DIY Whiteboard For $3.00
Like most geeks, I love whiteboards. I like it for doing quick UMLs or to just quickly get ideas out (I don’t like them when used for power trips during interviews though - thank you very much).
Also, for some reason, love to practice my Chinese characters on a whiteboard. The big whiteboard pen is closer to a 毛笔 than a normal ball point pen, but takes less effort to use (the ink, the clean up, etc).
Bringing Up an EC2 Instance (Movie)
I use Amazon’s S3 quite a bit and I really like it. I’ve also been very curious about using Amazon’s EC2 - their cloud computing product.
If you’ve never heard of it, what EC2 allows you to do is bring up images of computers into a big network of processing power and bandwidth. It’s like you have a whole box under your control, but … there is no box. It’s like VMWare for servers. The billing for these instances is by the minute hour - around $0.10 for Linux and $0.12 for windows - so you can bring up test boxes only when you want them, or throw a bit of extra power at a problem.
Hidden Keys on the iPhone
You may already know when you are filling in a URL with the iPhone if you hold down the .com button for a few seconds you are offered selections of .net and .org, but you might not know other keys do the extra-bit-on-hold too.
I was just testing out the next version of my XiaoCiDian iPhone application and found that other keys offer other options when you hold them down. Mostly vowels and and a few punctuation key. Here are some screenshots:
Frequently Asked Question about Chinese on the iPhone
I’ve been lucky enough to get quite a few emails asking about how Chinese input works on the iPhone 2.0 software. I have received several emails from people with jailbroken 1.4 phones that want to upgrade to 2.0, but want to know how Chinese input works before going to the trouble of upgrading.
Most of the emails were referring to the post with the movie showing Chinese input on the iPhone, but some parts in the movie were a bit unclear. I responded to a few people directly, but this post will likely get more google search hits so it might be a bit more helpful.
Mac OS X Regex Widget Update 1.7
(RegexWidget is a Mac OS X dashboard regular expression testing widget)
Another small update to the Regex Widget. A bug reported by Niels Castle led to a new feature and an, arguable, bug fix.
The new feature is Multiline support. When you tick the multiline check box it allows the “beginning of line” (^) and “end of line” ($) parts of a regex to work. See the screen shot for an example:
XBox Controller as a SNES Controller
If you are into playing emulated Super Nintendo games on your Mac OS X laptop, but find the keyboard awkward to use, and have a spare Xbox controller, and a spare USB cord laying around … have I got a deal for you.
(I should preface this with using game emulators and and game ROMS is, sadly, of questionable legality)
Short and sweet: it seems XBox controllers (non 360) use USB to do their magic, so modifying an XBox controller to use with your computer is very simple. Just cut the XBox controller and the USB cords then wire them together (leaving out the yellow wire). The inside wire colors will match up so it shouldn’t be hard, but here is a movie showing how it’s done (ignore the driver part unless you are on windows).
Printing Labels on Mac
How to print address labels on Mac from Address book, and any other kind of consumer Avery stock.
Chinese Learner Social Network, Pinyin Sound Board, and Flex
My Chinese teacher’s semester is coming up, and a request he often gets in class is to have a way for people to practice correctly. It’s difficult to know if you are pronouncing something correctly, and if you practice the wrong way too much it tends to be hard to undo.
Depending on how you go about learning Chinese (Mandarin), you’ll probably start with how to pronounce pīnyīn (the romanization of Mandarin. For example, 谢谢 == xièxie). However, the pronunciation of letters in pīnyīn do not match English, and it’s easy to forget how the components sound.
Lookup Chinese Characters by Character
One hard part about learning Chinese is looking up new characters in a dictionary.
If you find the character online, it’s not that hard. You just copy and paste it into a dictionary like dict.cn, and you have your answer.
If you come across a new character in printed form, however, it’s not quite as easy. You have to know (or be able to deuced) the main radical, stroke, and count and then look it up in a paper dictionary (which is often a three step process). It is very time consuming for a noob such as myself.
Testing Browser Resolutions in Safari (Scriptlets)
I needed to test a couple different sites in different resolutions, and I couldn’t find a simple way to get Safari to resize to “standard” formats (1024x768, 800x600, etc). I found this post on MacOSX Hints about how to use scriptlets to make Safari go full screen, and decided to expanded upon it to solve my problem. Here are the scriptlets:
To install them just drag them to the Safari bookmark bar (as seen in the shot below).
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