Thailand Pass Woes

So, I’m trying to get back into Thailand on a TR (Tourist) visa. As of November, all travelers to Thailand by air must enter Thailand using the Thailand Pass system. And there have been a lot of issues with the system since its launch on November 1st. The issues...

Don’t look to Facebook to talk to your loved ones

October 4th should be a day ingrained in everyone’s memory as the day on which Facebook demonstrated its fallibility and undependability. As I write this post, DNS servers appear to load Facebook’s site, but an error message acts as a placeholder for anything else. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other...

Working with diaspora populations should be acceptable in Linguistics

I began working with the Sizang language in 2014-15 and I began working on it while I was still in the United States, before I had ever actually stepped foot in Burma. I got quite a few materials from Kosei OTSUKA during a SEALS Conference in Yangon. Luckily, he...

Learn the Khmer writing system with a PDF I just OCR’d

I took the liberty of downloading Eisel Mazard’s scan of Cambodian System of Writing and Beginning Reader with Drills and Glossary, by Franklin E. Huffman, with assistance from Chhom-Rak Thong Lambert & Im Proum. After downloading, I ran it through Scan Tailor, and OCR’d it (English only, I’m afraid)....

New page: “Software”

I’ve added a new page called “Software“, which contains information and links to useful software programs I enjoy, as well as scripts that I have written to automate repetitive tasks. Please check it out....

Thanks to Stack Exchange, I have my PDF solution

A helpful user on Stack Exchange solved the problem from my previous post for me by creating a small bash script, which reads values from a CSV file and then replaces the matching values in the PDF with the new ones. Check it out: This script takes an input...

Fixing PDF bookmark locations

It’s been a while since I’ve attempted to code anything. After hours of trying to figure it out, I finally found a somewhat-working solution. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-stop-shop solution. Let me explain. The issue So, a very efficient way to try to write things is using Pandoc, which...

RIP Laoshu505000

I’m actually a couple of days late on posting this, but besser spät als nie, as they say. Moses “Laoshu” M. McCormick, polyglot and YouTuber from Akron, Ohio, has passed away due to heart complications, according to what his sister wrote on GoFundMe. This is very sad news, since...

Goodbye, MM Facebook

Well, it’s happened. I was surprised when my friend sent me this link claiming that Facebook and Messenger have been banned in Burma — from Facebook while I was at home. However, I knew from two days ago that the connection would be gradually disrupted, rather than taken out...

My ICSTLL Presentation

My ICSTLL presentation on Ngawn Chin‘s linguistic classification went very well. It was attended by some popular names in Kuki-Chin and Tibeto-Burman linguistics, such as Jim Matisoff, David Bradley, Lalnunthangi Chhangte, Zakaria Rehman, David Peterson, Pauthang Haokip, and Ken Van Bik (whose dissertation provided the proto-forms with which I...