Indic script convertor

I found this a while back and it has taken me a while to find it again the few times I've wanted to use it, so I'm going to post about it here. It's an online tool that converts between a number of Indic scripts, including Thai and Khmer.

http://www.virtualvinodh.com/aksharamukha

Map of LDS Missions

I couldn't find a good map of the missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS or Mormon Church), so I made one. A .kmz file (for use in Google Earth, etc.) is here, and you can view it in Google Maps here. The data was generated from an unofficial list on the LDS Mission Network website. The markers are in the city for which the mission is named, not at the location of the mission office.

Stuff white people like

Just in case you haven't seen this already, I thought I'd share. Michelle and I watched it four times yesterday, and the kiddo thought it was awesome.

Free Hugh Nibley (and other authors) ebooks

Update (20 Feb 2014): It looks like the Maxwell Institute changed their website and the script no longer works.  It's fixable, but I don't know when I'll get around to it. 

I posted about this elsewhere a little while ago, so apologies if this is old news for some of you. I recently discovered that the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, has made the text of many or all of the books they publish available online. This includes the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.
I've been wanting the read Nibley's books for some time. Now that they were available electronically (and for free), I wanted to be able to read these texts within FBReader, the ebook reader that I have on my Nokia N800. I put the first one into a epub-formatted ebook by hand, but then, seeing as there are many more of these books that I am interested in reading, I decided to write a Python script, GetBook.py, to generate ebooks directly from the website. Given the book ID encoded in the book's URL, it grabs the book title, author, chapters, and text, and formats it into a epub ebook. It works quite well, although I am aware of at least one small bug that I haven't fixed yet. The script and instructions for using it are posted on my website. Let me know if you need any help with it or have any suggestions for making it better.

NB: I've had a number of requests for me to send the epubs to people. I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I'm not sending them to people at this point.

Bread Bowls!

I made potato soup and bread bowls for dinner tonight. Here's how they turned out:



I'd been planning to make the soup since we have a surplus of potatoes that are on the verge of going bad, and I'd been thinking of making some bread, so I thought I'd try making bread bowls. They turned out a bit smaller than I was expecting/hoping, and the inside was a bit denser than I expected. I'm thinking I let the dough rise too long before punching it down and forming the individual . . . loaves(?). If any bread-making experts are reading this, feel free to tell me what I might have done wrong.
We decided that potato soup probably isn't the optimal filler for bread bowls--it ends up being too starchy and the bread doesn't really absorb the soup (which I suppose could be a good thing, depending on your point of view). I decided that the line between creamy mashed potatoes and potato soup is very thin. I also decided that someday I should make bread bowls in the shape of potatoes, slice them open rather than cut the tops off, and fill them with potato soup, maybe with some sour cream on top.

Ukrainian & Vietnamese

"little bit" in Ukrainian = "чуть-чуть" (transliterated "chut'-chut'")
"little bit" in Vietnamese = "chút chút"

Coincidence? You decide.

(For those of you wondering why I know this, I learned some Vietnamese while in Thailand, and Michelle spent some time in Ukraine. She'll often ask for "chut'-chut'" of some snack I'm eating.)

The Segfault

So I'm embarking on a project, sort of a hobby project. I'm working on building a homemade Segway-like vehicle. A couple other people have done this and documented it. The best one I've seen was put together by a fellow named Trevor Blackwell and is documented here. He seems to have money and didn't skimp on the parts he used. I, on the other hand, am a poor grad student. He doesn't give a total cost, but he does mention that his original version cost less than half as much as a real Segway, so let's say $2500. For his second version, his motors were $286 each (2), and the batteries were probably $18 each (60), so that's about $1650 already, and another $450 for the motor controllers makes it conceivable that it totaled more than $3000. I'm not going to spend nearly that much. I'm predicting about $500 total. A future post will detail my predicted cost breakdown. My next post, though, is going to be about the nifty features that I'm going to add, that the original Segway doesn't have.

By the way, as the title of this post indicates, I'm calling this project the "Segfault." Those computer geeks among you will recognize this term; for the rest of you, "segfault" is the commonly-used shortened form of "segmentation fault," a computer memory error. It came to mind when I was thinking of names for the project, and it seems to have stuck.