Darkoshi

probably not made in the U.S.

Sun, 25 May 2025 07:50:51 GMT

While shopping for bed slats (not for me), I found a set on the Kohl's website that says it is made "right here" in the USA from Canadian wood. But while checking out that brand's website, Continental Sleep, I belatedly realized the wording and grammar on their pages isn't quite right. So now I wonder, is the "Made in USA" claim a lie? Or do Chinese companies have factories in the U.S. making that kind of stuff? I could have sworn I saw that "Made in the USA" claim on one of their website pages too (for only that one product, which made it seem all the more dubious), but am not finding it anymore.

I looked up info on the company but found nothing other than a reference to "Continental Sleep Holdings", which was likely a different company, on a Wikipedia page about "Sleepeezee".

The reviews on the ContinentalSleep website seem fake too, with similar grammar and wording issues; not the kind Americans would make.

It's a bit surprising they haven't used an LLM to fix the grammar on their webpages. Once Chinese companies get better at doing that, there won't even be that tell to give them away.

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night of snow

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 09:42:26 GMT

It is our night of snow, snow on the ground and air temps below freezing. Tomorrow is today, will be sun and probably melt. Some might survive in the shadows for a bit longer.

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On Wednesday I ordered some things on Amazon. I chose an Amazon Day Delivery of Jan 27 for the ones that had the choice, as I'm in no hurry. An email I got today for one item "Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC" says, "New estimated delivery date: Monday, January 24, 2022 - Friday, March 25, 2022".

So either they'll have it shipped right out to me in a couple of days, or maybe it will take 2 months. Weird.

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Last year, in a store I came across some hologram artworks, 2-d paintings made into 3-d with holograms. 11 by 16 inches in size. They were neat, and I bought 2 that looked like paintings of southeast Asian goddesses.

Later after doing some searching, I discovered that the artist is Zeng Hao, and the paintings are of Kuan Yin, aka Guan Yin. I wonder if whoever made and sold these posters had permission from the actual artists; I tend to suspect not.

But I wanted to ask if any of you know... is there a special name for 3-d hologram artworks of this kind? The store had others with different kinds of artwork on them. But when I searched online, I didn't find anything like it, possibly due to not using the right search terms.

It also is a problem that photos of holograms don't look like holograms, so when looking at images in search results, I can't tell if the items shown are holographic like the ones I have or not.

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TV and radio apps

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 09:02:23 GMT

I bought a FireTV stick and set it up today. Installed many apps. Mostly wanted it for some German news and shows, but also installed other apps to try out.

One app is iQIYI, and on it I watched the first episode of I Don't Want to Be Friends With You. It's a 2020 Chinese series, free to watch, with English subtitles. The first episode was cute, funny and entertaining. I don't want to spoil it for anyone by describing the plot, as I had no idea when I started watching it. But this page has some details if you want, and lists its genres as: Comedy, Romance, School, Youth, Fantasy.

I admit, one thing that appeals to me about the show is the androgynous appearance of the lead character, a teenage girl.

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Recently I installed the Audials Android app on my phone. It's got radio stations from all over the world. Unlike some apps, the radio links all seem to be up to date, no hunting just to find stations that will play ok. It also lets you record songs/shows to your phone. (This feels like taping songs from the radio to cassettes like in the old days, except it's to your phone instead.) That can be useful for stations that don't list which song is playing. If I hear a good song, I can save a clip to help in figuring out what song it was so I can later buy it and support the artists.

The "record songs" option didn't work for me when I tried it. With that, the software looks for distinct gaps between songs before it will record or save them. But the "record show" option worked fine - you can select that and then click to stop the recording whenever you want.

Now I find myself listening to our local college radio station WUSC more often again, as I can simply tap on my phone to start playing it.

I'm also getting to listen to college radio station WUML again. I used to listen to it in Massachusetts during my high school years, when it was called WJUL.

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a single photo, a lot of roofs

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 06:22:21 GMT

Amazing detail in this photo when you expand it to full size:
Xijiang, a Hmong-majority township in Guizhou, China

Such densely packed roofing tiles on some of those roofs!
Houses, terraced slopes, mountains, trees, river, bridges, people with umbrellas...

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translating spoken Chinese from audio file

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 02:16:39 GMT

I got a strange voicemail in Chinese on my cellphone from the number 202-495-3793 (a Washington, DC area code). It's a short official-sounding recorded message in a female voice, with a simple musical tune in the background. (I like how the Chinese language, being tone-based, is itself melodic even without the music.)

I was curious as to what the message said, so I saved it to an audio file on my laptop. Then I opened Google Translate in the Chrome browser (the option for translating from audio / microphone input is only available in Chrome, not Firefox). The page's text input box has a microphone icon in the lower left that you click for it to start listening. But first you need to select the language; it won't auto-detect when using the mic input. Then I played the audio file.

The translating didn't work very well. I tried it several times. Mostly, it didn't recognize any words, and showed no output. A couple of times, it showed the following output. This is only a small portion of what was said:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi
Chinese Ambassador to the United States

But I'm not even sure that much of it is correct. In the audio, I can hear "Zhongguó zhù" at the very beginning, but not "mei dàshi" after it. Maybe that is from a different part of it. It's spoken so fast that I can't tell.. I do hear "shi" a few times but not sure about the rest.

I tried again and this time got:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan
中国驻美大使馆
Chinese Embassy in the United States

Zhongguó = China
dàshi guan = Embassy

I also tried playing back the recording at 2/3s speed, in hopes that would let Google Translate hear the words better. But it did not help.

Hum, this is sort of fun: Try to say Chinese sounding things and see what it translates to. But you have to click the mic to stop and restart in between, as otherwise it seems to output the same thing over and over again. ("No no no")

I seem to have learned how to say "China" (Zhongguó) pretty well! (But I doubt I'll remember it.)

Ah, in my trying to read "Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan", it instead translates it to "The beauty of life".

But I tested translating from me speaking German, and it translates that very well! I can hardly say anything that it doesn't understand! Even with my not-so-great speaking voice.

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opera browser

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 06:52:39 GMT

I was getting ready to install one of the Opera browsers on my phone, but I noticed that their Google Play pages say "contains ads" - even though the browser itself supposedly contains ad-blockers. So where do the ads get displayed? Do they block the normal ads and inject their own instead?

The app details mention: Opera Mini may show ads from Facebook. To learn more, see https://m.facebook.com/ads/ad_choices
But that link results in a Facebook page with message "The page you requested was not found."

I did a web search and didn't find more info on that, but found this (from July 2016): Opera browser sold to a Chinese consortium for $600 million.
That is news to me.

It reminded me of something else I read recently that surprised me too. I thought that Lenovo was a part of IBM, and that IBM was still a PC/laptop manufacturer. But IBM sold "off its personal computer (ThinkPad/ThinkCentre) and x86-based server businesses to Lenovo (2005 and 2014, respectively)". And Lenovo "is a Chinese multinational technology company with headquarters in Beijing, China."

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