Three cheers for this excellent hack.

Edit:  The code to this program is now long gone. My guess is it’s because the author embedded the graphics into the code which are not part of the GPL licence.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link
in  the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat,
you  will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

Too cool. Let’s try this:

• Potato
• Starch (starchy)
• Carbohydrate
• Organic compound
• Gas (gaseous)
• State of matter (The three classical states)
• Phase (matter)
• Outline of physical science (physical science)
• Natural science
• Science
• Knowledge
• Fact
• Information
• Sequence
• Mathematics
• Quantity
• Property (philosophy)
• Modern philosophy
• Philosophy

All right!

Now, YMMV: There seems to be a movement of people of sorts editing Wikipedia, trying to break the loop to Philosophy (source: Hacker News).

Boy, they have more time on their hands than me .

I’m not so big on expensive devices that creates a list of Japanese words or kanji – I’m sure there’s an “app for that” – but this little trick I found is free, you can set all the parameters you want, and runs on Ubuntu (and probably some other Linux distro).

Open a console and type:

notify-send こんにちは

This nifty little program pops-up a notification bubble, just like the ones were are used to see for other purposes on Ubuntu. I then create a script that randomly selects a word or expression from a database then set a cron job that runs the script every minute or so.

However, you need to tweak it if you send your message from cron. From a console, notify-send just uses your default X environment variables to display on your desktop but cron doesn’t know that and it won’t display anything. So you need to add your current X display before your script call.

DISPLAY=:0.0 notify-send こんにちは

Feel free to customize your script to your liking and make sure you read the man page to notify-send for more parameters (length of display, box title, etc.).

Happy hacking.

I’ve been learning Japanese for the last three years – actually more than that but I’ve been a little more serious these past years, meeting a teacher and all – and I’m always interested in reading about various techniques for language learning.  Pure memory of signs and words isn’t a new thing as a technique. I, myself, enjoyed building lists over lists of words when I was learning Hebrew and Greek in my twenties, organizing them in different groups, semantic or other.  That article prompted me back to one of the first book I bought when I started Japanese called Remembering the kanji by James W. Heisig which uses a technique similar to the one used in the article.  It focuses on how simple kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japanese) can tell a story that you remember and build on further stories to remember more complex kanji.  It’s an interesting method – and it was part of my daily routine for a few months when I was between jobs.  As the stories get weird and wild, just like the narrative opening up the article above, you have a sense that you can commit the kanji to memory far more easily that learning through all the standard classifications such as school grade or character stem, etc…

In about three months, I got as far as 250 kanji, over 10% of the required kanji at the end of high-school in Japan – the so-called “jouyou” kanji.  But then other things came along … then I lost some of the kanji I remembered … then I lost the narrative pointers described in the book.  Getting back into the book’s methodolgy was the hardest thing.  I finally gave that up.  But I didn’t want to drop out of Japanese, so I went for a more traditionnal way, a one-on-one with a native-speaking sensei.

I’m not going to argue whether or not this technique is good or not, only to point out that after checking out on other friends and colleagues who focus a lot on learning kanji (in some cases, for years) with the help of flash-cards or some portable tool, the more general goal of learning Japanese seems to elude them.  Kanji is such a tiny fraction of the real deal and one can learn the foundations of Japanese grammar and its vocabulary without it.

There are probably people – Heisig most likely and several other enthusiasts – that argue that such a technique as “narrative building” is good for learning kanji – although you find many detractors in the Amazon.com comments for this book.  After reading the article, I found that it doesn’t really answer that question.  To be fair, it talks about our ancestors’ ability to memorize as a survival skill, for a person’s character was determined by what he/she could remember, not like today where reading a lot – but memorizing little – is the norm. But it mainly describes how these mental geeks actually acquire techniques for a upcoming competition, a short-term goal of sorts, then flush it all away for the next one.  So what about language – or kanji for that matter – ?  Is it simply about cramming and *not* flushing it away ? Foer’s mentor, professor K. Anders Ericsson, could reassure me a little if he could transpose his work from what can be an impressive violon d’ingres to fields of endeavor that are actually, quoting Foer, “character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics.”

Not that I’m am against any form of drills myself.  Drills, tests and pop-quizzes are an essential part of learning – and true to myself, even more so as a programmer, I now have the skills to build tools to, yet again, generate lists over lists of contents for such events.

But the lesson I discovered here is that learning a language can be the same as remembering a deck of cards, if one has to, to quote Foer again, “focus on technique, stay goal-oriented and get immediate feedback on performance”.

And then remembering that:

• You can’t get feedback from a single book.
• Staying goal-oriented is hard.
• Technique takes time to hone and then you need to go beyond your “OK Plateau” and change it once in a while.

*sigh*

So one of my colleagues directed me to a fine website called Hack a Day, which, according to him, is a good start for an amateur like me.  They have all sorts of posts for beginners to look into, especially a great article on various development boards to choose from.  I heard a lot about the Arduino board, which claims to be “open-source”.  I got curious and read a little about it.  The site also featured this wonderful documentary on the Arduino: Yes!  Open-source hardware exists and it’s something that falls right into the kind of things I’m interested in. This documentary didn’t just give me some bits of information, it explained to me a philosophy; something, I believe, should always be a part of the art of programming.

Now I haven’t really used one yet, mind you. But this got me really interested on getting one very soon.

You can check out the documentary below (and use full screen) or check out http://arduinothedocumentary.org for other viewing / downloading options.

Happy hacking.

You have a band. You need a band name, a title for your first album and an album cover design.
Here’s how to do it:

1 – Go to Wikipedia and hit random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use Gimp or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor, photoshop is good too) to put it all together.
5 – Post it on your blog along with these instructions, and trackback or link to your post in these comments.

Many thanks to DanielN for his permission to use this image. Here’s a link to the original picture.

Now the real fun begins:  In the xkcd book (volume 0), there are 5 QR codes located on the left side of page 100012 (you did notice that it uses a base 3 paging count, did you ?).  I scanned the page and ran it each QR code through the ZXing.  The results ?  Well, let’s just say that Randall is a fan of  Mario Cart on the Wii and he’s being the nice guy he always seems to be.

My next test was really interesting: I have an ash grey T-Shirt with a QR code on the back in crimson color, measuring 3 x 3 inches.  You can guess this was going to be a little more challenging.  Since I don’t have a handheld device, I merely used the camera on my iPod nano to film it and extracted each frame with MPlayer on my PC.  The first films I took were short with awful results, so I decided to take a longer film, zooming in and out, and tilting the camera to minimize the skewing and warping of the images.  This time, I got 106 hits out of 1066 frames, a 10% hit rate which is very good considering that I was randomly moving my camera.  No doubt with a real handheld, I would have gotten more precise hits.

Still a lot of work to do (of course) but I’m happy with the results.

Get the tar.gz at Sourceforge.net.

Enjoy!

mplayer -ao pcm:file=<out file>.wav <in file>.mpa

Notice how the pcm:file replaces the old syntax. MPlayer (on Ubuntu at least) will warn you about this.

Hopefully I’ll stop scouring the ‘Net and go straight to this page if my memory fails. And I hope you do too