Disclaimer: This content reflects my personal opinions, not those of any organizations I am or have been affiliated with. Code samples are provided for illustration purposes only, use with caution and test thoroughly before deployment.
I added a Five Elements interactive reference to my Volume 1 quick reference. It brings the correspondences together in a wheel and table, with options to explore the relationships and switch between English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese labels.
I’m studying Traditional Chinese Medicine in English, and I find it difficult to translate English terms back into Chinese. To help with that, I built a quick reference for Volume 1 of Essentials of Chinese Medicine. It maps the book’s terms to Traditional Chinese and cross-references selected terms in the WHO’s International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine (2022). The WHO source presents its Chinese forms in Simplified Chinese.
The reference is based on Liu, Z., & Liu, L. (Eds.). (2010). Essentials of Chinese Medicine: Vol. 1. Foundations of Chinese Medicine. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-112-5.
You can also find it on the TCM landing page. If you spot an error, please use the email address shown at the bottom of this page.
We live in a world where almost every productivity problem gets the same proposed solution: make it an app. Track it digitally. Sync it. Add notifications. Put it in the cloud.
And yet some of the most reliable systems in my life are made of paper cards, folded A4 sheets, and tiny physical markers placed exactly where I will bump into them.
The reason is simple: physical cues do not need to win a battle for attention inside a screen that is already crowded with everything else.
In my previous post about replacing Raycast with macOS built-ins, I recommended turning your shell scripts into .command files so Spotlight can find and launch them. That trick still works, but after using it for a while I ran into two annoyances: Spotlight is slow to rank .command files, and running one pops up a Terminal window even for scripts that don’t need to show anything. It turns out there’s a better way.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Vanilla OS for quite a while, but almost all the official documentation was still focused on version 1. Back then, they were planning for the big v1 to v2 upgrade, so I waited. Since I visit my parents once a year, I need a stable, low-maintenance operating system that can be continuously upgraded so I can do some light work during my visits. The last thing I want to do is spend three days fixing my operating system updates and miss out on all the time with family. Today, while on vacation, I set up Hyper-V on my parents’ Windows desktop and decided to finally take Vanilla OS 2 (Orchid) for a spin.
What makes Vanilla OS interesting is its design philosophy: it promises an immutable, stable core while giving you the freedom to install software from virtually any Linux distribution.