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).
Trying to Video Chat between Mac and Windows?
Amazingly, everyone in my family now uses Macintoshes. Doing video chats with them is obviously simple - just fire up iChat and off we go. In general, I only video chat with my family.
One of my Chinese teachers, however, had the idea that we should try video chatting in Chinese to help me get some practice.
(For the curious, I am having trouble understanding Chinese. I can hear the sounds, I know I know the sounds, but they are not forming any meaning in my brain. With single words (with context) I am ok. I also have problems speaking full sentences - I can read and write pretty well, but that is only because I can rearrange word orders and take time to form what I want to say - something you can’t do when speaking)
Server Backup with Amazon S3 (Howto)
I’ve been interested in using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for server backups, but I couldn’t find a simple, straight forward howto. This is a walk though on one way to setup a Unix server to automatically backup data to Amazon S3.
I guess I should start out with what Amazon S3 is I suppose… It’s a service that you can use to store reams of data, offsite, online, accessible anytime for a decent price. As of this writing the costs are:
tudou.com : Chinese YouTube
If you are having trouble finding Chinese content to practice listening with, I found a neat site called tudou.com (土豆 - tǔdòu - which, as far as I can tell, means “potato”).
It’s basically a Chinese version of youtube, but it looks a lot nicer. When you watch a movie, the layout simulates a theater. I find that a nice touch. And just setting the background to black instead of “youtube white” makes quite a bit of difference in the experience.
Typing Pinyin on Windows Part ]|[ - Capital Letter Tones
One of my Chinese teachers is using my windows pinyin keyboard layout, and stumbled upon a problem. It seem that sometimes capital letters need tone marks too. For example, country names. Éguo (俄国, Russia) for example. It is rare in practice, but comes up quite often for teachers doing geography lessons.
I did a quick update to the layout to allow tone marks on capital letters. I’ve also heard reports that ctrl+alt+u doesn’t always create a u. I added ctrl+alt+v in addition to ctrl+alt+u to hopefully solve that problem. Both will now create a u. (I have only heard of 2 people having that issue)
Typing Simplified Chinese on Mac
(without installing any 3rd party software)
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