Saturday afternoon coffee, February 1st
Many of us need to stay caffeinated in these times....
Coffee and bread are my primary comfort foods, and they are something I can control — modifying strength, texture, ingredients — to suit the moments which otherwise too often seem entirely out of control. My day began with a seizure, not my own but of the belovèd wire-haired Podengo receiving end of life care at the quinta, and continued with further news of power seizures by fascists in the Chaotic and Disunited Oligarchy of ‘MurKKKa. The sky isn’t falling there yet, but with the elimination of so many positions and budgets relevant to aviation safety by Mango Mussolini upon his ascension to the throne, aircraft certainly are.
I think I’ll take that coffee with a shot of Grant’s.
The bread is a crunchy comfort, this time a sourdough by Mark Bittman’s no-knead method with some fresh ground rye and oats in with the whole-grain spelt. Bittman’s method is far more flexible than his book implies, and its primary advantage for me is that even hours-long interruptions hardly affect my breadmaking and in fact improve the taste of the final product.
For those who suspect this is an AI-written post because of the em-dashes above (a point frequently made by LinkedIn instagurus), two suggestions:
Get stuffed like a Christmas turkey. I don’t do AI word spew and neither should you. It rots the brain. This advice can be disregarded if it’s already too late for you, or you love to sing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah in your corporate chains.
Put your cursor somewhere you can type in a Windows OS. Hold down your
ALTkey while typing 0151 on the numeric keypad, and when you lift your finger off theALTkey the em-dash will appear. Do 0150 if you want an en-dash. See? No AI needed to use cool typesetting characters as others have done since o século XV.
There’s are a number of things of potential interest to us wordworkers that I want to mention briefly. First, a reminder of the online memoQ terminology workshops in February, two 90-minute sessions on February 20 and 27 at 5 p.m. Central European Time (CET).
Anyone is welcome to participate without charge by attending the talks and/or submitting questions before or during the presentations, and the recordings will be made available on Patreon with a downloadable, indexed HTML 5 viewing page and on paid subscriber pages of the memoQuickies Substack. It is unlikely that they will appear in any form except short excerpts on my YouTube channel due to concerns over Google’s support of fascist politics.
Speaking of Google… in all the many things on the to-do list for wrapping up the Portuguese limited company through which I did business for a decade and changing over accounts for limited sole proprietor activities in retirement, I forgot to change the credit card paying my annual Microsoft 365 subscription fee. I had heard that the fee increased because of that useless “Co-pilot” AI being included, something I will never knowingly use, but questioning whether I want my payment to contribute to the corporate groveling at the altar of Orange Jaysuss, I’ve been looking at alternatives for the Microsoft Office tools I’ve used for as long as 38 years now. So I’ve been looking at the Google Workspace suite of tools more as an intermediate migration measure despite my anger over the likely harvesting of my data for their “AI” nonsense.
I used Google’s presentation tool, Google Slides, instead of my usual Microsoft PowerPoint to prepare the slides for my ATA terminology webinar in January. This was a last-minute decision to take my notes and screenshots and make completely new slides, so I took a truly minimalist approach and didn’t mess around with fancy transitions or other features I knew were available. But even with that low-energy effort with Google Slides and Docs, I noticed some useful things.
Hotlinked time codes from the Description field of some of my old terminology tutorials on YouTube remained viable in the Workspace environment and in PDF files created from Docs or Slides. The same was true for videos embedded in slides. This can save me a lot of time accessing links for specific parts of some very long videos, and I’ll probably take advantage of this a lot for handouts in the future. Here’s an example:
Download that PDF and click on some of the blue time codes that sound like they may be interesting.
I was frankly surprised by how well the PDF downloads (equivalent to “Save As… PDF”) functioned for various Google Workspace documents, and I began to explore PDF generally with that platform more than I’ve done before. The Google Tools allow PDF documents to be opened in various tools, such as Google Docs, for editing, and from there they can be downloaded in many formats (DOCX, RTF, ODT, MD, etc.). Although the Microsoft Office formats downloaded appeared corrupted to MS Office 365 in more complex cases (documents downloaded from EUR-LEX, for example), the ones that weren’t showed fewer tags than the PDF to DOCX import filters used in popular CAT tools, and some formats (like MD) were squeaky clean and very well suited for alignments or use as monolingual references in memoQ LiveDocs, for example.
Try these files out yourself if you like. I need to look at more complex, multi-column layouts and some with call-outs of various kinds, but it seems that Google Workspace might be a useful conversion tool for non-confidential PDF texts.
I was surprised and pleased to notice that the memoQ default filter for converting PDF imports to DOCX has improved considerably since I last looked at it many years ago (when it inserted hard returns at the end of every line), but it still has significant issues in many cases.
Since human rights are too frequently forgotten in many parts of the world these days, and their are excellent texts on such matters in the public domain in over 500 languages in some cases, I think I’ll be using a lot more of these in my teaching examples. Occasional reminders, for example that women’s rights are human rights, certainly can’t harm anyone, and if some take exception to that, I’ll just think of the last stanza of my favorite Kästner poem and smile.
Some of you who have known me for years may have noticed that I have hearing difficulties in some environments with some speakers. Traffic noise from an open window makes it difficult for me to hear people in a meeting, and my companheira is heartily sick of my telling her to stop mumbling and speak clearly at the breakfast table so I can decipher that Kauderwelsch mix of language that is her loving lingo.
Well, I found a fairly unobtrusive, budget solution to that problem. Last year a friend sent me an article about hearing test and assistance features available with Apple’s iOS 18 in conjunction with certain AirPod models, and further investigation led me into sore temptation.
Dropping about €230 on a set of AirPods Pro 2 is one of the best investments I’ve made in a while. Their microphone features suck for use with speech to text or other voice recognition features, so I’ll still be getting another Plantronics Voyager Legend or similar for that (the housekeeper ate my old device), but in every other regard they are wonderful.
In Transparency mode, I can hear every mumbled word at the breakfast table, and the AirPods have been a great help to hear speakers at events like the recent New Voices in Translation conference in Lisbon.
The hearing protection worked great with firearms, the listening experience for music, podcasts and audiobooks was excellent, and the noise cancellation was helpful in many situations.
I may get a second set for when the first is recharging in the case. My doutora used to be annoyed when I wore earphones while she tried to talk to me, but after seeing how much those AirPods improved my understanding of her speech, she often insists I put them on.
Fans of speech-to-text and voice command features in translation work might be interested to follow developments in Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s commitment to such things has been spotty over the years, though I was very encouraged by the custom vocabulary features available in the old Windows Speech Recognition feature now on the chopping block at some indeterminate time in the presumably near future. The replacement, Voice Access, is extremely promising for the languages supported (English, Spanish, French and German), and the spoken editing controls are every bit as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But no vocabulary customization yet, alas. I’m waiting for that before doing any tutorials.
But for use in translation environments like memoQ, Microsoft Voice Access is truly wonderful, and the restriction for customized speaking vocabulary can be overcome by maintaining good term bases and speaking the keyboard shortcuts for inserting the term hits. As mentioned, the edit controls and general functionality of spoken keyboard shortcuts make this operating system feature an excellent choice for work.
Coffee’s gone, and my plans for another press full of it have been superseded by a request to go buy more goat milk for the sick dog. So I wish you all a non-stupid Saturday and look forward to sharing more soon….