Category: General
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What’s in a name?
Many years ago Ms Jiang, our Mandarin teacher, asked us for our names, went away for a few days, and came back with the Chinese equivalents. For a long time I wondered how she managed to do that, given that the names on our official documents are approximate English transliterations of the Chinese originals at…
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US$ 0.68, postage included
If you don’t know what AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.com) is, wherever you’re buying your stuff from, you’re probably paying too much. The best way to describe it is with an example. The gimmicks in this picture are USB LEDs that light up when they are inserted into a USB connector. They turn any USB power source into…
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Undoing Facebook
My Facebook account is now reduced to a groupie boosting Like-counts on my wife’s posts, but even this strange marital responsibility and my occasional anti-anti-China taunts are becoming less effective motivators for me to log into the social network. I can’t deactivate the account outright because I know that there will be that one need…