Hi! I'm Ben, I discuss software development.

Hi everyone. I’ve joined many in-person language exchanges and always found it hard to get the whole group engaged or get something out of it. Maybe someone is a beginner or they can’t really teach their own language well. The idea with this game is anyone from any level can practice both their target language and help others practice theirs. It’s free, no ads and currently only on ios. The game is called word head. It’s focused mostly for beginners and B1. The idea is, in a group, one person has to guess their target language word from a set list of words in a category. Everyone else has to give hints (in your target language or your native). For example, if they choose an easy difficulty and the category is Food, they have to guess from a list of 20 foods. Afterwards you can swap the language and the other players can practice from the English words.

whichlang.cr provides Crystal bindings for Rust’s whichlang language detection library. It detects the language of a given text.

The marisa.cr Crystal shard gives you access to the powerful Marisa Trie data structure, perfect for storing and searching strings efficiently. Let’s look at how to use it.

So 6 months of hard work building my first Flutter mobile app. I release it on the Google Play store (and Apple store) and it ain’t showing up on search. So what gives?

For the past few months I’ve been working heavily on an English Dictionary database, to help people learn English. It’s called English Fox, more on this next time.

After learning Chinese Mandarin for over 10 years. I feel I should write a guide on how to pronounce Mandarin and so give something back to the language learning community. This guide will go over all the pronunciations for specifically Taiwanese Mandarin but it’s about 90% the same as mainland China. This is everything I wish I knew when I started learning.

Three years ago I noticed some drastic changes to YouTube which I and many others didn’t like. For example the removal of the dislike count, or the automatic removal of comments, or the like / dislike numbers being magically altered. There was a real fear YouTube would eventually remove community comments, and video comments all together.

I haven’t found a good online test to simulate the official TOCFL Chinese test. So here is a version I made.

This will remove the sidekiq iteration hash from the arguments, so the sidekiq job will appear unique to unique jobs.

After reading this post on getting Radicale working on Gnome CalDav and CardDav. I just wanted to make my own post to show how it’s done in nginx. Here is the code below: