Author Archives: dave

accented characters in osx

Posted on 2011/09/26 by

I had a need to be able to print accented characters on certain letters, mainly being vowels, but potentially others as well. Most character sets have a limited set of accents, and most of them only apply to certain letters, and others don’t have the accents I want.

For example I want to print 5 main types of accents, being:

à á ā â ǎ

another example

x̀ x́ x̄ x̂ x̌

I’m using a macbook pro and pages in OSX, although this applies to any application, this is how I did it:

Open up System Preferences >> Personal >> Language and Text >> Input Sources

Once there, add a new keyboard, in this case I added “US Extended”.

Now to add some accents, I need to type the accent first, and then the character, but this only works for some letters (I suppose those that can be normally accented), but as you can see above, I have accented the letter ‘x’. So achieve this you must type the letter first and then [option]+[shift]+[code]. Not too hard, the five I need are:

  • a bar over the letter - ā - [option]+a then type the letter
  • a 'v' over the letter - ǎ - [option]+v then the letter
  • a '^' over the letter - â - [option]+^ then the letter
  • a '`' over the letter - à - [option]+` then the letter, and finally
  • a ' ́' over the letter - á - [option]+e then the letter

^ <-- is [shift]+6
` <-- is the back tick, or key with the tilde (~) on it
  ́ <-- is the quote mark key with single and double quotes [',"]

It was that simple :-)

note: I am learning the thai language and it is a very tonal language and inflections on letters are necessary to determine the tone of the word, hence I need this ability. These 5 marks above fit the bill perfectly, although the bar one really isn't needed, but at least now I have the option of including it, or not including it.

Originally found here: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/...

Posted in iwork, osx, pages, tips | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Home for Christmas…

Posted on 2011/09/16 by

I don’t have any idea how many people might see this (I really should introduce some IP tracking software on this site)…

But for anyone who’s interested, we’ll be home for Christmas. I have a few things to do in Thailand that expire mid December, but I might manage to extend them until later in the month…

Or… I’m also thinking of “running away” for a bit and go see somewhere else (open to suggestions–but it’ll probably be the USA). Then coming (/going???) home about xmas.

One thing is for certain, there’s a lot of people I want to catch up with… See y’all soon!

Posted in general | 3 Comments

We say Good-bye to Hua Hin

Posted on 2011/09/08 by

20110908-122607.jpg

We’ve been in Hua Hin, Thailand for the last few days, and tomorrow we head on back to Phuket – well, we’ll probably spend a night at Ranong on the way back. Suffice to say, this has been a very nice place to come and visit. Maybe even stay longer than a visit. It’s hard to say, because Kanchanaburi was also very nice.

Mybe it’s time to move on from Phuket. It’s a great holiday destination, but is it somewhere I want to live?

Posted in travel | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

I’m travelling at the moment…

Posted on 2011/09/06 by

View Bangkok to Phuket in a larger map

I’ve been in Thailand on and off for sometime now, but I have been pretty fixed in location. When I have moved I have generally flown (occasional bus, and once a train) everywhere.

We’ve been in Bangkok for the last few weeks and this time, we decided that instead of flying to Phuket, we would drive. With the shelving of the “flight plan”, we hired a car and set off.

It was going to be a two day trip.

A few hours into the trip, I knew that we weren’t going straight back. We had one detour planned on the way already, but as soon as we got there, it turned into another, and another, and even another…

Unfortunately I don’t have good internet (on the road), but as soon as I do, you’ll find a few posts of the travelling variety, around Thailand. This is a beautiful country, with beautiful people. Just stay away from the tourist traps and you’ll be right :-)

The map is rough, (pretty much just the end points), but it’s a guide to where we’ve been, or at least stopped each night. Although you can see where we went on our different day trips.

Stay tuned for more posts about this, because we have done some great stuff! Things I’ve wanted to do for a very long time (such as Hellfire Pass and the Bridge on the River Kwai). I did leave out the Tiger Temple, which has been on my todo list for sometime. But I’ll talk about that later.

See y’all soon!

Posted in travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Zeller’s Congruence

Posted on 2011/09/06 by

I was working on something a few weeks ago, and I needed to calculate the day of the week in PHP. I honestly thought it would be too hard. I thought there were too many variables: leap years, non leap years for years divisible by 400, and maybe something else I hadn’t thought of… As it turns out, it was quite simple really. Zeller to the rescue!
 
This wasn’t too hard to code, just be wary and make sure you keep everything at integer level, we don’t want to deal with fractions, as a fraction in several parts may add ‘one’ to the day value (it took me a while to find that!)

It is Friday, 2013-05-23 – although your time-zone may vary
 

Calculated using “Zeller’s congruence”:

where:
* h is the day of the week (0 = Saturday, 1 = Sunday, 2 = Monday, …
* q is the day of the month
* m is the month (3 = March, 4 = April, 5 = May, …)
* K the year of the century (year mod 100).
* J is the century (actually int(year / 100) ) (For example, in 1995 the century would be 19, even though it was the 20th century.)

 
Posted in code | Leave a comment

reCAPTCHA

Posted on 2011/09/02 by

reCAPTCHA in action

reCAPTCHA

Recapture Logo

I spent the day yesterday installing reCAPTCHA to help combat spam I’ve been getting on this and some other websites. I’ve known about the technology for a while, but I really hadn’t realised how far it had come.

Quick History:
The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is an acronym based on the word “capture” and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

Well, that’s where it started and the idea is quite noble. Spam is suppressed because bots/computers can’t pass the test. We use computers to generate and assess a test that humans can generally pass, but the computers themselves, can’t. The video below is from the designer of reCAPTCHA and he details why this system is better.

It is.

Basically, the time people spend solving CAPTCHAs is “wasted” time. It is unproductive. However, the reCAPTCHA project “uses” this time constructively. There are many large projects that are digitising old books, and the process involves scanning these books and using OCR to transcribe them. But as with CAPTCHAs, OCR suffers the same problem and can’t decipher all the words. This is where reCAPTCHA comes in. The images you see are words from scanned documents.

scanned document

scanned document

reCAPTCHA actually uses the human who is passing the test to solve OCR problems that computers can’t. I’m not doing the project justice. Check out the following document for some real world examples. This is pretty good stuff.

Once you’ve check that out, you can check out the following video from the reCAPTCHA team/project.

Oh, and by the way, back in 2009, reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google.

Let’s go back further: I watched a video a few years back, another guy had a very similar idea for cataloguing all the images on the internet. Unfortunately, this video is long, but he came up with a novel way of doing it. He created a game whereby people played a (re)CAPTCHA style of game. The funny part about this game was, CAPTCHAs annoy people, yet people played this game voluntarily.

Edit: this has been installed for a few days now and I haven’t got any spam since. Worth the free price I paid and 15 minutes to install! (I have a multi-site system)

Posted in general | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Canon EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 – warranty repair

Posted on 2011/08/29 by

ef-s 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS I have had the Canon EF-S 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 (dpreview.com review here) lens for about 2 years now, and although (as far as Canon lenses go), it gets a pretty bad rap. For general shooting in most situations, it certainly beats swapping out lenses while on the go.

Recently the zoom capability just stopped, I couldn’t zoom anything below 25MM, which incidentally meant I couldn’t lock it either. Occasionally, it wouldn’t go above 135mm either, but a shake of the lens would dislodge one fo the screws that was hampering movement and you could go all the way to 200mm. You could hear (at least) one screw moving around in there, and I suspect another that stopped the zoom retracting all the way back to 18mm.

A search of the web found a Canon Recall on this item. I’ve been in Thailand now for a few months, and this week I am in Bangkok, which happens to have a service centre. I called them up and they said, “Yep, come in and we can fix this.” Well, not in those words, but you get the picture.

Now for the uninitiated, it’s hard to convey even the simplest of concepts to Thais and trying to explain that this is a warranty issue, subject of a recall (printed below), is no easy task. I’m pretty sure the woman behind the counter finally understood where I was coming from…

But then the other day, I get a phone call from them. It will cost 963 (my heart is pounding at the moment, the lens isn’t worth that much!), but then finished her sentence off with Baht. 963฿, so about A$30. So I shouldn’t really complain.

I went and picked it up on Friday (just gone) and it’s back to normal. I know it was subject of a recall, but for $30 they’ve pulled it apart, fixed it, and probably gave it a bit of a clean, or at least a check over. Maybe, in that case, it’ll be good to go for another couple of years!

22 February 2011

To: Users of the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS interchangeable lens for Digital SLR Cameras

Thank you for using Canon products.

We have discovered that some EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens products may have screws that come loose inside the lens and which may interfere with zoom operation of the lens. We would like to convey the details and our service policy.

We offer our sincerest apologies to customers who have been inconvenienced by this phenomenon. Canon always strives to provide the highest quality products to our customers and we spare no effort in our quality management to make sure our customers can use our products with confidence. We hope our efforts will earn your understanding.

Phenomenon
There are cases in which the zoom barrel gets stuck and stops moving during zoom operation.

Affected Product
Digital SLR camera interchangeable lens “EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS” Serial Numbers 450ｘｘｘｘｘｘｘ to 631ｘｘｘｘｘｘｘ

User Support
The products with this phenomenon will be inspected and repaired free-of-charge. If you own one of the affected products, please contact our customer service hotline. We appreciate your patience, and we offer our sincerest apologies to the customers using these products who have been inconvenienced by this issue. Our free repair service will start on 22 February 2011.

Oh, and one more thing, my lens must have been one of the first with this problem. The lens’ serial number began 450-000XXXXX :-)

Posted in general, photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Phuket Weather Warning

Posted on 2011/08/26 by

20110826-114759.jpgI’ve been living in Thailand coming up to a year in December and although in the tropics, I’ve never really seen too much rain here. About my 2nd ever trip to Thailand, I think it rained everyday, and although I’ve seen bad bouts of weather (raining for say a week or whatever), it’s always been pretty good for me.

This year, as with many countries, Thailand has seen unusually high levels of flooding. Almost no point of Thailand has been untouched. For months the northern part of Thailand (Issan, where Fah’s family is from), and Bangkok have had weather warnings, flash flooding, and rain for weeks on end.

We’ve been in Bangkok for over two weeks now and other than for an hour or two some afternoons, we’ve seen very little rain. But right now, Phuket (notably Patong) is experiencing bad flooding. And I’m in beautiful (sic) Bangkok where the weather has been fine. We are due to go home in a few days, however we may extend our stay here a little longer.

An associated article (found below) talks about Phuket’s last period of bad flooding. This was back in March. At that time I’d flown home to Australia for a few weeks and so I missed out on the bad weather.

I missed the flooding back in Australia (shortly after coming here), I’ve missed the flooding in Phuket when I returned to Australia, I’ve missed the greater flooding of Thailand (including Bangkok), when I was in Phuket, and now that I’m in Bangkok, I’ve missed it all again!

I have to say, maybe it’s time I bought a lottery ticket :-)

(featured article from the Phuket Gazette)

Posted in travel | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Left and Right brain conflict

Posted on 2011/08/25 by

right and left brain conflict, colour test

right and left brain conflict, color test

I have loved this test ever since I first saw it, and I’m not even sure when that was.

Why is it so hard?

Well, apparently the right half of your brain is trying to say the colour, while the left side of your brain is trying to say the word.

Have someone read this to you, first have them read the words (that’s not too hard), but then have them look at the words again, and not say the word, but say the colour of the word.

The words are:

Yellow, Blue, Orange, Black, Red, Green, Purple, Yellow, Red, Orange, Green, Black, Blue, Red, Purple, Green, Blue and Orange.

The colours are:

Green, Red, Blue, Yellow, Blue, Black, Red, Blue, Green, Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Black, Blue, Red, and Green

Did I make any mistakes?

Posted in general | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Waterproof cameras… What to select?

Posted on 2011/08/24 by

lumix

Lumix DMC-FT1

I want a waterproof camera, and an old friend of mine once borrowed a Lumix (pictured) and it worked great. But at one point it got condensation INSIDE and as a consequence, no longer worked. It was repaired under warranty, but since he’d borrowed it, he bought his own anyway. On another trip, this one also developed a condensation issue in the lens and so two-from-two he’s had problems with the Lumix.

I can’t recall what happened with the second one, if it cleared up or not.

But in searching the web the other day I came across this little video, at least I now have some other choices to think about.

Posted in general, review | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments