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.
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.
I recently bought a new laptop and went through the hassle of setting up Git SSH key again. There are many guides somewhere on the Internet but it’s all over different places and they tell you to do different things with different outcomes. Also, the guide from GitHub is less than ideal as it requires using “Git Bash” which I do not like. So I’m writing things down for my future reference.
In the past 3 years, I’ve been learning Rust in Decembers for Advent of Code, and each time, I learned something new.
In the most recent Advent of Code (2019), I did not finish all the challenges, but I enjoyed it a lot! My early decision to modularize some repetitive function really paid off in the later puzzles.
The most important concept of Rust language is borrowing. After things have been borrowed, it must be returned. As simple as this concept is, there may be lots of times one get frustrated by the compile errors of the Rust compiler. Oh, Rust compiler is so strict that Rust beginners will be very relieved if their codes compiles!
I love BBC Radio 1 and I listen to it on the BBC Sounds website. But I noticed something weird. This web player is able to respond to my play/pause command from my Bluetooth headset!
This is quite weird, since not even popular websites like YouTube supported this kind of controls from a Bluetooth headset.
