Life and Times in the Southern Capital
tech
Pleco 2.2 Looks awesome!
Aug 18th
http://plecomirror.com/ocrdemovid.html
Check out this demo, on the fly OCR from your IPhone camera without needing you to take a picture! This could be a lot of fun (for total nerds like me).
GFW Google Schizophrenia
Apr 2nd
So appears I spoke too soon (along with just about everyone else). Google appears to be back to the same state it was in a few days ago in China. Namely rerouting through Hong Kong, but still delivering search results.
Turns out it was just a “glitch” and not censorship. Well, not intentional censorship of Google anyways. The search results were returning URLs which contained “gs_rfai”, which gets blocked as the Great Firewall interprets them as having something to do with “Radio Free Asia”, which is in fact blocked. So Google fixed the “glitch” and we’re back to normal, or what passes for normal in this cyber soap opera\pissing contest………
more info:
Google Search Finally Blocked in China
Mar 30th
At 5 pm today searches via google.cn (which currently redirects to google.hk) and google.com started to intermittently trigger connection resets after searches were attempted. Within a couple hours any & all searches would trigger a connection reset (i.e. you would get an error message page instead of the expected search results). It seems that occasionally I am able to still get a search result in different ways (via Firefox search tool bar, etc), but looks like a message is being sent loud and clear to Google HQ.
Forbes story: http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/30/china-blocks-google-tech-markets-firewall.html?boxes=Homepagechannels
Let Freedom Ring…
Jun 8th
Well, sort of. Twitter and Flickr are unblocked again, though the rest remain blocked…. I’ll take what I can get
**UPDATE**
As of October 2009, Flickr, Bing (in a modified form), and hotmail remain completely unblocked, while Twitter is blocked again….
Great Net Blockade of ’09
Jun 3rd
So it would appear the fun is over for awhile, a fresh round of sites blocked within China started yesterday. Among the early casualties are Twitter, Flickr, Bing (the new Microsoft search engine that is just a few days old) and in some areas even Hotmail (though still accessible in Nanjing for the time being). Also many proxies that worked previously are now not functioning within China. Of course existing blocks (Youtube, Blogspot, etc) remain in place.
If you need these sites, I would suggest a personal VPN, a popular choice has been Witopia, though not free, it runs ~$40 USD/year. Hopefully the blockade will ease in the next few weeks as certain sensitive anniversaries pass.
TaoBao Mania!
Jun 1st
I’ve got to admit that I am seriously addicted to Taobao, even when I am just trying to figure out how much something should cost on the streets (i.e. what I should aim my bargaining at), I usually check on Taobao first. But what I like most about Taobao are all the crazy things available. So, I was understandably pumped when I first read the excellent blog Taobao Field Guide. The site offers posts, links and pics to some truly awesome, and sometimes just awesomely bad items for sale on Taobao. It also offers how-to guides and practical advice for Taobao newbies and those who lack Chinese language abilities.
And if you’ve somehow never heard of Taobao, it is like the Chinese Ebay, and if you’ve never heard of Ebay, well…let me me be the first to say ”Welcome to the Internet! Please visit Google to begin your orientation.”
Best Nanjing City Map Ever!
May 21st
Best Nanjing map out there, combines a 3-d modeling of the city as well as street map and satellite views. Lots of landmarks are listed, some are a bit off (like the McDonalds on HuNan Lu) but most are spot on.
Flickr Unblocked?!?
Aug 9th
It would appear that Flickr.com, the awesome picture hosting/sharing site, has been completely unblocked in China. Previously, while you could access the site, most images would be inaccessible and just show the image frame with the red “x” in it. This is almost certainly in response to the many Olympic visitors in Beijing, one can only hope it lasts after the Olympics, or that the guy flicking the switches of the Great Firewall misplaces the post-it note that says “Re-block Flickr after closing ceremony!”
20Q Chinese
Aug 5th
20Q is a small electronic gadget type thing that plays the classic game 20 Questions. It starts off asking if the thing you are thinking of is animal, plant, mineral, or other. It then proceeds to ask yes or no questions determined by your answers to previous questions. It’s pretty amazing how accurately it guesses what you are thinking of.
I had one of these for awhile that operates in English, but was surprised to see one in the Hong Kong Airport recently, and for less than I paid for the English version overseas.
I immidiately purchased it and set about seeing how it operates. It seems to work just about exactly the same as the English version, just translated into Chinese. Seems like a pretty cool way to work on your Chinese. The scroll speed of the characters can even be slowed down so that you can jot down any unknown characters so that you can look them up in a dictionary as necessary.
The thing is so accurate that I would venture to say that if it guesses incorrectly, you probably answered a question incorrectly.
I found you can even buy one online in China ( http://www.gadgetlife.cn/products.asp?id=368 ). Amazingly it’s sold for about the same price as I paid in the HK airport ($90HKD), a surprisingly cheap place to shop (relatively speaking for an airport).
you can also play online at http://www.20q.net/
Just select language and go!
