If you are a Japanese learner like me, you may find the following two rikai tools useful for your net reading.

1) Rikai.com

There are several tools from rikai.com, but the one I use most is Japanese to English. Simply copy and paste the link of the Japanese page you want to read there, and it will come out with a page that show up the hiragana under the kanji wherever you move your mouse on. It’s simpler than it sounds like, just have a try.

Also for Japanese English-learner, a page translate English to Japanese might be useful too.

2) rikaichan firefox plugin

If you found the “copy and paste” is a hassle, try to install this rikaichan into your firefox. It will add an option to your right-click menu. Once it’s activated, it does the same job as rikai.com.

A few fun stuff to play lately and like to share here:

1) Using Tumblr to create a mlog

I found Tumblr quite a while ago but didn’t really look into it. Yesterday I had a try and discovered that it’s a really cool services. Like other things I use, it’s simple and clean. Basically you can import your own links, feeds, photos, video and everything you can think of into a mini blog. The thing I like most is they allow you to use your own domain. So I decided to use it to create a mlog. Here is my own domain M.RichardHong.com (RSS).

Although they support sending photos directly from phones, but it’s expensive for me as I normally take 2M pixels pictures with my SE k800i. So I just use blue booth to send them to my computer first then upload them. Also I create a “mlog” tag on flickr and set its feed import it to Tumblr automatically, thus I don’t have to upload photos to two places every time, they do the job for me.

Recording life is interesting.

2) Twitter Mobile

Jenn doesn’t like Twitter until I show her how to use it from mobile last night. She loves it now. Twitter does charge you for sending text to update unless you got free text allowance in your phone contract. I’ve got 500 in mine, so why not have a play:) It’s great for create a mini travel blog when you can’t use internet for days but want to share with your friends (and the world) about your travel status. There must be reason for Twitter being the top of the Mobile Technology in the SEOmoz’s Web2.0 Award. It’s simple and easy to use!

3) Clicky

Just found another counter for blogs called Clickly.

I used several counters before like statcounter, Google analytics and performancing, they are all good, but one thing I don’t understand is that they generate different outcome. (how come performancing’s blog counter now became almost exactly like clicky?)

I haven’t looked into details of clicky yet, but I like it’s design and seems faster than other services.

So far I’ve found two Chinese Twitter, one is fanfou.com and the other is komoo.cn. In terms of similarity, I found both of them are 90% closed to Twitter, and Komoo.cn is even close to 99%, which shocked me quite a bit when first saw it. But Komoo.cn is looking for UI developers now to change its “Tiwtter themes”, looks like it’s built by a team rather than by individual.

Here are some screenshots.

What do I think of these?

1) Perhaps Chinese programmers are not lack of skill but creativity.
2) Why there are so many cats?

Update:
1) Found another one wulog.com.
2) Yee is collecting more Chinese Twitter.

Haha, I start a podcast (RSS) in this blog as well. And the first guest is James from Studioduplo. In my previous post I mentioned about doing a podcast with him, here it is!

I learned a lot from this conversation. I think many people will be like me and wish to start a business like that someday. Well done to those guys!

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/studioduplo/studioduplo.mp3]

Download Podcast 33.8M