While Apple is slowly coming around to recognizing that some of its users listen to classical music, there is one quirk in the Music app on macOS that betrays its deep bias toward pop music. It’s this: when you create a new playlist, the application defaults to displaying the tracks in its “Playlist” view, which as far as I can tell serves no other function than to consume real-estate in the UI by displaying a thumbnail of the album art.
Some airports in X-Plane have terrain issues that can be quite entertaining.
This Delta 737-800 got lost in the maze of cargo ramps at PANC and was trying to taxi back to the terminal when it encountered a steep icy taxiway. It required 65% N1 just to get up the slope.
Clearly a fix is required. It turns out to be quite simple. In the global airports file apt.
As its name implies, the AwesomeTTS Anki add-on is awesome. It’s nearly indispensable for language learners.
You can use it in one of two ways:
Subscribe on your own to the text-to-speech services that you plan to use and add those credentials to AwesomeTTS. (à la carte) Subscribe to the AwesomeTTS+ service and gain access to these services. (prix fixe) Because I had already subscribed to Google and Azure TTS before AwesomeTTS+ came on the scene, there was no reason for me to pay for the comprehensive prix fixe option.
I make a lot of Anki cards, so I’m on a constant quest to make the process more efficient. Like a lot of language-learners, I use images on my cards where possible in order to make the word or sentence more memorable.
Process When I find an image online that I want to use on the card, I download it to ~/Documents/ankibound. A Hazel rule then grabs the image file and converts it to a .
In my perpetual attempt to make my language learning process using Anki more efficient, I’ve written a tool to extract English-language definitions from Russian words from Wiktionary. I wrote about the idea previously in Scraping Russian word definitions from Wikitionary: utility for Anki but it relied on the WiktionaryParser module which is good but misses some important edge cases. So I rolled up my sleeves and crafted my own solution. As with WiktionaryParser the heavy-lifting is done by the Beautiful Soup parser.
A few years ago, I wrote about my problems with HTML in Anki fields. If you check out that previous post you’ll get the backstory about my objection.
The gist is this: If you copy something from the web, Anki tries to maintain the formatting. Basically it just pastes the HTML off the clipboard. Supposedly, Anki offers to strip the formatting with Shift-paste, but I’ve point out to the developer specific examples where this fails.
Interesting links, a little thoughts for Monday, May 23, 2022.
More outages at Pinboard. It was time to find an open-source self-hosted alternative.
Espial, it turns out, works great.
I have written previously about stripping syllabic stress marks from Russian text using a Perl-based regex tool. But I needed a means of doing in solely in Python, so this just extends that idea.
#!/usr/bin/env python3 def strip_stress_marks(text: str) -> str: b = text.encode('utf-8') # correct error where latin accented ó is used b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xb3', b'\xd0\xbe') # correct error where latin accented á is used b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xa1', b'\xd0\xb0') # correct error where latin accented é is used b = b.
One of the things that I love about Keyboard Maestro is the ability to chain together disparate technologies to achieve some automation goal on macOS.
In most of my previous posts about Keyboard Maestro macros, I’ve used Python or shell scripts, but I decided to draw on some decades-old experience with Perl to do a little text processing for a specific need.
Background I want this text from Wiktionary:
to look like this: