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PERKINS.SH

My neat (I think so, anyway) little blog where I share my interests. Thanks for
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MEI UEN TYI

I’ve been reading the blog posts of some other upset people about a question
having to do with Mandarin romanization. It seems like it’s consistent in
mainland China, but in Taiwan, it’s been a more than a little politicized—it
seems like they need a system even easier and even more accurate (or at least
more different) at representing Mandarin syllables using Roman letters than the
global standard, Hanyu Pinyin, and at the moment their signage and naming is all
a mix of Wade-Giles, Gwoyeh Romatzyh, Tongyong Pinyin and some strange old
standard called MPS2 that I don’t know anything about.

The AI island of the future is no place for bad phonetics. Why don’t we attack a
core problem of history using the solution of tomorrow?

So, I present to you a problem that no one person could solve, but a compilation
of data scraped from the Internet and run through a computer program could in
about an hour of guidance by yours truly—the true Mandarin phonetic system of
our robotic future overlords—zhupyin.

That’s right—it’s the two tried-and-true phonetic systems used the world over,
Zhuyin Fuhao and Hanyu Pinyin, combined into one absolutely flawless way to
represent the basic syllables of the standard language. You pronounce it as you
see it (even the name). 問題？什麼問題？好像這一定是最清楚的料局，我們就不用勞心。

I came up with the idea and the AI generated the site, all the site copy, the
table, you know, it did all the legwork. So here we are! It took minimal effort,
and now I’ve thrown one extra log into the flaming pile of Chinese phonetic
systems that solve small problems with other ones (to be honest, some of the
other things that people come up with are really cool, like the one linked here.
It’s just fun to do this kind of thing, and mine was truly minimal-effort).

你們有問題，你們就能給我發電郵。support@zhupyin.org是注拼幫助的電郵位置（給這個電郵位置的電郵真來我自己的郵箱）。

謝謝你們看了！

Posted on June 27, 2024June 29, 2024Categories DailyLeave a comment on mei uen
tyi


I HAVE MY VERY FIRST ELECTRIC VEHICLE!

The NIU KQi2 Pro came in the mail earlier than I expected—I had it before noon
this morning, actually, which was nice because I wasn’t working today and got to
take it out of the box and get everything set up with plenty of time. It was
cloudy, though, and that turned to rain for most of the afternoon, so I didn’t
really get much chance to try it in full, although I’ve gotten generally used to
the controls just going around my neighborhood. It’s pretty nice!

You do need to connect it to the Internet through the app to activate it,
though, and then critical features like customization of the maximum speed,
remote lock/unlock, regenerative braking settings, and the rest are all done in
the app. It’s fine, though, I guess—the app gets my location data, but only when
I’m using it, which isn’t while I’m riding the scooter (my phone, the Unihertz
Jelly 2, also has very aggressive memory management and turns off any app that’s
unused for more than about fifteen to twenty minutes. I can’t figure out how to
change this, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem, and it does save battery
life and keep performance high and the phone from ever getting hot). Besides, at
least it isn’t Google getting the data, where they might be able to do some
damage with it (or target some ads with it)—I don’t plan on ever going to
mainland China, to be honest. Baidu can have all the location history it needs.

I’ve also been looking around the Internet for more Mandarin learning tools,
since I feel like I’m a little imbalanced (I don’t really watch any Chinese
dramas, read, uh, Danmei novels, or whatever it is that other people learn
Mandarin for…)

I stumbled across r/ChineseLanguage, which is actually one of the few remaining
relatively wholesome Subreddits. I’d recommend it if you’re bored for a while
and want to relate with some fellow members of the HSK2-sphere (there’s a nice
distribution of advanced learners and beginners on there, so I don’t feel
alienated! That’s neat). I’m always a lurker, though. I don’t have a Reddit
account, so my fun ended after reading the past few days’ worth of threads.

Anyway, after doing the lurking, I decided that I needed a reliable source of
challenging content that had characters, definitions, and pronunciations. I
installed a Firefox extension called “Zhongwen” (it seems popular—if you put
your cursor over some hanzi, it’ll tell you the definitions. If you put it at
the beginning of a phrase, it will tell you what the phrase means). I bookmarked
天下雜誌 “Commonwealth Magazine”, a Taiwanese news outlet that also puts audio
transcripts for all of its posts (I think this is pretty common in the online
news media world, but it’s a good bonus for language learning). Most of the
articles seem to not be confusing or excessively politically charged, although
I’m not sure if growing to expect that is something that we’ve only had to do in
the land of the ( -> ) red, ( <-> ) white and ( <- ) blue.

And then there’s always the classic Hūndì Dūndì for those of us who truly
believe in the meaning of the 兒化 (with Gwoyeh Romatzyh on the side for comedic
effect, ai ia!).

Finally, I’ve also decided to finally discontinue the old SearXNG instance that
ran on this server (on a different domain—it was at justsearch.ing). I think I
was really the only one who ever used it—I got a friend to check it out once,
but SearXNG just isn’t a drop-in replacement for other search engines like
Startpage. Little things, like my server being a little slow and searches taking
a while, or searches occasionally failing, just made the experience feel a
little “less than premium” after a while.

So, today, I tore down the instance, pointed the domain to a parking page and
turned off auto-renew. I took down the Docker container and I made a Kagi
account. So far, it’s been great—not only is everything very fast, but
customization is even easier than it was on SearXNG!

I also pasted the Kagi Oranginum CSS into the “Custom CSS” field, which is a
nice theme and one of the few that seems to work with the new UI that Kagi has
rolled out just this year. The whole UI is a little big at first pass, but I
realized that I preferred the Web browsing experience more anyway when I turned
my “Zoom” page-rendering scale setting in Firefox to 80%. Changing the font size
in Kagi only affects the text—the rest of the UI elements don’t scale to match,
so anything other than “Medium” looks a little strange.

Anyway, Kagi comes with other features that I didn’t expect to be attracted by,
either. Kagi has a GPT called “FastGPT”, which is kept separate from their
primary search engine (I like compartmentalization, and I can imagine most
opinionated Internet citizens are the same) and, jumping at the opportunity for
some 中文學, I had a conversation with an AI, something that I’ve been holding off
on for as long as possible in an effort to resist change for no reason.

It seems to produce results just as good as any GPT（可是我的小腦看不懂）!

And, of course, with an actual fleet of dedicated servers, Kagi search is faster
than my SearXNG was.

I know I’ve reported on things that I bought on the Internet today a few too
many times in the few blog posts I’ve already written, but hey, you know, I’m
having fun.

One thing that I think has also been a net improvement to my life has been this
neat Firefox theme that I found (and when I say neat, I really mean neat, I
mean, it’s pretty clean). It’s called Solarized Light, and it’s a very nice
color palette. I also changed my macOS terminal to match. My eyes are happy, and
I don’t have to resort to full-hardcore dark mode!

So, at the end of the day, thanks again for reading. This post was a little
long. I hope this doesn’t subconsciously set an unmatchable standard for every
blog post that stresses me out into not writing anything else for another three
months—that would beat the point of the blog being a personal center for
self-expression and low-tension vibes.

謝謝大家！

Posted on June 23, 2024June 23, 2024Categories DailyLeave a comment on I have my
very first electric vehicle!


A NEAT ONLINE TOOL

大家好！

This has nothing to do with anything, and everything to do with my off-hours
Mandarin studying strategies. I was looking around the internet last night and I
found a neat tool, which also has an offline version. It’s a Chinese-English
dictionary—I used to use the Yabla one until it went down earlier this week—this
one has a little bit of additional information, too, like HSK levels. I’m not
sure how the vocabulary from one to the other compares, but this one also has an
offline version; on Mac, this is a dictionary that you can add to the
“Dictionary” application, which makes it pretty clean and elegant and match with
the rest of the user interface.

這是我找到的中文詞典：

我希望你們喜歡，我已經能看這個詞典很好用。

Since this isn’t really a blog post, it doesn’t need a featured image, right?

If this is useful to you, I recommend you check it out! The full version is
$15.95, which isn’t terrible, even if it’s just a dictionary. A paper dictionary
would probably cost more than that, and this one is nice to keep around.

It can even do personal names of a few famous people:

再見！

Posted on June 20, 2024June 20, 2024Categories RecommendationsLeave a comment on
A neat online tool


GOING WITH THE FLOW

Although I haven’t taken any good pictures with my phone lately, today’s
Wikimedia Commons Image of the Day fits the theme of this post well, so it’s
today’s thumbnail. It was taken by Agnes Monkelbaan and you can find it at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page#/media/File:Breil-Brigels,_Lag_da_Breil-_Flem._23-09-2022._(actm.)_11.jpg.

“Going with the flow” is something that I think I’d like to do more of. There’s
a cycle that just keeps repeating: I get some momentum, I get some sleep, I get
some caffeine and I start coming up with ideas. During the semester, I work on
projects, I work on schoolwork, and then my sleep schedule keeps declining and
declining until I catch bronchitis or something from the person across the table
from me in physics class and then I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for the
rest of the week.

Maybe that was just a first-semester thing. You know, just adjusting to the
germs in my new semi-faraway environment (I go to school something like seven or
eight hours away by car from where I’ve lived all my life—it’s certainly not a
distant land, but far enough for them to have some strains of the flu that my
immune system has never seen before).

Anyway, I’d kind of assumed that I would be safe from that over the summer. I’m
back home, less classes, working will make me more tired, I’ll be more
relaxed—what I got, though, was the residue of that school-year energy. I keep
signing up for more and more days at work and trying to make more money, coming
back and studying for the summer class that I’m taking, you know, on and on…
then, a few days ago, I caught some cold or whatever. Completely unrelated to
everything else happening in my life.

But sometimes getting just a little bit sick is a good thing. It always changes
my brain a little and makes me calmer and more reasonable. I don’t have the
energy to be impulsive. I’ve been taking a shower in the morning and at night. I
mean, I’m really not that bent out of shape, I’ve been living my life completely
normally for the few days that I’ve had this little, you know, whatever it
is—it’s been just enough to make me realize that “going with the flow” is the
philosophy in life that I want to try to adhere to. I have my own beliefs and
goals and ideologies and whatnot, but, like, if something is terribly beyond my
control and I keep worrying about it, that won’t do anything. Cool heads and
chill people get things done.

We’ve also got a giant heat wave coming in (I live in the northeastern US, which
should make a good bit of sense for most people reading). It was almost a sauna
outside today, but it’s supposed to keep getting hotter—with all the negative
thoughts swirling around, this had climate change more on my mind than it even
usually is. You know? I mean, that’s the big issue that no one person can solve
and that everybody stresses about. First, at a personal level (which really
isn’t where I think we solve this problem, but anyway…) I don’t feel like I’m an
atrocious weight on the carbon footprint of humanity—I live in a town where most
of the power comes from a hydroelectric dam anyway (I’m just lucky for that),
I’m already a vegetarian (not in a pretentious way, I just really like soy-based
food products), but I do have to drive around my mom’s old SUV because I live in
a town without public transportation. 哎呀。

I had already been thinking about a certain thing for a while, anyway—they
seemed popular enough on campus—I’ve really been looking into buying an electric
bicycle or an electric scooter. Electric bicycles tend to be expensive (usually
upward of a thousand dollars), and they’re big and kind of a shiny target for
people who want to steal vehicles (on the car-free campus at my school for which
I’m so grateful, stealing bikes is the only and highest form of
grand-theft-auto, which makes me worry about it slightly more). Scooters are
smaller, lighter, and cheaper, so after a little bit of on-and-off research, I
bought a NIU KQi2 Pro. I mean, I know this “NIU” company was created by the
former CTO of Baidu and they even advertise as a selling point on their website
all the user data that they collect in order to improve their products for city
travel, but it was only $450 at Best Buy and, you know, hopefully I can just use
it without connecting it to the Internet. Let’s hope Xi Jinping 习近平 doesn’t
reserve the ability to remotely lock down the scooters of anyone who disparages
him from eight thousand miles away.

So, anyway, electric scooter aside, all I can really do myself to fight climate
change is to get educated, so I’m going to start trying to do my research where
it counts (not just about which electric scooter I should buy). I’m going to try
to listen to some climate-change informative podcasts, and I find any good ones
I’ll recommend them here. And to survive the coming week, I’ll just have to stay
hydrated.

Until the hole in the ozone layer closes, global temperatures start to lower,
and tech companies start respecting user privacy, I appreciate you for reading!
I apologize that I’ve just realized now that in the WordPress theme I use
(“Twenty-Fifteen”, the default one from nine years ago), the thumbnail images
for posts are downscaled so low that they look pretty fuzzy on most modern
displays (even on my 2015 MacBook Pro, which is of course from the same year and
has a Retina display that makes those image thumbnails look less than optimal).
If you like any of the featured images, I’ll start putting links to the
full-quality versions at the top of the blog posts. I’ll even edit my first post
to include the same thing.

Thanks again!

Posted on June 19, 2024June 19, 2024Categories DailyLeave a comment on Going
with the flow


ABOUT ME

The link to the full-quality version of this image is
https://www.perkins.sh/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/pond.jpg.

It happened again—I was just playing with fire and wiping my computer as I do
when I’m bored (actually, this time, I had a good excuse—I just bought a 2015
MacBook Pro at a flea market and was setting it up so I could use it—I used to
have a Framework Laptop, but I sold it because I would rather have had the
money. The new MacBook was only $180, and it’s pretty great!). Anyway, I
inadvertently wiped the source files for my old blog. I forgot to back this one
up, so it’s more-or-less gone. I mean, I have the public HTML files, but I can’t
add any new content and I was thinking of starting anew anyway.

So here I am! WordPress is a little nicer for the end-user than Hugo. I mean, I
know Hugo (the static blog/site compiler that I was using before this) makes it
easy to develop fast sites and create your own themes and layouts, but as far as
having customization options with as little hassle as possible (considering that
I’m not a software developer, although I am a proud now-second-year EE student),
WordPress is definitely my preferred choice.

If I have to write it in words, I’ll say that the mission statement for this
blog is for me to share my interests and to be able to summarize myself at any
point in time with one convenient, easily-accessible stop. Besides, blogging is
fun and expressive.

Those interests are a little varied, but they include EE (of course)-related
topics (like EE projects and even sometimes actual computer things), learning
Mandarin (although I’m definitely at a fairly low level—I started learning when
I was in about seventh grade, but then I took a two-year break at the end of
high school, because they ended their own Mandarin education program, then
restarted once I got to college last year).
我想用我的博客練習中文語法，也告訴你們我正在學什麼。你也能看，我喜歡用繁體字。比簡體字更漂亮，也是台灣用的，我不想去中國……

Today, I’ve been struggling with trying to determine whether the sore throat,
congestion, chills and minor muscle aches that I have are a cold or severe
allergies. I have to work tomorrow, and I still don’t have an internship yet, so
I can’t really afford to be missing days. I’ll take some allergy medicine
tonight and work it out in my sleep?

One more thing—on my last blog, I put up a “wallpaper of the day” to go with
each blog post. I think I can get more creative than that, though—what you see
above is the “photo in my library of the day” (which is mostly an encouragement
for me to make better use of my phone’s camera, which is, in all honesty, not
terrible—it’s a Unihertz Jelly 2). 不錯，對不對？

Thank you for taking a look!

Posted on June 16, 2024June 19, 2024Categories DailyLeave a comment on About me
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