Medieval font support on Android
October 12th 2010Froyo 2.2 brought native Arabic, Hebrew and Thai support to Android, but what about Glagolitic? What is a Slavic medievalist to do without the Old Church Slavonic combining characters, or any of the other wonderful characters introduced in Unicode 5.1... read more
Installing Cocoon on Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10
October 10th 2010This is an updated version of a how-to written for Intrepid (8.10), now horrendously out-of-date. It was written for Maverick (10.10) but should also work on Lucid (10.04). No knowledge of Ubuntu or Linux is assumed... read more
A tale of two Maverick wallpapers
October 9th 2010After seeing a call for artwork for Ubuntu 10.10 wallpapers on OMG! Ubuntu, I submitted a handful of photos to the Ubuntu Artwork pool on Flickr, just for kicks. Not long after, I discovered that two of my photos-- the feather and the happy cinnamon-- made the final 17 chosen for inclusion in the Maverick release... read more
Chrono Trigger on SNesoid: the Arris Dome password trick
September 22nd 2010I was delighted to discover SNesoid for Android, which has let me relive my favorite childhood games, particularly Chrono Trigger. But in 2300 AD, after spending a half-hour chasing a rat across the screen to extract the password from it... read more
Uploading to Flickr on Ubuntu: the options aren’t amazing
September 1st 20102/24/11 UPDATE: The recent release of Frogr 0.4 makes this post obsolete. It's the Flickr uploader for Ubuntu I've been waiting for. It does everything I was looking for, and more-- I highly encourage anyone looking for a Flickr solution on Ubuntu to go download it... read more
From rooted Evo 4G to Unrevoked Forever + Froyo
August 16th 2010Thanks to a clever Sprint employee who secretly stockpiled the coveted phone for new customers, I've had an Evo 4G since the day after it was released. Despite foolishly accepting the first OTA upgrade... read more
State of the projects (early July 2010)
July 10th 2010Birchbark letter XML I have at least a first pass at the names-in-context data for documents 1-23, to supplement the proof-of-concept data I put together previously. Medieval Slavic wiki I've put together a work plan (subject to change) with the articles I'd like to try to incorporate into the wiki by October... read more
Why I've walked away from Apple
July 1st 2010Yesterday, a friend made the mistake of asking me why I switched from iPhone to Android, on an afternoon when I had some time to kill at the airport. His response to my long e-mail was that I should publish it on a blog somewhere... read more
New birchbark XML: names in context (NIC)
June 27th 2010To enable a more interesting proof-of-concept for the birchbark letter XML project, I've spent the last week making a new, limited data set (all documents from 1100-1120, plus some documents with the same names from the 12th century... read more
Early results from a birchbark letter proof-of-concept
June 27th 2010The frustrating thing about attempting a proof-of-concept for the birchbark letters is that many of the calculations I find most interesting need to be run over the entire corpus-- which means a lot more data preparation than I currently have finished... read more