Singularity on the Plane

Waktu handphone pertamaku rusak, aku dibelikan Fren oleh bapakku. Inilah keadaanya saat ini:

Model HPnya Samsung sekian sekian dan menggunakan CDMA. Dilihat dari luar sepintas sih sepertinya tidak ada yang aneh. Tapi kalau dibuka:

Loh, kok baterainya njengking dari posisi normalnya? Inilah alasannya:

Kalau diperhatikan baik-baik, terlihat bahwa baterai HPnya cembung, seperti perut wanita hamil! Sial, aku memang sering meletakkan HPku di dekat HP-HP lain, tapi aku tidak menyangka hasilnya akan seperti ini. Ada yang lebih mengerikan lagi:

Salah satu sisinya retak, seperti telur yang akan menetas! Aduh, sudah berapa bulan ini ya…

OK, kita kembali serius karena ini masalah fatal. Ya, baterai ini sepertinya bisa meledak kapan saja kalau dibiarkan terus beroperasi! Kalau meraba baterainya langsung, kecembungannya benar-benar terasa besar dan mengerikan.

Memang baterai HP ini sudah cukup lama bermasalah. Terlalu gampang ngedrop! Tapi aku nggak pernah kepikiran kalau baterainya sampai menggembung seperti ini.

Beberapa waktu yang lalu, saat sedang makan di warung lesehan sama temanku, temanku itu membuka HPnya dengan alasan yang aku lupa. Aku juga ikut-ikutan membuka HPku, dan jreeeeng betapa kagetnya aku saat melihat baterai HPku seperti ini. Untung saja ketahuan waktu itu, soalnya kalau dibiarkan terus bisa-bisa aku jadi korbannya! Tahu kasus baterai-baterai laptop Sony meledak yang menyebabkan recall besar-besaran? Ngeri…

Sampai aku beli baterai baru, aku nggak akan nyalain HPku. Ah teknologi emang bikin pusing… Daripada capek mikirin HP, mending dengerin musik H!P dulu deh… (Pun, pun, pun… Apa ya bahasa Indonesianya?)

Did you know that in Windows XP’s IME we can input a kanji by drawing it? (Does Ubuntu, and Linux in general, have it?) I will outlay the steps here.

Obviously you need to have the IME installed. See this Wikibook page. For illustration, we’ll use Notepad. So fire up Notepad, switch the IME on, and input any character on the keyboard. I use ‘a’, which the IME will convert to hiragana ‘あ’ on the fly:

The magic key is ‘F5′, which will launch the IME pad. Press it and you’ll get this:

Press “OK” and you’ll get this:

On the screen pictured above, you can find a kanji by its radical (部首, bushu). However that’s not what we’re interested in right now. To input by drawing, click the top-leftmost button (circled red). You’ll get this:

Here’s the explanation for the UI elements:

1. This is the drawing area. You draw the strokes here by holding the left mouse button and dragging.
2. Matching shapes (and not-so-matching shapes) you draw in (1) will be listed here. If you’ve found the kanji you want, just click it.
3. 戻す (modosu) means “to return”. Click this to undo the last stroke.
4. 消去 (shoukyo) means “erasing”. Click this to clear the drawing area.

One thing to note is that stroke order matters! Try to draw a perfectly matching shape but with a random stroke order, and chances are the program will not give the kanji you want.

The power of this tool cannot be underestimated. For one thing, it allows you to quickly find a printed character you see. Suppose you went to a mini market and see a notice written in Japanese (for example, in Circle K Terban, Yogyakarta). If there is an unknown kanji there, you won’t have any information other than its shape. Finding the kanji through the method explained above will be very easy. After you have the digital form of the character, you can find its readings, compounds, and meanings in electronic dictionaries.

Second, you can use it to input rare kanji easily. Suppose for some insane reason you want to write “koe” (sound) using the rare kanji 聲 instead of the normal 声 (see for example “Endless Rain” by X Japan). You know its sound (no pun intended), but you can’t find it by typing in the IME because that kanji is archaic (even EDICT don’t list it). However, by drawing it you can find the kanji.

The third is for writing names. When IME don’t recognize a name, you can input it by drawing character per character.

I got a temporary modem to replace the fried one, but the situation is still unideal because the internet has been on and off. Worse, the connection was completely blacked out for the last 2 days.

So, I set out to go to a net cafe to blog stuffs. Of course I’ve prepared the stuffs on my flash disk so I could just copy-paste here.

But alas! After some seconds of browsing the flash disk, the contents just dissapeared from Windows Explorer. I tried plugging to another USB port and guess what?!? The contents are corrupted!!! (many files missing, file names using weird characters, etc…)

That why I hate technology with a passion… They simply don’t work! (oh, you DON’T want me to blog about how my mnemosyne data was corrupted by a UPS failure and I lose 3 days of work (thank God I have a backup)!!! Oh wait, I just blogged it…) Sometimes I think that life would be perfect if I was born a couple of centuries earlier, living as a farmer and not having to deal with the thing called computer…

Nuff ranting and whining. I’ll read some news and then go home…