A new iPhone was announced today, the iPhone 4S, and the response to Apple’s press conference was a bit lukewarm. Many were expecting the iPhone 5 and/or iOS5 today. But one of the more exiting developments for us was found on the specification sheet for the phones (tip o’ the cap to Joseph Erb for the heads up): there will be a Hawaiian keyboard and spell-check document included. Yes, we’ve had support for the ‘okina and kahakō in the iPhone and iPad for a while; however, while you can generate them from the soft keyboard by long-holding your finger on…
My Relationship With Beer? It’s Complicated
For all of the comments and jokes I post about Guinness on Facebook, I never was much of a beer drinker. When I turned 18 (back when the drinking age was still 18), my best friend bought me a six pack of Heineken. On my 21st birthday, I gave the last four bottles away. Didn’t care for it at. Over the years I tried a number of different beers, mostly of the mass-produced variety, and didn’t care for any of them either. I recall a conversation I had with a bartender in Ireland during our 2002 trip there. He asked…
Attacking The Electric Bill, Pt. 1
With electric costs soaring, we started to take steps to reduce our electric bill as best we could. Several years ago we replaced the bulbs in all of our most-used incandescent light fixtures to CFL (compact florescent lights). We also put most of the electrical devices I know use power when they are plugged in – whether or not they are in use. This included my computer equipment and our media system (TV, satellite receiver/DVD, Wii, audio receiver, etc.). When they are not in use, they are all switched off. It helped us cut down on our power use about…
(Almost) 100 Days Of Getting Healthy
Last summer I decided to address some sleeping issues that I’ve suffered from for a long time. I rarely woke up feeling rested, and many times felt more tired when I woke up that I did when I went to bed the night before. I undertook a sleep study, and confirmed what I had suspected for a while – I was suffering from sleep apnea. Not only that, but the doctor who looked over my results said it was about as bad a case as he’d ever seen. At one point during the night I went 90 seconds without taking…
Online Hawaiian Dictionary For Android Users
Last year we launched a mobile interface for the Hawaiian dictionaries on Ulukau. The system should detect all mobile devices automatically, and for those that it doesn’t, you can simply go to m.wehewehe.org to see the mobile interface. The one limitation of this system is for Android users: Android’s default font does not have a glyph in the correct location, so Android users see a box instead of the ‘okina. We’ve looked into fixing this, but found that it would be costly to do the recoding necessary to make this work under Ulukau as it currently stands. I have been…
Hawaiian Language Support in Windows 7
This document shows which fonts on Win 7 have the ‘okina and kahakō characters used in Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. You’ll find that only the following Windows 7 fonts have the ‘okina and all vowel-kahakō characters (at least in the standard install on our Dell): Arial, Arial Unicode MS, Calibri, Cambria, Cambria Math, Consolas, Courier New, Lucida Sans Unicode, Meiryo, Meiryo UI, Microsoft Sans Serif, Segoe UI,Segoe UI Light, Segoe UI Semibold, Tahoma, and Times New Roman Some others have some or all of the vowel-macron characters, but not all. Some fonts have none at all. This document is…
Hilo Heart Walk 2011
Yesterday Marie and I joined several hundred individuals at the Hilo Heart Walk–a fundraiser for the American Heart Association. About 30 of the walkers were from Team 365 in 2011–a group started by our friend Liana Honda. The goal of the group is to walk at least 365 miles this year. Having a group of supportive individuals–some of whom I met for the first time yesterday–is incredible motivation. That and the fact that I found a great workout tracking app for my Droid X called CardioTrainer has made a huge different. CardioTracker clocks your miles for you, keeps track of…
Leokī Users: FirstClass app for iPhone/iPad/iTouch!
This is pretty cool. We’ve been using FirstClass software for the past 17 or so years to operate Leokī, which was the first telecommunications server to ever operate completely in a Polynesian or native language within the United States. It took them ages to get Unicode support into it, and just recently they released a FirstClass app for iPhone/iPad/iTouch. It seems to work flawlessly, handling the ‘okina and kahakō with no issues. I love it when a plan comes together. Unfortunately the app is not localized into Hawaiian like we’ve done for Macintosh and Windows users, but, hey, it’s a…
From The “Small Word” Dept.
A few weekends ago I was in Honolulu for the Mele Songwriter’s Conference. On Friday evening, after the conference events wound down, my buddy Tarvin Mākia and I headed to the Tapa Bar at the Hilton Hawaiian to listen to Jerry Santos. Jerry was on a break and talking with some visitors, so I snuck up behind him and waited for him to finished. After we chatted I turned around and there was a Japanese woman in front of me who asked, “Do you know O___ H_____?” I was flabbergasted, and all I could muster was “Excuse me?” She repeated,…
Memories of Musicians Institute
In spring 1985 I moved to Hollywood to attend Musicians Institute. On the first day of instruction all of us students (@500) gathered in the school’s performance auditorium for orientation. As a “getting to know you” exercise they had all of us in odd number rows (I was in row 1) turn around and introduce ourselves to the person directly behind us, then stand up and introduce that person to the rest of the class. Yes it took a while. The fellow sitting behind me was a guitar student named Nick Nolan, about 19 years old. He was also the…