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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Philip Newton's LiveJournal:
- Multi-Page TIFF
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If you want to split a multi-page tiff into separate pages, IM may have problems as it will still use up a lot of memory to hold previous pages even if you use a command like...
convert "a.tif[i]" b%03d.tif
This might be regarded as a bug, or perhaps a future improvement.
The better solution may be the non-IM "tiffsplit" program.
| Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 | |
| 7:48 am | Parrk your carr in Harrvarrd Yarrd Amy seems to be turning into a rhotic speaker; I’ve often heard her say things such as “car” and “are” rather than “cah” and “ah” as I do. It’s still a bit unstable; this morning, she said “dinosaur” and “dinosaw” in separate sentences. And not completely authentic, due to overgeneralisation/hypercorrection: she also said “girarff”. I wonder why that is. More exposure to rhotic than non-rhotic accents due to films and the like? Ah well. Let her talk however she wants, as long as she speaks English :) Current Mood:  pensive |
| Friday, June 1st, 2012 | |
| 8:31 pm | The things you learn: aftermath Listening to this clip on YouTube, right at the beginning she said aftermath with a BATH vowel in the final syllable. Huh! I had always used TRAP there, as in maths. (But then, I’m not sure whether I’ve ever heard the word spoken before.) Looked it up on dictionary.com; its house dictionary only has TRAP for the final vowel, but further down, the World English Dictionary has BATH (i.e. it lists both the TRAP and the PALM vowel, and in fact the PALM one first). Since for me, BATH goes with PALM, perhaps I should use BATH in aftermath as well. Current Mood:  geeky |
| Thursday, May 31st, 2012 | |
| 11:47 pm | My sister is a *what*? Apparently, in the Standard Written Form of (modern/revived) Cornish (using traditional graphs), the word for “sister” is whor. (See, for example, this glossary (PDF).) How unfortunate. |
| 7:47 pm | This page has insecure content When I loaded a page in Chrome just now, I got a bar at the top saying, “This page has insecure content. Do you want to load it?” I had seen that message often before and knew it referred to content accessed over HTTP on a page that’s loaded over HTTPS, so it referred to the security of the access… but today, for a second, I had an image of some content sitting on a step somewhere, biting its nails, going “Should I ask him? I’m not sure whether he likes me at all…”. The many meanings of insecure content :) Current Mood:  amused |
| Monday, May 28th, 2012 | |
| 12:20 pm | The things you learn: skink In Klingon, there’s an animal toqvIr lung translated as “Tokvirian skink”. I thought that was a made-up word, but apparently, there really are animals called “skinks”. Huh! (And they’re lizards, which makes sense, given that lung “loong” is described as a lizard-like animal. I presume the name was influenced by the Chinese word 龍 lóng for a dragon.) |
| Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 | |
| 10:51 am | The things you learn: Stroke order of 生 So apparently Chinese and Japanese use different stroke orders for writing 生. Interesting! |
| Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 | |
| 11:23 am | The things you learn: Edmonton and Hamburg Turns out that Edmonton and Hamburg are at nearly exactly the same latitude (around 53° 32' N), as I found out just now when I received a Postcrossing postcard from there. (Postcrossing plots the start and end on a map and draws a line between them, and I wanted to see whether the line just looked horizontal or whether it was actually completely horizontal.) So the postcard travelled effectively due east all the way! (Well, if it had followed a rhumb line, at least….) Always fun to see such coincidences. |
| Monday, May 14th, 2012 | |
| 4:08 pm | The things you learn: “ĝis la revido” Today, I found out that in Esperanto, “ĝis la revido” means “up to the dream-child” („bis zum Traumkind“). A curiously idiomatical phrase for a farewell :) Fun stuff! Current Mood: amused |
| Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | |
| 8:15 pm | Typos as class markers From spam today: Upscale dating is what you deserve, and its free!. I don’t know about others, but for me, “upscale” includes “educated” which, in turn, includes a reasonable command of standard English spelling and punctuation. Especially in advertisement copy where you’re trying to show your best side. |
| Thursday, April 26th, 2012 | |
| 5:44 pm | You know you’re old when… …someone asks what A: and B: are for on Windows. Ah, kids these days. (And they probably have no idea what the icon on the “Save” button represents, either.) Current Mood: nostalgic |
| Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 | |
| 8:54 am | Non-self-segregating morphology The other day, while practising my Esperanto flashcards on Anki, I got a new word: bankalsono. I didn’t recognise it, so I tried to parse it: bank'al'sono? Something about making a call to a bank? bankal'sono? A “Bankal sound”, whatever that might be? Then I asked it to show me the answer: “Badehose” (swimming trunks). Oh! It’s ban'kalsono! Perhaps one should start using the apostrophes more often to separate the morphemes :) Famous mis-segregations in German include Wach'stube vs. Wachs'tube; Blumento'pferde vs. Blumen'topf'erde; and be'in'halt'en vs. bein'halt'en. (Though in most cases, the alternate parse is merely humorous, or the entire pair might be a bit constructed.) |
| Friday, April 20th, 2012 | |
| 12:29 pm | The rane in Spane falls manely on the plane The other day, I finally got around to taking all the words I had jotted into the margin of my notebook during the week-long Esperanto course in March and look them up the dictionary and make Anki flashcards out of them. Two of the words I got that way were ebeno and ebenaĵo. They were defined in my eo–de dictionary as something like “(Geometrie, Physik) Ebene” and “Ebene (konkret; besonders in der Geografie)”, respectively. And yesterday morning, I had the insight that while, in English, both of those words are 𐑐𐑤𐑱𐑯 in the Shaw alphabet, 𐐹𐑊𐐩𐑌 in the Deseret alphabet, /plɛɪn/* in IPA, and presumably Funny how both of those English words correspond to the same German one; I don’t think I’ve ever connected them. Presumably they both come from Latin but one of them took the scenic route through France. * (or however you choose to notate English phonemes; perhaps you would prefer /pleɪn/.) |
| Sunday, April 8th, 2012 | |
| 12:10 pm | Easter cards from Amy, with her name in shorthand :) Amy made me two Easter cards (link goes to the Flickr photo set)… and signed her name in Gregg shorthand! (See the two “back” images.) I told her a while ago how to write it (since I’m trying to teach myself Gregg shorthand, so it’s been on my mind quite a bit recently), but I’m still a bit surprised she remembered. The proportions are rather off (it looks more like “Anner” than “Amy”), but still! She even remembered the “capital” dashes on one of the two cards. To see what it should have looked like “by the book”, see this image (it’s also linked to from the set, but you can’t see anything in the thumbnail; it’s the white space just after the last image). Current Mood:  impressed |
| Monday, April 2nd, 2012 | |
| 1:46 pm | Twilight Stella borrowed the Twilight DVDs and she asked me whether I wanted to watch them with her, so we watched the first one together. Maybe I’ll watch the others with her at some point, too. Current Mood:  calm |
| Sunday, April 1st, 2012 | |
| 8:01 pm | The things you learn: pronouncing “thorough” In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o. I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from. The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have “hur-y”. (I do have NURSE in words where I segment things with the r in the same syllable as the u; for example, in “furry”.) OK, so this presumably represents a pronunciation with NURSE; that sound is regularly spelled e-r, so that made sense. But I have commA at the end of the word; the vowel in both syllables is nearly the same for me. So seeing an o there seemed odd. (So I would have spelled the word th-oo-r-a, since oo is used for STRUT.) I checked dictionary.com and while that gave both STRUT and NURSE for the first syllable, it gave only GOAT for the final vowel. Then I had a look at Forvo; that had seven pronunciations recorded. Clicking through them one by one, it seems that there is a Commonwealth/US split for this word, with commA for the former (the UK samples and the Australian one) and a fairly clear, unreduced GOAT for the latter. Huh! Learn something new every day. (And now, thorough sounds extremely odd to me. Typical result of listening to a word over and over!) Current Mood:  accomplished |
| 10:14 am | Google Maps “Quest” view Google Maps has an awesome Easter Egg for today—check out the “Quest” view! Current Mood: happy |
| Sunday, March 18th, 2012 | |
| 8:02 pm | Reicht das Erzählte, oder zählt das Erreichte? At the moment, there are election posters in Hamburg with the slogan, “Reicht das Erzählte, oder zählt das Erreichte?” I thought that a rather clever turn of words. (And I’m sure it wasn’t the candidate pictured who came up with it, though I had never heard it before.) For those who don’t speak German, the meaning is, “Is what has been told enough, or does what has been achieved count?”, or perhaps a bit more fluently, “Are you going to be satisfied with what other people have told you they wanted to do, or are you going to measure people by what they have actually achieved?”. The punchy bit is in the parallelism of the nouns and verbs: reichen “to be enough, be sufficient” vs. erreichen “to achieve” on the one hand and zählen “to count” vs. erzählen “to tell [e.g. a story]” on the other hand. Current Mood: geeky |
| Friday, March 16th, 2012 | |
| 8:18 pm | Note to self: splitting up a multi-page TIFF file From the ImageMagick manual, of all places: |
| 8:37 am | Ah, those Swedes! I just got some spam from Sweden with a sender of “test testsson”. Made me chuckle :) Current Mood: amused |
| Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 | |
| 1:59 pm | Pi Day! It’s Pi Day! 3/14 1:59:26.5 p.m. In the strange middle-endian, 12-hour dialect spoken by some people :) Current Mood: geeky |
in Gregg shorthand, the first sense is spelled plane while the second is spelled plain.