Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: languages

  • Want to memorize foreign language vocabulary? memrise.com

    The Chinese characters for "Hong Kong".
    Image via Wikipedia

    I have been absolutely addicted. A week ago Thursday I discovered a new site. It was an article over at the makezine blog talking about the benefits of learning mandarin for what they do. I’ve always been intrigued by mandarin – I remember learning a bit of cantonese in Hong Kong and have a short book on chinese symbols. I must admit a lifelong fascination with languages (there’s the study new languages site, my how to learn spanish for beginners site and my onlineradiotv.com site which each have highlights of my interest in languages and the great exposure to other languages that the internet can bring. Anyway…. I’ve used a flash card program for a long time to work on vocabulary (mnemosyne) – I have around 10,000 spanish cards right now – a bunch of french (200) and italian (400) and german (6000+) cards as well. I’ve cracked the book a bit on chinese, but not much. So, one of the resource sites they mentioned was memrise.com

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  • Ripping a DVD with Multiple Audio tracks

    First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

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  • Translating web pages

    I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….

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  • Direct links to international broadcasters audio streams

    I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.

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  • WMF patch from Microsoft expected January 10th

    The Microsoft security bulletin on the WMF vulnerability has been updated to indicate that Microsoft expects to release an update for the issue in their regular patch release on January 10th. The first couple paragraphs strike me as a bit defensive. Explaining about their immediate mobilization of Incident Response and immediate work on a patch, in addition to the explanation of extensive testing of the patch in 23 languages….

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  • OpenOffice.org 2.0.1

    The first maintenance release for Openoffice.org 2 has been released sometime today according to Betanews.com. It’s mainly a bugfix release. I didn’t see an official announcement on their main site, but there is a link to some of the details that have been fixed. (The link is for one of the release candidates.)

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  • Mozilla Firefox 1.5 release this afternoon

    According to Planet Mozilla it looks like we should expect the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.5 at around 3PM EST (12 noon PST). There are no promises, but that’s what I’m seeing, no exact time mind you, but ~around 3PM EST today. Likely once there is an official announcement news will spread quickly and the download servers will get pounded, so I know I’m going to be trying to get in earlier if possible.

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  • Mozilla Firefox birthday

    According to spreadfirefox.com, a year ago today was the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0

    Firefox was released prior to November 9th, 2004 in preview releases and early betas, but the official 1.0 came out a year ago today, hard to believe. According to some sources it has as much as 10% of the web market share, although that’s tough to gauge (varies by site content.) It shipped originally with support for “17 languages and on 5 platforms”.

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  • Google adds more languages

    Well, of course, you know that Google offers search services in a long list of languages. They can be found at the main Google page by going to the “Language tools” link to the right of the search box. It takes you to this page, which gives you the ability to search pages in a specific language, in a specific country (or combination of the two.)

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  • Sunbeltblog on Windows Vista’s attempt to keep Windows up to speed

    Sunbelt blog has an article about Microsoft’s plan to keep Windows Vista from becomming more sluggish as the system aged. Microsoft’s plan is to run defragmentation in the background and preloading commonly used components as outlined in this article.
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