Opening Hours for the Working Class of Japan

Looking at openings hours as a whole in Japan makes you wonder if the country was made for housewives. A colleague once said that it was always the women who handled the household finances because they're better at it. But really, at a time when more husbands worked than wives, what working adult in Japan could make it to the bank between 9 am and 5 pm on a weekday? Shopping malls close at 8pm, which is way too early for most of the working class. Parcels almost always gets delivered in the middle of the day when a working adult can in no way be at home.

Japan is not really convenient for people working here. Do they really think that everyone has a housewife to rely on? Does Japan really believe that the people who have money or who are actually earning money don't deserve to enjoy the convenient services they have?

I say, either open way earlier than 10 am or close way later. Think of your services and who needs them.

Feature Request: Copy Text to Clipboard

Looking through my past feature request post I found a solution to one of them. I found a keyboard shortcut that works with rikai-kun (for chrome) that lets me copy the words that pop up. Here's a list of all the keyboard shortcuts for rikai-kun. The copied entries are tab-separated so you can paste it directly into Excel or a text-based file to export to flash card software or applications.

Keyboard shortcuts when popup is visible

A	Alternate popup location
Y	Move popup location down
C	Copy to clipboard
D	Hide/show definitions
Shift/Enter	Switch dictionaries
B	Previous character
M	Next character
N	Next word

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Japanese Dictionary
jisho.org

I was using Weblio for translations but it has a lot of advertisements so loading the page takes too long. Jisho.org is a simpler site that loads faster. Kanji characters have furigana so you can read the example sentences or words you are looking up. The site also uses hash tags to help narrow down searches. You can even use them to call up specific word lists for studying.

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Japanese to English Translations
Linguee

Linguee comes up with common translations for words and this site also gives example paragraphs of how the words are used. You get the context in which the words are used.

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New link for Jim Breen's WWWJDIC EDict
wwwjdic word search

Whatsapp Web

Why does whatsapp only work when my phone is connected to the Internet? What's the point?

Mendeley Desktop now has a "Recently Read" tab!

This very short post is a few weeks late. Maybe months. Anyway.

I am very happy that Mendeley has a "recently read" tab now. At least I can track my reading history per session. If they kept a history log of when I read each article last that would be great too.

Reading sessions

I would love it if I could get someone to help me read my Japanese book. I've been reading just fine because I can more or less tell what the words mean but I want to know how to actually read them. 

It'd be nice if someone could read the words I don't know for me and help explain them to me as I read the book. 

That's my new request for the day. 

Mendeley Collections

Mendeley is an awesome reference manager. It works across various platforms and is able to sync your library over different machines. Even if the machine you're using doesn't have Mendeley, you can still easily access your references through Mendeley web. 

Adding references to Mendeley is easy and pain free. The problem with Mendeley though is if you want to bring your library with you everywhere. 

I can't seem to get the software to load fast on my school's workstation because every time I load Mendeley, it's the "first time" it loads. That means it automatically starts importing all the pdf files I have uploaded to the web. 

At first I thought I'd work around that by keeping my pdf collection on dropbox and manage them through Mendeley. That worked but the problem is, the program still tries to download the entire  database of PDFs even when they are already in my computer. 

That just sucks. 

So, I've decided not to load any PDFs at all. I turned the function off. Now Mendeley works just fine for me. 

I use it to manage references and when I need my PDFs I can simply click "add pdf" and it'll be where I expect it to be. No harm done. Would be nice if it's automatic but I guess nothing in this world is perfect. 

Feature Request: Automatically Save Web Content

Maybe it already exists, maybe it's just a worthless dream, but I really hope that there's an app or software for this.

I'm an amateur translator who can only translate Japanese to English or Mandarin to English. Because I'm an amateur I often have to look up words in dictionaries to check if my translation was correct. While this isn't difficult, with many awesome online dictionaries available, I would like to actually be able to save the results I found. For future reference.

Why would that be important?

Well, I love learning new languages and increasing my vocabulary would be a lot easier if I can just remember the words I just learnt. The problem is, in order to do that, I have to constantly copy and paste words from the dictionary result into another document before I can process the words. (I create CSV and TXT files to import into flashcard programs such as AnyMemo or Mnemosyne.)

So I would love it if there's a program out there that would help me download the dictionary results I found into a text file or something.

That reminds me, if there's a software that can automatically insert the exact date and time when I open a file or start typing or start... something, that would be great! (Even if I have to click a button or list the actions to trigger this function I would still want it.)

Haven't found anything useful online but maybe I will. (I forgot I used to use this blog to track good websites.)