I have some Japanese e-books that I am reading in my Kindle (mine is Kindle 8th Generation). I use Calibre to manage file format conversion and sending them to Kindle.
However, when I send them to my Kindle, I encountered some problems:
The furiganaembedded in the e-book are shown incorrectly. They are inlined instead of appearing on top of the kanji characters.
The reading layout is horitonzal left-to-right instead of vertical right-to-left.
So after scouring Calibre’s forums, this is happeneing because of two reasons:
I was sending the converted e-book as “old” MOBI format which does not support those layout features.
There were some extra CSS required to be injected for the reading layout.
On Windows 10 and Windows 11, sometimes “United States-International” keyboard layout will appear in Window’s keyboard layout options. This keyboard layout is not what you normally want since most keyboard uses the normal US keyboard layout and not the US-International layout.
Keyboard layout list from taskbar showing English (United States) languagewith United States-International keyboard layout
There’s something strange going on. I do not have any memory of adding it. When you check the keyboard settings in Time & Language > Language & Region > English (United States) > Language options, you won’t see it listed in the keyboard list. This seems like a Windows bug that happened to some users since Windows 10 era.
Windows 11’s Language & Region settings
In English (United States) settings, only US QWERTY keyboard layout is enabled
Apparently, the workaround for this is to add the keyboard layout “United States-International” from “Add a keyboard”.
Find “United States-International” in “Add a keyboard”After “United States-International” is added, you can remove it.
After this, “United States-International” will show up in the keyboard list. Then, you can find the option to remove it. After you removed it, it will disappear from the Keyboard layout list.
Keyboard layout list from taskbar no longer showing United States-International keyboard layout
However, this is not permanent. Seems like after some time, perhaps after some Windows Update, it will appear again in the list. However, when it happen again, one can re-apply the same trick again. Let’s hope that it will be fixed in future Windows versions.
I finally went to Japan! It was really nice. I found myself enjoying through both the ups and downs. Many things happened in the planning and execution of the trip. In this post I reflect on what happened, what I enjoyed and not, what I learned, and what I hope to do next.
Ideation
The initial idea was sparked many years ago (maybe it was 2019?), thrown around occassinally when chatting with Leo or with the Unyu group. But that idea stuck at being just an idea as there was no more concrete planning that happened since then. Also the Covid travel restrictions happened so I couldn’t really act on it int the past few years. Then last year around August, after more deliberations and encouragements, I took the risk and booked the flight tickets.
Once I booked the non-refundable tickets, the journey started becomnig real. I even thought of a quote from the anime A Place Further Than The Universe:
If you can still turn back, it’s not really a journey. When you hit the point of no return, that’s the moment it becomes a journey.
When I wrote Seasons of Anime, it was just middle of the year. Since then, I watched a lot more anime titles. I decided to use MyAnimeList to keep track of the titles I’ve watched and its ratings. Here, I will list some titles that are really exceptional to me in no particular order.
Recently I finished a book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again. With it, I realized that a lof of our time spent on screen are designed to be distracted away by something else and it’s really hard to focus on 1 stuff at a time. At any moment, if you don’t take effort, you will be swarmed by notifications, badges, cravings for rewards, fear of missing out, and many more tricks. The author postulates that this is what makes us, collectively, have lower focus than what we used to have in the past, i.e. focus being stolen away from us.
Welp, it’s the time of the year again to review the year.
This year, I definitely didn’t post much. In fact, it was the lowest number of posts per year since I started the blog. It can’t be helped I guess, since I had filled up my free time on many other stuffs.
Last year during 2022 in Review, I picked year of authenticity. However I’m not sure if I achieved that. I felt that without deep trust, it was scary and can be dangerous to do so. At times, I did open up and I was thankful that I did.
There were a lot of things happened in 2023, and most of them are not planned very far ahead. In a way, that’s not a bad thing, as I got to experience things that I normally won’t.
Earlier this year, after having gone on a vacation (in February), I found that my habit of listening to podcasts and reading books had been broken. During my commute, I didn’t feel like listening to podcasts or reading books anymore. Most of the time, I spent on just listening to music. However, after a few months, I felt like I could put in something more productive. That’s why on a fine day in April, I decided to learn Japanese.
