• Many languages at the same time (most of which I do not know),
• Short-hand annotations, and imprecise wording from people not always familiar with the technical field,
• Database field entries which may have been botched down by inappropriate input methods or bad text transfer from a database to another.

However, I have to admit that a positive aspect is that I (and the team I’m working with) have good knowledge of the technical issues we encounter most often (it’s amazing how electronic car parts fail always the same way).

So, I had to develop a set of tools and methodologies to solve most of the issues found here and I thought that you may want to hear about them (at least, I thought of sharing that knowledge with you).

Raw text

The first issue I often encounter is the presence of badly formed raw text. It’s not readable at all, even by somebody whose mother language is used in the text. For example, we may find “text” like:

And we have to understand that what was actually typed by the original writer was:

%20

This comes from very bad handling of international text (non-Latin text using characters more complex than the usual 7-bit ANSI/ASCII character set A-to-Z and a-to-z). Rather than complain, I found the Branah.com web site, hosting a very useful anything-into-anything convertor, where I just have to more or less recognize the appearance of the garbled data (the example lines that you can see in the photo below, will be an appreciated help here) and it will get translated into useful text.

Quick translation

Then, the text should be actually translated. I could ask a Russian to translate Russian text for me. But what when I have Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Korean, Japanese, etc. in the same job list? It’s better to speed up the process with Google Translate.

For sure, Google is not perfect. But for many languages, it’s providing a relatively good translation (remember that I’m not trying to get a great literary novel printed in a new foreign language).

A few of the tricks from Google Translate

• Detect language: This option is quite good at recognizing the language from even a few words. If it does not work or if you are sure of the language, you can ease its job by selecting the right source language.
• Translation language: You may prefer using your own primary language; But remember that if you understand several others, you can sometimes try them too. A muddy translation may become clearer.
• Simply clicking on the translation may provide alternative translations. Sometimes, the second one is better for your understanding.
• Sometimes, the length of the sentence is breaking the Google algorithm. You may want to try and cut the original text in parts. It’s easy and trial-and-error is a fairly good process.

You may also remember that – by providing new translations of your own – you are helping Google getting better. One thing I personally observed as very efficient is that offering the correct translation for a technical word today, may lead to its use in further translations a few days later (any proposed translation is vetted by experts before incorporation into the internal database, but it can be quite fast – and very useful).

A few other translating options

I do not use them as often, but some other free tools are available too. Some even offer similar services and performance. I would list:

• Babel Fish (aptly named after the nearly-magical universal in-ear translator from “The hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy“).
• Babylon 10 (maybe related to the SciFi TV series of a few years ago, Babylon 5?)
• Bing translator
• BabelXL

Closing statements

Even with really ugly text, with imprecise comments, our team has been able to classify very efficiently horrible text into usable data.

The next stage would certainly be to start using Artificial Intelligence (maybe relying on the existing knowledge about tens of thousands of text snippets) to increase our productivity while reducing this altogether boring task. Do you know a good solution I should check now?

I spoke about small computers that can easily become a network server (Raspberry Pi) and Android boxes which ease publication of videos onto our TV set(s). And, here comes a comment about Marion’s old Vaio laptop having not enough of a battery (please, understand: “What could you do to avoid hauling the ugly laptop to the TV room?“).

So, I started looking for a TV decoder box and a video solution.

I quickly came to the easy conclusion that I would have to use an Android TV box relying on Android TV 8.1 (or better), with Kodi as a video player (I had tested it successfully on a Windows 10 PC a few years ago).

TV box

First, I must select a box. The cheapest ones start aroudn $25. So, there is no budget reason to doge the request. But, if you want to keep a little margin for future expansion, it’s worth looking at 3GB of RAM memory, and if you think about 4K video, the processor must be helped with a small graphic GPU.

All these boxes come pre-configured with Android TV. Even if version 7.1 is enough, you can easily find boxes with version 8.1 (or even higher). But, please, forget about earlier versions. they will be outdated in terms of performance and features. Everything will be short, including compatibility with modern applications.

Suppliers are plentiful. But avoid those who do not even bother printing their name on the box: They are in the business of selling “dumb boxes” and will not support you in case of the slightest technical difficulty. If they don’t even dare naming the box, think about any other business presence.

You can also avoid boxes marked as using chips from Rockchip (strictly no Kodi support – see below) or Allwinner (known for not even developping its own software code…). Source: AndroidPCreview.

Finally, you want a box shipped with a recent version of Kodi (THE reference software for media management) and a “launcher” (a simple user-friendly graphic interface to launch Kodi and/or other applications from the remote without needing a keyboard to key commands in (Remember: this is a family-level application not a geek arena!))

According to my analysis, Android boxes under $50 are usually not feature-rich (or on sale for some bad reason). But between $50 and $95, you’ll easily find good-enough boxes (sometimes even with a small wireless keyboard along with the remote, even if this is not very useful after the first install).

Personally, I chose a cute little plastic hexagon from Evanpo: the T75Z plus, for 63€ at Amazon.fr (you may find it with a small wireless keyboard too).

• Android 7.1
• 4K support
• Processor: Amlogic s912 octo-core ARM Go
• Graphics processor: Mali-t820mp3
• 3GB RAM & 32GB storage
• 5GHz WiFi
• pre-installed Kodi
• 1000 Mb/s Ethernet
• Kodi button on the remote control, to directly launch Kodi.

It’s ready right out of the box.

Kodi and the Synology NAS server

I wanted specifically to use the box to show videos stored on my good old Synology DS413j network server which is hosting all family sensitive or shareable data.

At first, I tried to share files using the Windows sharing (aka Samba/SMB), but I could only get error messages from the Android TV box. So, I moved to another easy solution: Install le NFS file sharing on the NAS and ask the box to grab files from the server using this protocol (Kodi knows both of them; Just click the next option).

I got inspiration (and a very detailed tutorial) from TechJunkie. But the posts from TrendBlog or Esau Silva are quite good too.

No doubt about it: A NAS server is a perfect solution to provide media to the whole family. If you use Kodi (or even VLC) on the box, you won’t even need a NAS with transcoding capacity (it would just be more expensive, not more useful).

So, I wanted to use my old Chromecast 2013 (but the issue and its solution are exactly the same on a more recent model) to cast a photo slideshow on a TV set which is sitting mostly unused in the kitchen of our flat. But, this did not appear easy to do from Chrome (at least not easy to me).

I finally ended up with this solution: Use IrfanView to bring a slideshow to the PC screen (a laptop of a desktop will both be easy enough, but a Mac would do). Then, I ask my Chrome browser to cast the desktop to the TV further on the network. Nothing fancy, nothing elegant, but I was looking for too complicated or Chrome-integrated…

For years, I used Google authenticator applet on iOS. I knew that it would be a pain if my phone stopped working (or if I replaced it). The only reason I was OK with this, was that I had setup Google authenticator on two phones (I happen to have one for business and one for personal use – don’t ask why…)

Actually, replacing one of these smartphones pushed me into testing Authy as a replacement for Google. And I should have done this earlier. There is no way I will switch back to Google after this.

Authy provides:

• A cute user interface
• Shared accounts between several phones (and a fast way to switch from one old phone to a new one)
• All the needed 2FA bells and whistles (compatible with the TOTP standard)

In thirty/forty minutes, I recreated all the factors for my accounts (e.g. Google, Outlook, Evernote, Dropbox, or even Ubisoft). And this was needed because I could not transfer this knowledge from the old phone to the new (even though I had both phone working in front of me). But in three/four minutes I could extend it to my other phone. So, any time I need to replace a phone, I can extend/transfer in a matter of minutes, independently of the number of web sites are included in Authy.

I feel much safer. What would have been happening if I had lost/broken my phone with the codes from Google Authenticator? (graceful degradation, no risk of losing access to many web sites at a time in case of a single failure).

I feel much more positive about extending my use of 2FA/two-factor-authentication to  much more web sites because of the added ease of use (longer-term commitment).

Furthermore, Authy is available for several Operating Systems:

• iOS
• Android
• Windows
• Google Chrome

Go and install it!

Actually, I am trying to make sure that you will get much more than you can swallow here: tens of thousands of character fonts. Not only a bunch of them, but two sources of the nicest kind.

FontPark is nothing less than a 70,000-font archive. You can search, dig, drag, drown into it.

But this is really an organized archive, which makes it quite usable even from the pro designer. and did I mention that most fonts are freeware or free for personal use?

But there are other sources for your character fonts. I found an interesting one because they are free and very accessible while containing real good quality font-ware. Google has built its own web font store: Google WebFonts

What is really special about Google WebFonts is that it comes with an API that most web sites can use to collect the fonts and use them when designing a web site. Actually, it’s as easy as using standard CSS style commands. As in the following example:

body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
}

Definitely good news for the web designers.

• You cannot avoid mentioning the Google webmaster tools. They do a lot of things and contain a performance evaluation but it is very crude and updated at frequency that you cannot control (several days if not several weeks between updates).
• Pingdom: Full Page Test has the enormous advantage of being precise and not requiring anything more than your browser. Give it an URL and it will tell you what happens and how fast. Great.
• Using Firefox, there is a nice plugin to observe the load times and the detail of what is loaded: Firebug. It will produce the graphic display below.



• But if you want to go even one step further, you should complete Firebug with the Google Page Speed extension, which will provide precise recommendations about what you could do to improve your page load times.

Today, I learned that Bloglines will close its doors and stop completely its services in the coming days (on the 1st of October 2010); I have to switch immediately to a new service.

I started to look into the available options, either an on-line RSS aggregator (Google reader comes immediately to mind), or a Windows-based aggregator on my PC. Dear reader, do you have some recommendations for me?

In the activities of their new mobile phone, Google and HTC unveiled several videos giving us a peek looking (somewhat simplified but still real) into what is done to produce a modern mobile phone. Admire it and remember what the phone was tested against before bringing back your broken phone to the warranty department and claiming that your younger son just ate the corner of the display when -actually- you drove over it with your car…

See also:

• Nexus One design
• Display and 3D framework
• Nexus One manufacturing (nice shooting of industrial equipment)
• Nexus One: Day One (advertisement)