Do usable translation gadgets exist? An investigation

I bought this 2005-era translation device because… because…

OK, here’s the thing: Normally when I’m reading something in French, I’ve got some proper tools handy for doing translation — I’m gonna need it. But other times, like when I’m reading an English book from the 40s, there’ll be a few French phrases here and there (because there was an assumption that all proper Englishmen have at least a basic understanding of French), and that’s fine: I have no problem (finally) reading French at a level of a British 12-year-old from 1947.

But sometimes I’m stumped by just the simplest word, because I just forget, say, whether “neck” is “cou” or “genou”. So I fish my phone out of my pocket and:

That took literally half an hour! And now I forgot where I was in the novel! DID MISS MARPLE DIE MEANWHILE

So I wondered whether somebody had made a li’l device that I could have on the table here, that’s instant-on, and you can just type a word and get the translation?

And the answer is “no, not really anymore”, but about twenty years ago, there were various devices on the market (before Google Translate killed off this tranche). You can get them almost for free on Ebay, so I thought I’d just get one for laffs and giggles — I mean, I don’t really expect it to actually be useful, but perhaps it’d be fun?

This is a Lingo 6, and it’s extremely light. The keyboard is pretty nice — it’s perfect for thumbing. But let’s look at how you work it:

So we start from “off”…

Hit the “on/off” button, and it’s instantly on. Very nice. But the default mode is… to show what time it is!?

OK, so you hit the “mode” button to get to translation. And the default “from” language is English — and there’s no way to change that.

So you hit the French flag.

And then type “cou”.

And then “enter”.

And then the English flag. “Neck”! I knew it!

So what if you type a way more obscure word like “cheville” (“ankle”)?

It’s not in the dictionary, so it selects “chèvre” instead. *sigh*

Video demonstration:

You can configure the “beep” away, which is nice, but otherwise not a whole lot of confing going on.

Oh, and why is the keyboard so messy with all the numbers and symbols over the letters?

Yes, because it’s also a calculator. How useful!

So as I guessed, this is a cruel joke — the hardware is nice, but the UX is… is… Even if it’s (as you can see from the videos) much, much faster to use than a modern phone, let’s just say no users were involved in designing the UX. And the dictionary is so small that it’s just idiotic, anyway.

This is where you go “well, why don’t you use Siri!? It’s the best!” Well, first of all, I don’t have any such listening devices here, and second of all — “nice way to say ‘I don’t know French’ without saying ‘I don’t know French'”.

“Siri, what does ‘ver’ mean? No, not ‘vers’. No, not ‘vert’. No, not ‘verre’. ‘Ver’! ‘Ver!'” (“Worm”, “towards”, “green”, “glass”.)

Anyway, amusing device, but it doesn’t help me with my original problem: Having a frictionless translator thingie by my reading chair.

I’ve got an old Blackberry Priv. If confed without a pin, it can be woken up fast and stuff. And the keyboard is nice. Google Translate is possible to use on it, but it’s otherwise so old that I can’t even log in to Google Play to upgrade Google Play so that I can install a better translation app.

But I guess if I applied myself, I could fix that — sideload an app, or write one myself. The bigger problem, though, is that I don’t want yet another device that I need to charge all the time. I tested the Priv, and it seems to hold the charge for about four days before needing recharging, and that’s just too annoying. If I had a device that used magcharge (as a friend suggested), that would help — I could just have the charging thing on the table here, and it could sit on it normally.

But… even more clutter! And wires! And it’s really too big! Gah.

So I’m asking: Has somebody made a nice little device for a single use case like this? Like… I envision an epaper device with a physical keyboard, small and handy — a screen not bigger than, say, four inches, that’s instant on, and has a battery that lasts for months when it’s powered off. And that’s programmable so that I can put some simple app on it, and it has to be powerful enough that it’s not too annoying to write that app for it.

Preferably without too much Android and stuff, because Android has a tendency to do stuff like this at random:

Just a gadget gadget, and not some entire computer that suddenly decides that it’s going to update itself.

Is this too much to ask for!?

Comics Daze

Yes! Comics!

And for music, I’ve been listening to my albums chronologically on and off for almost a year now — starting with the late 60s, and I’m now up to 1993, I think… It’s kinda fascinating how certain years were more or less exciting musically. 1993 is probably some kind of low point? At least I bought a bunch of not very thrilling albums that year, apparently.

The Lemonheads: Come On Feel the Lemonheads

12:04: Chissakobee by Minetaro Mochizuki/Shugoro Yamamoto (Abrams)

This is very… I hate recapping, but I kinda have to here, because it’s just so odd. This series is about that hairy guy up there having to take over a construction company (!) after his parents die. OK, fine..

Sandoz: Digital Lifeforms

But an orphanage (!) has burned down (!) and he also has to take care of the kids from the orphanage. Because of course he does. So this is a sort of comedy with tension both from the construction company (will he be able to find financing to carry on?!) and also with the kids, and also with two women who kinda come and live with him to take care of the kids.

*phew*

But most striking about the book is the way they avoid depicting faces — half the panels are just random body parts. There are especially many panels that feature crotches.

And the humour is just bizarre.

I can’t really say I much enjoyed this book, but it’s certainly… something.

12:35: A Tale of Two Travelers by Madita Schwenke (Fieldmouse Press)

I got this from here.

This is based on a Grimm fairy tale. I’ve always disliked fairy tales (and myths) — well, as far back as I can remember, I’ve always found fairy tales to be annoying. In kindergarten I was probably like “fuck straight off with that Hansel & Gretel or Jesus story shit! I wanna read some Wind in the Willows or Tove Jansson! Gimme the real stuff!”

This version is less so, but it’s still got that skeeziness going on.

Probably just me, though — I guess most people love these things?

And what’s up with the reproduction? The lettering looks especially smudgy. Annoying.

12:45: Different Ways to Fly by Rumi Hara (Fieldmouse Press)

This is a very short book.

But it’s pretty charming.

12:47: The Most High Girl in the World by Emily Zullo (Fieldmouse Press)

This is fun…

… but the storytelling is pretty choppy. I mean, it’s about being really high, so that’s probably appropriate, but still.

Underworld: Spikee

12:52: The Devil’s Grin #8 by Alex Graham

Number eight!? I think I may have skipped an issue… it’s been a while since I read the previous one, at least, and I don’t really remember much about the series.

Uhm… yes, that doesn’t ring any bells. I guess I should get the previous issue… Now done.

But while I don’t remember much about what’s gone on before, it’s pretty entertaining.

It’s very soap operaish, and there’s about a dozen characters, but this issue is mostly about Robert and Dandelion. It works well.

Oh, right, I’d forgotten there had been some kind of controversy on the interwebs. Wasn’t that several years ago? And… “B—- X—-“? Bianca Xunise? I thought everybody assumed that the cartoon attacked Lee Lai? But the strip was about neither of them? “Anyone in the scene knows exactly who I’m talking about.” IS IT TILLIE WALDEN

Man, it was just a year and a half ago. It feels like it was years and years ago.

13:30: Clap Twice If You Think I’m A Funny Girl by Natalie Raskin

This book is pretty unfocused, but that may be the point, kind of.

It’s got a nice flow, and it’s pretty original. I like the artwork.

Underworld: Dubnobasswithmyheadman

13:48: The Children of Light by Jean Pleyers (New York Review Comics)

This is a French comic from the early 80s.

It’s certainly… something. I mean, it feels like some strange artefact, so I can totally see why NYRC has reprinted it. It’s got the slick look of a French science fiction comic from the 70s — like Luc Orient or something — but the story is more like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, if I remember correctly.

Which is to say that it’s not very … good. I ditched it halfway through.

14:14: Concrete: Stars Over Sand #1-2 by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse)

Speaking of… I never cottoned on to Concrete in the 90s. I liked the artwork, but I just didn’t … enjoy reading it. So I got some Concrete collections some years back just to check, and I still didn’t much like it.

So why did I buy this now!? I have no idea. I guess I was curious to see what’s going on now — it’s been a couple decades since the previous book?

Yup; the artwork still looks sharp. And we’re given absolutely zero explanation about what all this is, but apparently Concrete has a child now?

I’m not spoiling anything — they tell you what the plot is on the cover of the first issue — but it’s about the most fake of fake plot contrivances: Concrete goes all amnesiac all of a sudden. Which gives Chadwick an opportunity to do his “poetic” thing.

Still, it’s not that bad? It’s got some sense of urgency.

14:30: I’m a Cop no. 3 by Johnny Damm

I got this from here.

This book consists of quotes from ICE agents and other cops, along with collages and super-heroes from public domain comics.

It’s good stuff.

Did you all read that article about this guy who’s been swatted 55 times? The cops didn’t stop busting down his door and pointing their guns at him until he sued them? It’s such an absurd thing that you’d think the cops had something against him in particular, but I guess the explanation is probably something more trivial, like the cops getting overtime and a 4x “danger” pay when they do stuff like that.

(Oh, and why was he swatted in the first place? He correctly pointed out that Norm Macdonald is really boring.)

14:39: Yearly 2025 by Andrew White

I got this from here.

Oh, right, there’s also a process zine about Yearly 2026. Very nice.

Yearly 2025 is a collection of (very) brief pieces — which is understandable, since White had a child that year. And amazingly enough, none of the stories are about a lack of sleep. Well… perhaps it seeps in here and there.

But it’s a solid book. Kinda hypnotic.

The Sea and Cake: The Sea And Cake

15:01: See You Again, Maybe. by Vivian Nguyen

This is fun — it’s a slightly supernatural story (or perhaps more dreamlike).

The storytelling suits the story — it’s a bit confusing, not altogether clear — but then everything is resolved nicely.

15:14: I, Candy by Ruby Carter

This is a very short book.

But funny and unnerving at the same time, which is always nice.

15:16: Ending Theme by Hirokazu Oshima (Star Fruit Books)

This is nice and wistful — it’s about running a used bookstore that then has to close down.

Very appealing.

The Golden Palominos: This Is How It Feels

15:29: Cram Comics #5 edited by Andrew Alexander (Cram Books)

Yes, it’s another solid issue of Cram. I guess it’s the best anthology that’s still being semi-regularly published?

It’s a mix of various things — some rather abstract…

… and some more straightforwardly narrative. Ace. I got it from here.

15:56: Karavan för en drottning by Joe Kessler (Lystring)

I really wonder why Kessler chose such a greige cover for this book…

… because Kessler’s artwork is so exuberant.

Anyway, this is a wordless book structured around two children being told a story — perhaps a fairy tale, and perhaps not —

It’s got an evil wizard, a queen, a giant lion and all that stuff.

It’s really good. You have to put in a bit of work as a reader to interpret what you’re reading, which is all for the better. Sticks the ending, too.

16:28: Beware Her Fury by Mirion Malle (Drawn & Quarterly)

Hey! The first D&Q book of the day…

Heh heh.

But… this isn’t my kinda thing, really. It’s all about going to therapy, and the artwork is so uninspiring, so I ditched this after reading one third. Sorry!

Lisa Germano: Inconsiderate Bitch

16:47: Freedah by Eden D

I like it — it’s very much a classic underground comic book.

So it’s about drugs and sex and all that stuff. Very appealing.

16:56: Enemy Invasion by Sørum/Johansen/Noguchi (Vigmostad Bjørke)

<nelson>HA HA<nelson/>

Hey, the artwork is pretty nice…

How to explain the plot… hm… hm… OK: “Ender’s Game”. There you go. The plot “Ender’s Game”.

It’s not just that, though — there’s some interesting things going on otherwise, but that’s the focus. Which is unfortunate, because:

“Huh! VGA X 777 card?! But it’s not out yet!” “Everything can be found in Shenzhen, my friend.”

It’s all got a whiff of…

So I was gonna google the age of the creators, but I didn’t have to:

Anyway, it’s not awful… I mean, the artwork’s nice. This album is just the first in a series, though, and it feels like watching the first 25 minutes of a two and a half hour epic, so it’s not very satisfactory in that way.

Pet Shop Boys: Relentless

17:14: The End

But I think that’s enough comics for today. And… 1993 wasn’t really the best year for music, was it?

Home Renovations XIV: The Doorening

Last night, the sliding door (in front of my shelves of shortboxes of comics) popped off when I was sliding it open. I had noticed that it had gotten a bit “sticky” lately, but hadn’t really investigated.

And… this turned out to be the problem: Those “rails” at the bottom slid out. Like WTF.

And it turns out that they’re only fastened with double sided tape! Like… wat? I mean, there’s not supposed to be much pressure in an outwards direction, so you could see how that would work OK…

But look — this (aluminium, I guess) metal profile thing is so “hollowed out” that it only has these three narrow strips that make contact with the floor, anyway, so there isn’t that much surface to glue?

I was wondering whether I could drill a hole in the middle and fasten it with a screw, but:

Even the middle bit isn’t solid! Geez. So if I wanted to fasten it to the floor with a screw, I would have to drill either to the left and right of it, and then either use washers to fill in the gap (but that would be kinda precise; pretty fiddly) or cut a 2mm thick strip of wood and glue it in there, but…

In any case, the aluminium isn’t thick enough to do countersinking, so the screw head would stick up.

Which may not be a problem — there’s a couple millimetres worth of clearance.

But… eh…

I guess there was a reason the carpenter glued the thing in the first place — it’s designed to be glued, and there doesn’t really seem to be much of an option to do anything else.

But if we’re gluing, I can at least use better double-sided tape than was there originally.

So much red tape.

Don’t adjust your screen — your screen isn’t broken. That’s just a lot of tape.

There! Glued! It seems pretty solid to me — I can’t make it budge a nanometre.

All done!

But while messing around with this thing, I think I discovered what the actual problem here is. The carpenter who built this shelf for me put one of the feet of the shelf on top of nothing — the beam is about 4cm to the left (where the screw is), but where the foot is there’s just air.

So it’s sinking… slooowly. I mean, it’s lasted for about fifteen years, so that’s not bad, but I think I have to get somebody in to redo this thing, because it’s probably just going to get worse.

But not this week. Or month. It’s time to concentrate on procrastinating.

(What’s that I’m hearing? Is that a resounding crash? Nah.)

Keanu all together again

I bought this 3D printed Sad Keanu like a decade ago? But the other day he fell off the shelf and broke into a number of pieces. So I was going to throw it away, but then I saw that I still actually had all the various bits, and the breaks look clean — i.e., no actual splintering into dust anywhere.

So I applied some glue and…

He’s alive again! Yet still sad!

OK, back on the shelf you go — but this time around, with some sticky stuff to make you sit a bit more securely.

Emacs, movies and SQLite

Hey, it’s the… *counts on fingers*… 22nd anniversary of me using Emacs to watch TV and movies!

And in the start, it was a snappy, focused package that just listed directory contents and let me play the files… but then it grew to take care of resuming where I left off, and fixing the frame rate of the TV to fit the video file, and lately it’s also automatically choosing the correct subtitles and audio track.

This means that it’s now calling mediainfo before playing the file to get all that data. And since it’s accessing the files over nfs, and mediainfo apparently has to load the entire file (or large parts) to cough up that data, things have gotten slower:

Look at that! It’s horrible! I have to wait, er, two seconds before I can watch Saturday Night Live?! How can anybody live like this?

Now, sensible video player interfaces compute all this stuff when they incorporate a file. But I didn’t want to do that, because just having some directories of random files that I can move around without doing any synchronisation is just so convenient.

And it worked without that delay until I added the auto-subtitle selection thing.

But… one thing I’ve had to precompute anyway are the thumbnails, and I’ve just plopped them into the directories, which is icky:

Having the video player mangle the source directories like this is not ideal at all. I mean, I don’t look at the mess myself — the Emacs interface hides all this junk — but I know it’s there! *gasp*

So… taking all that into account (the new slowness and this yuckiness) I thought it was time, after 22 years, to bite the bullet and do things the traditional way. I.e., prescan the files and stash everything in an SQLite database. (And besides, the “use no database” thing fell apart very quickly — the file for keeping track of progress was a database file anyway, just very primitive.)

Tada!

Look how fast? Ish. Fastish. mpv still has to load the start of the file over nfs, so it’s not instantaneous, but it’s a fraction of a second, so that’s OK.

And look how pretty:

Putting everything into an SQLite database also means that I can keep track of more data. Previously I only kept track of whether I’d seen something, and how far I’d watched something (so it could resume automatically), but now I can also keep track of how many seconds I’ve watched something, for instance. (Skipping to the ten minute point and then abandoning isn’t the same as watching for ten minutes and then abandoning.)

And I think I still can keep my “just move files around” (to a “rainy day” directory, for instance) workflow — I store file hashes, so even if they move around, they’re recognised when they’re re-encountered.

But now for the real test — my kitchen computer. I use it to watch Star Trek while cooking, and it mounts the /tv/ directory over sshfs over wifi! (The TV computer mounts the directory over nfs over Ethernet, so it has much less latency.) Will it be able to access the SQLite database in a reasonable amount of time?

Yowza! That’s speedy! The only system, which ran mediainfo on the file before starting to play, was very, very slow — it took multiple seconds. The new thing is, like, a million percent faster! That’s bigly faster!

And with all the data stashed in a more convenient way, it’s easier to whip up stuff like this, which answers “when did I last watch DS9, and for how long a time?” (The answer is — “now”, and “not very”.)

The code is on Microsoft Github, for those that are curious.