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I swear ta gawd I need some new hobbies…

I touched on this once before, hence the “revisited.” And here’s an update of sorts.

Plan A

Here’s a neat new plugin which, though apparently designed for providing dictionary definitions, can be used as a neat way to footnote all the non-English words in your blog posts. For anyone in the China blogosphere who enters any great amount of Chinese words in your text, this may be a cool method to list definitions at the end of your posts.

From Web tools Collection:

WP-Definitions is an easy way to bring clarity to your blog by adding double square brackets around any word like this: [[word]]. The definition of that word will then be included at the bottom of your post and the word itself will become a named anchor linking to the definition.

Plan B

If that plugin doesn’t meet your needs, you might try this one which (as I said) I previously wrote about:

How to Annotate Chinese Characters with Pinyin Tone Markers

Though I spoke of it in a China-specific context, it could be applied to any second language words – Japanese, Spanish, French, what have you… Or essentially any situation where you want to annotate a certain word or phrase. Just hover your mouse over the word, and you get your annotation pop-up.

note: this command will work for windows users only

??o??? dn + ?l? + l??? ss??d ?s??ld ‘u???? dn ?p?s-????? u????s ?no? u?n? o? ???l p,no? ?? ‘?ou pu?

?o???u ?o? u uo????sqns
?ss?l?sn ?o? n ??pun ?l??

¡u?op ?p?sdn ?u?p??? ?? ??? s?osu?s ?s?u??? ??? poo? ?o? ??s s??l ???q?? ???? pu? ‘??u?pu?d?pu? u????? ‘?uo? unl?? ‘????ss?? ???nbs u??u?,u??? ???l ??n?s ?d?? u?? ? ?ou ‘??s

loo? ?x?? d?l?

l?s?no? ?o? ?no ?? ????? ?????? ?l???l ??n? ?pu?? ? s? ?? ?nq ‘?sod?nd l???????d ?u? ????s u?? ?? ?u??? ?,uop ? ?u?op-?p?sdn ?x?? ?no? ?u?dd?l? ?o? loo? ?l???l ??n? ? s,????

u?op-?p?sdn ?x?? ?no? d?l? o? ?o?

I just came across a somewhat unorthodox way to get around China’s Great Firewall.

If you’re apprehensive about the governement censors picking up on any of your sensitive content, you might want to consider using this wordpress plugin to set up a sort of Super Silent Stealth Ninja Blog:

Text to Image Plugin for Wordpress

What this plugin does is converts the text that you write on your blog into an image (png file), which obviously cannot be read by Chinese increasingly robot censors. So if you were to write about the forbidden 3 Ts (and no I don’t mean that chick with the 3 titties in Total Recall) or F@lun G0ng, you’d be safe from at least a part of China’s Net Nanny.

Drawbacks:

• China does still have human censors, and they just might find you.
• Your readers may have difficulty finding you via search engines, because just like the Chinese censors, google relies heavily on text-reading robots too. But if you’re confident the content is good, readers will most certainly come to you.

This is an interesting blog tweak for sure.

If anyone decides to test it out, be sure to let me know.

(h/t to Weblog Tools Collection)

China Law Blog posted an interesting piece the other day, examining an NBC World Blog article which made this assertion:

China needs to produce businesses that come up with the kind of “path-breaking innovation” that he says begins with technological breakthroughs.

“There isn’t a single innovative Chinese company,” he adds, citing the country’s low rate of patent applications. At last official count, in 2004, China still only filed 2 per cent of the world’s global patent applications. Source

I think to say there’s not even a single innovative Chinese company is going a bit far. But given fact that there are 1.3 billion+ brains out there, and factor in the ammount of money it sinks into research and development — I’m sure China’s not where they want to be right now.

Especially since Japan is sitting at the top of the list of world innovators. And they spent less to get there.

Still, I wouldn’t dare say there’s no innovation in China.

But just when you thought it was safe…

That said, I appear to have become the latest victim of a certain not-so-creative (read: content-stealin’) Chinaman.

• See my Feb 23rd Post: Money Management in China, and in My Country
• Now check this out, from New China, New Chinese: Foreiner (sic) in China? Money Management: in China, and in my Country

Dude, that’s not cool.

Now if I submit my content to an aggregator like Chinalyst, no problem. But I don’t remember giving my consent before this one.

I feel so used and violated!
But oddly enough, there’s a strange sense of post-violation satisfaction as well.

Maybe I should have a smoke…

I mentioned the Chinese IM service QQ before, and how there’s, like, a ba-zillion people using it here in China.

Now I reluctantly stopped using QQ a while back for two reasons: 1) It’s a little resource heavy, and 2) My computer has about as much processing power as the sitting American President.

But I just found this interesting IM client called Pidgin, which you can use to consolidate all your Instant Messaging platforms such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL, ICQ, and oddly enough, QQ.

I’ve installed the program, and it works pretty smoothly. It’s pretty light, and I find runs way better than QQ. You can a preview of Pidgin in the picture here. Notice that my QQ contacts are sorted on the top, while my MSN contacts are listed just below. Sweet, huh?

I’m having some trouble trying to get it to run a Chinese IME, but I’ll keep working on that and keep you updated.

UPDATE: Go to Tools> Preferences> Conversations, then uncheck Buddy Icons.
And then go to Tools> Preferences> Smiley Themes, then select None. Turns out program was transforming Chinese text for emoticon shortcuts, and displaying them as

But in the meantime, I have a ton of old friends who I’ve lost touch with sending me messages via QQ/Pidgin here today. It’s nice to see them all again.

To give Pidgin a try, click here.

Alright. I heard about this interesting form of “microblogging” on twit.tv, and they spoke so highly of it I thought I’d check it out.

In a nutshell, tumblr.com gives you a platform to make a website/blog, normally hosted on tumblr.com. As for content, it allows you to add things that you find in your day-to-day internet surfing (i.e. favorite links, cool youtube videos, quotable quotes, whatever), and place it on your blog. When you find stuff you like, you just click a few clicks – and voila, it’s on your site!

For anyone who’d like to start a blog, but couldn’t be arsed with the pain-in-the-ass of updating it, or coding — this is likely a good option for you. And I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna take to this one.

I’ve already started one, just to test it out. I’m gonna use this to keep track of online movies that I find during those “bored-out-of-my-f*cking-mind” moments.

Be sure to pay a visit:

China’s Pirated Media

…and here’s the RSS feed if you want movies fed to your news reader automatically, or have them fed to your Email whenever I post the links.