primarily used earbuds for listening to podcasts, and almost never for music. Only now have I actually looked more closely at the capabilities of several different earbuds. I will comment only lightly on the Voice Control functionality, at least until such time as I actually start using that.

The earbuds included with the 3rd generation iPod have a remote microphone and controls for:

Volume (+/-)
Pause/Play (press the depressed area between + and - once)
Next Track (press that depressed area twice)
Previous Track (press that depressed area thrice)
Voice Control (press and hold that depressed area)

The Next/Previous Track options allow you to move between consecutive (previously downloaded) episodes of a podcast series.

Voice Control for podcasts appears to have no particular utility. Most of the options that glide by on the screen are for music (e.g., play album, shuffle, etc.), although iOS devices with a camera can invoke FaceTime as well.

I recently upgraded to a 4th generation iPod (a blog entry is forthcoming). Its earbuds lacks the remote microphone and controls (the lack of a 3rd white band on the jack is an indicator of this); those are available on the iPod itself, although they are less convenient to use. This is the first iPod to have a built-in microphone. Volume can be controlled by the iPod's physical volume buttons. iOS 5 added the ability to press the Home button twice to access Pause/Play, Next track and Previous Track buttons on the touchscreen.

The model of Skullcandy Smokin' Buds earbuds that came with my 4th generation iPod duplicate the functionality of 3rd generation iPod earbuds, except for Volume.

Kindle app can download free English(-English), French-French, and Spanish-Spanish dictionaries

2011-11-24T13:44:00.002-05:00

The free Amazon Kindle app can download free English(-English), French-French, and Spanish-Spanish dictionaries. While the intention was clearly to enhance the reading experience, you can open the Kindle app, select a word, then click on Full Definition to make general use of any of your downloaded dictionaries as an e-book itself.

The Kindle app is apparently aware of the primary language associated with an e-book; it's likely mandatory, or at least highly advisable, that producers of e-books include that piece of information. If you select a word and have previously downloaded the dictionary matching the e-book's primary language, the Kindle app will show the definition in a pop-up window. It will offer you the chance to download the dictionary if such doesn't exist on your device; click on the i in a circle icon to select from the different dictionaries.

From Amazon, I downloaded the free Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) as a French language e-book when writing this entry. Perhaps I will even attempt to read it some day (I loved that Saturday morning cartoon), but it can at least serve as an e-book through which to get directly to the French-French dictionary.

I had used my usual Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar to select a Spanish word when writing this entry, but that e-book's primary language is actually English. My Spanish being far less complete than my French, I would need to select some basic Spanish e-book to sustain even a glimmer of a chance that I might someday read it, although any Spanish language e-book would serve to get directly to the Spanish-Spanish dictionary.

As of 11/24/11, the other language dictionaries are:

Deutsch
English (UK)
Italiano
Português

Crash landing on iOS 5.0.1

2011-11-18T00:58:00.017-05:00

I had not been planning to upgrade my 3rd generation iPod from iOS 4.3.5 to iOS 5, having been happy with its capabilities as is. I had also learned of, and/or experienced, a number of problems associated with iOS 5. Typically, iOS 5 either broke an existing app, or an app's functionality worsened when the developers updated it to accommodate iOS 5.

I've mentioned on multiple occasions how my iPod has a hardware port problem. Aligning its cord properly to charge can take a few minutes of fiddling, and properly aligning it for a PC iTunes connection is even more demanding. In those delicate alignment attempts, "Charging is not supported with this accessory" is a message I've periodically seen for more than two months. That message came up again yesterday as I was trying to get it to charge, and when I tried to lower the brightness...bam, it was totally hosed. The screen displayed only the iTunes icon and a picture of a USB cord, as shows up when you activate a pre-iOS 5 iPod, which requires a wired connection to Mac/PC iTunes.

After several hours of work, including numerous error messages and laborious re-seating of the cable at multiple junctures, my iPod is now at iOS 5.0.1. I mistakenly thought that I would be able to restore from my less than two week old PC iTunes backup and remain on iOS 4.3.5. However, it seems that PC iTunes only allows loading of the most recent iOS version that works for your device -- not unreasonable. At least I was able to get back my 102 apps from PC iTunes in a single operation.

Backing up to iCloud should reduce my cable alignment problems to only recharging the iPod, since I should be able to restore over wireless from now on.

I was surprised to discover there was no way to mass-reload my hundreds of French language instruction podcasts, but I have started rebuilding my collection manually. (2/9/11: Actually, I could have used PC iTunes to copy over all that I had previously synced.)

I was also surprised that my small number of not-particularly-important photos did not come back. I have seen a few web articles suggesting ways to get them back, and I may yet pursue that. If I do, I will try to report the result here later.

The Traditional Chinese handwriting recognition seems tangibly slower, both on a 3rd generation and on a 4th generation iPod, than it was on a 3rd generation iPod running iOS 4.3.5.

As I worked to recreate groups of apps and reassemble my desired first Home Screen ("springboard"), I seem to have moved some app icons so quickly that the iOS became confused. For a while the icons of some random apps (no more than one per screen, I think) became invisible, although their titles remained visible. With all the icons jiggling and me swiping screens left to right and right to left, the app which was invisible would sometimes change (i.e., an invisible one would become visible, but a different app on the same screen would become invisible instead). I found it was possible to drag an invisible app onto a visible one to create a group, but not vice versa. That invisibility problem eventually cleared up, so everything is visible now.

Although Apple tried to disallow moving the new Newsstand app into a folder and off of the first Home Screen, folks have found out how to do that. I moved it into a folder with Messages and Reminders, two other new apps for which I have no particular need, then moved the folder off the first Home Screen. A Google search for "ios 5 move newsstand to folder" should find assorted pages with the technique, which does require a certain quickness of action.

Below is a list of some of the functionality which I wanted to recover, and commentary on what was involved. I tend not to give my location to apps to use, normally entering that manually when I want (e.g., in The Weather Channel app).

Calendar (iOS 5.0.1): I use a Google account for Calendar, so it was simple to add that account to the iPod. Although the Day and Month views showed my events, the List view was empty at first, so I feared I would have to create another calendar from scratch (ugh) to restore that functionality. However, the next day the List view showed events normally.
Contacts (iOS 5.0.1): I use a Google account for Contacts, so again, it was simple to add that account to the iPod.
Notespark (1.3.2): All my data is already on Metaspark's webserver, so all I had to do was login and tweak a few settings (e.g., font size, etc.), and I was back to pre-crash functionality.
iCED (3.2.3): I had previously made a Murage account and it was straightforward to download my paid Add-ons again. I made a few tweaks to settings (e.g., maximize History).
tChess Pro (1.7.1): Much like Notespark, I just had to tweak a few settings to get it to look and behave the way I like it. I normally e-mail myself the pgn of individual games that I play through using tChess Pro, so I can easily reload those. I have also kept files on my PC of pgn collections of games, which I can similarly e-mail myself to reload. (This is one of my most-used apps, so a blog entry on it should eventually appear.)
Opera Mini (6.0.1 - pointedly not the latest version, which is 6.5.1, which for now I'm holding off on upgrading to): Initially I started recreating my Speed Dial locations manually, and had 8 of the total 9 set up -- I didn't know the 9th one's URL. Then I used Opera Link to restore my (generally-rarely-changed) bookmarks from the last time I saved them, and it loaded the missing 9th Speed Dial location. Apparently I wasted my time loading the first 8 manually.
Safari (iOS 5.0.1): I was pleased to discover that Apple was apparently already saving bookmarks, so they all came back automatically. I still prefer Opera Mini, though. I tend to use Safari only when Opera Mini can't do the job.
After first writing this Safari blurb, I checked out Safari's new Reader feature, which can render some web pages in a more readable way (hiding ads, too!). In my limited testing, Wikipedia article pages work well with Reader (though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page not so well), as does this eminently readable article about iOS 5 improvements, which is what led me to really test the new Reader and Reading List features. This wiki article about "Kindle Myths and Partial Truths" (some content of which is relevant to iOS devices using the Kindle app) has part of its content cut off on the sides in the Reader view. I have observed that an advertisement embedded within a column of text on a web page can render Reader results incomplete (on one occasion, none of the article text actually came through in Reader).
To compensate for the small screen of the iPod, I have long used Opera Mini's Single column view to transform the elements on a web page, including the font(s), into a presentation I find easier to read. Reader fulfills the same function with more polish, but can transform far fewer web pages than Opera Mini. Without these transformations, text can sometimes be difficult to read without "spreading" pages with your fingers (to enlarge the image), after which you might additionally still need to move the display back and forth to see different parts of the whole text.
Reading List saves bookmarks to iCloud and shares them in Safari across iOS devices (and Macs, supposedly, too, but I have a PC). The Reading List bookmarks didn't show on my other iOS device in either "direction", initially, and multiple web pages, some from as recently as October 2011, suggested that it didn't work. Perhaps from iOS 5 this syncing was fixed in 5.0.1, because eventually the same Reading List bookmarks showed up on both my iPod and iPad.
Reading List's syncing seems to be forced among iOS devices sharing an Apple ID. Opera Link's similar syncing of bookmarks is optional, and can be done manually or automatically among Opera Mini instances within which you have logged into Opera Link.
Kindle (2.8.5): Login, all my books were under Archived, and it was simple to download 15 of them into Home. (2 were expired library loans.) Select a word in any book, then download the dictionary to make it available going forward regardless of Internet access.
iBooks (iOS 5.0.1): Login, go to Store, Purchased, and download each of the 14 (all freebies) again. Maybe I was doing something in a non-optimal way, but it seemed to be an extremely clunky and user-hostile interface. I could only download the top 3 books, then had to Swipe to the right to be able to Hide each of them in turn so that I could access the next 3 lower books on the screen. I had to repeat that procedure to get through all 14.
The Weather Channel (4.1.1): Add my location to Favorites under Bookmarks and get rid of whatever is already there.
Dropbox (1.4.6): Login, mark as Favorites the documents I want saved locally so they're available without wireless Internet access. Set Local Storage to maximum reasonable for device's capacity.
OverDrive (2.3.3): Although the iPod didn't need an Adobe ID to authorize usage under iOS 4, it requires one under iOS 5. Download my usual Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar to confirm download of public domain ebooks, then test other types (e.g., Adobe ePub from the library) as desired. (I wrote in another blog entry about how to view Kindle books on library websites using an iPod.)

I am updating this entry with additional items and comments, and am also revising earlier entries accordingly, as time permits.

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I had read Sonny Hung's My Apple Newton (PDA) blog, which he introduces as:

This blog records my Apple Newton experiences, as well as comparisons with other PDAs, Smartphones and Mobile Devices. It is also a repository for storing complex set up procedures for future reference.

I thought I might enjoy doing something similar for the iPod since I found it to be an extremely useful PDA. Based on the web searches that brought people here, this blog may have been helpful to some other folks, but in any case, it has certainly proven useful to me after this crash. Given how my iPod seems to be living on borrowed time, my blog will likely serve me well again similarly in the future.

Word Magic Compact English-Spanish Dictionary app

2011-10-30T22:53:00.004-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-spanish-dictionary-apps.html

This free app (version 2.0.2) has a limited subset of the material in the paid version (Word Magic English-Spanish Reference Dictionary, which has a healthy 4.5 / 5 stars from 82 ratings on 10/30/11), and may be adequate for occasional look up of common words. If you need a more complete dictionary, you may need to upgrade to the paid version (which the app makes sure you know is an option!), or find another more complete app. For someone like me, who occasionally listens to Claudia Fernandez' basic Spanish podcasts, it can be helpful as is.

Ads run in the free app.

Search pops up a row of the full range of possible accented letters (áéíóúüñ). iOS natively allows those accented letters to be entered, so that is not necessary, but it can speed up entry of words.
The x at the end of the row is to cease text entry in Search, but it looks quite weird, since it's just another letter, in the same font and size appearance as the other accented ones!

All these accented letter possibilities are enumerated, with useful usage details, in the old but free and still useful Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar, which I mentioned here.

4/2/11 was the last day of a promotional 25% off sale for their $7.99 General Reference product. I think they have run sales more than just that once.

11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.

iOS 4 vs iOS 5: podcasts

2011-10-23T16:00:00.042-04:00

What was named the iPod app under iOS 4 on the iPad was split into a Music app and a Videos app under iOS 5 on the iPad. The Music app functionality in iOS 5 on an iPad is SIGNIFICANTLY different from, and inferior to, its former functionality, at least with respect to podcasts.

Having upgraded my iPod to iOS 5, for the most part I have not noticed any loss of podcast functionality compared to iOS 4. I think the following is a new iOS 5 improvement: when playing a podcast while a Passcode Locked iPod is in sleep mode, press the Home button twice to bring up selected touchscreen controls which can be used without unlocking the iPod. Back, Pause, Forward, and Volume are available. Back and Forward allow you to move between consecutive (previously downloaded) episodes of a podcast series, although according to my recollection, under certain circumstances (related to the actual podcast?), Back would start the same podcast over from the beginning. The iPod's physical volume buttons, which are always active, are often still easier to use than the touchscreen volume slider, at least when starting from sleep mode.

2/8/12: I just stumbled upon what I think is another favorable change in iOS 5.0.1 from iOS 4. If you have 2 or more podcasts from a single series saved, when the last one is finished playing, the first one starts playing. According to my recollection, under iOS 4, the podcasts would stop playing after the last one in a series. This new(?) behavior may not be everyone's preference, but since I mostly listen to podcasts repeatedly for French language instruction, I'm glad for such podcasts to play in an infinite loop.

If you manually subscribe to podcasts strictly over-the-air (i.e., you don't use pc-based iTunes for any part of such subscribing), getting those podcasts can be more hassle in iOS 5 on an iPad than on any of:

iOS 4 iPad
iOS 4 iPod
iOS 5 iPod

For the 3 (French language instruction) podcasts I follow, I manually download each episode directly over WiFi to my iPod, typically once a week, downloading all 3 podcasts' new episodes at the same time. I keep each episode forever, and have listened to a number of them more than once -- repetition is helpful for learning languages. I suppose I can count myself lucky that I'm manually subscribing to only 3 podcasts on my iPod, and not more, otherwise I'd have more manual downloading work.

Under iOS 4 on an iPod/iPad or under iOS 5 on an iPod:

If you have many episodes of a podcast series within the iPod's Music app (or the iPod app on an iOS 4 iPad), an effective way to get directly to the bottom of the list is to go back to all podcasts (tap the left-pointing Podcasts button), then select the desired podcast. If the list is long, this is faster than repeatedly swiping down a long list of episodes. Make mental note of the last episode's title and/or date; one of those should be sufficient to identify on the upcoming iTunes app screen what the next episode will be. Tap the Get More Episodes... link underneath the list, which will take you directly to the podcast within iTunes, then get your desired episodes.
12/31/11: Under iOS 5.0.1 on an iPod, this technique has worked less consistently than under iOS 4. Doing my usual weekly consecutive loading of episodes from 3 different podcast series, I have periodically needed to explicitly eject the iTunes app from RAM before it will do what I want when I tap the Get More Episodes... link. On one occasion, while downloading the second podcast series' (half-hour) episode, the iTunes app crashed when I simultaneously tried to have it display the new podcasts from the third podcast series. My iPod's total podcast episodes (including some outside my primary 3 podcast series) number around 500 now, but I don't believe that should really have impacted the robustness of this technique.

As usual, you can press the time display (hh:mm) in the top middle of the iPod to go directly to the top of the list.

Under iOS 5 on an iPad:

There seems to be no way to go directly from a podcast within the Music app to its matching section of the iTunes app (the better, perhaps, for Apple to expose you to whatever is being prominently advertised on the "front page" of iTunes). You have to go to the Podcasts section, then type in the name of the podcast for which you're looking, rather a drag compared to what you could do previously.

The visual presentation and handling of podcasts have changed, worse in basically every way:

There is no way to see the text that the podcast creator has included! The full text of the One thing in a French Day podcast is included and is visible in the Music app (see my image here) on an iPod (the iPod app in some non-iPod environments), but it's not visible in iOS 5.0 on an iPad!! (Yes, IF you are connected to the Internet, you could go to her website for the text, but why should you have to, when she already included it with the podcast?)
There are no options to change the speed to 1/2 or twice normal. The speaker for one particular (English language) podcast I downloaded speaks very slowly, and doubling his speed was a distinct and totally intelligible improvement.
There is no button to rewind 30 seconds. I rarely used that, but there's always a chance it might have been handy.
Tap-hold on the ~~new~~ rewind and fast forward buttons does not seem to work very smoothly. Ah, I later saw that those buttons were there under iOS 4, and I never noticed them. They apparently work similarly under iOS 4 and iOS 5: tap-hold on either one for a longer time and you will skip backward or forward, respectively, by a larger and larger amount the longer you hold.
Although I never noticed it before working on this blog entry, iOS 4 also provides an additional, vertically compact (one line per episode), list view of the episodes alphabetized by title (not necessarily the same order as in the vertically less compact view showing the "album art"), showing what # each one is in the list, showing the total time, and allowing you to assign 1-5 stars to an episode. ~~This additional list view is gone in iOS 5.~~ In iOS 5, tap the small album art to the right of the fast forward button, tap on the now-big album art, and the list icon button can be accessed.

In iOS 5.0 on the iPad, Apple is incorrectly recording video storage under the Music app, instead of under the Videos app where it belongs. I have 23 video podcasts saved according to Settings > General > About, but Settings > General > Usage > Video (spelling is inconsistent with the VideoS name of the app, but icon is the same) shows "No Data", which is incorrect.

An interesting article and subsequent comments about iOS 5 and podcasts:
http://www.carrypad.com/2011/06/10/ios-5-still-lacks-smart-podcast-handling/.
And a similarly interesting follow-up: http://www.carrypad.com/2011/10/12/hey-apple-ios-5-needs-newsstand-for-podcasts/.

The most exhaustive detail (article and comments) I have seen about the worsened functionality in the iOS 5 Music app on the iPad:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/12/ios-5-features-changes-in-music-app-for-ipad/

I saw mention there of more lost functionality, which I subsequently experienced myself:

You can no longer play episodes of the same podcast continuously. I used to be able to play multiple episodes of Car Talk or Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me continuously, typically while doing household tasks. Now I have to start playing each episode separately. At least those shows are hour-long ones. Separately starting each of my 3-5 minute French language instruction podcast episodes would be intolerable; fortunately, I normally listen to those on my iPod, which can still play them continuously.

Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test

2011-10-18T23:24:00.003-04:00

Check broadband speed with this free native iOS app. I had previously used Ookla's http://www.speedtest.net/ website from a PC browser to do the same thing, but checking broadband speed can often more conveniently be done on a mobile computing device. Their app stores results of your broadband speed tests, which you can export to CSV and e-mail.

My broadband speed is regrettably often erratic (both regrettably often erratic and regrettably often erratic), with recent high and low download speeds differing by more than a factor of 12. The Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test app will help me keep an eye on my provider, who won't be my provider for long if they revisit that low end of broadband speed with any frequency.

You can get additional perspective by using the app to test broadband speed of any wireless Internet access to which you have access.

Difficulties in subtitling foreign language material

2011-10-10T07:00:00.007-04:00

In the French language movie Queen To Play (2009), there is a sequence where characters recite chess moves. One of those moves is Black's bishop to the g4 square, which is mistakenly subtitled "Bishop...j4", an impossible move.

To me that's a strong indication that the person doing the subtitles was not a native French speaker, and also did not know the algebraic notation of chess. The sound of the French letter g is somewhat like the sound of the English letter j, so someone who was more used to English than French could easily have mistakenly chosen j, particularly if they didn't know that the algebraic notation letters for a square on the chessboard range only between a and h. A native French speaker, however, is unlikely to write j if they have heard g, even if they knew nothing about chess algebraic notation.

In the French language movie Amélie (2001), one character is directing another character over the phone to a certain page in a book. The spoken French is "Page 51.", but the subtitle says "Page St.". That error seems like someone misread handwriting for 51 as St. I see now that this error (and others) are cited for this film at IMDB, under Goofs > Audio/visual unsynchronized, although my interest is more about the aspects of language underlying such errors, not the errors per se.

Subtitles in pirated works probably take even more of a beating.

In the movie Tape (2001), one character responds to another's question about what time it is with "It's quarter of.", without specifying the hour (i.e., quarter of what). The subtitle is "十五分" (15 minutes). There is no Chinese translation for "quarter of" if the hour is not specified, so this inaccurate subtitle is no surprise.

In Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), a character says "They went down the ventilation shaft!". According to my memory, a pirated Chinese version used the subtitle "他们出去了" (simplified Chinese for "They went out!"), which lacks the flavor of the original sentence.

Three characters differentiated by the direction of a stroke

2011-10-09T12:35:00.002-04:00

子 (zǐ, and also frequently zi [neutral tone]) is a very common character, whose final sideways stroke is horizontal.

孑孓 (jiéjué; mosquito larva) shows that the final sideways stroke can be made both tilting slightly upward from left to right, and also tilting slightly downward from left to right, each change resulting in a different character.

I had long ago seen 孑 (jié) as the left half of characters like 孫 (sūn; grandson) and 孔 (kǒng; hole), but had incorrectly imagined that it was simply a variant of 子 (zǐ) when 子 served as a component part of another character, similar to things I touched on here.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

2011-10-05T22:58:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Steve.

Your company's insanely great products ignited mine and many others' enthusiasm.

Two characters mapped to a single representation

2011-09-23T23:39:00.001-04:00

In Chinese, the character for meat/flesh 肉 (ròu) and the character for month/moon 月 (yuè) are both mapped to the same radical, which can be combined with selected other components to make other characters. That radical is visually a thinner version of 月. Here it is on the left side of 臉 (liǎn; face) and on the right side of 期 (qí [pronounced qī in China]; a period of time).

Despite the radicals being the same visually, the nature of the character of which it is part makes it clear which of the two original characters (meat/flesh or month/moon) is being represented. Face (臉) is more related to flesh (肉) than to month/moon (月). A period of time (期) is more related to month (月) than to meat/flesh (肉). At least in my own usage, the radical appears far more often in its flesh/meat guise.

In a quasi-similar vein, some old typewriters (well, I guess all typewriters are old these days) didn't have a key for the numeral 1 -- you hit the key for the letter l (ell) instead.

Multiple ways to say "For example" in Chinese

2011-09-12T22:55:00.001-04:00

In my relatively early years of learning Chinese, I attended a free, somewhat less formal class in which, at unpredictable times (unpredictable by me, anyway), the teacher kept using a phrase which I could not understand. When I asked her what it was, she was unable to remember having said anything of consequence. Many of my fellow students were native Cantonese speakers who didn't seem to bat an eye when the teacher spoke the mystery phrase. Perhaps they were already familiar with the phrase in Cantonese, and the Mandarin equivalent was easily understandable.

Outside of class I asked my mainland Chinese roommate for assistance, but my pitifully incomplete description of the sounds didn't give him much to go on, and, not surprisingly, he couldn't figure it out.

Eventually I learned that the teacher had been saying 譬如說 (pì rú shūo; "For example"), which explained why she couldn't tell what I was referring to from her lecturing -- it was only a helper phrase, never a major, or even minor, lesson point. By that stage of my Chinese studies, I think I had actually already heard elsewhere some different ways of saying "For example", but couldn't make the connection.

Here are other common ways of saying "For example" (capital F because this phrase is always used at the beginning of a sentence, never at the end). I've personally heard native Chinese speakers use all of them:

比方說 (bǐ fāng shuō)
比如說 (bǐ rú shuō)
好比說 (hǎo bǐ shuō)
例如說 (lì rú shūo)

2+ iOS international keyboards

2011-09-10T17:06:00.002-04:00

If you have two or more international keyboards configured, you can tap-hold the world globe key and then directly select one of the others. That's available in iOS 4.3.5, and may have been available in earlier versions. Tap by itself immediately takes you to the next keyboard.

I normally always have the Chinese (traditional) Handwriting keyboard configured. When I'm including bits of Chinese among English words, as opposed to writing longer text in Chinese, I normally use the English period instead of the Chinese period (。). The Chinese period takes up more space, presumably because within the Chinese context each character or punctuation mark should occupy the same amount of space as any other.

When I temporarily additionally configured the French keyboard, the order of keyboards was English-Chinese-French. I was mildly annoyed that I would have to tap twice to switch from Chinese to English, particularly because I'd be switching back and forth between the two languages frequently. Nice to learn that this is no longer an issue.
1/7/12: Even moreso since I recently added a fourth keyboard, Pinyin for simplified Chinese characters. I haven't devoted a great deal of time learning handwriting for simplified characters, so the Pinyin version of the keyboard for same is quite helpful.

iOS international keyboards for Latin alphabet languages other than English

2011-09-04T13:09:00.000-04:00

Earlier I had noted that, for occasional inclusion of accented characters in, e.g., French or Spanish, there was no need to add the respective iOS virtual international keyboard.

Recently, I was typing in a longer sentence in French. At that time I realized that, for extended writing in a Latin alphabet language other than English, one greatly benefits from switching to the appropriate international keyboard, in order to get proper suggestions for auto-correction, replacement suggestions, etc.

A French teacher long ago had written the following famous phrase on a piece of paper for me:

Ce qui se conçoit bien
s'énonce clairement,
et les mots pour le dire
viennent aisément.

which I subsequently misplaced. The second line eluded my memory for many years, but I recently remembered it, then searched for background on the complete phrase on the mighty Internet.

French Wikipedia says the original is from Nicolas Boileau:

De L'Art poétique (1674)
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. (Chant I)
(bold emphasis is mine -- see below)

I find it a tad odd that multiple people have rendered his original phrase with slightly different words, even, e.g., on a mousepad.

The meaning of the French phrase hasn't changed in any of the slightly-different renditions I've seen, including in the one I got from my French teacher. On the other hand, the Gettysburg Address certainly wouldn't sound the same if someone started reciting it with "87 years ago...".

English translations of this French phrase feel quite awkward to me compared to the original, and I'm not including one here. Interested readers can copy the text and search on the mighty Internet themselves.

Clarifying last names in spoken Chinese

2011-08-27T19:17:00.009-04:00

When calling in a take-out order in Chinese, it is common to be asked "你貴姓?" (Nǐ guìxìng?; What's your last name?). The normal response is "我姓...." (Wǒ xìng...; My last name is....), clarifying the character of your last name if needed. A small number of last names have two characters, but I won't get into those here.

Some last name characters are typically clarified in terms of some or all of their component parts (e.g., radicals). These descriptions can be pretty precise, where a component part(s) is/are only visibly "squeezed", or, e.g., an existing line(s) is/are lengthened, shortened, or moved "a little bit". Some such descriptions take a few more liberties.

I think the first time I was exposed to this clarification of last names was years ago, when I was talking on the phone to a native Chinese speaker, a guy who I had never met. He told me his last name was 張 (Zhāng). Then he added, 弓長張 (gōng cháng Zhāng).

Now, not having known about this common style of clarification of last names, and also not knowing the 弓 (gōng) character, I was pretty confused. Mentally imposing (quite incorrectly) a Western style first-middle-last (e.g., Franklin Delano Roosevelt) structure onto what he had just told me, I asked him if his full name was 張弓長 (Zhāng Gōng Cháng).

If anyone actually is named 張弓長 (Zhāng Gōng Cháng), that would be pretty weird -- it's kind of like someone being named Roose Velt Roosevelt. I think at that point in our conversation, this guy realized I didn't know as much Chinese as he thought I might. When we later met, he may have explained this style of clarification of Chinese characters, but in any case I eventually learned about it.

Both component parts combined without meaningful change:

古月胡 gǔ yuè Hú
木子李 mù zǐ Lǐ
言午許 yán wǔ Xǔ

Both component parts combined with mild changes:

耳東陳 ěr dōng Chén (The 耳 character changes this way, but it doesn't always change this way when it's a component of a more complex character.)
人可何 rén kě Hé (The 人 character changes this way.)
口天吳 kǒu tiān Wú (The 天 character grows "arms".)
木易楊 mù yì Yáng (The 易 character gets an additional horizontal line.)

Some characters are identified purely by just specifying a portion of their parts. Within the context of last names, that is sufficient to identify them.

草頭黃 cǎo tóu Huáng (The Huáng character that has the 草頭 radical.)
雙人徐 shuāng rén Xú (The Xú character that has the 雙人 [double person] radical.)

Somewhere there may be a far more exhaustive compilation of such last name character clarifications. From my own experience, the above are many of the commonly used ones for relatively common last names. Note that last names are simply a subset of characters which can be clarified in this manner.

Some last names are so well-known and common, and other last names having the exact same sound are so rare, that it's unlikely anyone would ask for clarification. A good analogue in English might be Brown. If he calls for take-out, my favorite singer Jackson Browne doesn't likely get asked, "Is that Brown with an e on the end?"

I don't recall ever hearing of this type of clarification for any of:

劉 Liú
馬 Mǎ
王 Wáng (三橫一豎王 sān héng yī shù Wáng, the Wáng character having 3 horizontal strokes and 1 vertical stroke, provided by Yitrun -- thanks!)

林 Lín is also in this well-known and common last name category, but it happens to have an "obvious" clarification, 雙木林 shuāng mù Lín (The Lín character that has a pair of trees in it).

The old question, "What's in a name?", has quite a different answer in Chinese!

Mercury Web Browser Lite app

2011-08-27T18:43:00.008-04:00

For some months, the free Mercury Web Browser Lite was my favored "night browser", a browser that allows a significantly dimmer screen than normal for browsing in the dark. Although I'm an Opera Mini browser guy (most of the time during the day, anyway), in 2012 I bought Mercury Web Browser Pro, so probably won't be updating this entry much, if at all, going forward.

The Lite version limits you to two tabs, which was actually acceptable for my usage. That was one tab more than my original night browser, Late Mobile Browser, which I wrote about here.

The paid version is more full-featured and seems to have quite a following. Still, Mercury Web Browser Lite already has quite a few features, and may still be of use to you.

Mercury Web Browser Lite 5.1 and 5.2 could identify itself (masquerade) as a different browser, as shown below (version 5.1), but that capability was taken away in 5.2.1 according to an App Store review. That masquerading ability can sometimes be helpful, as I wrote about here, but if you didn't get a version before 5.2.1, you are likely too late, unless the company restores it in the future. You could of course buy the Pro version to get that, and other additional features as well.

Ads on the iPod:

5.1 did not show them.
5.2 showed them (which led to many negative App Store reviews), though not continuously.
5.2.1 no longer shows ads according to the company's version notes in the App Store.

Chinese vocabulary for today's world

2011-08-27T18:17:00.003-04:00

Ordered by Pinyin syllables. I'll likely add notable other ones I come across going forward.

部落格 (bùluògé) blog
更新 (gēngxīn; first, not fourth, tone on gēng) update (e.g., an app)
聯想 (liánxiǎng) auto-complete (which I mentioned previously here)
下載 (xiàzǎi) to download
消歧義 (xiāoqíyì) disambiguation (in Wikipedia when the object of the search could mean different things)

OverDrive Media Console & other e-book reader apps

2011-08-21T12:01:00.035-04:00

11/1/11 WARNING: The 2.3.3 version of OverDrive Media Console apparently introduced a bug that prevents download of e-books to the iPod under iOS 4.3.5 (possibly under all earlier iOS versions as well). It may even wipe out existing e-books, but I cannot confirm that. Stay with version 2.3.2, or hope for a future fix. I ended up upgrading my iPod to iOS 5, and OverDrive 2.3.3 can again download e-books.

11/11/11 WARNING: Version 3.2 of Stanza, available 11/10/11, doesn't work under iOS 4 (according to multiple App Store reviews), although it is needed under iOS 5, which would not run the previous version, 3.1.

The free Overdrive Media Console app allows wireless downloading of assorted electronic media, e.g., books and audiobooks. You can check out such materials from libraries if you have a valid library card. The materials automatically expire at the end of the check out period, "returning" themselves. Beyond the choice of materials at my library, I imagine I could also check such materials out from other libraries in the network, but have yet to investigate. As of December 2011, I haven't downloaded any audiobooks, so cannot comment on them. OverDrive also has personal computer based software as well, which I think you can use to get additional material onto iOS devices, but I have not used it -- the iOS app meets my needs well as is.

In September 2011, OverDrive added Kindle compatibility to libraries in its network, broadening the e-book selection and also increasing the appeal of the Kindle app. I tried it out from my iPad, downloading material both wirelessly and wired, and was interested to see that Amazon later sent me e-mail (first warning that the e-book would expire in 3 days, later to say that the e-book had indeed expired) noting that if I purchase the e-book "from the Kindle Store or borrow it again from [my] local library, all of [my] notes and highlights will be preserved." (see also http://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/publiclibraries). That seems to be a win for consumers, Amazon, OverDrive, and libraries, and a loss for Amazon competitors and privacy advocates.

12/8/11: After noticing that in Safari, Kindle books were showing on library websites only on an iPad and not on an iPod through this process, I contacted a librarian, who subsequently conveyed to me this information from OverDrive:

Please note that Kindle devices, Smartphones, and other small screen devices that operate a mobile versus a standard browser are not currently supported for direct checkout and download for Kindle Books. At this time, Kindle Books can only be delivered to a Kindle or free Kindle apps from a PC, Mac, or tablet. We hope to expand mobile access in the future.

Please ask your patron to contact Amazon to find out when they will be adding this capability. Amazon can be contacted by clicking on the 'Contact Us' button at the following link:
http://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/publiclibraries

Mercury Web Browser Lite (version 5.1 and 5.2, but not 5.2.1) and Mercury Web Browser Pro can identify themselves to websites as other browsers. OverDrive starts up Safari, but you can copy the URL, paste it into Mercury, set Mercury to identify itself as Mobile Safari(iPad), refresh the browser if needed, and you will be able to access the Kindle e-books on an iPod (at least I could through my local library).

Some of the following e-book commentary is directed toward public domain material, which is typically formatted rather roughly. Commercial e-books, such as those for sale on Amazon, are normally formatted nicely, so some of the following comments would not apply to them.

There are also older public domain materials which are freely downloadable and which don't expire; my library helps direct you to those as well. While the selection is of course rather "historical", from a quick look I found two eBooks which are sufficiently "timeless" and can be of use for my efforts at strengthening my Spanish:

Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar by C.A. Toledano (1917). Basic grammar rules presumably haven't changed much, if at all. I like to learn/relearn this stuff, although many would find it tedious and boring, e.g., how to conjugate regular verbs or spelling rules like "The diaresis [two dots] is placed over u in 'güe' and 'güi' when the u is to be sounded.", as a friend and I had similarly discussed some months ago, touching on the Spanish word for penguin, pingüino.
An Elementary Spanish Reader by Earl Stanley Harrison (1912).

It appears that material that originally used chart-style formatting visibly suffers in these presentations (e.g., the list of vocabulary equivalents in Spanish and English starting at the bottom of page 13 of Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar), but it's still usable.

I also downloaded Chess Fundamentals by J.R. Capablanca, of which I long ago bought a printed copy. However, the chess diagrams are squeezed very thin, so it's necessary to turn the iPod screen to landscape to see them properly. (My blog entry about this e-book under iOS 5)

Probably pure text, with minimal or no diagrams/charts, works best with OverDrive Media Console.

For normal reading, you can choose a sepia background, which I find more pleasant on the eyes, instead of white. OverDrive Media Console also has a Night Mode, to flip text to be white on a black background, plus a brightness control.

9/11/11: Public domain e-books are available through multiple iOS apps, not just OverDrive. For example, Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar mentioned above is additionally available in all of:

iBooks
Kindle (which, unlike the 3 other apps, lacks direct access to the Table of Contents)
Stanza (from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15127.epub.noimages on 12/21/11)

An app's combination of features, including its access to material, may appeal to you enough for you to use it for all of your reading, or you might use different apps in different circumstances. For instance, in my own usage of Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar, I prefer direct access to the Table of Contents, so Kindle would not be my choice for that. iBooks has a brightness control, good for night reading. Kindle requires you to login (register the device) any time you cold-start the app, and while it is registered it will check for a sync when you start it, and maybe at other times (presumably part of how Amazon invokes security, e.g., as in the 2009 remote wiping of George Orwell's 1984 from Kindles). Stanza has a variety of themes (visual appearance of the text and background) for reading both in the day and at night -- first app I've noticed to have had such; vertical direction swipes also alter the brightness (up = brighter, down = dimmer). iBooks, Kindle, and Stanza all hide controls and informational notes (e.g. page x/y, plus the standard iPod top info bar which shows time, etc.) when reading, giving more space (at a premium on an iPod!) to the actual material. If remaining battery power is ever a concern, any "night mode" which has white text and a black background should make the battery last longer, since less energy should be needed to illuminate the screen.

11/27/11: Syncing across multiple iOS devices:
Kindle features the best syncing, including for Kindle e-books borrowed from the library. iBooks cannot be used for borrowing library e-books, but otherwise may be close -- I cannot remember if I synced my small library across iPod and iPad manually, but my iPod has Winnie-the-Pooh, which came free at one point (probably when the iBooks app was released), but is currently not free in the iBooks Store, and was not on my iPad until I copied it there manually from PC iTunes as a result of writing this additional note. OverDrive and Stanza e-book access is device-based; you must download each e-book from scratch onto each device.
12/10/11: With OverDrive, log in to your library account on each device onto which you want to download the e-book. For any iOS device after the first, you should be able to (again) download materials that are checked out to your account (I was able to from my local library, anyway).

As a result of this investigation, Stanza is my preferred app for Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar. Kindle is my favorite for reading library e-books, but sometimes a book I want to read is only available in epub format, for which I would happily use OverDrive.

12/12/11: Currently Amazon runs a Kindle Daily Deal, where they have a very favorable discount on a different e-book each day. You may wish to follow that by checking their website each day and/or by signing up for e-mail or Twitter notifications. I learned about this special pricing the day after having sadly missed the chance to get the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $1.99.
1/3/12: As I write, Amazon is offering the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell e-book for $2.99! It's great to have a digital copy for convenience of reading, but the charming (or perhaps annoying, depending on the reader) print footnotes have been turned into endnotes. The print version generally (maybe always) has the explanation of a footnote (or at least the start of it) on the same page as the footnote appears. This difference in footnote presentation between print and digital copies would likely be more significant the first time you read the book, but this is my second (or third?) time through. Time will tell how often I turn to the now-endnotes.
Ah, I see Barnes and Noble is also selling the Nook Book version for $2.99. Both companies list the digital version's regular price as $3.99 ("suggested retail price set by the publisher" -Amazon), which I think is a significant drop from mid-December 2011. Competition may have truly been responsible for bringing consumers a lower price on digital copies of this book.

Late Browser Mobile app

2011-08-14T20:22:00.003-04:00

8/27/11: I now recommend Mercury Web Browser Lite over the Late Browser Mobile app.

I have not used the free Late Browser Mobile app much, but it does give you the option to use a mostly darker screen for nighttime web browsing (darker than usual, e.g., with Safari). The top portion of the screen, which has the controls, remains at the normal brightness level. I imagine the developers did that so you could never inadvertently dim your controls down to where you couldn't find them.

However, that section of normal brightness detracts from a full-screen "dark-browsing" experience. Perhaps the developers could instead have restricted the lower limit of darkness, such that the controls in many instances would remain visible?

I imagine the developers wanted to save space at the top of the screen for their controls, so they removed the common iOS top bar which shows the clock time in the middle. Normally you can tap that time display to zip to the top of the document, but I don't see any way to do that in Late Browser Mobile.

This is the only app I can think of which displays an ad (the same one) twice, once at the top and once at the bottom of the initial search screen. Thankfully it seems only one would be visible at any one time, depending on how you've swiped the screen up or down, and no ads show when you've left the initial search screen.

The very bottom of the initial search screen has a 5-digit "LED" display which shows a number, which seems to be strictly ascending in my usage, and may indicate some quantity of the data you have downloaded in your browsing.

8/24/11: Wow, I didn't realize how many free browsers there are in the App Store. While I don't think any are likely to dethrone my favored Opera Mini browser, perhaps I'll find other browsers with a night mode.

iHandy Level app

2011-08-13T16:06:00.005-04:00

You never know when you'll be riding the Mount Washington Cog Railway and want to snap a quick photo showing how steep the climb is.... You may have to zoom in to clearly see, but I am holding the iPod almost level as the train ambles up the mountain.

This free iHandy Level app does indeed come in handy around the house, e.g., when mounting things on the wall.

Weather apps

2011-08-02T21:10:00.005-04:00

The iPod comes with a basic Weather app, which I relied on for some time to find the expected temperature range for the day, and to decide whether I should bring an umbrella.

Later, I switched to using The Weather Channel free app, which, after a somewhat longer initial startup pause, provides a larger amount and different levels of detail for a variety of time segments (24 hours [up from 12 hours after an 8/2011 update], 36 hours, or 10 days). It has a number of other features, including "In Season", which provides 3 days' worth of pollen projections for Tree, Grass, and Weed types. The app has ads, not surprisingly. Normally I would just start up the app, find the information I want, and shut it down. While writing this entry I left the app running for a bit, and unexpectedly discovered that at least one of the ads had a life of its own, expanding to take up more space on the screen (although it did come with a close box). Unlike in the iPod's basic Weather app, to view weather for each location beyond the first one that you add, you must tap on the open book button, then switch to the desired location. This remains my primary weather app.

I have also tried the Weather+ Free app, whose main screen has ads plus a prominent "Upgrade to Full version!" nag reminder. The extra piece of information it has, about which I might occasionally care and which The Weather Channel free app lacks, is a humidity projection for the four days after today. Like in the iPod's basic Weather app, weather for any locations beyond the first one that you add can be viewed by sliding the screen left or right.

IMDb (Internet Movie Database) app

2011-07-31T12:21:00.003-04:00

Like many folks, I have often used Google to search for a bunch of different things, including movies. In some such movie searches I thought (not sure if I can reproduce this now) that the first screen of search results only showed the remaining show times for that day. In any case, I'm not always looking for just a given day's possibilities -- I might be looking for a show time in the coming days.

It's not always clear that it is worth installing an app for something which is already eminently usable through a web browser. Aside from the space/clutter issue that comes with each additional app, if the app later gets updated (a frequent enough occurrence), you will get the minor nag notification to do that update. That's not such a big deal, but since I don't always want to choose the Update All option, I need to login with my Apple ID for each app's update, and it's kind of annoying to see, e.g., "7 updates" notification. I've been refusing to do a particular app's update for over a month because the update's only listed "improvement" was...to bring ads.

There should be some significant added value in an app over what could be done in a browser, and I was pleasantly surprised that the IMDb app delivers. It does list all show times, but it also (if you gave it a geographical location to search) quite prominently shows movies from local "artsy" and at least some college/university theaters. I don't go out to movie theaters extremely often, but I might just be lured out a tiny bit more by IMDb's app.

Protecting the iPod screen

2011-07-29T18:17:00.004-04:00

Many people use cases and/or clear screen protectors to protect their iPods or iPhones. I prefer my iPod to be as thin as possible, so I use only a clear screen protector. The one from Pure Gear that I use doesn't seem to have meaningfully diminished the touch screen sensitivity.

Over time, some shallow scratches have appeared on the screen protector, but are only a cosmetic issue. It's possible that those scratches wouldn't even have made any mark on an unprotected iPod's glass screen. One time, before I had put the screen protector on, the iPod fell out of my pocket onto the tar and landed screen down. The screen suffered only a minor scratch, but that put an end to my procrastinating about putting a screen protector on!

After my first iPod failed, I got a replacement iPod. This time, I put the screen protector on a day before dropping it glass-down on the tar. Later, I noticed some scrapes on one of the iPod's metal corners, and some small chipped glass, which can sometimes catch a bit on fabric, but those are very slight annoyances. If such would bother you, you may prefer to also get a full size case that would prevent such damage to the iPod itself.

White noise app

2011-07-22T19:41:00.007-04:00

After trying several free "noise-making" apps to mask external noises and allow me to sleep more easily, I bought the appropriately named White Noise app from TMSOFT ($1.99 when I installed it).

I first tested the free White Noise Lite version, which has ads and reduced options, for a while. After several uses, it displayed a nag screen to encourage purchase of a full-functionality version (I do not begrudge the company that nagging, though). It periodically also displayed an error message ("WhiteNoiseEngine Error AVAudioSession activation error: Error..."), but continued to be usable.

I favor the "Oscillating Fan" sound, which stays at a fairly consistently loud level. That was also available in the free version's smaller selection of sounds, so I was able to do truly practical testing before buying the app. The "Air Conditioner" sound is not bad, either.

I like being able to set multiple timer choices (e.g., 8 hours, 3 hours, 1 hour), any one of which you can choose when playing a sound. That ensures that the sound ends before your alarm rings (will your alarm wake you if the sound is still playing?). That's not an option if you are, e.g., running a mechanical white noise device all night. If you wake up an hour and a half before your alarm, but want to sleep longer, you could play a sound for 1 hour.

It's inadvisable to download anything (e.g., an app or podcast) in the background while playing a White Noise sound, because when a download finishes, the White Noise sound will stop playing. The same thing applies when playing a podcast, according to my recollection of trying to listen to consecutive podcasts while washing dishes, and finding the podcasts ending unexpectedly.

White Noise has alarm capabilities, but I prefer to use a separate alarm device. Indeed, I only tested the alarm now while writing this blog entry - it wasn't important functionality for me, but it could be useful while traveling.

If you sleep on your side, and if White Noise can help you sleep even with only one earphone in (i.e., the pillow muffling noise for your other ear), that might improve your chances of hearing your alarm, a fire alarm, or any other noise by which you would really want to be awakened.

When running White Noise, if you don't set the iPod to sleep, the display will change after 1-2 minutes to be a digital clock, with simulated LEDs, down to the amusing very weakly lit LED segments that are "off" (A numeral 8 has all seven possible segments lit. A numeral 0 has only six of the seven lit; the middle segment is very weakly lit.).

However, if you wanted your iPod to have more battery power when you get up (presuming you don't sleep with it while it's charging), you would do better to activate Airplane Mode so it won't waste energy doing anything with WiFi (as mentioned by Apple here), and also set it to sleep. Hey, it might as well "sleep" while you sleep.

After I had already bought White Noise, I read various, mostly positive, reviews at the Apple App Store. Some people apparently use the app to help them sleep on planes and in military zones.

TMSOFT also makes a White Noise Pro app which only works on the iPad. If the White Noise app, which works on both the iPod and iPad, did what you needed, and the White Noise Pro app didn't have any compelling additional features, it's difficult to see why you would buy that over White Noise, which could be loaded onto multiple iOS devices at no additional cost.

Fortune cookie Chinese

2011-07-06T22:43:00.000-04:00

In a rare twist of...fortune, I just got a fortune cookie fortune that had a Chinese vocabulary expression that was new to me and seems potentially useful to know:

美妙的 (měimiàode; beautiful, wonderful, splendid)

French-English: colocataire, locataire

2011-06-23T21:38:00.003-04:00

Years ago I was chatting in French with a Canadian fellow who rented an apartment with a Frenchwoman. I referred to her as his petite amie (girlfriend), whereupon he corrected me and said in French that they were colocataires, which I had always mentally translated as roommates (i.e., she was not his girlfriend).

Today when I was chatting about those folks in French with a different Canadian fellow, I wanted to first mention that they were renters, and I found myself coming up with nothing when searching my mind for the French equivalent. I explained in English my lack of sufficient French vocabulary, and my chat partner replied that the word is locataires.

I mulled this over and realized that while colocataire would probably most commonly be thought of in English as meaning roommate, an alternate translation is joint tenant (per http://www.wordreference.com/fren/colocataire, a great web resource for translation, which has a matching iOS app that I've used on my iPod for months). From that alternate translation, it is "obvious" that locataire on its own means tenant/renter.

Merci, C.!

Voice Memos app useful for recording measurements

2011-06-22T23:35:00.000-04:00

I don't often have great need to use the microphone that is part of the Apple earbuds, but it sure came in handy with the Voice Memos app while standing on a chair, using a measuring tape to record multiple ceiling height items. I remember seeing a contractor making similar measurements, calling them out to his assistant to write down. Quite the Personal Digital Assistant, this iPod.

Mnemonic for the tones of 梳 and 漱

2011-06-19T15:57:00.002-04:00

I have long known that, excluding the tones, shu is the Pinyin spelling for the verbs for both comb (梳) and rinse one's mouth (漱). However, I have always found it difficult to remember which one is first tone and which one is fourth tone. Until now, that is, having finally associated the hair on one's head with being higher than one's mouth, "like" the respective tones of 梳 (shū) and 漱 (shù) -- first tone is typically defined as high, and fourth tone as falling.

And with this blog entry, I've also finally learned how to write those characters, too!

The meaning of iOS Chinese handwriting input buttons

2011-06-14T21:25:00.007-04:00

Each time you start using Chinese handwriting to compose text for a note, e-mail message, etc. (though not for a search -- see below), the two button choices on the left are:

空格 (kōnggé) Space
換行 (huàn háng) Return

Then, after you have entered 1 or more characters that iOS considers could be part of a longer (more characters) expression, the button choices change to:

其他 (qítā) Show other choices for next character(s) of longer expressions. A character that is part of a set expression might have multiple characters grouped together as a single choice. For instance, 孑 (jié) offers up the lone choice of 然一身 (rán yī shēn) because of the set expression 孑然一身 (jié rán yī shēn; to be all alone in the world).
停止聯想 (tíngzhǐ liánxiǎng) End the current attempt to auto-complete, the expression is already complete.

The functionality of the 停止聯想 button was clear to me long ago, but I only recently looked up the definition of the decidedly newfangled expression of 聯想 (liánxiǎng; auto-complete).

For (typically Google) web search in a browser, the two button choices on the left start as:

空格 (kōnggé) Space
搜尋 (sōuxún) Search

Then they follow the same transformation described above.

The functionality of the 搜尋 button was clear to me long ago, but I mistakenly thought the button label was 尋找 (xúnzhǎo; look for), probably because I was more familiar with 尋找 which shares the 尋 character.

S like in sugar; 意義的意; C like in circus

2011-06-10T00:26:00.003-04:00

Some years ago, I was talking with a (possibly overseas) telephone support representative, one who did not sound like a U.S. native English speaker. She gave me some sort of an identification code, like S777, and clarified the first character by saying, "S like in sugar". Since the s in sugar is actually pronounced like sh, sugar seemed an odd choice of word. Probably more common would have been to say, "S like in Sam".

Another time I was asking a native Chinese speaker for clarification of what the character was for the Chinese word which she had just spoken in some larger sentence context. The Pinyin sound had been yì.

I was rather surprised that she responded, "意義的意" (yìyì de yì; the character in 意義 whose sound is yì). The sound of the first two characters is in fact the same (yì), but a more precise translation is likely "the first yì-sound character in 意義 (i.e., 意).

In English, if somebody ever said something sounded like the c in circus, it seems the most natural interpretation would be that they were referring to the first c (which has the s sound), not the second c (which has the k sound).

(意義 means "meaning".)

Chinese character pairings having matching Pinyin letters but different tones

2011-06-06T06:03:00.003-04:00

fūfù 夫婦 (a husband and wife)
gōnggòng 公共 (public)
jījí 積極 (energetic)
māomáo 貓毛 (cat hair)
shìshí 事實 (fact)
xiǎngxiàng 想像 (imagine)
xìnxīn 信心 (confidence)

The Pleco Chinese dictionary app, with its Wild search capability, could straightforwardly find all such possibilities, but these are examples that are common enough that I could come up with them while, e.g., idling in the supermarket.

Opera Mini 6 web browser vs iOS 4 Safari

2011-06-05T17:09:00.047-04:00

12/17/11: This entry is about Opera Mini 6/6.0.1 vs iOS 4 Safari, and is now largely static. See my subsequent blog entry on Opera Mini 6.5.1 vs IOS 5 Safari for a newer evaluation of the two browsers.

This entry gets updates, either unadvertised or advertised-with-dates, over time. I mostly read text while browsing the web on my iPod, which is probably one reason why Opera Mini works so well for me. I have little to say about images and videos in Opera Mini.
10/29/11: Most of the following discussion of Safari's capabilities refer to iOS 4; iOS 5 Safari has different, improved functionality.

I nursed my wounds on my iPod for some time from having upgraded from the excellent version 6 to the more-crash-prone-and-generally-worse-but-usually-still-better-than-iOS-4-Safari version 6.0.1, and was not in a hurry to upgrade further (on the iPod) -- once bitten, twice shy. I did eventually upgrade to 6.5.1, which I consider is better than 6, though not by a huge margin.

7/15/11: Version 6.0.1 was released in 7/2011. I believe they changed the formerly obligatory single column display into the Single Column View option in Settings. That was likely done to allow the universal binary to display non-mobile websites normally on iPads, which have much larger screens. In any case, I happily use Single Column View on the iPod. However, Single Column View is not the default, which means if Opera ever crashes (7/27/11: ugh, a far more frequent occurrence with 6.0.1, but how much of that is related to 6.0.1 versus Opera server issues is unclear) or is fully closed, as I described here (e.g., to release any RAM it's holding onto), it is necessary to select Single Column View again. I normally keep Opera in RAM all the time.
(7/21/11: If you like 6.0's single column display on the iPod, you would likely be better off not upgrading to 6.0.1. I have to re-select 6.0.1 Single Column View at least as often as each time Opera Mini crashes, which, sadly, is frequently.)
Upgrading to 6.0.1 displaced one of my existing 9 Speed Dial entries with an Opera page, but I eventually reset that.

The free Opera Mini web browser is an alternative to Apple's Safari browser, with various pluses and minuses. Opera Mini version 6 was released in 5/2011. Wikipedia has a decent article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_mini, which also links to the interesting http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-web-content-authoring-guidelines/. A list of technical specifications can be found at: www.opera.com/mobile/specs/. Here is a CNET review.

I use both Safari and Opera Mini regularly, but actively try to make greater use of Opera Mini, which I feel has more advantages for the iPod. An iPod is typically connected to the Internet less often than an iPhone, so some of the following items (e.g., Saved Pages) are more significant for iPod users like myself.

PROS:

Opera Mini does not automatically reload a page when you tap the back arrow to return to it, at least if you return within some period of time (ever?). Thus, if you are reading a page which has multiple links to other pages, e.g., Google News, then tap to read an article, returning to the original page will not invoke (frequently pointless and time-wasting) reloading, unlike in Safari. Also, if you load pages into different tabs while you have Internet access, but later lose that access, you can still read those pages, even without having stored them as Saved Pages. RAM issues mentioned below will still be applicable.
Unlike in Safari, you don't have to switch away from the current tab to open new pages, because you can open links in background tabs (tap-hold, then tap on "Open in New Tab"). This is helpful while, e.g., reading through all headlines in Google News, allowing you to open all stories you'd like to read in background tabs. RAM issues mentioned below will still be applicable.
Unlike Safari, Opera Mini allows saving of static copies of web pages on the iPod, letting you read or reread them later even without wireless Internet access. That can be useful to save pages for recipes, technical reference, humorous articles, or for any other reason, e.g., because you don't have time to read them right away. Although I was once annoyed that I had to make 7 separate Saved Pages for an article (and I've seen articles requiring even more pages), that effort did serve me well since I was imminently losing Internet access, and I was able to read the (interesting) article soon afterward, while waiting in a store.
At least 15 (someone else can test for the maximum number...) tabs are possible, exceeding Safari's limit of 8. RAM constrains the total number of tabs effectively usable; "The page has been cleared to save memory." message is what you are left with content-wise on a tab when you run low on RAM.
9/8/11: Bummer, my Opera Mini had a serious problem and lost my saved pages. Rather shocking to discover I no longer had any entries in Saved Pages. However, that did make me realize that I was saving a large number of pages (in these 2 months of using 6.0.1), but only in a relatively small number of instances loading any of them again, so I wasn't too upset. From this Opera Mini forum thread, it looks like saved pages may be lost again upon an eventual upgrade of the iOS Opera Mini
If you make an account on Opera's servers, you can use Opera Link to determine at what frequency to save both your nine Speed Dial targets and the state of your bookmarks there, for future restore (e.g., in case of a serious crash) or for sharing on another device(s), including on a pc. Automatic syncing is possible, but I prefer to sync bookmarks manually, which avoids attempts at same when you know (or perhaps, even when you don't know) that you lack wireless Internet access. Opera Link can also be used at any time on any Opera Mini instance device, so it is not linked inextricably to an Apple ID like iOS 5 Safari's Reading List. Although I didn't test this, it appears that if you use desktop Opera, there is supposed to be an Opera Mini folder for bookmarks, which is the extent of the bookmarks that get synced with Opera Link.

CONS:

Opera Mini does not provide end-to-end encryption. If you don't trust their company, don't use it for anything requiring credentials or anything to which you're concerned about them having potential access.
There is a short startup delay as it makes the connection to the Opera proxy servers ("calls home").
Presumably because of the Opera proxy server, has extreme difficulties using maps.google.com effectively; I strongly advise using Safari for that. Even Safari cannot yield copyable text, though.
On rare occasions, my initial attempt to bring up a page doesn't succeed, which I imagine is an Opera proxy server issue.
Opera's proxy servers may lead to this side effect:
Going to, e.g.:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/05/26/dumb.doctors.office.ep/
prompts you with:
It looks like you are from outside the U.S. Would you like to make International your default edition? Yes | No Close
which I chose to simply ignore.
Only Safari can Add to Home Screen, using apple-touch-icon.png when available (not favicon.ico, as it turns out; according to http://www.webmasterworld.com/html/3560399.htm). I had to remove some such Home Screen icons to prevent inertia from making me mindlessly use Safari. Opera Mini's Speed Dial is a partial substitute.
The upgrade from 5 to 6 messed up images in previously saved pages from The Onion (and maybe from other websites, I didn't check). Not a big deal, I re-saved some pages to restore the images. However, images are rarely, if ever, crucial for me. (7/22/11: No obvious similar problems from the 6.0 to 6.0.1 upgrade.)

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

Using Single Column View ensures that, because of its size, text will be pleasantly readable in portrait mode, at least for me. http://www.thechessmind.net/ is a chess blog which I have often been reading of late. In Safari, I sometimes feel the need to switch to landscape mode to make the text more legible, but the text has always been fine to read in portrait mode in Opera Mini.
When using Single Column View, some items which might typically (as viewed, e.g., while not using Single Column View, or in Safari) be unobstrusive on the side of a web page may appear, sometimes as a large clump, at the top or bottom. I have gotten used to that, and simply swipe to get past the clump, if it's at the top, to get to the real content, e.g., on http://www.thechessmind.net/.
Find in Page: The Done button means done with searching; search happens as you type. Can search repeatedly in a page. Safari can find in page also, although it's probably somewhat less intuitive; see, e.g.: http://www.tipb.com/2010/09/16/ios-42-features-find-text-safari-web-page/
Only 1 Speed Dial Start Page is possible per tab. So if you start there, then keep going "forward" to additional pages, you'd have to tap the back arrow, potentially many times, to get back to the Speed Dial Start Page again in that tab. I tend to keep common destinations in both the Speed Dial Start Page and in Bookmarks, so in some cases (precisely 9 - the number of possible Speed Dial target pages), I do have the Bookmarks route as an option, but it's more to the point to just open a new tab, which starts on the Speed Dial Start Page.
In very early June 2011, it seemed that it was sometimes necessary to scroll to the bottom of a page to be able to activate the Opera controls (some Opera proxy server problem?), but this problem seemed to have been fixed by 6/5/11.
In very early June 2011, the links returned for a Google search for "tornado hurricane difference" could not be opened with taps (some Opera proxy server problem?). I did the same search in Safari to get to those links, then copied the most interesting link to Opera Mini in order to save its content. This "tappability" problem seemed to have been fixed by 6/5/11.
One day in mid-June 2011, I was unable to reach websites ("Unable to connect. Please review your network settings."). I have many of the same sites bookmarked in both Opera Mini and Safari, so I just switched to using Safari for a time, switching back to a once-again-working Opera Mini later in the day. As long as Opera Mini problems aren't an "overly common" occurrence, I am unlikely to switch to any other browser as my main browser -- the Pros of using Opera Mini are that useful to me.
To copy lengthy text from a web page (I only tested using Single Column View, my normal mode of operation), it is more effective to select text starting from the bottom and press-dragging up to the top. Selecting text from top to bottom seems fraught with pitfalls which can prematurely stop your selecting, when you'd have to start all over again by going to the top of the web page (press the time at the top center of the iPod screen to do that), then again pressing and holding on non-link text until the Select Text option appears, tapping that, then press-dragging again to select. A reasonably rigorous test page for this, about hiking Mount Washington. Although you could save the entire web page, copying its text elsewhere can be useful in some situations.
9/4/11: Power-User settings are available by going to config: in the location bar, as described further on http://www.guruslodge.com/bmobile-phones-tutorial-and-solution-centerb/operamini-secret-codes/, which I just discovered. Changes apparently survive Opera Mini crashes, unlike the Single Column View setting. For my own usage, I turned off the Phonenumber detection, which I suspect is probably only of use if (a) you have an iPhone (which I don't), and want to call such a number immediately, or (b) you normally use iOS assistance to add new contacts (which I don't, for reasons mentioned here).

Podcasts for beginner-intermediate Spanish lessons

2011-06-05T14:52:00.002-04:00

In high school, I was fortunate to have a Spanish teacher who seemed to know that I had some proclivity for foreign languages. I had once done a small bit of supplemental work (reading Le Petit Prince [The Little Prince]) beyond the French I took each year, of which she may have been aware, being the Department Chair.

This Miss York (Thank you!!) suggested that I skip 2nd year Spanish, so I ended up taking 1st and 3rd year. I had to hustle to get up to speed in the 3rd year, not having been exposed to the 2nd year material, but it was well worth it to develop a Spanish language foundation that would encourage me in future years to keep at it.

For some time, I've thought that if I again had my high school Spanish textbooks (which were loaned to students each year by the school, as I presume is the norm in U.S. public schools), I should be able to, reasonably quickly, refresh some of the grammatical knowledge I once had. However, podcasts remain rather more convenient, and I found one which feels pretty good for my level, although to date I've only listened to a small portion of its content.

iTunes U, DePaul College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Basic Spanish, by Claudia Fernandez, is my choice. Eventually I hope to again be able to compose meaningful new sentences on my own (too bad you can't split infinitives in Spanish, I'd obviously love to do so). For too long I've been living off of random sentences like:

El mago hace muchos trucos de mágia. (The magician does many magic tricks. ["does", not "makes", Google Translate!]), and
Las ardillas buscan nueces en los árboles. (The squirrels look for nuts in the trees. [not "The squirrels in the trees looking for nuts", Google Translate!])

which I've picked up from a Transparent Language RSS feed.

The Name "Scott" Transliterated into Chinese

2011-06-02T13:26:00.003-04:00

Some years ago I bought the X-Men 2 DVD, which has Chinese subtitles, so that I could watch it multiple times, possibly without audio, to practice reading Chinese characters. One X-Man's name is Scott, which is transliterated into Chinese as 史考特 (Shǐkǎotè). This is one of those instances wherein an English s sound is transliterated into a Pinyin sh sound, which always seems a tad odd to me. 蘇珊 (Sūshān) for Susan is another (okay, okay, that second s in Susan is pronounced like a z in English).

I found 3 additional transliterations of "Scott" in Chinese dictionary apps which used the Pinyin s sound instead of the Pinyin sh sound:

司各特 (Sīgètè)
斯哥特 (Sīgētè)
斯考特 (Sīkǎotè)

The Pinyin ka sound (e.g., 卡 kǎ) may have been a better choice for the second Pinyin syllable. However, the original transliteration might not have been into Mandarin, but into a different Chinese dialect, in which the sound of the character was indeed closer to the English sound.

Anyway, in Flushing, NY, I saw an office's large bilingual streetfront sign asserting wide acceptance of the Pinyin sh transliteration:

ScottTrade 史考特證券
(Shǐkǎotè zhèngquàn; Scott "negotiable securities", i.e., stocks and bonds)

What does an avocado have in common with an alligator?

2011-05-20T23:43:00.003-04:00

The other day I looked up the Chinese word for avocado, which is 鱷梨 (èlí). As I stared at the first character (shown in large size above), I felt that from its component parts (the left side of the character is the fish radical) that it just didn't seem to be a "normal" character for a veg..., I mean, a fruit. Popular Internet answers indicate the avocado is a fruit, although I had long thought of it as a vegetable. Being mildly allergic to avocados, I never had much interest in them, until now (linguistically!).

I wondered if that 鱷 character was the same one which I could remember phonetically, but not visually, for alligator (鱷魚; èyú), and indeed it is. I was told that the avocado skin resembles alligator skin, which is understandable. I later realized that the right side of the character might be a stylized rendering of what an alligator's skin looks like.

The second character in avocado, 梨 (lí), means pear. Apparently "alligator pear" is a common enough name for an avocado, although that was new(s) to me.

Tape cartridge case given new life by iPod

2011-05-07T17:48:00.007-04:00

This old plastic tape cartridge case holds earphones nicely.

The case serves quite functionally as a landscape orientation iPod holder, facilitating video entertainment.

The case also works as a portrait orientation stand. Perhaps I should say it works as a "lean", since the angle of leaning can vary not insignificantly in this orientation. At least you can still press the Home button, which you couldn't do with a freebie smartphone stand I recently saw. The Safari page below is self-referential, but the Google news was a little too negative to use.

I have extra cases, if folks who know me want one/some.

The proper Chinese pronunciation of Chen (陳)

2011-05-05T23:38:00.002-04:00

Note that the proper spelling of pronunciation has no o before the u; pronounciation is incorrect.

陳 (Pinyin: Chén）is a common Chinese last name, often spelled in English as Chen. The way that spelling is typically pronounced in English led me to pronounce 陳 incorrectly in Chinese for quite some time. In English, the "en" portion of Chen, is pronounced like "en" in ten, but that's not the way it's pronounced in Chinese, despite the English spelling being the same as the Pinyin spelling, save for the addition of the 2nd tone.

The "en" portion of 陳 is pronounced more like "un" in sun, as I tested with CED. That "un"-like English sound is the sound of most occurrences of "en" at the end of a Pinyin syllable, e.g., in 分（fēn; to separate），門（mén; door）, 很 (hěn; very), and 笨（bèn; foolish).

The only exception is when r precedes "en" in the Pinyin, as in 人 (rén, person). There the "en" portion is pronounced like "en" in ten. That R in Pinyin can be quite a tricky letter, another case of which I wrote about here.

I stumbled upon this 陳 pronunciation issue when a native Chinese speaker asked me if I was saying 陳 or 錢 (qián; money, but also a last name), making me aware of my having improperly carried over an English sound into Chinese.

Free Chinese language lunar calendar app

2011-04-28T21:53:00.005-04:00

One of my coworkers told me about this free Chinese language lunar calendar app (has ads):

万年历免费版 (wànniánlì miǎnfèibǎn; 10,000 year calendar - free edition)
（萬年曆免費版 in traditional characters)

You can find it at the App Store by searching for "Chinese calendar".

Although the app's name is in simplified characters, it has a setting for traditional characters, which is what I use (although the "quality control" on simplified versus traditional characters is not always perfect). I also chose holiday and vacation settings for Taiwan; China (the default), Hong Kong, Singapore, and USA are other choices.

Now, I cannot read Chinese quickly enough to rapidly absorb all the Chinese text that introduces the app. However, aside from the fact that my coworker was already using it, I felt "safe enough" that Apple is a "large enough" company :-) to have reviewed the app, including its instructions, before making it available in the App Store, and I installed it. While certainly some bad apples (pun intended) could get through their review process, there should at least be more supervision there than at the Android Market, about which news stories like this 6/13/11 one already seem a bit too common.

As my coworker said, this app provides yet another opportunity to learn a little more Chinese, even if you are not big on consulting the lunar calendar for, e.g., good days to get married or what have you.

iPod RAM

2011-04-24T17:00:00.003-04:00

Apple does not advertise the amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in the iPod (or iPhone or iPad). On computers, memory normally refers to RAM. However, common (Apple-promoted) usage of the word memory in the iOS device context refers to what is typically known as storage on computers (hard drive or solid state drive capacity).

Some folks typically take apart each new Apple device to find out how much RAM it has, then post their findings on the web. Based on that information, my 3rd generation iPod has 256 MB. In practice the question of whether your iOS device has enough RAM probably boils down to, "Does it do what you need it to do?"

In my earlier experimentation, I was loading 4 Chinese dictionary apps. That, plus being in the midst of watching a movie on Netflix and loading multiple pages in Safari may have been the most demanding usage I was making on my iPod's RAM. In any case, I began experiencing performance delays.

Entering my Passcode, there would be a delay between when I tapped the screen and the (normal) black dots showed up. When I wrote Chinese characters using strokes, there would be a delay before the strokes actually appeared on screen.

I also started experiencing crashes in Safari. On the iPod, restarting Safari is pretty quick, so that didn't really put me into a tizzy. I also experienced one crash in Notespark while editing a note that was entirely in Chinese.

I eventually concluded which of the 4 Chinese dictionary apps met my needs best, so I no longer needed to access the others with any frequency. After 2 longish "intermissions", I also finally finished watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Netflix. That allowed me to release the RAM those apps might have been holding.

After double-pressing the Home button to show recently used apps, tap-hold any of the app icons until a red "minus" circle appears in the left corner of each icon (the icons also start jiggling). Tapping on the red minus circle of one of those recently used apps should release any RAM it has been holding onto.

Reducing the number of apps in that recently used set, and keeping fewer pages open in Safari seem to have largely eliminated my iPod RAM issues. It would be swell if my iPod had the 512 MB RAM that the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 have, but managing my app usage a little more tightly seems to have eliminated practical issues.

Someday I may go back to using apps with wild abandon, without explicitly freeing RAM as described above, to see if any issues surface, now that I'm largely done testing those 4 Chinese dictionary apps. After all, ideally a consumer need not concern himself overly much with RAM issues. If I find anything of interest, I will try to update this entry.
4/27/11: Forget that wild abandon. Slow performance in Safari showed up almost immediately.

Brought to you by the letter R

2011-04-23T13:33:00.002-04:00

I find it interesting that the general sound associated with the letter R in English, when present in any of the languages which I've studied, is qualitatively different from the English sound.

Chinese: Something of a cross between R and a very light G as in rouge (a word which itself has French origins), an example being 日 (rì; sun, day). The sole exception I know of is when the R is followed by UI (Pinyin) in, e.g., 瑞 (ruì; lucky, auspicious), when there is no very light rouge-G sound; in this specific Pinyin context only, it seems very much like an English R to me.
French: Comes with an "airy" H sound, i.e., R is aspirated, as in rural (rural), one of the French words I find most difficult to pronounce smoothly (though the U doesn't make it any easier!). When double-checking on "aspirated", I saw that P in pie is given as an example of an aspirated letter; I wasn't particularly aware of that aspiration as a native speaker.
Japanese: A cross between an R and an L, e.g., in this romaji (Roman letter) rendering: arigato (thank you).
Spanish: R is "rolling" (along the tongue), and there is also RR, which is even more rolling, as in borrador (chalkboard eraser). Keep those two sounds straight for pero (but) and perro (dog)....
Taiwanese: There is no R-type sound, as my former Taiwanese teacher confirmed. (A Cantonese-speaking friend also said Cantonese has no R-type sound.)

Calculator on iPod and Palm

2011-04-18T23:33:00.007-04:00

One thing I was very pleased to see on the iPod Calculator was the fact that if you entered, e.g., 2 + 3, the + button would have an "illuminated" border around it after being pressed. I like having an indicator that shows if the last button you pressed was an arithmetic operator. This may be more important to me since I normally set the iPod to not make any sound when I tap a key, so I get no auditory confirmation. Along with that, Apple chose to not let multiple consecutive presses of the same arithmetic operator change the running total. If you were entering, e.g., 5 + 5, on the iPod, you could never do inadvertent additions by hitting the + key more than once in a row (e.g., if you couldn't remember whether you had last pressed 5 or +, you might press + a second time), as would occur in the Palm Calc application.

In Palm's defense, if you hide the Graffiti section of the screen, you can see a display of entries like you might see on an adding machine, which could help you prevent inadvertently changing your running total (I just learned this now, as I am leaving the Palm platform!). As far as I can remember, in all my years of (periodic) usage of the Palm Calc application, I always had the Graffiti section of the screen visible, because I normally had it visible when doing other things, so it remained visible when I invoked Calc. Perhaps Palm should have hidden the Graffiti section of the screen by default when the Calc application was started. What user is going to prefer to use Graffiti software to enter digits when Calc already gives you nice big buttons for each?

The iPod Calculator's "clear" button's label is AC initially (All Clear, i.e., reset running total to zero), which is the same function as C on the Palm. After you enter a number, it changes to C (clear entry), which is done by the CE button on the Palm. It changes back to AC after you press C. After mistyping a digit on a multi-digit number which was not the first in a sequence of numbers I was adding, I was briefly put out when, looking at the C button, I mistakenly thought there was no clear entry functionality -- I hadn't noticed that that same button was labeled AC at the start.

Note also that after entering a sequence like 6 + 7 + 8, if you press C to clear the entry of 8, the + sign remains illuminated as a helpful indicator about what you've pressed. So in that case, your running total of 13 is still active, although 0 is displayed because it's waiting for you to enter the next addend.

The iPod Calculator has an m- (memory minus) button which Palm lacks, which might be useful. It will probably be more useful than the % and √ (square root) keys the Palm has but which the iPod lacks.

Winner: iPod.

The Android calculator apparently shows math operations horizontally in the display, e.g., 1+2+3 shows exactly like that, not just as 1, then 2, then 3, as would be the case on iPod or Palm. Press = to see the total. Presumably it follows My Dear Aunt Sally's rule of Multiplication & Division operations first, then Addition & Subtraction operations, if there were a mix of the two types.

Tips for editing text on the iPod

2011-04-14T19:10:00.015-04:00

Most or all of the tips below were initially tested on iOS 4.2.1. Most or all of them likely work under higher versions of the iOS.

The purely technical content below is likely all in the iPod touch User Guide, a link to which is initially provided in iPod Safari. Apple has apparently replaced the previous iOS 4.2 PDF file with one for iOS 4.3.

See Settings > General > Keyboard for some of the following. I changed some of my settings, and no longer remember exactly which ones were the factory defaults. Experience-based comments below are mine. I use many of these techniques frequently.

When editing text, to bring up the choice of Select / Select All / Paste, two quick taps after the end of the line, before the next line (if applicable), is faster than tap-hold; if you're in the search bar, there is no next line. If you are replying to an e-mail message, two quick taps before the body text of the e-mail to which you are replying may do the trick (it did for me in Yahoo! mail). Cut or copied text survives even turning the iPod off (by holding the button down for several seconds and doing a slide to power off); if you've never cut or copied text, presumably Paste is not an option.
Double-tap on a word to bring up Cut / Copy / Paste / Replace. Replace will offer suggestions if it can.
To select the text from the left margin (after a hard return, if you are not at the top of the file) until the next hard return, use two fingers simultaneously, with space between them, to tap the text. Not easy to do on a short line of text (e.g., a single word), when you're better off using tap-hold to bring up Select / Select All / Paste.
If you have Auto-Capitalization enabled in Settings > General > Keyboard, the pronoun I and some words like English can be entered lower case; iOS will capitalize them.
After existing text, tap space twice to get a period and a space. It's common to want a period and a space, and this way you don't need to switch to the number keys to get the period. You can of course then delete the space, if it's extra. This technique is also efficient for things like "p." (page), "e.g." (less efficient for "i.e." because of Auto-Capitalization of the letter i), and website names. It works perfectly for things like "St. John" because the first letter after the period is capitalized, so you could just type S-t-space-space-j-o-h-n, i.e., you don't have to tap Shift to get a capital J.
Many contractions such as can't and won't can be typed without entering the apostrophe; iOS will put the apostrophe in.
If you want to undo the typing (pasting) you've just done, shake the iPod. You'll be given the choice to Undo Typing (Undo Paste) or Cancel. If you choose the Undo X option, shake the iPod again to additionally get a Redo Typing (Redo Paste) option, and be presented with another level of Undo. Not sure how many levels you can get. An interesting practical difference between the iPod and iPad; here's a thread on shake/undo for the iPad. Not every operation is easier on the iPad!
Analogous to the previous tip, Undo Delete is also possible with a shake. I usually need this when I am editing a longer piece of text in an input box (like Title for a Calendar event or Safari's search bar), and my finger comes close to the X delete-circle-icon, and I accidentally touch it, inadvertently deleting my text.
I previously wrote about getting Special characters in French and Spanish, and I just learned from http://www.tcgeeks.com/30-essential-ipad-tips/ that the analogous technique applies to getting a web address suffix different from the .com, like .net or .org. Presumably it's because I have a traditional Chinese keyboard enabled that I can also get .台灣 (.Taiwan).

English idiosyncracies

2011-04-12T22:13:00.000-04:00

Did you ever notice that the stress is on the first syllable in preview, but on the second syllable in review?

Special characters in French and Spanish

2011-04-11T22:36:00.005-04:00

When I was in college, one of my roommates had one of those newfangled (at the time) Apple Macintosh computers. He let me use it for a French paper, and I was ecstatic that I could enter accented characters like é simply by pressing a key combination, a feat totally outside the capabilities of the typewriter I'd been using for papers. Apple got it way back then, and they still got it.

I previously wrote on my first (much less active) blog about how OpenOffice 3.1 [is] markedly less convenient than Microsoft Word 2007 for common accent marks in French. Microsoft got it, too. OpenOffice...not so much.

It is even easier to input special characters in French and Spanish in iOS. Instead of just tapping a letter (or character), tap-and-hold, then slide your finger to select from any alternate choices that appear, and "let go" (lift your finger from the screen). You can even get œ (tap-and-hold o), which is not in the "Western European Latin Alphabet #1", as I'd previously written. For Spanish, it is also possible to get the upside down question mark (¿) and exclamation point (¡).

If you're working primarily in English with a dab of French or Spanish here and there, there's no need to add the French or Spanish virtual keyboards, just tap-and-hold and choose the character variant as described above.

Podcasts for advanced French lessons

2011-04-10T13:15:00.041-04:00

Having just been jarred awake about getting podcasts "over the air" onto my iPod, here are my candidates for working on improving my French (I may update this list over time):

French Podcast ("Linguistic 360: News in Slow French". Around 30 minutes each. Probably slowest speed French of these 3 podcasts, as befits its name. Acknowledging the difficulty in getting used to larger numbers in French, the hosts typically repeat them twice; a grammar and idiomatic expressions [e.g., poser un lapin, to stand someone up, not to give someone a rabbit] segment comes at the end of each program. Text included: summary; outline of news; outline of grammar and idiomatic expression topics.)
Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com (Around 5 minutes each. Mix of normal and slower speed French, depending on the episode. Words and expressions are routinely repeated to assist listener learning. Spelling tips for words are often given. Occasional dictation exercises, which can be checked at the website. Text included: ~3-4 lines introducing the lesson content, typically ending in "...".)
8/22/11: I wonder if there is some hidden internal number for each podcast episode, or some other issue at play. I had (have) episodes 835-1212 showing sequentially from top to bottom on my iPod, but subsequent episodes, starting from 1213, are loading (sequentially) at the top (before 835). Not a particular problem, but odd.
10/24/11: After a sync with my PC, the sorting was corrected for all the episodes I had. However, episodes 1213 and on had their playing times changed to 0:00, and their "album art" was lost. Newly downloaded episodes are coming with the album art and proper playing times, but they are regrettably loading at the top of the list, just like 1213 and on did previously.
10/29/11: I think it was another subsequent sync with my PC which ended up eliminating the album art from the main listing of episodes in the Music app (which is actually good, since more of each episode's title is now visible in that list), and the sorted the episodes properly again. We'll see what happens after future episode downloads and syncs with PC iTunes....
One thing in a French day (Around 3 minutes each. Normal "gentle" speed French. FULL TEXT, minus standard introduction and closing, of podcast is included!!)

I found the longer News in Slow French nice to listen to during hands-full cooking. Some listeners may object that one of the hosts is not a native French speaker (probably an American, I would guess; don't know if he ever states where he's from), but he has good style and carries on lively dialogue with the other host (hostess, actually; two different women during the time I've been listening).

I previously listened to my old friend Louis (Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com) on the Zune during quiet lunches, when it was convenient to replay things for review. Louis explains many words and expressions. Dialogues are at normal "unfettered" speed; he explains selected content, and then you hear the dialogue a second time.

I was beaming for quite some time when I accidentally tapped the iPod screen and discovered that text is included with these podcasts (associated text may be available at the websites, too, but I don't normally go to those, I just listen on the iPod). I happened to be listening to One thing in a French day, which, as noted above, includes the full text, so this discovery was particularly exciting. That text gives me an option to just have some French reading practice, if I'm ever in a situation where listening to the podcast is inconvenient or undesirable. Because of its format, One thing in a French day lends itself well to including the entire text (swipe up and down to scroll). The other two podcasts have lengthier content, so it's perhaps less practical for those creators to include the full text.

All of these podcasts are wonderful, and in just a couple of days of listening, I feel I have already learned good stuff. Did you know the (or at least some) French say arobase for the @ in e-mail addresses? Laetitia (One thing in a French day) includes that in each episode's closing, so I looked up what I incorrectly imagined was a robase. Common name for a cell phone? That's portable, which I know now from Rylan (French Podcast). Louis (Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com) taught me that I had the wrong impression of how to pronounced suggérer (to suggest) -- I didn't think there was a (brief) hard g sound in it at all.

There may be other similarly wonderful advanced French podcasts, but these showed up first on iTunes in my search (real estate's "Location, location, location!" is analogous to the value assigned by Google's Page Rank), but I doubt I'll look further as long as these creators continue to produce more, similar quality episodes.

Occasional episodes from Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com (e.g., 1270 - Real Life French: un attroupement) and from One thing in a French day (e.g., Le parc de Couzieu) report that they "cannot be played on this iPod" when I try to download them. I'm not sure why, but it is not a big deal if I miss an episode here or there.

While some podcasts have little value after having been listened to, I always wished that I could mark a podcast series as one whose episodes should not be deleted by Zune sync-with-PC operations. I never found an option in the PC Zune software to do that.

I am so pleased that retention of podcasts on an iPod is totally under the user's control (some info from Apple discussions). An iPod hardware port problem prevents me from reliably syncing my iPod data with my PC, but if that is ever rectified, I will not have to fear that my French (or other) podcasts will be deleted against my wishes during such synchronization.

On my 3rd generation iPod Touch running iOS 4.3.5, processing a long list of podcast episodes does take a significant amount of time:

When the Music app displays the list of my ~300 and growing episodes from Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com.
Directly switching from the Music app to the podcast source in the iTunes app as I describe here is also slow. On 10/29/11, that podcast lists 293 episodes.

In the iTunes app on 10/29/11, Linguistic 360: News in Slow French has 35 total (lifetime) episodes, and One thing in a French day has 20, which Laetitia has presumably chosen as the maximum to show there at one time.

After syncing to a PC, in the left panel under Devices > (your device name) > Podcasts, you can see how many times you've listened to a particular episode, which may be of interest.

Although I often use the White Noise app to help drown out external noise when trying to sleep, on quieter (too quiet?) nights, I have sometimes found it helpful to fall asleep to some One thing in a French day episodes (perhaps excluding those involving excited children ;-) ), though I doubt that is greatly strengthening my French....

11/26/11: Under iOS 5.0.1 (I used iOS 4 when I first wrote this entry), I recently noticed that after tapping the FREE button for an episode, it turns into DOWNLOAD for some podcasts, but into GET EPISODE for others (only Learn French with Dailyfrenchpod.com of the above three podcasts). DOWNLOAD doesn't get redrawn on the iPod when tapped, which speeds up the process of queuing for download, particularly helpful when you're downloading many episodes. Maybe the GET EPISODE button has some benefit for podcast producers?

You mean I can play music on my iPod?

2011-04-10T12:31:00.002-04:00

I'm one of those people who doesn't have a great need for new music. I've been largely content with my CD collection for years, which I ripped to my PC and also transferred to my Zune, a gift from a relative who had no need for it. The only artist whose works I almost always buy is Jackson Browne, and it's only as I prepared this blog entry that I learned from this jackson browne discography, maintained by another fan, that I've missed two(!) albums since 2008.

My iPod's port hardware is unreliable to the point of the iPod generally not showing up within my PC's iTunes after connecting iPod and PC with the USB cord. Since that type of connection is how I would copy my music collection to my iPod, I had expected not to put any music on the iPod.

However, after opening the Music app ("You have no songs", or something like that), I was guided by Apple's savvy to the iTunes app. I had previously put the iTunes app into an "Entertainment" group, which I had largely forgotten about given my other (happy) use of the iPod.

In iPod iTunes, I downloaded the 4 free songs currently being promoted. I subsequently discovered that I wouldn't be able to delete them from the iPod since I lack access (reliable access, in any case) to my iPod though my PC's iTunes. Okay, so no more wild downloading of free songs -- who needs additional clutter?
(8/1/11: With some cable fiddling I got my iPod to be recognized by my PC's iTunes, after which a second pair of hands helped me delete those songs. If I released my awkward hold on the cable, my iPod would immediately disappear from within my PC's iTunes. Right before that, I was also finally able to update my iOS to 4.3.5 from 4.2.1 using the same type of cable fiddling.)

However, podcasts can be deleted directly from the iPod, and that is a whole 'nother thing (and future blog entry).

iPod is a dream device for practicing Chinese

2011-04-09T11:47:00.001-04:00

For years I have kept notes of assorted Chinese vocabulary to which I have been exposed and which I seek to remember. Most of those notes are on paper, but occasionally they are in electronic form, like in Palm Note Pad, which allowed drawing of anything, e.g., Chinese characters, as graphics.

With the iPod, I finally have a take-everywhere combined reference and repository to lookup (via dictionary apps, such as these) and record (using Notespark) things. I am manually transferring some of my Palm Note Pad Chinese vocabulary to the iPod, and perhaps will similarly transfer some of my old paper entries.

Within Notespark, I have a 中文生詞 (Chinese vocabulary) Tag. Each note labeled with that tag typically gets the "triplet" of English + Chinese character + Pinyin, e.g.:

paper clip 迴紋針 huíwénzhēn

Limiting a note to a single vocabulary item allows me to see a list of the items I've entered for easy review, even if the entire triplet (which becomes the note's title), is not immediately visible. If I want to record a date or some other piece of information with a vocabulary note (e.g., because it helps me think of associated circumstances), I put it on the first line, which makes it the note's title instead. The triplet still shows up underneath the title, in a smaller font size, and in gray instead of in black.

Originally I labeled these vocabulary notes with a 中文 (Chinese) Tag, but I now use that Tag strictly for notes which contain Chinese but are not intended as vocabulary records.

Since the iPod supports entering Chinese characters via strokes, I am able to practice my character writing skills, instead of just exercising my phonetic memory of words to generate characters using Pinyin, the typical computer method. Using Chinese this way in notes, e-mail, and blog posts is fun with the iPod!

Tone sandhi, particularly in names

2011-04-05T21:10:00.000-04:00

One of the things that makes Chinese challenging to learn is the tone in which a syllable needs to be spoken in order to convey the correct meaning. There are 5 such tones; 4 primary ones, plus a "neutral" tone, the 5th (I will generally not put any number after a neutral tone Pinyin syllable).

There are also tone sandhi, rules which dictate if a tone needs to change to a different tone because of the tone of the following syllable.

And then, there are the inevitable inconsistencies. Here are some among names used to address people.

Bruce Lee's Chinese name is 李小龍. In Pinyin those individual syllables are Li3 Xiao3 long2, but tone sandhi dictates that two third tones in a row should be pronounced as a 2nd and a 3rd tone, respectively. Thus, his full name is pronounced Li2 Xiao3long2.

That's the same tone sandhi rule that says that if you hear Xu2 Lao3shi1, you cannot know if that is, e.g., 許老師 (Xu3 Lao3shi1) or 徐老師 (Xu2 Lao3shi1), because both names are pronounced the same way due to tone sandhi effects on the former.

However, it seems to be that if a two-syllable word which follows a last name is already two 3rd tones, then you don't apply this tone sandhi rule. So for 3-character names, you may have to know the tones of the second and third characters to know how you should pronounce the first.

The individual syllables of Yo-Yo Ma's Chinese name 馬友友 are each 3rd tones: Ma3 You3 you3. However his "given name" of 友友 in some ways is a unit on its own, and tone sandhi already changes it to be pronounced You2you3. For his name, that renders moot the idea of tone sandhi for 馬, which is now followed by a 2nd tone, not by a 3rd tone.

This same pattern repeats for President Ma of Taiwan: 馬總統 is Ma3 Zong3tong3, which is pronounced Ma3 Zong2tong3. This would also be the case for any random "Boss Ma", 馬老闆: Ma3 Lao3ban3 would change from tone sandhi to be pronounced Ma3 Lao2ban3. (Woo, I must have forgotten how 闆 is written, that feels a bit odd.)

Tone sandhi applies to the name of Confucius, 孔子, whose individual syllables are Kong3 Zi3, but which is pronounced Kong2 Zi3. Of course, when I first encountered his name that was not obvious to me, since most or all the words I'd encountered with 子 in it did not have it pronounced as zi3, but as zi (neutral tone), e.g., 孩子 (hai2 zi; child)，兒子 (er2 zi; son). I consequently mistakenly thought it was pronounced Kong3 zi. Probably 子 is always pronounced Zi3 when it is part of someone's name.

In English the indefinite article a changes to an when followed by a vowel, e.g., an apple. Tone sandhi is vaguely like that, but rather more difficult. The tone sandhi rule I described above is one of the most striking, but there are other tone sandhi rules, too.

Converting Palm Calendar to iPod

2011-04-03T12:11:00.042-04:00

4/8/11: Stop the blog presses, I eventually concluded there were too many problems and other issues with the data conversion I tried (some details below). I exported the partially messed-up data I had from Google Calendar, then imported that into a different Google account. Next I deleted the (original) linked iPod-Google Calendar from each end, and remade my Google Calendar from scratch, using selective Windows Copy and Paste operations between the two Google Calendar accounts using different browsers (and occasionally copying text from Palm Desktop), doing various modifications along the way. The result is a much cleaner set of events, without historical event record baggage (and any associated performance hit when syncing).

If you have a need to keep your historical events and/or you sync more than just your own calendar, good luck -- based on my experience, you are going to need it, if you hope to have your data "properly" converted.
5/20/11: It turns out you may need good luck even to sync your own calendar (see below), although my problem with deleting events may have been fixed with my upgrade from iOS 4.2.1 to 4.3.5. Some pre-4.3.5 version higher than 4.2.1 may have fixed it, but I have no idea which one, if so.

I UNDID WHAT I COULD FROM THE ***DATA CONVERSION*** DESCRIBED BELOW:

After reviewing this thread http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=2952265980c1b13d&hl=en (82 replies to original query as of 4/3/11) and http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740 (read all tabs on that page, currently Setup/Sync Calendars/Known Issues), I used PdbConverter (http://www.shredzone.org/projects/pdbconverter/wiki), whose author kindly made it available for free. The process involves converting your Palm DateBook.mdb file to an iCalendar file, then uploading that to a Google Calendar account and synching that with your iPod's Calendar app.

Years ago I synched my Palm Calendar with PC MeetingMaker, but after multiple instances of data corruption (some apparently related to Daylight Saving Time), I gave up that synching. My Palm Calendar data has long been maintained and accessed solely by me, manually. I hope I encounter few, if any, data glitches from the synching that I'll now be doing with Google Calendar. (4/8/11: So much for that hope.)

I generally don't keep or care about historical records on my Palm Calendar. According to my recollection, I had deleted many (all?) of the non-repeating historical ones on the Palm prior to this conversion, intending to reduce unimportant data baggage. However, when I made one last pre-conversion backup of my Palm data to my PC using Palm's HotSync Manager, I think I forgot to change the settings to Handheld overwrites Desktop, so the default of Synchronize the files applied, horribly effectively undoing my deletion of historical records.

I never had any need to use Palm Categories (e.g., Business, Personal) for Calendar records, so that simplified my data conversion.

In some of my other app research, someone suggested simply using Google's free calendar app. I want as much of my iPod functionality to be available even when I'm not online, so I rejected that option.

IPOD/GOOGLE CALENDAR OBSERVATIONS:

Calendar search is available at the top of the List view. Both the List view entries and search results are limited to records going back one year (as I see from repeating events); see http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2667000. I largely use the Calendar for future events, so that search limitation probably won't hamper my usage.
Google Calendar apparently defaulted all my converted events to send me e-mail 10 minutes beforehand. I quickly changed my settings to put a stop to that, and to other unwanted e-mail notifications.
When logging into this gmail account using the Google app, I was asked whether to allow the app to use 10 more MB on my iPod, to which I agreed. That was presumably related to the calendar conversion.
If you turn off the iPod when Calendar is running as the foreground application, when you turn the iPod back on, regardless of whether you are in the List/Day/Month view, you will be taken to today's date (and the current time) (4/9/11: This behavior does not seem consistent; I don't know what the deal is.). That does not happen if you close the Calendar and reopen it later, even if you turn the iPod off in between. If I am looking at a future (or past) date, that unstoppable go-to-today behavior is counterintuitive and undesirable -- it means I have to do more work to get back to that date, which I may not have finished dealing with when I turned the iPod off. There is already a Today button which can accomplish the same thing but only at the user's request (tap). The obvious workaround is to always close the Calendar before turning off the iPod, but we shouldn't have to do or remember that.
To keep data cleaner (e.g., to avoid spurious results in searches), delete repeating events through Google Calendar, which allows deletion of All events in the series. The iPod Calendar can only Delete This Event Only ( = Google's Only this instance) or Delete All Future Events ( = Google's All following). I had tried to limit repeating events to one month in the past on the iPod in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Calendars > Sync, but that doesn't seem to have applied to the initial retrieval of calendar data from Google. Depending on your intended change, you might also want to modify repeating events through Google Calendar.
Although on the iPod, you cannot enter an Xth Y-day of the month repeating event, e.g., the first Friday of the month, you can do so in Google Calendar and let that sync with your iPod
(5/7/11: Some subsequent iPod modification of such an event apparently caused it to later show on the iPod under Repeat > Custom as "Every month on the (null) Friday", which in practice meant EVERY Friday, so this workaround isn't perfect. I almost never use my Google Calendar except for the add/delete "tricks" I write about in this blog entry, so I'm pretty certain the problem originated from iPod event modification(s). I can't reproduce this problem now with a new event and a few simple test modifications, though. I'll likely keep using this technique, since the apparent potential downside is limited.).
Don't overlook using Google Calendar's strengths; the iPod can "understand" more options than it allows you to use natively. Perhaps more options will be available in future iOS versions.
5/16/11: Ugh, that makes twice (!) today that about a month's worth of past events (back to 4/11/11) which I had previously deleted from the iPod abruptly reappeared, and had to be deleted for a second and third time. This bad behavior might be reproduced by flicking backwards in the List view too quickly (?) -- I know I have a tendency to do that. The associated Google Calendar account showed a 4/12/11 instance of a repeating event, which was apparently resurrected each time. The 2nd time the iPod calendar went wacko on me I also found two more instances of a different repeating event on 4/22/11 and 4/23/11 in Google Calendar. Anyway, I delete the bad events wherever they are found, and hope for better behavior in the future. When I get more time I will search to see if others have experienced similar problems, and if there is a recommended solution. I switched Calendars > Sync to the minimum of 2 weeks back instead of the 1 Month Back which it had been set on. I also got rid of a rarely-used Google Mail account which I had recently added for Mail only -- maybe that was interfering with the other Google account which I am using via Exchange for Contacts and Calendar? Perhaps not allowing "over the air" syncing to finish before exiting Calendar causes problems?
5/20/11: Argh, once again, many of the same events have returned on the iPod from the land of the already-deleted, dating from 4/12/11. Four events similarly returned on the Google Calendar side, dating from 4/12/11.
(Man, I miss my Palm Calendar!)
6/2/11: Yet again, events dating from 4/12/11 which I'd previously deleted have reappeared. I was just deleting events from 6/2/11 and 6/3/11 when the event List temporarily displayed only those two days, I got this bad sinking feeling, and bam, long-deleted events were back again, yet again.
8/27/11: I am cautiously optimistic that my earlier deleted events are finally staying deleted. I deleted them on the iPod very patiently (i.e., I waited for the "throbber" icon to stop rotating after every delete operation before starting the next one, to avoid possible data processing "race condition" errors), and they actually seem to be truly gone now. Perhaps it was a bug in iOS 4.2.1? I was only able to upgrade to 4.3.5 earlier this month; maybe that fixed this problem.
10/7/11: Ugh, cautiously was the right adverb for optimistic. Quite a number of my previously deleted events from as far back as 4/2011 are back again. Maybe iOS 5 will fix this, but I am not sanguine about such prospects.

Free Spanish dictionary apps: Span¡shD¡Ct

2011-04-03T10:52:00.002-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-spanish-dictionary-apps.html

PROS:

Word Game is fun for someone with my level of Spanish knowledge (I have to make educated guesses relatively often). A Spanish word is presented (with definite article if a noun) along with audio pronunciation, and you choose between 4 English translation choices. The exercises get harder if you get more correct answers, and easier if you make mistakes.

CONS:

Word Game: English misspellings (e.g., fourty instead of forty, lightening instead of lightning).
Word Game: Spanish word(s?) inadvertently included in English translation choices (mapa).
Ads.

11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.

Free Spanish dictionary apps

2011-04-03T10:41:00.003-04:00

Below are the free Spanish-English dictionary apps I'm trying out. Each one also gets its own separate blog entry, into which incremental updates will flow over time. If I ever feel those entries are sufficiently mature, I may make a chart comparing all of these apps.

One or more (all?) of these apps have more powerful paid versions, but for now I don't have a need for capabilities beyond what I've found in the free versions.

11/26/11: For a free Spanish-Spanish dictionary, see this blog entry.

"Converting" Palm Contacts to iPod

2011-04-01T00:20:00.016-04:00

In my Palm Contacts, I generally only kept basic information on a small set of people and organizations with whom I connected more frequently. I transferred that data to my iPod primarily by using the iPod's Exchange account capabilities in its Mail, Contacts, Calendars area, using a gmail account as a contacts conduit. I don't actually use that gmail account to e-mail anyone; its primary utility to me is to provide a web interface into, and to serve as a backup repository for, my iPod contacts.

As I had done with my Palm Tasks, I used my PC to transfer some data using copy and paste between Palm Desktop and gmail's web interface. I entered some data on the iPod, through which I could enter, e.g., a person's Chinese character name as "Nickname" using "Add Field". Gmail's Add dropdown list allows you to add a nickname (or other fields, e.g., Title and Company), but I couldn't conveniently add Chinese characters from my PC.

Google now provides the capability of restoring contact data from within the past 30 days, which could certainly be useful if, e.g., you mistakenly delete some:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1069522&hl=en
Thanks, Google! You're an even better backup buddy now!

Miscellaneous notes about the process follow. Any item here may no longer be relevant in the future, and it's always possible I misremembered or misrecorded something, but maybe these will be helpful. I only rechecked some of these before adding them here.

"Google Sync for iOS devices is still in beta" (as of 4/2/11), per Google's note under the "Known Issues" tab on http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139635 (same link as given above). Prospective users of this method should read
Do not double-click on a Windows .vcf file (a Contacts transfer avenue out of Palm Desktop that I investigated, but in the end did not use) that contains lots of records, as you will be forced to manually close each one of them.
The order of phones entered in gmail is significant. The iPod's order is work/work/home/mobile/pager; the default type for input is mobile.
"Other" or "Main" as a phone type from gmail will not sync to the iPod as phone.
3 different phones and 2 different e-mails seemed to be the most that would come over from gmail for a given contact via a sync operation.
iPod entry does not allow for 2+ home phone numbers or 3+ generic work numbers.
Gmail defaults to sorting by first name, but you can change that to last name (which would match the iPod).
Gmail data entry work/home distinction of e-mail gets lost in the sync to the iPod.
It doesn't seem possible to turn off synching (with the idea of only periodically re-enabling such temporarily) without losing all contacts stored on the iPod, so there will be ongoing synching and concurrent battery-draining (except when in Airplane Mode). Even though I quite rarely update my iPod Contacts, at least I'm protected from forgetting to sync, and consequently finding my iPod and gmail contacts out of sync (but see important 7/31/11 note below).

4/3/11: jmcrsb wrote "from palm desktop v6.2.1 exporting all the contacts as Vcard format allowed nearly perfect import into gmail contacts" in this Google discussion thread, but I'm already done with my Contacts "conversion".

7/31/11:
I misunderstood exactly which iPod contacts get synced to Google. I have occasionally entered new contacts from scratch on the iPod. I mistakenly thought that that contact data was syncing to Google, but it wasn't. The reason I was confused is because if I had originally entered a contact on Google, then iPod updates to that contact's data would get synced to Google. However, totally new entries on the iPod get no link to the Google account, UNLESS they are entered under the Exchange group under Contacts, which I didn't do.
(8/28/11: If you press and hold on, e.g., a phone number in an e-mail message, you are prompted with a choice to Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact. Following along with what I wrote above, Create New Contact will only add the entry on the iPod, not on Google. So for my purposes for new contacts, it's better to copy the phone number text and paste it in while manually creating the new contact under the Exchange group.)

As I have mentioned in other blog entries, my iPod has a hardware problem; I have no regularly reliable way of backing up my iPod's contact data through my PC's iTunes connection, so instead rely on Google for such backup. To correct this just-discovered data problem, I manually created duplicates of these iPod-entered contacts, some in my Google account, and some on the iPod but this time under the Exchange group under Contacts. That gave me the Google backup that I mistakenly thought I was already getting.

Then I deleted the original data for each of those contacts, data which was only on my iPod. In some cases, I no longer needed a contact's data to be on the iPod, so those I simply deleted without first duplicating them on Google. I had one contact entry which is merely one of my own e-mail accounts, which I don't need or want synced elsewhere, and it serves as a little reminder to me about where to enter new contacts on the iPod when I want them backed up to Google.

8/21/11:
Presuming you sync your iPod Contacts to Google as I describe above, then when you lack WiFi access to the Internet, I strongly recommend you switch the iPod to Airplane Mode before accessing Contacts. Twice when away from home (and consequently away from my usual WiFi) I failed to do that, and my iPod seemed to have gone into continuous overdrive trying to find WiFi access, presumably in order to synchronize my Contacts data with Google's. The iPod got hotter than I remember it ever getting on any other occasion (8/22/11: Hmm, queueing up multiple podcasts to load at one time also heats the iPod up significantly.). In one case, I completely powered down the iPod until I could get it to WiFi access again, although other solutions might also have been able to get it to cool down.

"Converting" Palm Tasks to iPod using Notespark

2011-03-31T23:06:00.001-04:00

The Palm Tasks functionality is like a to-do list, with the ability to assign a priority between 1 and 5 to each item. You could check each item off when it was done, keeping an archive record of it on your PC if you chose. I just learned a moment ago that you could also set a due date on an item, a feature I obviously never used.

I simply used Palm Tasks as a somewhat longer term to-do list, which I only occasionally consulted. Given that, I created five Notespark (which I first wrote about here) Tags tasks1 through tasks5, and used copy and paste operations on my PC (between Palm Desktop and Notespark's web interface) to throw all the items having a priority of 1 into a single note with the Tag tasks1, doing the analogous operation down to the items having a priority of 5. Then I synched Notespark to get those items onto my iPod.

I never archived checked-off Tasks items on the Palm, I merely deleted them. Keeping all the items in Notespark notes allows me to access them rapidly without needing a dedicated to-do list app, and I just delete the text of any item that I finish.

Netflix video on the iPod

2011-03-28T20:54:00.001-04:00

To lengthen my iPod's battery life, I've been keeping screen brightness at about 30%, which has proved fine for everything except my first foray into a Netflix movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (for which a friend's husband won an Oscar!). Since many of the movie's early scenes are fairly dark, I cranked the brightness up to 100% in order to see things more clearly.

I also used earphones for the first time, really, and the sound is pretty good. It was reassuring to see that all that lint in the earphone port didn't cause any problems. I'm only 17 minutes into the movie, and the flexibility of Netflix streaming on-demand means that's as far as I'll get until I'm good and ready to continue, like maybe during a future meal....

Watching episodes of the comedies The Office and (the animated) Futurama previously was totally fine at 30% brightness, but much of those shows' entertainment value is their audio content. Setting the volume up to maximum without using earphones was okay in a quiet room.

Free PDF reader apps: PDF Reader Lite

2011-03-26T16:20:00.007-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-pdf-reader-apps.html

PDF Reader Lite is my favorite free PDF reader app.

PROS:

Nice flexibility in ways of getting PDF files onto iPod.
Text Reflow allows flowing the text into a single column for reading, which can be a boon. However, images are not displayed in Text Reflow, and "images" which are composed of specialized fonts, such as some chess diagrams, will be displayed in an unusable form.

CONS:

PDF Reader Lite lack's Safari's capability of allowing you to tap twice to either zoom in or zoom out on a column of text, a "natural" part of functionality for an iPod. To zoom without changing the total document form of the text, you can either use the spread-and-pinch of the iOS, or use PDF Reader Lite's magnifying glass functionality (tap in the center of the screen to bring that up), both methods of which require more manual futzing around to center a column of text (but see Text Reflow under PROS above).
Included manual would benefit from smoother English (see TIPS below, for a clearer explanation of how to move a file) -- author may be a native Chinese language reader based on a screenshot(s) in the manual.
Free version can only store or open 10 files. My usage over time will determine whether it's worth upgrading.

TIPS:

To move a file from one folder to another: Go into the folder, tap Edit, select the file you want to move by tapping on the circle to its left, tap cut (copy is also possible, if you want the file to appear in multiple folders), tap PDF Documents to go up a level, tap the folder you want to move the file into, tap paste. If you nest folders, extrapolate additional actions accordingly.
To get a file from the web, enter the URL of a page having a link to the PDF; don't enter the URL of the PDF. Then, when you click on the PDF link, choose Save Linked File. For example, enter http://www.myersandchang.com/index.php?p=385 (the Myers + Chang restaurant menu page), don't enter http://www.rwmanager.com/uploads/myerschang/DINNER_MENU_102510_1295711602.pdf (the dinner menu PDF).

Free PDF reader apps: iPDF

2011-03-26T15:47:00.006-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-pdf-reader-apps.html

PROS:

Has capability like Safari to tap twice to either zoom in or zoom out on a column of text, a "natural" part of functionality for an iPod.
Simple ("naive") search capability to find PDFs on the web might be useful for a casual search for a focused topic or title (e.g., "Pride and Prejudice").

CONS:

Very basic functionality.
Number of potential search results seems to be artificially limited. When searching for PDFs associated with "chess", the "View More Results" button no longer appeared after I tapped it 7 times. I find it very unlikely such PDFs on the web are exhausted after 8 screens' worth of results. For more complete results, try Google's Advanced Search, specifying File Type as "Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf)", after which you'll have to transfer the file to some other PDF reader, like PDF Reader Lite (which I discuss here).
Ads.

TIPS:

To rename a file: get into the Reader, tap Menu, Rename File. A name like CH_2009_04-06.pdf (for the April-June 2009 issue of Chess Horizons) of a series is typically more helpful than having the first few words of the PDF content showing as the title (the apparent default). For a magazine, those words could easily be the same from issue to issue.

Free PDF reader apps: Dropbox

2011-03-26T15:18:00.005-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-pdf-reader-apps.html

PROS:

Its built-in PDF reader has the capability, like Safari, to tap twice to either zoom in or zoom out on a column of text, a "natural" part of functionality for an iPod.

CONS:

This security concern, raised in 4/2011.

OBSERVATIONS:

On an iOS device, mark a document as a favorite to access it offline from that device: https://www.dropbox.com/help/77. 2 GB of such files can be synced.

Free PDF reader apps

2011-03-26T15:13:00.003-04:00

Below are the free PDF reader apps I'm trying out. Each one also gets its own separate blog entry, into which incremental updates will flow over time. If I ever feel those entries are sufficiently mature, I may make a chart comparing all of these apps.

7/2/11: I only rarely use PDF files on my iPod, and my focus to date has been on those typically having 2 or 3 columns in portrait orientation. PDF files having no columns will typically need to be read in landscape orientation for the text to be big enough to read; I'm not sure yet how much I will eventually cover that type of usage. I have also since loaded more PDF-reading apps on my iPod, but to date I have looked at those even less than the few I list below.

Dropbox (whose main functionality is to allow sharing of files over the web after you make an account, but which has a built-in PDF reader)
iPDF
PDF Reader Lite by Kdan Mobile Software LTD (my favorite)

Correcting my stroke order when writing 那

2011-03-24T20:08:00.002-04:00

Ouch, I just learned from my iPod that I've been writing the very basic 那 character using the wrong stroke order for many years. I had been starting with the leftmost downward stroke, and couldn't get 那 to come up as a possible choice of character on the iPod.

A little investigation confirmed that starting with the other natural (to me) first choice of stroke, going left to right at the top, then down, is correct, and that brings up 那 as a choice from which to select.

It is just wonderful to have such convenient chances with the iPod to easily practice Chinese characters (and split infinitives).

Overly Modern French 101

2011-03-23T19:42:00.002-04:00

I'd previously seen a story similar to the first in English, but don't remember having seen one in the style of the second. This type of thing is more fun to read in French than in English, though, at least for a francophile like myself. I edited out some text from the first which only made sense in the e-mail context in which I'd received it.

(1)
Puveoz-vuos lrie ceci? Seleuemnt 56 porsnenes sur cnet en snot cpalabes. Je n'en cyoaris pas mes yuex que je sios cabaple de cdrpormendre ce que je liasis. Le povuoir phoémanénl du crveeau huamin. Soeln une rcheerche fiat à l'Unievristé de Cmabridge, il n'y a pas d'iromtpance sur l'odrre dnas luqeel les lerttes snot, la suele cohse imotprante est que la priremère et la derènire letrte du mot siot à la bnone palce. La raoisn est que le ceverau hmauin ne lit pas les mtos par letrte mias ptuôlt cmome un tuot. Étonannt n'est-ce pas? Et moi qui ai tujoours psneé que svaoir élpeer éatit ipomratnt!

(2)
UN B34U JOUR D'373, J'37415 5UR L4 PL4G3 37 J3 R3G4RD415 D3UX J3UN35 F1LL35 JOU4N7 D4N5 L3 54BL3. 3LL35 CON57RU15413N7 UN CHÂ734U D3 54BL3, 4V3C 7OUR5, P4554G35 C4CH35 37 PON7-L3V15. 4LOR5 QU'3LL35 73RM1N413N7, UN3 V4GU3 357 4RR1V33 37 4 7OU7 D37RU17, R3DU154N7 L3 CH4734U 3N UN 745 D3 54BL3 37 D'3CUM3. J'41 CRU QU'4PR35 74N7 D'3FFOR7, L35 F1LL37735 COM3NÇ3R413N7 4 PL3UR3R, M415 4U CON7R41R3 3LL35 COURRUR3N7 5UR L4 PL4G3, R14N7 37 JOU4N7 37 COMM3NÇ3R3N7 4 CON57RU1R3 UN 4U7R3 CHÂ734U. J'41 COMPR15 QU3 J3 V3N415 D'4PPR3NDR3 UN3 GR4ND3 L3ÇON. NOU5 P455ON5 UN3 GR4ND3 P4R713 D3 NO7R3 V13 4 CON57RU1R3 D35 CHO535 M415 LOR5QU3 PLU5 74RD UN3 V4GU3 L35 D3MOL17, L35 53UL35 CHO535 QU1 R3573N7 5ON7 L'4M1713, L'4MOUR 37 L'4FF3C71ON 37 L35 M41N5 D35 G3N5 QU1 5ON7 C4P4BL35 D3 NOU5 F41R3 5OUR1R3.

Did the author of the first text intentionally add in some extra letters at times (cdrpormendre, priremère)? Or does that just show how difficult it is to write like that?

Ha, iPod Safari guesses that 745 D3 54BL3 might be a phone number and highlights it. Nope, it's just a tas de sable.

The significance of diacritical marks and special characters

2011-03-23T19:34:00.001-04:00

A friend from San Francisco once told me the tale of a person having received a Worker of the Year award. The award was in Spanish, and there was one minor problem...the printed award lacked the tilde (~) over the n in the Spanish word for year (año). The award thus read, "Trabajador del Ano" -- Worker of the Anus.
(Actually, I think my friend told me "Trabajador de Ano", but I think the middle word was probably "del" [of the], instead of just "de" [of].)

That's the most extreme case I've heard of where the lack of a diacritical mark makes a big difference.

On a more technical, but less disturbing, note, I recently learned a little tidbit about the eight-bit ISO 8859-15 (Western European Latin Alphabet #9) character set, which includes the Euro symbol along with some characters from the French and Finnish languages, characters which are missing from the more heavily used ISO 8859-1 (Western European Latin Alphabet #1) character set. Despite good intentions, ISO 8859-15 was apparently unable to overcome the popularity of ISO 8859-1.

The ISO 8859-15 bonus characters for French are œ, Œ, and Ÿ (replacing ½, ¼, and ¾, respectively). I had never heard of French words that had Ÿ in them, so I found it interesting that such a character existed in the French alphabet.

A French Wikipedia page, which I can't find at the moment, mentioned that when the working group met to decide what characters would go into ISO 8859-1, one member said there were no contexts in which œ would be confused with oe (hmm, for words that have oe, I can only think of Noël and Citroën off the top of my head, and that e is different). Another member of that working group worked for a printer company, and said that they didn't even have Ÿ available on their printers. This was the mid-1980's, it seems, so those may have been daisy-wheel and dot matrix printers.

Oof, I see 8859-15 also kicked out ¦ ("pipe") for a Finnish character, a dreadful decision for technical computer usage.

French Wikipedia page on ISO 8859-15

Free Chinese dictionary apps: Pleco

2011-03-20T11:54:00.014-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-chinese-dictionary-apps.html

PROS:

By default uses different colors to represent the 5 possible tones; colors can be turned off or configured. I'm trying red (1st tone), blue (2nd tone), green (3rd tone), purple (4th tone), gray (neutral tone), roughly following the red-yellow-blue-green-orange-purple-brown-black order of my Crayola crayon days. Yellow and orange, being lighter colors, afford less visual contrast from the white background, so I didn't use them. Gray (the default) seems most appropriate for neutral tone.
Add-on dictionaries available, both free and paid. You can switch freely between them within the app.
Settings > General > Enable Night Mode allows you to switch the background from white to black, making the display dark but readable.
The Wild button allows search for multi-character combinations (or multiple Pinyin syllable combinations) even when you don't know the first character (Pinyin syllable). For example, to see the multi-character (multiple Pinyin syllable) entries whose second character is 珠，enter:
@珠
(@ can be typed in normally, or by pressing Wild). Any 2-character entries are shown first, then any 3-character entries, etc. Even more search capabilities are described in the Advanced Tutorial section of the Instruction Manual, e.g., the use of $ to represent 0-3 characters (Pinyin syllables). These features make good usage of computerized capabilities, but I'm not sure how often I would actually need them. Still, it's useful to keep them in mind, since none of my other Chinese dictionary apps have such functionality.

Free Chinese dictionary apps: KTdict C-E

2011-03-20T11:51:00.004-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-chinese-dictionary-apps.html

KT is apparently for Klaus Thul.

PROS:

Seems to cold-start faster than CED, iCED, and Pleco. I don't like waiting when I want a translation or want to know what a character looks like, especially if I'm switching back and forth between a Chinese dictionary app and another app, like e-mail. Switching back to an app means it's not a cold-start of it, naturally.

CONS:

Ads.

Free Chinese dictionary apps: iCED

2011-03-20T11:47:00.037-04:00

12/22/11: The ABC Edition is $14.99 until 1/3/12 (50% off). I believe it should be the same as the free edition after you have bought the Add-on of the ABC Chinese-English dictionary, which I have, and am happy using.

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-chinese-dictionary-apps.html

My preferred Chinese dictionary app. Its usage of the visual tone choices (see below) can save time when looking up a character phonetically, and is more smooth all around. It is also the only dictionary app I know of which allows you to copy out (to other apps) Pinyin syllables with tone indicators just like you would write by hand, e.g., Hǎo bàng! （好棒，Excellent!), instead of having to write Hao3 bang4!
PROS:

Adds all 5 visual tone choices as separate buttons to tap above the English keyboard, e.g., a horizontal line for first tone, as people would normally write by hand. I'm used to adding numbers to indicate the tones, but this functionality saves you from switching to the number keys when entering Pinyin.
You can copy and paste Pinyin syllables having these visual tone choices.

CONS:

Ads. This app serves me so well that I paid to remove the ads. I don't have an iPhone, so never really thought about how such ads nibble into one's 3G data usage, but that makes sense.

CC-CEDICT DICTIONARY LINGUISTIC ISSUES (which are not iCED's responsibility):

10/16/11: The surname whose Pinyin is Oū is given as 區, and for practical* reasons should perhaps be given only as 歐. Pleco, for instance, has it as 歐, which matches what my native Chinese speaker source expected.
Neither the 844-page Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary, published in 2008, nor the 1762-page Far East Chinese-English Dictionary, published in 1992, include 區 with the pronunciation Oū; in traditional Chinese, 區 is always pronounced qū, and is not a surname.
The 976-page simplified Chinese The Pinyin Chinese English Dictionary, published in 1991 by The Commercial Press, gives both 区 and 欧 (the simplified Chinese versions) as an Oū surname, but I suspect that 欧 is far more common than 区.

* It is not possible to wholly map traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese on a one-to-one character basis, although many apps, like iCED, make some attempt to do so, to serve users of either.

Free Chinese dictionary apps: CED

2011-03-20T11:46:00.012-04:00

Parent blog entry: http://kenamored.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-chinese-dictionary-apps.html

3/20/11: I cannot find this on the App Store now, maybe it's gone or has changed into something else.

PROS:

Includes "Say it!", apparently native speaker syllable-by-syllable pronunciation of entries, although I don't normally use that functionality.

CONS:

Search results do not start appearing as you type, unlike all other Chinese dictionary apps I have tested to date. This app may very well be a work in progress, so future updates may bring this capability.
No in-app documentation.

Free Chinese dictionary apps

2011-03-20T11:44:00.012-04:00

The iPod's native support for Chinese character has been a huge boon to me, since I am usually eager to learn to read and write more traditional Chinese characters. Although I have learned some simplified characters in my classes, I focus on traditional ones.

Below are the free Chinese dictionary apps I'm trying out. Each one also gets its own separate blog entry, into which incremental updates will flow over time. If I ever feel those entries are sufficiently mature, I may make a chart comparing all of these apps. Even if somebody already made such a chart, my chart will be tuned to characteristics I personally found useful (including app loading speed, perhaps). I traffic in day-to-day practical uses of Chinese (like learning that 板栗 on a Chinese restaurant menu means "Chinese chestnut"), not academic or literary ones.

CED (3/20/11: I cannot find this on the App Store now, maybe it's gone or has changed into something else)
iCED
KTdict C-E
Pleco

One or more (all?) of these apps have more powerful paid versions, but for now I don't have a need for capabilities beyond what I've found in the free versions.

If you have the space, it's worthwhile keeping multiple such apps loaded. In 10/2011, I was surprised to discover that, for about one day overall, iCED (version 3.2 (111)) would crash every time I opened it, although that might have been related to it having difficulties purging itself of the bug I'd recently found. It was particularly odd timing, since I had just been thinking about how iCED has been my favored Chinese dictionary app for some time, and that I had decided that I would make the in-app purchase to get rid of the ads, primarily to support the creators' efforts since the ads didn't meaningfully interfere with my usage. I temporarily used Pleco, generally my second choice, while iCED was unusable.

What's in a name?

2011-03-18T23:37:00.001-04:00

I searched far and wide (well, maybe 15 minutes) to find a "decent" name for this blog address, needing to supply the part before ".blogspot.com". Along the way, I traveled through a desolate wasteland of apparently long-abandoned blogspot blogs. I hit a number of them, including ones whose creators had, years ago, taken attractive blog names, and then written a single shill entry to try to make money from advertising. I should have used blogger's internal method of checking possible names instead of dignifying those sites with hits.

I tried using my first name (Ken) inside or with some other words, rejecting everything my web search turned up for "words ending in -ken". I remember hearing that Steven Sondheim used a rhyming dictionary, probably long before the web made that easy.

I eventually pulled down a paper dictionary from my shelf to look at words that started with "en", eventually considering that "kenamored" fit the bill quite well -- enamored was already a word I had planned to use in the blog description. Don't ask a (regular) paper dictionary, however, to find "words ending in -ken."....

Converting Palm memos to iPod using Notespark

2011-03-18T20:51:00.017-04:00

I recently got a used 3rd generation (no camera) iPod Touch. It has an unreliable communication port, so synching data with iTunes does not appear to be a practical possibility without a $200 repair (3/20/11: If I really needed iTunes connectivity, an Apple Certified Refurbished iPod Touch could be a better deal, coming with a new battery and outer shell, plus free shipping). However, after fiddling with the connected cable, I was at least able to upgrade the iPod's iOS to 4.2.1. Then my adventure began, and a most enjoyable adventure it's been.

The first Palm PDA data I converted for use on my iPod was Memos, of which I had a couple hundred. After discovering that the iPod's built-in Notes application was incredibly ("laughably") basic compared to Palm Memos, I researched various replacement apps in Apple's App Store and on the web.

The clear winner: Notespark ($4.99 when I installed it). It quickly and correctly converted all of my Memos into its own notes, translating over the Palm category (e.g., "Business", "Personal", plus the categories I had created) into a Tag.

Notespark synchronizes note data from iPods over the web (using https) to their servers. Although I originally wanted to keep the synching of data between my iPod and my PC, I couldn't do that with the iPod's broken communication port -- the iPod wouldn't show up reliably as a device in iTunes. However, my notes being on Notespark's servers brought the huge advantage of being able to edit notes over the web. Using a computer, I can copy lengthy text from the web onto my iPod (after a sync), or edit Notespark notes whenever a computer keyboard is more helpful than the iPod's on-screen keyboard (most of the time, although at the moment, I can only enter Chinese from the iPod).

Some Notespark note advantages over Palm Memos:

Notespark Tags are like Google Mail's Labels: more than one can be applied to a single data object (a Notespark note or an e-mail message, respectively).
Accepts Chinese characters, providing a great practical opportunity to practice writing them more often. To use Chinese characters (I use traditional, but behavior is presumably the same for simplified) when creating a new Tag, you must include a regular English letter to activate the Save button. Then you can delete the English letter and use the still-active Save button. I've notified Notespark of this bug; the Notespark web interface works fine with Chinese characters and does not need this workaround.
Lengthy notes are possible. On the Palm, I had been forced to split some text across multiple memos because it wouldn't fit into a single one.
You can limit the scope of a search to the notes within a given category, e.g., All (closest to the Find capability on Palm, which always searches through all Memos and other data stores such as Calendar, Contacts, etc.), Starred, or associated with a specific Tag you have created. If you have a Tag for, e.g., Project_1, and you only want to look for occurrences of a particular string within notes that have that Tag, you can do so, avoiding superfluous search results associated with other Tags.
Because you can sync data on the Notespark server with your iPod, if your iPod is out of power but you have access to an Internet-connected computer, you can make changes to your notes over the web and sync them to your iPod later, when it does have power.
The reverse chronological ordering, based on date last edited, of notes, can be helpful. One time I had edited multiple notes having multiple Tags, and a short time afterward I remembered there was something I had written which I had wanted to deal with. Checking the All category showed me the notes I'd edited recently, so I was able to quickly find what I was looking for.

Some Palm Memo advantages over Notespark notes:

Can rename a category and simultaneously update all memos already associated with it. Pick your Tag names carefully in Notespark, or else you may be in for some laborious future renaming, one note at a time (speaking as someone who knows from multiple such experiences).
Categories sort case-insensitive, the most intuitive way. "iPod" should not appear lower in an alphabetical list than "Zune", which is what would happen now in Notespark on an iPod. Before converting from Palm Memos you may wish to rename all your categories to use consistent letter case for sorting consistency within Notespark. The Notespark web interface does sort categories case-insensitive. I've notified Notespark of this inconsistency; they've filed it with other bugs, and hopefully it will eventually be fixed so that iPod Notespark sorts categories case-insensitive, as it should.
Memos stay in the order found on the Palm (this was even a choice within the Palm Desktop PC client: Sort by "Order on Handheld"). If you grouped two memos adjacent to each other, you could edit either of them without disturbing the order in which they appear among other memos. Notespark Settings allows notes to appear either in reverse chronological order by last date edited, or in alphabetical order of "title" (what I believe is the first line of text of a note). Notespark's title order option is not as useful as the arbitrary order of the Palm, which you could set yourself by dragging a note to a different ordinal position.

I've only lightly touched on the web interface and other aspects of Notespark. Check out https://notespark.com for more information.

I have no affiliation with Notespark other than as a satisfied customer.