Keyless

Do you know how to write chinese characters on a computer keyboard?

Unlike Indoeuropean languages, which use a quite limited alphabet to write, the Chinese language writing needs thousands of characters.

Do you imagine what does a chinese keyboard look like? Daniel Engber, in Slate Magazine, explains:

You use a piece of software called an "input method editor," which allows conventional-looking keyboards to produce the thousands of characters used in written Chinese. There's no standard system, though, so two Chinese keyboards may not look exactly the same and they may not function in the same way.

A variety of keyboard input method editors or IMEs have been designed to allow the input of Chinese characters using standard keyboards. (See it on the Wikipedia).

In spite of this complexity, for me, a foreign adult student, it is easier on a keyboard than on a piece of paper :-). However, I can imagine this is different for a native chinese speaker, ins't it?. So, since I see a discussion about a Keyless Mac on El Blog de Enrique Dans, I'm wondering if the option of a keyless, more flexible, interface would be on hand for Asian users?

On the other hand, some people argue that it is not worth it since speech recognition software would become an even easier interface to replace classical keyboards. However, even if this could be true for first-time entries, there's still the need of reusing text, making hyperlinks, combining multiple formats, images, video, etc.

An interesting evolution to follow...

Update : Reading tag : keyless

Technorati tags : keyboard, keyless, speech recognition

Happy Holidays

Hey, I just made a total elf of myself.

Jaume, would you dance with me?

Check me out by clicking the link below:
http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=1f25e5b755b70e84209fefdG06122902

Easy Chinese

Technorati tags : Chinese, humor

Greetings

Have you seen the UOC greeting card?

Its author is a student, Raquel García, and I just love it!

Hope you'll like it




Felicitación multimedia | Felicitació multimèdia

Technorati tags : greeting card, New Year Greetings

World AIDS Day

I've seen it in many sites like Google, Yahho, and many others, also in the media, TV, radio... today is the day dedicated to spread the fight agains this desease.

If you want to actively help, from home, you can: here you can join.
In Spain, you can do it via Cibervoluntarios.




Technorati Tags: WorldAIDSDay, AIDS, WorldCommunityGrid,

What's that?

Little Devil pointed me at some information from this site: Cyborg Web Shop

When I look into it I cannot find an "About" section, "Who we are", or anything.

The only thing we find is... a shop!?

Does somebody know something about it?
Who they are?
Are they serious?
¿?
Are they real, after all?

Gmail spam trick

As you might know, I'm in love with Gmail and the truth is, I find new ways to use it, all the time. My last discovery comes through Clipmarks, a good place to share interesting things you've found over the internet. When you find something, you show an excerpt and the link, you tag it and you choose wether you want to keep it for yourself or share it with everyone. When people like a shared clipmark, it'll become popped up.

This is the last number one clipmark: A Gmail's trick that will help you know if a souspicious site is sending you spam. I have tested it and it works!


Copy/paste of content from www.hedir.com:, as shown by the clipmark:

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don't sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a "+" in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

Neat! Smile
_________________
Please review my site Thanks!

I can think of other useful things I can do: for instance, I could use it to automatically forward all e-mail from other accounts about a specific issue. Then it would be simple to organize it with labels.

I'm wondering how many other possible ways could this feature be used.


Technorati Tags: Gmail, clipmarks

Future Travel Agencies

We are only a few years away from looking at travel agencies differently as we do today.

I remember being a little child and whatching TV at my grandad's home. I couldn't reach the device and when I asked for changing the channel, the answer was a denial. Later, as soon as I grew up enough to handle it by myself, I was banned. There was a generational divide. I preferred to choose among different channels, adpat the volume to each situation, etc. while my grandparents wanted to have everything tuned with a fixed standard and the only thing they cared about was the on/off switch. It had nothing to do with being a child or an adult: there was a new technology and children adapted sooner than oldies.

There are a lot of technologies today younger generations know much better how to benefit from. I remembered this when I discovered the following video on Hotel Blogs :



Look at the main issues commented:

- Price student packages
- Feel cheated
- Stop wasting my time
- We know what we want
- DIY = best value
- I don't use travel agencies anymore
- Travel agents = information centers
- Interaction between youths

I found this so interesting that I have proposed a poll.
Do you want to participate? Express yourself here!


Technorati tags : travel agencies

Ecological Footprint Quiz

Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz and start some action about climate change.


Additional info:
Cumbre de la ONU sobre el Cambio Climático: 2ª Conferencia países firmantes del Protocolo de Kioto y 12ª del Convenio del Cambio Climático. Nairobi, 6-17 noviembre 2006

- Informe sobre el impacto económico del cambio climático: Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
- Oficina Española del Cambio Climático - OECC

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)


--- Technorati tags ---
Footprint , Earth Day , Huella Ecológica , Emprempta Ecològica

Be a blogger, my friend

A really friendly post by Jordi Abad tells us ten reasons to become a blogger, worth to be read. These are some more thoughts I'd like to add:

...

Because you rule in your blog

Because you can experience the feeling of blogging your moods.

Because you could discover a storyteller inside you

Because telling what works for you could help others

Because you'll learn that There is nothing wrong with you.

Because... Because... Because...

And yours? Devote me a smile and tell me your reasons. Whatever it is, remember: Be a blogger my friend (if you want).

An experimental change

Dear friends...

Yes, this is me, Carme! The same person, nothing changed! Nothing happened to my tongue! :-) It's just that I decided to try a slight change in this blog.

Why? First of all we must consider that conversation in the blogosphere really is a complex thing. Moreover, I realized that sometimes what you say could benefit others.

But, how did this come up? Last week, I discovered coComment, a tracking system for comments allowing to tag them. I sent them a request for assistance with forgotten tags and the answer is now blogged. It might help other people wishing to tag older comments. Tags can help us not only because they make my comments searchable but also they allow me to keep track of issues I'm interested in.

So what's my point? My sources, links and comments are multi-language, according to the author choice, but how could I organize my own blog to follow such a conversation up? Some people have multi-language blogs, like Iñaki, with posts in English and Spanish, and it doesn't look bad, so I will follow him and will start with two languages. I will use Catalan, my first language, for my posts about private stuff while I'll post in English, Internet's pidgin, about more general issues.

I will assign an additional tag to every post with the chosen language, so that everyone coming here will have the option to read only the posts written in one language (see direct links at the top-right corner). I'll do the same with comments and as soon as comment feeds with tags work I will add them here.

Depending on the experience and feedback, I will phase further changes in... let's see!