Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
There’s something really fun about writing your own microcontroller code as a software engineer that hasn’t worked with embedded before. At least for me.
Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.
Working with VMs always felt difficult because of this. So authoring was built-in to Docker. Now you can use Apptron to author and embed a Linux system on a web page. This aspect is usable, but it's only going to get better.
Paste in some parallel text (e.g. Bible verses, movie subtitles, song lyrics) and read what Farsi you can on the first line, looking to the lower lines for clues if you get stuck.
The core version of Pingtype is for traditional Chinese, but it supports a few other languages too.
Good to see that there are others learning and creating! Another shameless plug for my translator site: https://pingtype.github.io
It takes text, adds colours for tones, pinyin, literal, and parallel translations.
There’s also a character decomposition tool at the bottom of the page which can be helpful if you’re able to recognise half a character but can’t remember the pronunciation for typing it.
The YouTube channel has some song lyrics, movie subtitles, and audio Bible that might help with learning.
Also I just read some of your blog about learning Chinese :) Haha, I can totally relate to some of it. What I noticed is, that when I speak Mandarin with locals (on vacation, because I am not living there), they are always super happy, that I speak their language and they make an effort to speak it with me. This might be dependent on the region one is in. From your writing I would guess you might be in Taiwan or HK, and while I have been in HK, I have never been in Taiwan and I don't know how people handle it there. I have mostly been in southern China and it's always been great and an overwhelming amount of people were very friendly and welcoming. Of course living there and traveling there for a while are 2 different things and experience might differ. If you happen to visit Berlin, feel welcome to visit our Chinese language meetup (https://dragon-descendants.de/en/) and if you want you can ask for me, 小龙.
Wow, the tool for decomposing characters is very cool! I assume you are talking about the thing that appears, when I click "Matrix"? I think it would be good to have "decompose characters" somewhere. But I might actually use this to get the component characters. In my app in my vocabulary file I also have tags for words, which are like "component:<component here>", so that if one knows how parts of a character, one could also search for it, without knowing its pinyin, by searching for "tags contain component1 and contain component2 and ...". I might add more component tags using your tool.
What I noticed though is, that some of the components don't seem to be like what I would expect to be shown as components. For example I tried the word 衣服 and 服 is shown to have the component "二". I guess one could see it that way, but some other dictionaries stop at 月 which itself is a component with set meaning (moon) and usage as radical (often for body parts). My favorite online normal dictionary for example: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=... (hover over 3 dots of character and click the button with the 字 and scissors to see decomposition) says:
服 = 月 + 𠬝
𠬝 = 卩 + 又
If you go further, wouldn't you also have to decompose "二" into "一" and "一"?
A Chinese teacher told me there are various approaches for decomposition, so this might not be a science or that rigorous, but I think consistency would then dictate, that you decompose "二" as well. I don't always agree fully with their decomposition either and usually I stop at any component, that still has meaning by itself, which can be pretty low level 1 or 2 strokes components already. For determining that, I also use information from a language school, which I copied into a repo: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/language-learning/src/... "All radicals from their website". Also useful for memorizing the characters, if one can derive a mnemonic for a character from its components and their meaning.
The advanced UI looks very complex, but I don't mind that. In fact it is quite cool! Just has some stuff I don't even know what it is about. I noticed, that once one toggles the advanced UI, I didn't find a way to toggle it back to simple again.
Matrix is just a visualisation tool, I never actually found a practical use for it other than looking cool.
The decomposition feature is at the bottom of the page below the generated HTML. It's the text box with "隹" and a Search button. Clicking Search will show the 2 parts of the character, and all characters that contain that radical (䧶, 䳡, etc), and all multi-character words containing that character.
Clicking any of the related characters (or numeric codes for radicals that don't have a Unicode representation) will then show the genealogy for that character.
See "copying from images" in http://localhost/pingtype/docs/docs.html
If I ever come to Berlin then your meetup sounds fun! I'm pretty far away though; I live in New Zealand now.
All the best with your learning, I hope you keep making progress!
You've figured out how to access the Start menu, and figured out where the Power menu is through the icon, but now have a choice between 關機 and 重新開機.
Which one is shut down, which is reboot?
You have one chance, otherwise it requires an embarrassing trip to the server farm.
That specific case led me to make the following table of Windows strings in other languages:
https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/windowsStringsTable/index...
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.