I don't really have anything to put here, so I'm just going to put some things related to tech that I find useful but were fairly non-obvious to me.

1. You can change the default font in Google Docs. Arial haters, this one's for you.

2. On Twitter, you can share a video without quote-tweeting it (this happens when you see "From: account name" below the video). If you have a link to the original tweet with the video, just append "/video/1" to the end of the URL.

   However, this doesn't work if you're using it on a tweet where the video is shared (you see "From: account name"). Instead, you need to find the original tweet's URL. There's a few things to understand here:

   • At its core, Twitter is a platform for sharing text, up to 280 characters (the original limit, 140 characters, was the size of a text message). Everything else was originally built on top of that, and to some extent still is.
   • When you share a video on Twitter, the text of the Tweet includes a link to the video at the end, which starts with pic.twitter.com. However, you don't see this because Twitter replaces it with the actual video.
   • Furthermore, all links that you share on Twitter are shortened using the t.co URL shortener. This is done to minimize the character count taken up by URLs, and probably for tracking purposes.

   So in order to share the video, we just need to find the video link hidden at the end of the unerlying text of the tweet. We can do this as follows:

   • On iOS, you can already share the video URL directly so you don't need this. Long-press the video and select "Tweet video".
   • On Android, long-press the text of the tweet to copy it. Then paste it somewhere like a notes app. When you paste it, you'll find a link at the end of the tweet. This is the video link, and you can use it to reshare the video.
   • On web, you can use the "Embed Tweet" functionality. Copying the HTML code will reveal the video link at the end of the tweet.

3. If you're using a Chinese Pinyin IME, some of them may require you to type "v" instead of "u" to represent ü in Pinyin, which is not something you learn in a textbook.

   Part of the confusion here is the way Pinyin renders sounds. Note that the vowel in 鱼 yú is the same as the vowel in 绿 lǜ, which is different from the vowel in 路 lù! That's because there's an ambiguity between these sounds followed by an l, but not followed by a y.

4. In the Ubuntu Korean IME which allows you to type with a US keyboard layout, an uppercase letter will force the start of a new Hangul block (a dash doesn't work).

   Also, at least for this IME, keep in mind that Revised Romanization tries to better reflect the way Hangul is pronounced. When typing, you want RR transliteration instead, which directly maps to the jamo used in each Hangul block.

   For example, the Revised Romanization for 임니다 is "imnida" which reflects the pronounciation, but you would need to type "ibnida" to input it. See the table at the bottom of Romanization of Korean (Wikipedia).

5. You can open a "simple" text editor just by visiting data:text/html,<textarea>, which just creates an HTML page with a single <textarea> element using a data URL.

   One use for this is that you can paste into it, then copy out of it, if you want to "Paste as plain text" something with multiple lines. This sometimes has advantages over using a native text editor; for example copying out of Notepad on Windows will use CRLF for line breaks, whereas Chrome shouldn't.

6. In Android, you can copy text out of any app, anywhere, by long-pressing from the task switcher. Unfortunately, this only seems to work for English text (it seems to be performing OCR).

7. If for some reason you have a Windows XP virtual machine, and you're trying to install East Asian language support (necessary to display Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), and you're missing files from the Windows XP install CD... you can get by for the first few by manually downloading each of the files individually online, but there's a lot, and it's maybe not the wisest thing to do.

   You can actually get a significant number of the necessary files by downloading and extracting files from the installer for Windows XP Service Pack 3, which is still available by searching the Microsoft Update Catalog. This includes cplexe.exe (and many of its friends as well, the exe is not enough). However, files such as xjis.nls, c_10001.nls, etc., don't appear to have been updated in any of the service packs. (Trust me, I checked!)

   The simplest solution? For some reason, archive.org hosts a CD of Windows XP Professional SP3. Just download that and mount it into your virtual machine, and Windows will be happy! I have no idea why a website as prominent and reputable as archive.org is hosting that when it's obviously copyright infringement, but I guess that's their problem, not mine...

   If you're wondering why I'm trying to install East Asian language support on Windows XP in the year of our lord 2021... maybe some questions are better left unanswered. But if you do find yourself in this situation, feel free to get in touch — I'm hoping some people will find this through Google and won't have to suffer as much as I did.

   And no, Windows Update (and Microsoft Update) do not really work anymore on Windows XP. So if you want to install updates, the only way is to download them online, probably from unofficial sources...

If you want, you can take a look at the website that used to be here (warning: embarassing).