Comments for The Plot Hatching Factory

Comment on Android Chinese IME keyboards revisited by DS

DS — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:20:06 +0000

Mat, I am one of those for whom the Chinese0-only settings of gPen is proving problematic. I am having the exact problem you mentioned: the my strokes in the IME disappear after about a millisecond or two; I never have enough time to finish writing out a character even as simple as “你”. Can you tell me which setting increases the time delay for writing? I have version 2.4.8 of SCUT gPen.

I’m really looking forward to using gPen with Google Translate and the Hanping dictionary. After reading your article, I’m going to try out Smart Keyboard and Hanzi Recognizer as well. I’m going to start following this blog to watch out for other IMEs that accept written character input.

Comment on Android Chinese character clock by aabram

aabram — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:14:55 +0000

There is one hanzi clock widget I’ve found: Nanji Clock Widget. Not exactly the most configurable, but at least works without additional hassle.

Comment on Linguists vs Computer Scientists by Mat

Mat — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:24:10 +0000

Wow, thank you David. I’ll be in touch!

Comment on Linguists vs Computer Scientists by Prof. David Powers

Prof. David Powers — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 08:18:41 +0000

You’re spot on – I recruit people from Psychology, Linguistics, Neuroscience and Computing to work with me in Computational Linguistics/Computational Language Learning. Most of my Postdocs have an interdisciplinaray Cognitive Science background, but such a degree ends up being a political bunfight because there is really too little time to cover everything. So now I/Flinders have replaced a single CogSci undergraduate offering by a double degree covering all four disciplines, and am putting up scholarships (undergrad to start or swap into the double degree or postgrad to follow on with a PhD).

Basically, there’s too few a pool of people that I can really accept for a PhD because they don’t have both the linguistics/psychology/humanities background and the science/computing background.

My point is, it’s not the fault of computer scientists or linguists for knowing only their own area, because the system is biased towards become superspecialized – knowing almost everything about next to nothing, and interdisciplinary projects are notoriously hard to get funded, and similarly hard to get people for.

So it’s great to see someone trying to connect the dots.

As far as Chinese go, I’m an Australian learning Chinese (and writing this from Beijing where I spend several months a year on Chinese NLP projects) after many years of European languages, and needing to see/understand how our techniques work in Asian languages, and what new twists we get…

Anyway, if you’re ever in the neighbourhood (Adelaide or Beijing), look me up… Alternatively, drop me a line and I can put you in touch with a Computational Linguist in Melbourne who works on Asian languages…

David

Comment on Android Chinese character clock by Mike Newton

Mike Newton — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:13:28 +0000

This is a pretty awesome modification. I’d love to make some more language mods to my phone, but I don’t have a technical background nor the confidence to go fussing around inside the guts of my phone to make it happen.

Really cool blog too, by the way!

Mike

Comment on Android CEDICT Chinese dictionaries: QuanWei vs Hanping by Mark

Mark — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:20:43 +0000

@F I MacIllFhinnein Chinese handwriting recognition is now built-in to Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro.

Comment on Android CEDICT Chinese dictionaries: QuanWei vs Hanping by F I MacIllFhinnein

F I MacIllFhinnein — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 20:58:11 +0000

I have both Hanping and Quanwei, but the real dealbreaker for me is that Penpower’s handwriting interface works with Hanping and doesn’t with Quanwei. (Oh, and Quanwei insists on giving you both full-form and simplified characters instead of the one you want – in my case, full-form.) The two annoying things about Penpower are that if you use its keyboard it always clicks – no way of turning the noise off – and that it doesn’t seem to have an apostrophe: it’s amazing how often you want to use it when you have to do without it.

Comment on The Rebreather Decision by Hugo

Hugo — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:17:05 +0000

Well, 2 years later and nothing delivered. I enjoyed divng a YOBD these last years

Comment on Android CEDICT Chinese dictionaries: QuanWei vs Hanping by Oepix

Oepix — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:54:09 +0000

Thanks for the information. Me and my wife (she is chinese) tried some of the apps and she also had some problems with Hanzi recognizer, to recognize her writting. we also tried Hanping CE and it is really good.
I hope they will soon finish porting Pleco or a similar camera recognizer, which is offline usable. I tried the demo of one OCR-app for chinese characters (I think it was called chinese character camera recognizer), but it needs a active internet connection for tranlations.

Comment on 90W UFO Grow Light: Chinese quality explored by Mat

Mat — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:04:54 +0000

I didn’t look at others because I haven’t bought any others. To an extent with the price what it was I thought “how bad can it be?” The same outfit(s) appear to produce similar ’300W’ lights, in a rectangular shape. Heaven only knows by how much they’re exaggerating that.

In my view, if the cost of proper LED lighting can’t be justified and you don’t want to build them yourself, then the best option is go to with compact fluorescent lighting. You can buy very large and bright devices, they’re going to cost you a bit more in power and you will absolutely have to contend with hundreds of watts of heat, but power is kind of cheap and heat is easy to get rid of.

Right now LED lighting only seems to make sense if you can be sure of getting a high quality unit and using some nice power LEDs coming out of China which cost effective.