computing – panglott

Apps for learning Czech

This last week or so I’ve been looking at and assessing notable apps for language learning (Czech). These are really awesome, probably the best way to study a language on your own—fun, engaging, and easy to get into. They include lots of spoken content, start at a basic level, elicit positive knowledge in a variety of ways, and used spaced repetition and other cognitive techniques. All of these are better for absolute beginners intereted in self-study than nearly any book, podcasts, CD, or other software I have seen. They are heavily gamified, and are relatively fun and easy to come back to, an ideal way to study a few minutes a day or more. This is a relatively new format, though, with a bunch of competition, and there is a lot of variety.

So far I’ve tested these with languages that I have some knowledge of (French, which I studied in high school/college, or Czech, which I have been learning over the summer), so they are very easy for me at present. However, I would like to also test them with languages that I am unfamiliar with, such as Irish or Indonesian. I avoided tools that didn’t have Czech (such as Babbel and Busuu, which offer other popular European languages as well as Indonesian and Turkish/Arabic respectively), except Duolingo, which I had an old French account for from some time ago.

Duolingo has the best software. The iOS app is slick and works well. Duolingo is free to use; their original business model was based around crowdsourced translation, but they have shifted to language certification. The content appears to be very high quality, but it has a relatively limited number of languages relative to some of the other software below. However, this would be fantastic for the mostly large international languages Duolino covers (Irish, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Esperanto, Turkish, Norweigian, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch). Here’s the Duolino intro video. “Lessons” are broken into tiny chunks of a dozens questions or so, and involve varied translation-based activities that involve listening, speaking, typing, and identifying words and sentences (although there is a bias towards listening and reading/typing). According to an in-house study, it only takes a Duolingo user an average of 34 hours to learn the equivalent of a first college semester’s worth of Spanish ( PDF ). Now take that with a grain of salt: a single freshman college semester amounts to about 45-48 hours of in-class instructional time, and does not constitute a particularly high level of proficiency. This is still an average of 16 minutes per day for 18 weeks, that you schedule on your own.
Mondly Languages has a Web and iOS app with an interface approach similar to Duolingo’s, although the software is much more flaky. Sometimes the lessons fail to progress, so you may accidentally repeat levels unless you quit and restart the app. There is plenty of translation, but words are also matched to pictures and there is much less typing and speaking. It’s also, at the early levels, much “easier” than Duolingo (since many of the answers are fairly obvious). Mondly has a different business model than Duolingo, and the app costs $15-20 past the trial levels. Still, it has many of the benefits of an app like Duolingo: interactivity, integrated audio, extensive gamification. Moreover, it supports more languages, including Czech (as well as German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Romanian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean, Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Indonesian, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Afrikaans). The Czech app consists of about 18 eight-section lessons organized by topic, as well as a daily vocabulary lesson.
Memrise is somewhat different, and is a freemium Web and mobile app with advertising and premium features. Memrise comes out of the spaced-repetition arena, but includes most user-generated content. So, it has some similarities to Anki, without the expectation that you spend a lot of time making your own cards and hours reviewing flashcards. Its software also leaves SRS way behind. The Basic Czech course, for example, is highly gamified, including flash cards, exercises, spoken audio recordings, and other interactive content, and there is plenty of other Czech material. Since Memrise is older and has user-generated content, there is a very wide selection of languages and courses (probably of very varying quality)—for example, there are a number of courses on Native American languages, and user-generated adaptations of textbooks like Complete Czech. See also this discussion of the app, Plant a New Language in Your Mind.

AFTER A WEEK
After a week, Duolingo remains very good. Mondly’s problems are increasing. Mondly’s execution is not as good: Mondly’s content more closely resembles a phrasebook, and the learning curve a few lessons in goes up quite steeply. Mondly also doesn’t have a clear interface to review old material. And for exercises that require the user to speak speak a phrase, Mondly’s speech recognition is very frustrating for more complex words and phrases. Memrise is the only one that doesn’t require any speaking (only headphones). Memrise is probably better, at least until Duolingo Czech comes out.

All of these are essentially old-fashioned translation exercises dressed up in interactive, gamified apps with audio.

Language learning apps in the New York Times

Some of the new language learning apps have been covered in the New York Times over the past few years; here are some links to the overviews/discussions there.

The Web Way to Learn a Language: 2010 overview of consumer language learning technology, including RosettaStone.com, TellMeMore.com, Livemocha.com, Babbel.com, bbc.com/languages, other sites such as Learn German, japanese-online.com and learn-korean.net, and apps such as Lonely Planet Phrasebooks, Oxford Translator Travel Pro, World Nomads, and Ultralingua Translation Dictionary.
On Language: Chunking: Ben Zimmer in 2010 discusses lexical chunks in language pedagogy: ‘Ritualized moments of everyday communication — greeting someone, answering a telephone call, wishing someone a happy birthday — are full of these canned phrases that we learn to perform with rote precision at an early age. Words work as social lubricants in such situations, and a language learner like Blake is primarily getting a handle on the pragmatics of set phrases in English, or how they create concrete effects in real-life interactions. The abstract rules of sentence structure are secondary. …In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms or conventional speech routines, but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently, in patterns that are known as “collocations.”’
Powerful Tools for Learning a Language, or Several: 2012 endorsement of the Babbel (and Busuu) apps: “The different language apps are all similar, and they’re free on iOS and Android. You can set up a free account to keep track of your learning, and this will let you try the full fee-carrying online program.”
A Start-Up Bets on Human Translators Over Machines: A 2012 profile on the launch of Duolingo.
Translation Service Enlists Web Users to Do the Work: Another 2012 profile of Duolingo looks deeper into the technology.
Room for Debate: Is Learning a Language Other Than English Worthwhile? : A 2012 debate
10 Paths to a More Fluent Vacation: 2012 overview of some language learning resources, from the cheap (bbc.co.uk/languages, Coffee Break Spanish and Coffee Break French, DigitalDialects.com, French in Action, LearnaLanguage.com, LivingLanguage.com, and Livemocha.com) to the expensive (Pimsleur.com, RosettaStone.com, and Transparent.com).
Measuring the Success of Online Education: 2013—”Duolingo, a free Web-based language learning system that grew out of a Carnegie Mellon University research project, is not an example of a traditional MOOC. However, the system, which now teaches German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and English, has roughly one million users and about 100,000 people spend time on the site daily. The firm’s business is based on the possibility of using students to translate documents in a crowd-sourced fashion. Seventy-five percent of the students are outside of United States, and Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Luis von Ahn notes that the foreign students are significantly more motivated and have a higher completion rate than their American counterparts. The firm, which was founded by Dr. von Ahn and his students, commissioned a study of the effectiveness of the language training system that indicates that students may learn languages more quickly online…”
Inventive, Cheaper Tools for Learning a Language: 2014 overview of Chineasy, Duolingo, Lingua.ly (which focuses on the news), and Mango Premiere (which uses feature films), as well as Anki, Forvo.com, and Rosetta Stone’s travel app. Forvo.com is pronouncing dictionary with user-generated pronunciations.
Spanish as a Second Language, With the Accent on Fun: Duolingo, Busuu and Other Apps Teach Languages on Phones: 2014 overview of Spanish-learning apps for iOS and Android from MindSnacks, Duolingo, Busuu, and SpeakTribe, as well as Cat Spanish.
The Benefits of Failing at French: 2014 discussion of cognitive improvement from studying French but not learning it well enough to converse with a three-year-old “…after a year of intense study, including at least two hours a day with Rosetta Stone, Fluenz and other self-instruction software, Meetup groups, an intensive weekend class and a steady diet of French movies, television and radio, followed by what I’d hoped would be the coup de grâce: two weeks of immersion at one of the top language schools in France. …to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test. …After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth.”
Learning a New Language: Challenges and Joys: 2014 letters to the editor in response.

Czech is a lesser-studied language, and almost none of these tools have resources for the language: Not LiveMocha, Babbel, Busuu, Lingua.ly, Rosetta Stone, MindSnacks, SpeakTribe, or Learnalanguage.com. Duolingo Czech for English speakers is in the incubator headed toward beta release. Forvo.com and Mango Languages support Czech, and DigitalDialects has basic material in Flash. Italki is a means of connecting with language teachers. It looks like Mondly Languages is attempting to compete with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone ( Tumblr, YT ), with many more languages.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown strategy notes

X-COM: Enemy Unknown is a fantastic game where, over the course of about 30 missions, you confront an alien threat to humanity. It was the first game I bought for Xbox360 in 2013. Completing the storyline is enough practice at turn-based tactical combat for me for a while, but it has fantastic replay value after putting it down for a year or two. Which is what I just did.

The “economy” isn’t exactly straightforward, but there is an economic component to X-COM base management. Countries with satellites give you money; money and captured alien resources give you advanced technology for your soldiers; sending soldiers on missions lowers panic (if successful) or raises panic (if failed or aborted); launching satellites in a country lowers its panic; high panic causes countries to withdraw from the X-COM project. Send up lots of satellites early to build your economy, then recruit engineers to construct advanced equipment and build out your base, and recruit scientists to research new technologies.
If there’s one key to X-COM, it’s protect your soldiers. If your experienced soldiers die, your rookies won’t be able to complete tough missions on their own; if you abort or fail missions, your panic levels will shoot up; if the panic level shoots up, countries will withdraw from the X-COM project; if countries withdraw from the X-COM project, you lose the funding to hire and develop experienced soldiers. This is how you lose the game.
Soldiers are very fragile, at least until you tech to Titan Armor and Chitin Plating, and even then things can go south with undisciplined tactics, especially on a long mission. Don’t dash your soldiers out: this will trigger new groups of of hostile mobs and the soldiers not have any actions to take them out. Don’t send soldiers out to new areas of the map without clearing currently active mobs: newly triggered mobs will swarm your flanks and your dudes will die. The correct method is to slowly, cautiously move the soldiers out one move, then Overwatch to kill any hostile mobs with reaction shots. Save actions to deal with any triggered hostile mobs. Set up ambushes. Keep your squad together so they can focus fire and protect each other with Overwatch.
Alien weapons explode when their wielder is killed, but capture the alien with an Arc Thrower and you capture its weapon. Capturing alien weapons opens up plasma weapons technologies (rather than through the default tech tree). Sectoids use plasma pistols, but Thin Men use light plasma rifles, which opens up research on the game’s best weapons—plasma rifles and plasma sniper rifles.Skipping laser weapons to go straight to plasma is one viable strategy, just don’t take too long. Lasers for ship weapons are cheaper than plasma, and might be sufficient.
Snipers are the best, and mobile snipers are the best of the best. I was long a fan of Squad Sight, but this is useful only on open maps with long, clear sight lines. On crowded urban or UFO maps, it forces the sniper to rely on his pistol while moving.
Support may not rack up the kill count of Sniper, Assault, or Heavy soldiers (usually less than one kill per mission). But they are still fine riflemen, and Medkits to stabilize or heal are essential. Always take one, two if you can.
With the Heavy, take the extra Shredder Rocket, but be careful about the rockets of the Heavy. Nearly the worst mission in my current game happened when assaulting a downed UFO. My squad was clustered around a log, the Heavy missed with his rocket and blew up the log. This only killed one soldier outright, but weakened the squad enough that Mutons tore through it. Only two soldiers survived the mission, it was my first major setback in this game.
Sell items with no research benefits, such as damaged UFO computers and components, on the grey market. Other components are really useful for later production, save them up.
Engineers are more valuable than Scientists in the early game, since they’re needed to unlock the building of so many things while a lack of Scientists simply slows research. However, your need to research a variety of techs to finish the storyline and expeditiously get advanced weapons and armor (Arc Thrower, New Fighter Craft, &c.). So don’t neglect Scientists and Laboratories.
The tutorial is fun, but it kills all but one of your starting rookies on the first mission. Protect your rookies, don’t play the tutorial if you can help it ;)
Don’t merely develop new talent, save your existing talent. Once your soldiers become Colonels, save them for when you really need them, and put them through psionic testing rather than risking them on missions. I learned this lesson the hard way in my current game, when my best sniper (and only psion), Col. Pieter “Xeno” Meek (65 kills over 20 missions), and my only other skilled mobile sniper were randomly killed on a very difficult cargo ship UFO mission. I had to spend extra months training new psions and snipers for the final mission, which came with the appearance of a huge orbiting battleship.
Spoilers! The story has three critical junctures: capture an Outsider to start the Alien Base Assault, develop new fighter craft then build the Hyperwave Relay to assault the Overseer Ship Crash Site, then send a psionic soldier in psi armor into the Gollop Chamber to end the game and begin the final mission. This halts all research, engineering, and other events, so be prepared. Sending a psionic soldier with psi Armor into the Gollop Chamber maxes out his psionic skills, and this soldier must survive the final mission. So don’t send a rookie!
IIRC new, more difficult alien types arrive every month.
Key technologies: Xeno-Biology unlocks the Arc Thrower and begins the storyline tech line. Alien Materials leads to Carapace Armor. Other techs: Arc Thrower (Xeno-Biology > Arc Thrower); Carapace Armor (Alien Materials > Carapace Armor); S.C.O.P.E. (Weapon Fragments); Firestorm aircraft (UFO Power Source > New Fighter Craft); Titan Armor (Carapace Armor + UFO Power Source > Elerium)

Installing the Nix package manager on Mac OS X

I used fink a bit back in 2001, when OS X was shiny and new, but didn’t really use it much. After abandoning fink back then, I haven’t used any package manager for OS X at all. But OS X is not shiny and new; it’s shipped with ancient versions of Python forever, some of the official versions of Python for Mac have been buggy for me, and I’ve been using Linux more and wanting some of the advantages of package managers.

I use a lot of Debian, so maybe fink would be the way to go again; it seemed nearly dead for a long time. Here’s a great late-2013 overview of the state of package management on Mac OS X. But toying around with Linuxes and functional programming has pointed me to NixOs and the Nix package manager.

Going to nixos.org/nix/, we are advised to install by downloading an install script and piping it to sh. Hm, piping it to less instead doesn’t reveal anything too obviously scary: it downloads and installs a binary for x86_64-linux, i686-linux, or x86_64-darwin. So we’ll try

sudo curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

nix-env can perform one of several operations per invocation.
* Installing software is done with the --install or ‘-i flag. See also the --pre-built or -b flag to install pre-built/binary software only, and the--dry-run flag which runs through the process without doing anything (for testing purposes).
* Upgrading software uses the --upgrade or -u flag. Also the -b flag works here.
* Uninstalling software can be done with the -e flag.
* Querying with --query or -q by default shows the installed packages. See also the --available or -a flags and the --description flag.

So for example nix-env -qc should compare installed versions for what’s available. The command nix-channel --update will update the list of Nix expressions.

Mac text-to-speech for articles and audiobooks

At the command line, you can make your Mac speak with say. say can use different voices, read from a text file, and export the text-to-speech to an audio file.

say -v Fiona -f article.txt -o recording.aiff

In System Preferences > Dictation & Speech, you can [http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/04/add-voice-of-siri-to-mac-os-x/](add the voice of Siri), which is Samantha. Some of the voices, like Allison and Susan, sound even better than Samantha. Most of the non-American voices aren’t quite as good, but it can be interesting to have a different English accent, like Fiona’s Standard Scottish English. Cellos is, ironically, the voice in some Android phone commercials.

say -v Cellos "Droid"

Postbanging: vanilla Debian like CrunchBang

Sadly the creator of Crunchbang Linux has decided to end the project, with the view that vanilla Debian can be used the same way. Probably he is right; it’s probably not necessary to maintain a separate distribution and repositories, when what makes Crunchbang so special to me is its configuration and UI. CrunchBang has been a wonderful distro for me, and for a while my only wish has been to set something similar up on a Raspberry Pi or non-Debian distro. It’s just such a nice low-end UI, I like it so much better than LXDE or XFCE.

So postbanging will be some impetus to learn how to configure a Linux desktop environment from scratch. Crunchbang is a Debian-based distro built on the Openbox window manager, Conky, and tint2. An essential guide is adding CrunchBang features to other distros and the list of CrunchBang applications. Here is a very useful thread from the CrunchBang forums. Read some more: Getting started with OpenBox, OpenBox default configuration, xinitrc, configuring tint2. There is plenty to read about configuring conky ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ).

These are just the most basic stuff. Nothing on actual apps later, and I have little interest in a graphical login—I prefer typing startx. I’m starting with a fresh virtual machine running a jessie RC1 netinstall ISO.

apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install xorg, xinit
apt-get install openbox
apt-get install tint2, conky, obmenu, ttf-liberation
cd ~
mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox
cp -R /etc/xdg/openbox/* ~/.config/openbox

# Edit .xinitrc to start OpenBox
echo "exec openbox-session" >> .xinitrc

# Edit .config/openbox/autostart to start tint2 and conky
echo "(sleep 1s && tint2) &" >> ~/.config/openbox/autostart
echo "(sleep 2s && conky) &" >> ~/.config/openbox/autostart

After running startx, command-click on the screen to bring up the menu, then open the Terminal editor. Next, edit the tint2 configuration files with nano ~/.config/tint2/tint2rc .

panel_size = 0 30 # to get full monitor width
panel_position = top center horizontal # puts the panel at top

Finally, configure your ~/.conkyrc file. Here’s one based on the CrunchBang version, configured to display only default OpenBox keybindings:

##############################################
# Settings
##############################################
background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont Liberation Sans:size=9
xftalpha 1
update_interval 1.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type desktop
#own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 200 200
maximum_width 240
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
default_color 656667
default_shade_color 000000
default_outline_color 828282
alignment top_right
gap_x 12
gap_y 56
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale no
##############################################
#  Output
##############################################
TEXT
S Y S T E M    I N F O
${hr}
Host:$alignr$nodename
Uptime:$alignr$uptime
RAM:$alignr$mem/$memmax
Swap usage:$alignr$swap/$swapmax
Disk usage:$alignr${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
CPU usage:$alignr${cpu cpu0}%


S H O R T C U T    K E Y S
${hr}
Alt+F4$alignr Close Window
Alt+Tab$alignr Cycle Windows
Alt+Space$alignr Show Menu
Alt+Escape$alignr Activate Last Window

EDIT 2015-02-22
The CrunchBang community is continuing with a project named Bunsen Labs Linux, which will be mostly install and configuration scripts for a vanilla Debian netinstall. They have some useful information on getting an install going There’s another individual-directed offshoot at crunchbangplusplus.org.

I dunno, tiling window managers and NixOS are looking pretty interesting as well.

EDIT 2015-02-24
StumpWM is like all Lisp tools set up like emacs :( but xmonad: Awesome.

“Fleventy-five”

Quoth Erlich, the douchey bro who runs the “incubator” on “Silicon Valley”:

Yeah, I know what binary is! Jesus Christ, I memorized the hexadecimal times
tables when I was 14 writing machine code. OK? Ask me what 9 times F is. It’s
fleventy-five. I do not need you telling me what binary is…

It’s a cute moment, but F times 9 is not actually anything like fleventy-five. As it turns out, Erlich is quite the puffed-up bullshitter. ;)

But if not “fleventy-five”, what is F times 9?

There are a couple schemes for rendering hexadecimal numbers into English. Those by John Nystrom and Base42 use words that don’t resemble native English vocabulary very much; the system at Hex Headquarters is more suitable.

Hexadecimal F is decimal 15. Decimal 15 times 9 is decimal 135, just as hexidecimal F times 9 is hexadecimal 87.

That is, F times 9 is eightek seven. Not as funny. However…

What’s 7 squared times 5? Fimtek-five!

What’s B squared plus A? Levtek-four!

No rapture for the nerds

Ramez Naam has some wonderful posts at Charles Stross’s blog about why The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears, including some graphs on Why AIs Won’t Ascend in the Blink of an Eye. In short, a technological Singularity is plausible only if designing smarter AIs is a problem of linear complexity. If it is a more challenging problem, a hard takeoff becomes more unlikely or impossible. William Hertling makes some thoughtful points in rebuttal, which probably depend too heavily on the lack of constraints to Moore’s “Law”.

The techno-utopianism (or even just techno-optimist) of the Singularity too often relies on really naive ideas of the self, even if clever writers subvert them. People can’t achieve immortality by uploading their souls to a computer because souls are an illusion. The human mind is fundamentally embodied; hours in a sensory deprivation tank cause minds to create powerful illusions of sensation. And the tricks computers use to simulate human behavior also demonstrate their profound lack of the human experience that drives human behavior. Machine translation can improve with better representation of linguistic structure, but it’s never going to approach real translation until the machines understand semantics, pragmatics, and stylistics in the way that humans do.

Unicode Hell: torture your type for fun (and profit?)

Sometime at the start of my graduate program in linguistics, I frequently needed to cite examples from differing alphabets and scripts. So I put together a dummy text to weed out fonts that can’t handle Unicode well, mostly edited snippets from Wikipedia. Serif fonts in general do poorly with this, and the best performer overall was Arial Unicode MS. Mostly I wrote in LibreOffice in Gentium Plus, or Hiragino Mincho ProN W3 for Japanese and Japanese/English texts, but even Gentium had difficulty with the wilderness of combining diacritics in a presentation on the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis. Needless to say, this is overkill for most purposes.

“Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,” wrote Cicero—there is no one who loves pain because it is pain. “Ðā ne sacað þe ætsamne ne bēoð,” said the canny Saxon—those do not quarrel who are not together. “Hwon gelpeð se þe wide siþað,” quoth he—a little boasts he who travels widely. “Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem,” Masaryk wrote: as many languages you know, as many times you are a human being.

“Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow” is a pangram, and thus contains every letter of the alphabet. “Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy” is Czech: The too-yellow horse groaned devilish odes. While “Eble ĉiu kvazaŭ-deca fuŝĥoraĵo ĝojigos homtipon” is Esperanto: Maybe every quasi-fitting bungle-choir makes a human type happy. Norwegian blåbærsyltetøy is blueberry jam. The Klingon word lIghoH “He disputes you (pl.)” shows the importance of serifs. It’s hard to pronounce Antonín Dvořák [ˈantoɲiːn ˈlɛopolt ˈdvor̝aːk]. Tau, or 6.28318…, is twice pi.

English idea derives ultimately from Greek ἰδέα “form, appearance, kind,” from the Proto-Indo-European root wid- “see, know,” which is cognate with Sanskrit veda “ritual knowledge, lore” and English wise and witty, Other English words that derive ultimately from Sanskrit include ashram (Sanskrit āśrama “hermitage”), ganja (gāñjā “hemp”), pundit (paṇḍitá “scholar”), and loot (luṇṭhati “he steals”).

ハングル（朝: 한글、hangeul）は、朝鮮語を表記するための表音文字である。「ピリカチェプ」 means “good fish” in Ainu.

Blog redesign

It’s time for a major blog redesign, since changes in Blogger’s interface long ago irritated me enough to drop off blogging almost entirely (I’ve also been super busy with school). I love writing in plain text/HTML/lightweight markup language, but hate the assumptions that too many WYSIWYG editors make about my writing preferences, and Blogger made both modes annoying. I’ve needed to modify my tools, and if so, I’m going to make the blog run the way I’ve always wanted to.

Static site generators may be so 2012, but editing plain text files (stored in the cloud and published with some scripts) seems to me like a powerfully writer-centric workflow. So this blog is written in Python Markdown, generated by the static site generator Pelican with Python on Mac OS X, and published. We’ll see how that works.