Since there’s few enough people talking about these, I seem to get a few people commenting based on organic search. There’s been some notable developments in terms of Chinese-capable IMEs on Android of late and I thought I’d kick out an update on those.
First of all, Google has been updating their default Android English/European keyboard and the Chinese pinyin keyboard. Google pinyin has a button to fast switch to English but there’s no way of getting back. Fortunately Smart Keyboard Pro added Chinese recently. This has a simple iPhone-like button to switch between any languages you have enabled. Finally we have a one-button switch between English and Chinese.
The English keyboard is very good, at least as good as Android’s default keyboard although you may need to get in and change some settings like getting auto capitalisation and training full stops/spaces to work etc. The Chinese keyboard seemed as competent as Google pinyin although of course it doesn’t have the sync to cloud stuff.
Mark Carter, the guy behind the Hanping dictionary on Android, prompted me to take a fresh look at the handwriting IMEs. Now I don’t think these sorts of IMEs are useful for non-native speakers, as a rule, because we tend not to be super fast at sketching hanzi and quite experienced with pinyin.
However one app really surprised me, gPen. It’s available in traditional and simplified variants. When you run it you get a large qwerty keyboard with an animated advert on the top. Oh oh! And it makes horrific tones out of the box, so you hit the settings and they’re all in Chinese which is going to prove problematic for some.
However… once I turned the tones off and dialled up the time I had to write a character (increased the delay allowable before the IME goes with what I’ve written), I found it very good! What you do is sketch on top of the qwerty keyboard, it’s genius really. So you can tap out stuff in English if you want, or sketch out characters.
At first I was painstakingly drawing characters with limited success but later on I just scribbled them and it seemed to work better somehow, not sure why that is. It looks like it’s stroke order sensitive, which is fine if you’ve been religious about stroke order when you learned characters like I have been. Maybe that’s the extra information it needs to work so well even on messy scribbles?
Now I’m not sure I’d actually use gPen much because I find the Smart Keyboard Pro option much more useful for me. However the IME is so good that it’s absolutely useful in terms of sketching a character you don’t know into a dictionary.
It may also be worth mentioning an app called Hanzi Recognizer. This is a standalone full screen app which allows you to sketch out a character and get a list of candidates and CE-DICT entries for them. It’s free so I suppose I should try be nice, but it’s hard having been spoiled by Pleco’s recognizer. You need to finish writing something and then hit recognize. It also seems to put odd stroke labels on what you’re sketching, as if you’re certain about those on a character you don’t know… still anyway, it seems useful in light of no other Android apps like this.
Earlier this year I was happy to proclaim Swype a revolution in mobile. I’d walk down the street merrily swyping out entire emails with just my thumb. I had to get on a beta but after it was installed, life was generally pretty good. It was an awesome keyboard, not touched by legions of also rans. Unfortunately, Swype Inc are their own worse enemies.
Firstly, these guys love themselves. Rather than just put the damn thing in the market, for the last year we’ve had to mess around with a craptastic seperate installer app, frequently dig out old usernames and passwords for a beta to get reinvited to download the thing again. On top of that at one point the craptastic installer wouldn’t register the keyboard so it unhelpfully just whinged about not being the right device because it thought you had stolen it. Turns out the solution was a weird hack of pressing back, right at the end, rather than OK. Nice…
Then there’s that fucking pop-up. This is what makes me think they’re not even using their own keyboard. If you select a word that’s down the list of choices, because of a custom word you entered, Swype helpfully pops up this message to tell you what’s happened and tell you that you can delete the word if you like. That’s great, but it pops up every fucking time this happens. There’s no control to disable it. What’s more, it’s persisted through at least one update. This is just plain baffling.
Worse of all, however, is the fact that whatever was good about Swype they’ve just gotten rid of. Where once I used to be able to sketch out words and write away with minimal corrections, now every second bloody word needs to be corrected. Sometimes I’m just tapping the keys because I’m in a bloody hurry and can’t be arsed taking my chances on whether Swype will get it right again. I thought this was maybe me, but today I spoke to someone else who had exactly the same experience. Swype has basically gone shit.
All this time, you can’t buy it, the endless beta bullshit, the lame show stopping obvious bugs, and the virtually broken actual swyping, and we’re ready to call it a day. It’s frustrating because they recently added an actual swypable Chinese keyboard. It’s kind of nifty although they’ve not really thought through about how much of a time waster it is to disambiguate two things in a row for single characters. There’s also a handy way to flick to English, but the long press scroll through entire list of languages to get back to Chinese.
It’s actually easier to use the Google pinyin keyboard and switch to English, even without text prediction, than it is to have to switch entire languages. I switched to the standard Android keyboard earlier this morning and already I’m not going “oh for fuck sake!” at my phone at yet another Swypo. Thanks Swype, you were good when you were young but now you’ve let yourself go and you’ve become far too much hard work, I’m ready for the next big thing.
I bought this 90W LED grow light for my chilli greenhouse off eBay for $108 including postage. That’s astonishing value, way better than anything else on the market. By all accounts, these things are all over eBay, selling like hotcakes. Probably to dope growers but let’s not go there…
I’ve been happy with it, I could see it drew bugger all electricity and is bright as hell. It sent me down an avenue of exploring LED lighting more fully but after I constructed my first simple 20W LED grow bar, it was apparent that LEDs were a lot better than this device was showing.
While I’m doing a rebuild of the greenhouse, I thought I’d whip the case off to see what sort of LEDs it has. Ugh, no dice. The thing has been made roughly like someone would make a barbeque. Extensive use of silicon and sealant used as a mounting solution including mains electrical blocks…
What we can see is that there are three PSUs. One of which is a 12V unit that powers the three ‘temperature controlled fans’. Well, it was quite apparent there’s no temperature control but I knew that anyway – they howl all the time. Other than that we have two identical mains LED driver boxes which feed through holes in a circular aluminium plate where the LEDs are which I can’t get to. They went through an electrical block though so I could simply measure the voltage and remove a wire and put my meter in series to measure the current.
I got about 55v on each circuit at 400mA. The current figure is unusual because 1W LEDs, which they’re supposed to be, are generally 300mW. Since we have a total of 110v of DC potential and 90 LEDs, it’s apparent they’ve got two parallel circuits in each side. Which means they’re running the LEDs at 200mW. Those aren’t 1W LEDs at all.
In total I got 22.78W and 22.95W each so 45.7W. Almost exactly half of what the thing was sold as. These are so ubiquitous on eBay and the Chinese sellers on Alibaba that I think there’s actually more than one factory pushing them out in Shenzhen. There’s probably only one outfit making the metal housing and the acrylic face but other than that they probably put what they want in there.
China is still where it’s at for LEDs. Recently some actual branded LEDs with good specification from a firm called Prolight have begun being sold by Chinese vendors on eBay for prices better than bulk deals of no-name questionable heritage LEDs on Alibaba. I recently bought 20 x 3W Red LEDs for $27. They call them 3W, everyone does, but they’re more like 1.75W. The convention appears to ignore the much lower forward voltage of different types of LEDs. Regular 1W LEDs draw about 600mW for reds and genuinely 1W for blue and white. 3W white LEDs tend to be about 2.5W in reality.
This is pure power consumption, not light output. I’m not even going to go there on the issue of luminous flux when it comes to buying LEDs from China. Essentially this is a figure you can completely discard because it’s something that they entirely made up, or they don’t understand such as quoting Lumens for 660nm deep red LEDs which is rather nonsensical.
Anyway, these awesome LEDs appearing on eBay recently means I can buy the equivalent in power consumption (to say nothing of the fact I’m sure they’re a lot better than the ones in this ’90W’ UFO), for about $60. I previously paid twice this price for 1W LEDs and I’m exceedingly happy with those but this time I know where they came from and have the manufacturer’s full data. That’s not normally something you see in China either. One incredibly common practice you see on Alibaba is multiple firms selling exactly the same product but modifying the part number and claiming they’re the manufacturer. You can tell just from the style of the table and the rest of the model number that it’s the same part. Just one more thing I fail to see the point of…
That still means I’d need to mount and power them for $48 which isn’t doable for a one off. However if you were building a larger system, you absolutely could do better.
Particularly taking into account a better design, higher efficiency LEDs and so on. From this episode and my experiences of chatting away to suppliers in Shenzhen is the wilful deception which seems to serve no purpose than to turn you away. In this case the manufacturing technique is astonishingly low tech to the point that a small investment in tools and they could make these things cheaper and better.
They could make something rather like this 90W grow light that would be vastly superior while being only a little more expensive. That would be preferable because they’re competing against things a lot more expensive than this, there’s no need to go down the cheap and nasty route.
Last week I attended the Australiasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) workshop, which was more of a conference really. I had worried that I’d end the year not having an idea for the sort of academic ‘community’ I wanted to strive for but the ALTA workshop came along at the last moment, after all my exams were finished, and turned my world upside down in an extremely good way.
I was put on to this by the lecturer in a computing subject I took up this semester as a breadth component of my degree in arts (linguistics). Since computational linguistics has doubtless triggered his Google alert, I should say “Hi Tim, you can stop reading now 
”.
As I mentioned when I started this sort of return-to-uni blog/diary thing, when I decided to go back to university it was to study Chinese and China with a flavour of politics and international relations. I had constructed a kind of plan which revolved around picking up the skills and knowledge to add to what I was doing for a living so I could go and apply that to the whole growing nexus of all things China.
In my life I’ve caught a good few lucky breaks and that was reinforced when I set off to travel the world. Lots of bad stuff happened too but for some reason the fact that good stuff happened purely by accident had more of an immediate impact on my life philosophy. On that basis I tried to work to a plan but be prepared for strange things happening and to go with the flow.
These are things I’ve come to realise about exams which I would do well to recall next time. Particularly since I realised most of them after the mid term exams but apparently forgot much of them this time around.
Without fanfare, my last exam took place on Friday. As a ‘departmental’ exam, it took place in a regular lecture theater. It was vastly less stressful and hugely more convenient than the huge public exams at the royal exhibition hall. I don’t really get the point of the huge exams at the REH, they only do two exams a day and thousands of students gather and risk putting their belongings into a shipping container outside. Not willing to play that game, I travel to the exam with only what will fit in my pockets.
The only good thing the REH has going for it is that it’s a quiet and well lit environment. Other than that, it’s horrific. My Understanding Asia exam was deeply unpleasant. It was very hot and from my position I couldn’t make out any clock at all, which is of a critical concern when faced with an Exam Paper From Hell, the sort that requires multiple hand written essays on various subjects. Fortunately I just completed my final essay at the end of time, although had I been able to see a clock I would have spent a little less time on the previous five smaller essays. Six essays in one exam and a multiple choice section, horrific.
We all like Chrome, what’s not to like? Well the lack of your favorite Firefox extensions for one, in particular the excellent pop up annotators for Chinese such as Chinese PeraPera Kun and Mandarin Popup. Fortunately cschiller came along with the Zhongwen extension which he’s been updating quite regularly. It’s good work and for those of us that absolutely need an annotator such as this (I’ll pedantically stick to annotator because this is more correct than translator), it made Chrome viable. Hooray!
That said, there’s a new kid on the block. You could be forgiven for missing it altogether because it’s called Mouseover Dictionary Framework and as the name implies, it’s actually a framework for implementing this kind of extension for any language. The author, known to us only as dictinfo.blogspot.com, has also made a Chinese-English dictionary. All you need do is install both extensions, ten click on the dictionary icon and select Chinese-English. There’s a Chinese-French one too if that tickles your fancy.
Mouseover, as I’ll call it from now on, is very good indeed. Zhongwen has niggling issue such as leaving artifacts of the pop up notification on/in HTML elements when you turn it on. That’s just cosmetic but the way it constantly appears not to pick up certain compound words in a sentence is not cosmetic and is actually really quite annoying.
There are feature differences between the two extensions to bare in mind. Zhongwen has nifty features to post a highlighted word to your study list on ChinesePod or Skritter. It’s also got tone colours, which you may find nice if you happen to use the same tone colours as Zhongwen does (they’re not configurable). I don’t but having badgered cschiller, he put in a setting to turn them off.
Mouseover has heaps of settings, you can make the box exactly how you like. It’s really rather impressive in this regard. There’s also some nifty shortcuts to enable and disable for all tabs/only that page and to pin the look up word so it doesn’t go away. There’s the usual sort of highlight text and translate thing too. Chrome makes it hard to implement extensions that can work on text in a text input field, Mouseover has a workaround for this with a key combination that performs a lookup – again most welcome.
Update: Unfortunately it seems the Mouseover framework has a critical flaw. It appears to disable the ability to copy text from any page when it’s enabled. At first I thought it was just hanzi which would be annoying but it seems to be everything. This is a humdinger and a showstopper so with tail between legs I’m heading back to Zhongwen.
I’ve an exam tomorrow, a really really hard Chinese one. It’s basically an oral presentation and follow up interview. This is a real weak area for me, for whatever reason the process of figuring out what I want to say and turning it into Chinese, despite the fact I’m more than well enough armed with the vocab, grammar and so on, I just seize up.
My usual sorts of study are entirely visual so this is probably why. I’m also an obsessive reviser, I go over and fix things, and say a short thing again and again until I’m happy with it which is exactly how I write things too. It’s not, of course, how you speak. I’ve had two weeks to prepare, so I planned to put together my four possible candidate topics, write out some talks and practice them solid for a week.
That wasn’t how it worked out, I only finished my last story yesterday but I’m in better shape than I was last semester for this exam and I have to remind myself I actually did okay at this last time as well. Although this time they’ve changed the rules and you don’t get 10 minutes between finding out your topic. That’s unlikely to affect me, as ever it’ll be the mysterious brain freeze.
I’ll spend the rest of the evening taking a bit of a different approach and not looking at anything I have written down apart from a few brain-jogger topic queues and chat away to myself trying not to repeat/revise anything. I don’t anticipate being entirely successful, yet again I’m stuck by how I should have discovered and implemented this method rather sooner than now. 临渴掘井 (lin ke jue jing) springs to mind, an idiom that means not digging a well until one is thirsty.
It’s the last week of lectures at UniMelb now. I’ve a couple of final assignments due and a Chinese listening comprehension exam. Then there’s a massive break of a full month before the rest of my exams hit but it’s this week that’s got me under the most pressure. As the first year draws to a close I had to reaffirm my choices so I’ve been reflecting on that a little. Things seem pretty clear to me now, I’ll focus on linguistics and Chinese and gradually specialise in computational linguistics.
I’m very excited about next semester since I’ll be getting into some real nitty gritty on the linguistics side as well as ramping up my Chinese study into the study of modern Chinese literature which will be rather more interesting that stuffy old text books. I took a breadth subject in computing because I thought it would just be an easy subject given my techy background and I could really do with a bit less pressure. It hasn’t been difficult, which is welcome, but it has been perhaps one of the most influential subjects as it rekindled my interest in electronics and computing so that I’ve been engaged in a number of fun technical projects. While the subject itself is kind of basic, surprisingly the assessment projects are challenging.
At first I tried to deny it but the fact is I enjoy programming and learning technical stuff more than anything else. I suppose in my drive to do what has to be done, I forgot you can really have fun too. If I was ten years younger I think I’d follow in the footsteps of Tim Baldwin, who pretty much does just about everything I think is seriously cool only with Japanese. One of the things I’ve found difficult to deal with as a new undergrad student is that people generally don’t give a shit about. I mean that in the sense that if I want to take to an academic to work out what’s going on, get a bit of guidance etc, it just doesn’t really work. When you’re a post-grad and all that, you actually become their job so I’m sure it’s different. Well, I hope it is.
That’s okay because I know I’ve got heaps of stuff to learn yet but it would be nice to have some direction, particularly since I want to tackle a reasonable project in my chosen field over the long summer break. This time around that’s going to have to be something of my own devising but maybe at the same point next year, with another year under my belt and a decent project to demonstrate some aptitude and ideas, then things will become a little more guided.
Another belated entry but as I explained earlier, I’m lucky if I have time to scratch myself these days. I can’t believe how this semester has flown by, we’re half way through now. After next week there’s a two week mid semester break and then it’ll be into the home straight of final assignments and exams.
It’s probably also about time I figured out what direction I’m going to go with my studies. I completely support the so-called Melbourne Model which is the name given the new strategy of undergraduate degrees at the University of Melbourne. Essentially they got rid of all those zillions of different degrees which were basically just some words on the end of Bachelor of Arts etc. Instead there’s broad degrees which enforce a number of things including choosing from so-called interdisciplinary foundation subjects in the first year. More controversially there’s the dreaded ‘breath’ component where students have to choose subjects outside of their home faculty.
