The copyeditors’ consensus
(5/01/2021)For three years, English Wikipedia editors passionately debated whether to prominently spell Vietnamese names with Vietnamese diacritics.
Human-readable chicken scratch
For three years, English Wikipedia editors passionately debated whether to prominently spell Vietnamese names with Vietnamese diacritics.
A year ago, I was pretty sure I’d be spending all my free time contributing buildings and turn lanes to OpenStreetMap. I did contribute plenty of them, but I also have a tendency to get distracted by ideas out of left field. During the past year, I wound up contributing several kinds of features to OSM that never make it onto conventional maps. At some point, I took up mapping flags.
Recently, I discovered that the author of several Firefox add-ons has turned some of them into spyware designed to steal passwords from unsuspecting users.
About 18 years ago, my family took advantage of Labor Day weekend to make our first day trip to Chicago, to finally see the bustling Vietnamese community whose clearance we had happily bought for years.
It’s always bothered me that, for a website that bills itself as “more obscure than an IP address”, the domain name “1ec5.org” is empirically simpler than an IP address.
(Oh, typographers and their silly terminology.) Introducing a Unicode font for the original Vietnamese alphabet of 1651.
AVIM, my Firefox extension, is now compatible with Thunderbird as well. Plus: Help wanted.
Back in May, I noted that the major Web translation services, Babel Fish or Google Translate, hadn’t gotten around to supporting Vietnamese. Today, Google has, and my first thought was to try and break it.
Back in November, I released a keyboard layout for Vietnamese, to improve the Vietnamese typing situation on the Mac. Now I’m showing non-Mac users some input method love too.
Updated: Introducing an extension for Firefox and its companion e-mail program, Thunderbird, that checks your Vietnamese spelling as you type.
In high school, the Spanish teachers would always warn about the perils of using the Babel Fish service to quickly translate to and from English and Spanish. It gets better (read: more entertaining) with non-cognate languages.
Updated: A keyboard layout for typing fully-accented Vietnamese into any Mac application: you strike multiple keys, one letter comes out. Not the best way to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but you just try talking to someone without any vowels. Isn’t happening. Plus: Where’s the tofu?
Here’s something I haven’t offered for awhile: a quote of the day.