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A year ago I wrote an article about traveling light without a computer, even in a business setting, by using a cloud drive along with public computers instead. I had just returned from Argentina, and the method worked great. This year I was packing for the same trip again, and planning on doing the exact same thing. The technique involves a small amount of printing to paper. In the original article I said this:

"Every trip is different. When packing data, I think about the trip, I think about the things I’ll need, I think in terms of a toolkit at my disposal which includes 1. Paper, 2. Computer, 3. Mobile devices, and 4. Thumb Drive. (Paper, by the way, should never be underestimated. Instant-on, infinite battery life, and who cares if it’s stolen. So thin-and-light that it vanishes when viewed on-edge. There’s a reason it’s popular.) To this list I can now add #5: Cloud drive."

So there I was, packing for the same trip a year later, and thinking as usual of the few things it would be nice to have printed ahead for paper reference. (more…)

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Awhile back Natalia pushed me out of the nest, saying it was finally time for me to start writing to her in Spanish. For years we have been writing back and forth bilingually, my e-mails in English, hers in Spanish. Which was super pleasant. But it was laziness on my part, and in fact unbecoming of a person whose goal is to do business in Latin America.

Writing in Spanish was hard for me at first but it’s getting easier with practice. I read well, but speak poorly, and I had zero experience with writing. To my surprise though, just having everyday language tools readily at hand makes it much, much easier now than it would have been, say, 5 years ago. It isn’t cheating to use these things. In fact writing simple e-mails with the support of spell-checkers and grammar-checkers, conjugators and dictionaries, and of course machine translation, is just a great way to get continual correcting feedback while learning any language.

Over the years I’ve written several posts about language learning and language tools, so today I decided to make a new category called Language — it’s apparently a theme on this blog. If you click Language on the sidebar, you’ll see some of these prior posts. Always they have a special focus on free or nearly-free computer applications. I just finished sending an e-mail to Natalia and I thought it might be worth describing the tools I like best for anybody else who’s struggling with a second language. (more…)

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When I was a tyke they gave us map-reading aptitude tests. I loved those tests. Ever since, I’ve tried to stay one jump ahead of the rest of the class. Now I’m an old guy. Anybody who knows me knows I get stuck in a good map, like anybody else might get stuck in a good book. In fact, on trips, I no longer bring a book to read. It can be a camping trip, a foreign trip, no matter where I go I know I’ll just be reading maps. It’s relaxing for me. Sometimes after staring at a good map for a really long time, suddenly there it is: the perfect route, the perfect camping spot. Or in a city, something fun beyond the bridge, that I would have totally missed.

On any trip, I’d rather have the perfect map than the perfect guidebook — or even the perfect guide. It’s fun having that freedom to just explore on your own. Maps let you do that. It’s not uncommon to know things even most locals don’t know, based on serious perusal of a good map. Come to think of it, in our house, we even decorate with maps. The maps get the premium wallspace. They are our art.

This article is about how I’m doing topos now. So it’s about topos specifically. Much of what I say though is equally applicable to city maps or road maps, like you’d use on other kinds of trips. (more…)

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Recently a good friend called me and asked my recommendation for the best way to learn Spanish. This post is not about language learning generally, it’s about one single, wonderful toy I recently discovered, which I’m using every day now in my own language practice. But first, as background, I would like to talk more generally about learning languages, from a bird’s eye view.

If you want to skip over the "Tricks" section right below, feel free. The new technique I found is at the end, under "Toy." (more…)

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If you love your gadgets — and I think we all love, and hate, our gadgets — you may recognize that feeling of bliss, so rare, when all of your gadgets are working. I had one of those moments, oddly enough, passing through security and customs back into the United States. I set my shoes in the tray, pushed my roll-aboard and daypack onto the belt, and… they stopped me. "Sir, do you have a computer?" No… "A cell phone?" No…

Just in that moment, I felt that little wave of bliss. A successful three-week trip, partly business, and all of my gadgets were working — in fact even better, I had no gadgets, to NOT work.

On the cell phone, I cheated — Natalia gave me one to use while in Córdoba. On the computer, though, I was trying something new, and I have to say the reviews are in. I have proof-of-concept now, and it’s great.

Some background. On any trip, of any length, no matter who you are, (more…)

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It’s probably safe to say that we all love Google. A basic Google search is so effective and so danged useful that we mostly overlook the things Google DOESN’T do. Google gets blocked by anything that isn’t clean HTML or PDF. It can’t fill in a form to query a database. It can’t go past anything requiring a fee, a subscription, or a password. The part of the web that Google can’t reach is called the Deep Web, and it happens to be non-trivial. Best estimates put it around 500 times larger than the Surface Web, in terabytes. But that’s not what actually matters. What’s important is that much of the highest-quality content is housed there. There’s good stuff underneath the Surface Web, that we wish we could get at.

Every search is different, but depending on what we’re after, it’s always easy to recognize high-quality hits as opposed to low-quality hits. For example the last serious search I did (several hours) was learning about cloud backup and storage. Specifically I was shopping for an online backup provider which would also work well for retrieving encrypted & passworded documents using any Web-enabled device while traveling. This is a new hot area, with a lot of buzz, a lot of new startups, lots of flavors available, a ton of competition. Hard, in other words, to cut through the fog. In this case, a high-quality hit would be (more…)

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More than a year ago I posted a lengthy article on machine translation, reporting the state of things back then, and testing six leading MT products ("MT playoffs, March 2009"). The results had Google in first place, with Language Weaver next, and Microsoft third. I closed the article with this: "Bear in mind this was a single test of 500 words, and just English-Spanish. But things are changing so fast a person really should do their own tests anyway once a year…"

Testing is actually hard work, not as easy as you would think. You really should do it, though, if you routinely use these tools. Get a chunk of sample text, run it through the various MT options out there, and compare the output. Seems quick and easy. The hard part, though, is that the output (in my case) is Spanish, and while I read it OK, it’s slow going for me really judging quality. Added to that, first impressions of MT quality can really be deceiving. A butchered first sentence makes a whole paragraph look like crap, and it’s only after digging into it that you might notice what’s good about it.

Well, I did the work, as well as some other research having to do with translation in general, and I’m feeling really good now. All caught up on things. In a nutshell, here’s what I found:

I tested seven MT providers, including all the current leaders. Overall I was very impressed by the quality I was seeing; links to their translation pages are provided at the end of this article, if you want to see what I mean. The biggest surprise by far was that, over the past 16 months, Microsoft must have been grinding away pretty hard in the back room, because they’ve quietly closed the gap with Google. In my opinion they can claim the number one slot now, at least for Spanish. I totally wasn’t expecting that. In fact, I had to stare at it from several directions before I could actually believe it. (more…)

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I went to the bank last week, and I had my computer Joe slung over my shoulder just in case I needed something. It turned out to be a good thing because I was missing some account info. While I was looking it up I could see my banker was watching with quite a bit of curiosity. Finally she said "Wow, that’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen an iPad before."

Now Joe is a lot of things, but he’s definitely not an iPad. Just for starters, he’s a 3 pound ruggedized brick, built for construction sites. He’s all Windows. He might be portable, as real computers go, but still he’s full-size. My banker is a smart person. It’s just that for many people the iPad is the first slate they’ve run across.

iPad’s ARE beautiful. Much more beautiful than Joe. I got to play with one “˜til my heart content, at the Apple store in Salt Lake when they first came out. Now… I’m keenly aware that the world doesn’t need another blogger jabbering about the iPad. But because I have five years of computing exclusively on a slate, I did see that I was having an entirely different experience than the other people in the Apple store. (more…)

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I’ve now had my new computer, Joe, three full months, plenty of time for bonding. My old computer Moe is pushing five years old. Here’s a family portrait:

Joe is just the next generation on Moe. They’re both slates as you can see, from Motion Computing. Moe was my favorite computer of all time, and Joe is just better yet. Since a sweet computer is one of the three pillars of Pete’s happiness (and the other two are also doing very well right now) I’m feeling quite cheery.

Prior to Moe I was what you would call an "advanced keyboarder," one of those guys with a bevy of speedy shortcuts and macros, all second nature. I loved my keyboard; I still love keyboards. (more…)

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Last month I listed Language Weaver as a close-second-place to Google in translation quality. I had read that by purchasing Babylon’s software I could get access to the Language Weaver engine. So I tried it out (the software is cheap) and found out that oops, there’s a catch. Just to be sure I traded quick e-mails with both companies; but at least for now, here’s where it’s at. Babylon is limited (probably by contract) to a 300-letter translation block. That’s right, letters, not words. Basically unworkable except to gist a single sentence. Windows Live accepts 500 words, and Google appears to be unlimited.

So Language Weaver is only for big guys. The company is very nice people, though. (more…)

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