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Music legend, proto-rapper1Even though he wasn’t crazy about the title. and black poet Gil Scott-Heron has passed yesterday at the age of 62.

His slam on 70s society was so powerful as to give us one of today’s most ubiquitous journalistic clichés. He was a sharp political analyst, tireless militant for civil rights and the inspiration to a surprisingly wide spectrum of artists.

I was rarely so disappointed as when I read of his arrest in 2001 and ensuing decade of drug problems. Having sung for most of his career about the ravage of widespread drug-abuse in inner-city communities, seeing him eventually fall into the ugly trap of crack-cocaine felt like a personal betrayal.

Despite (or perhaps because of) all that, his last album, released only a couple months ago, was one of his most powerful. It will probably be one of the best album released in 2011 by any artist, dead or alive.

RIP Gil Scott-Heron

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A very nifty trick I discovered while working on making KanjiBox accessible to blind users.

I previously mused that an iPhone/iPod made a much better and more cost-efficient language-studying tool than any dedicated electronic gizmo out there. This is now a thousand times truer…

One of the coolest features brought by version 4 of iOS (the software that runs on all iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) is also one of the least known and used: VoiceOver is a built-in screen-reader geared at making Apple devices accessible to blind and visually impaired users. If you are such a user, you know about it already and will learn nothing here. For everyone else, this feature still has much to offer!

VoiceOver supports a dizzying collection of languages: from English to Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, most European languages, hell, even regional accents (English comes in US-, Brit- and Aussie-accented variants… Canadian-French as well). While the quality for English is about what you would expect from late-90s speech synthesis, the quality of some other languages is vastly superior. This is particularly true of the Japanese and French voices. To my very limited ear, Mandarin and Mexican-Spannish also sound quite close to human quality (Spain-Spanish, on the other hand, is pretty robotic).

As it turns out, your iPhone (/iPad/iPod Touch) comes with a native pronunciation teacher, out of the box. For hard-to-read languages like Japanese or Chinese, it can be a life-saver: helping you decipher SMS, emails or web pages, instead of relying on clunky, time-consuming, copy-pasting to a dictionary app.

Below are detailed instructions on how to enable VoiceOver and use it to read any text in any language on your iPhone (setup should be near-identical for iPads and iPod Touchs):

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DaveCorp Gardening International, has announced the diversification of their portfolio. Keeping their recent investments in CTRO, MINT and BSIL, and staking new positions in A.MINT, L.GRAS and L.BSIL…

Market analysts are very optimistic on the Summer prospects of DaveCorp Gardening International and predict a bullish market on delicious Thai curries and fresh mojitos1The real kind, using apple mint & spearmint, not that poor ersatz some people make with peppermint..

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Free Wifi in Shijo It is quite hard finding free-access wifi anywhere in Japan, let alone access that does not require you to sit and purchase a drink (most often at such exciting local eateries as McDonald’s or Starbucks)…

Which is why I figured I’d commit this tidbit of info to Google (and the occasional Kyoto-bound reader of this blog):

I just noticed some new banners have been put up along Shijo dori, announcing free wifi in the street. This is apparently courtesy of the neighbourhood’s shopkeeper association. Only small catch is that the wifi is password-protected1I have no doubt there is a suitably pointless bureaucratic reason for that.… and nobody seems to have realised that the primary target for such an offer (foreign tourists without 3G cell phones and limitless data plans) might have a hard time reading the katakana spelling of “password” on the banners. Ahem.

Anyway, the free wifi network info are:
Access point: shijo-0123456789
Password: 0123456789

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Time to finally change topics a little…

As part of my grand OCD project to document every last tiny aspect of my activities (and possibly do something cool with the data one day), I have started compiling a List of Movies I watched, with ratings and mini-reviews.

At the moment, it is limited to recent viewings, plus the content of my permanent movie library and a couple random ones. Over time, I will try to commit more, as they come back to me.