Pleco is well worth the $100 (educational discount or $150 without) for those serious about learning Chinese. It’s a universal app so looks great on iPad. I plan on taking tons and tons of screenshots but I’m on an iPad and waiting for 2.2 cuz they say they’ll optimize UI a tad before I do.  So I plan on emphasizing why it’s worth the $100 cuz they don’t do the greatest job at marketing it. I do have some minor complaints though I wish it had a slideshow mode like two free apps below do and also wish one could increase the length of the popup window since I do like the fonts a tad bigger than default.  Maybe fine on iphone but for ipad there is much more room.

Get Survival Mandarin 347MB cuz of videos but free until Sep 2nd then back to $10 I believe.  They had a 7 day learning Mandarin app for $2 which I thought is good for one totally new to Chinese like myself.  So gonna see if that Survival Mandarin app is worth the $10 or not. Well going through Anki $25 and nah I don’t think I’m gonna include it.

eZi Test Chinese $free has a great slideshow mode and nice multiple choice mode.  Recently was updated to include a few more cards.  Also has built-in voice pronunciation syllables only though. Why is this slideshow so great?  You can choose what to display on first side toggle on or off Simplified, Traditional (choose which one is on top or bottom) Pinyin (choose which kind of Pinyn tones), English definition (choose all, first meaning, or just first word, Spoken Mandarin. Now once it flips you can choose how long to display front and back side of flashcard.  You can toggle again Simplified, Traditional, Pinyin, English and Speak Mandarin.  So on the front I like it to show me only Simplified and Tradition and have it speak Mandarin then after 5 secs or so it’ll show me that again speaking it again with the pinyin and English definition.  I wish Pleco could do this!

Flashcards Deluxe $4  or demo has some decent vocab lists and it is a universal app so that gives it a bonus. Also recently added a Simplified and Traditional fonts to choose from in an update. Slideshow is decent but not as good as eZi Test Chinese though since you can’t have multiple fields display at once so that limits it’s flexibility in configuring it. Still this is a great app and not only for Chinese but tons of other subjects, etc.

Dinhua Dictionary Audio Module I bought for $1 when it was on sale but it’s back to $5 now.  It’s decent and has prerecorded words on many of them rather than just syllable recordings.  You must manually search and add each vocab though as it doesn’t have importing of pre-existing vocabulary lists.  I’d be more inclined to recommend this one if it did.  There is a free version without the audio.  Quiz mode is decent and I like the style.

That’s basically it for learning Chinese apps.  What that is just a few.  Your right but that doesn’t mean I didn’t purchase a ton of others or tried out their demos.  I did, it’s just I felt underwhelmed.  The Japanese apps are much more diverse so like I mentioned there is huge room for improvement (dictionaries and flashcards field is solid though).  Here’s a few more Chinese related apps I recommend.

MetroNav Beijing $1, MetroNav Shanghai $1, MetroNav Guangzhou $1, MetroNav Taipei $free  these are excellent subway maps and displays times and has taxi cards to show to have a taxi take you to a particular subway station.

Pocket Timetable $3 universal app by far the best for looking up train routes, ticket prices, times, etc.

Shanghai WOW! City Guide $free or Chinese version $free contains lots of info of places to visit with prices.

Fancy Food ipad $2 or Eating in China iphone $2 both are excellent showing you lovely photos of turtles and frogs among many other exotic and traditional cuisines.

Wits and Wagers bgg coming out for iPhone October 2010 by North Star Games.

Neuroshima Hex bgg tactical 4 player war game programmed by Portal Publishing and Big Daddy’s Creations

Tichu bgg one of the best 4 player partnership card games. Programmed by Steve Blanding who brought us Mu card game on iphone / iPad.

Settlers of Catan bgg ipad version coming soon

Five below all programmed by Codito’s company.
Tikal bgg and El Grande bgg by Wolfgang Kramer
Brief History of the World bgg by Ragnar Brothers
Le Havre bgg by Uwe Rosenberg’s
Age of Industry bgg by Martin Wallace

Reiner Knizia has following coming out:
Medici bgg , Ra bgg and Tigris & Euphrates bgg programmed by Codito’s company

Samurai bgg programmed by Conlan Rios brought us Wriggle, Knizia’s Robot Master, Knights of Charlemagne, and Monumental.
High Society bgg and Kingdoms bgg programmed by Shannon Appelcline who did Knizia’s Money for iphone / iPad.
Through the Desert bgg programmed by TribeFlame who did Keltis Oracle for iphone/ iPad.

Board Game apps  I currently enjoy on iPad are:
Carcassone, Zooloretto, Keltis Oracle, Mu, Small World, Honey That’s Mine, Gipsy King, Knizia Money, Dead Man’s Dice, Kachina, Roll Through the Ages, Blokus HD, Pathology HD, Rush Hour, Quoridor.

(bolded games mean they are iPad version or are universal iphone / iPad games)

update August 20, 2010 a couple more announced are Through the Ages A Story of Civilization and Summoner Wars and Chicago Express and Modern Art

Ones that have been released are Medici, Samurai, High Society, and Tichu

Currently I’m using Snow Leopard 10.6 on my Mac mini, iMac and Mac Book Pro so all the following software works with that. Obviously I use other software but these would be the first I’d replace if I wanted to wipe my Mac.

Mac OS X Freeware / Donationware

Menu Meters displays memory usage, bandwidth activity, cpu % usage, disk usage in the menu bar. Prefer it to using Activity Monitor.

SmcFanControl (free) shows you tempetaure of CPU and fan rpms in the menu bar.

Namely type first letter or two letters to launch apps. I don’t need nor want bloated QuickSilver.

Hidden Files widget toggles showing hidden files such as .DS_Store .Trashes .Spotlight-V100.

Name Mangler advanced batch file renamer

GrandPerspective displays graphical map of hard drive and you can locate huge files you may have forgotten about.

VLC (VideoLan) to play xvid, divx, mkv h264 movies as QuickTime can’t do it.

Virtualbox by Sun Microsystems, run windows or linux in a virtual environment…no need to pay $80 for Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

ntfsmounter allows you to write to windows NTFS formatted external usb hard drives. This is a new feature of Snow Leopard.  It mounts and umounts external USB drives.

Typist I don’t need this but if you can’t blind touch type you should get this freeware to do typing drill exercises. Have your kids learn a lifelong skill.

SABnzbd newsgroup client works on Mac, Linux, Windows.  Totally automated process to download nzb files.

Cost $ Mac OS X software

Transmit $30 ftp client, dual pane interface and can choose multiple external editors within Transmit. Why does the freeware cyberduck have ability to throttle bandwidth but not transmit? sigh oh sigh.

Little Snitch $30 outgoing firewall.  I actually bought a family license for this one.  Worry about spyware?  No, well then skip, but any advanced user should definitely check into this one you’d be shocked how many legit apps always want to E.T. phone home.

SizeRox $10 batch image resizer and file name renamer.  Can watermark.  Still no freeware like irfanview on windows so this is probably the best and most reasonably priced I could find.

Pixelmator $60 is probably best cheap Photoshop clone on Mac. If use a pen tablet to draw with check out ArtRage $25.

Only have a few tips.

-  In Preview settings under PDF tab set initial document scale to 200%.  Opening PDF displays full width of screen and can actually read it without having to zoom in every single time.

- Save power by disabling screensaver and instead if you need to leave your computer on to download stuff, process video etc. just turn off the screen(s).  System Preferences | Expose | Active Screen Corners (top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right) select Put Display to Sleep and move mouse top left of screen for instance to turn off / blank your monitor(s).

- Set background to all black in Safari by right clicking on little black image above and choosing Use Image as Desktop Picture.

Control + shift + eject key also puts display to sleep.  But to be able to remotely login via RemoteTap (iphone app) and then put the displays to sleep I was hard pressed to find a solution.  Solution is in Applications | Utilities | open Keychain Access App and in Preferences choose Show Status in Menu Bar.  Now click the lock button and choose Lock Screen which puts displays to sleep and when one moves mouse to wake up the user’s password needs to be entered.

Safari

Block flash elements in Safari except when you wish to see them by installing clicktoflash.

Block all most all ads in Safari by downloading usercontent.css to username/Library/Safari and in Safari Preferences | Advanced selecting that file.

usercontent.css worked great but interfered in a few things so now instead I use free Safari AdBlocker which works in 64 bit mode with Safari.

Well back in the day I bought my 400GB for $200 each.  I’ve probably had four or five die on me last few years both Seagate and Western Digital.  Even though data was safe in my ReadyNAS through the years I attritube failure to heat.  Those puppies would get 65 C/ 149 F that is as hot as hell is I’m sure.

Seagate used to be fine but evidently last year or so many reports they suck too.  So who is the new king? Samsung check out 1.5TB drive at 23 C / 73 F or even 27 C / 80 F which is lower than Western Digital 33C / 91 F. So 23 C or 33C? Yea I’ll take the 10 C cooler one.  Next step is get five more Samsumg 1.5TB hds top populate both my ReadyNAS devices.  So grats to those Koreans as Samsung seems to be putting out the coolest 1.5TB harddrives which is critical for longterm life.

Update Feb 2010 now got all 1.5TB drives and Samsung still running cooler than Western Digital.

NAS I can transfer via gigabit 1000Mbps (theoritical 125MB/s) huge files at 21MB/sec.

Now if I was on 10/100 Ethernet max is 12.5MB/s. Not getting 10 times more as harddrives are the bottleneck but twice the speed I believe it’s worth it.  Although my hard drive is so busy downloading stuff and unraring it I think I like just unrarring it directly to my NAS which done at 7MB/sec.

I know technically this is approximations but for all intensive purposes the following is correct.

1000KB = 1MB (3.5 inch floppy 1.44MB, CD 700MB, email attachment 10MB limit)
1000MB = 1GB (DVD 4.4GB, DVD-9 dual-layer 8.5GB, 4GB Memory, BluRay disc 25GB)
1000GB = 1TB (1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives)

CD/DVD/Bluray read/write speeds.
36X CD speed = 5.3MB/s
4X DVD speed = 5.4MB/s
1X BluRay speed = 4.5MB/s

Internet connection speeds
56Kbps = 7KB/s (remember dial up days from 1995, got DSL in 1997)
64Kbps = 8KB/s (ISDN ring a bell anyone, maybe was 128Kbps)
512Kbps = 64KB/s
1024Kbps = 128KB/s
3G (1,000Kbps) = 125KB/s (yea iphone is slow)
1.5Mbps = 192KB/s (some DSL still at this speed and T1s)
6Mbps = 800KB/s (cable and maybe DSL)
10Mbps = 1.3MB/s (cable)
18Mbps = 2.3MB/s (cable)
25Mbps = 3.1MB/s (cable)
50Mbps = 6.3MB/s (cable)
100Mbps = 12.5MB/s (fiber, 10/100Mbps ethernet)
1000Mbps = 125MB/s (if all switches, routers are gigabit ethernet)

Time to download 10GB bluray.
1.5Mbps = 15 hrs
6Mbps = 3 hrs 45 mins
10Mbps = 2 hrs 30 mins
18Mbps = 1 hr 15 mins
25Mbps = 1 hr
50Mbps = 30 mins
100Mbps = 15mins

Time to copy 10GB bluray to NAS
unrar on the fly 7MB/s = 24 mins
10/100 ethernet 12MB/s = 14 mins
7200rpm 21MB/s = 8 mins

1. Action – Taxes, Build, Harvest, Fireworks Display, Military Parade, Research, Privilege
2. Persons – Monk, Builder, Farmer, Healer, Warrior, Scholar, Tax Collector, Pyrotechnist, Courty Lady
3. Event – Peace, Drought, Contagion, Mongol Invasion, Imperial Tribute, Dragon Festival. Decay occurs end of phase.
4. Scoring – 1 VP for each palace, each courty lady, and each privilege. Also there is end game scoring.

yotd_reference.pdf 957KB one page – shows actions and events and quick phase description.
yotd_player_aid.pdf 166KB one page – shows 9 persons with related 7 Actions and and 6 events
yotd_quickref.pdf 63KB one page – quick summary of rules
yotd_gamerules.pdf 4.35MB 8 pages – official rules from Rio Grande Games.

Showing screenshot of In Year of the Dragon game in progress on mabiweb.

Now before you play on mabiweb.com you may wish to learn In the Year of the Dragon playing a flash version (my mirror) versus AI opponents.

In the Auction House you can choose to play a check or a thief.  If you play the highest check amount you get to choose between the two exhibition cards.  If a player choses a thief they steal the check played this round unless of course there are two are more thieves then no thieves steal anything.

In the Castle you can Exhibit your cards which must be at least 3 consecutive for instance AAB or BCD or BCCD or CDEEF.  If you have the best exhibit or 2nd best exhibit you advance based on the two numbers on the board where the lead player is currently. However, when you exhibit you could have someone who played a thief steal from an exhibition card from you.  Thieves can be caught and thrown in jail if you play a detective.  Detectives advance using a catch up mechanism.  If your in 4th place you advance 4 spaces forward for instance.  Game ends when one player reaches the dinner table (pink section) and all players reveal their collections. Player with most valuable collection advances 8 spaces and 2nd most valuable collection advances 4 spaces.

Scoring is done at the end of the game which is your money in your hand plus the income earned from harvest.  All plantations that have water produce their respective fruit / vegetables. Income is your number of workers times base of your plantation.  As you can see green color (mrbass) has four workers on peas and there are 7 pea plantations all connected there I get 4 x 7 = 28 as seen below in the scoring screenshot.