Built while working with old books

Myeolchi-bokkeum has a way of going hard once it’s been sitting in the fridge. Fry it too long in the sauce and it sticks to the pan, too. So here the sauce boils for exactly 20 seconds, and the anchovies — already fried crisp — get folded into it. It tastes like what I ate as a kid over rice with water poured on it. At a glance Ingredients anchovies 2 handfuls sauce (soy sauce2, gochujang2, oligodang3, sugar1, garlic0.5) optional (sesame oil1) Prep ...

After the holidays there’s always Spam and canned tuna left over from gift sets. And there’s aged kimchi in the fridge. When you can’t face going out for groceries but something has to go on the stove, these three are enough. Not a single vegetable goes in. No scallion, no onion. It follows Cho Mi-ryung’s recipe, and the key is serving it with a rolled omelette made deliberately bland. At a glance Ingredients ...

Most galbi-jjim recipes open with soaking the ribs in cold water for a couple of hours to draw the blood out. This one has no such step. Instead the ribs get seared hard over high heat, and then braised. It’s chef Ryu Su-young’s recipe, and it’s my three boys’ favorite dish in any season — they scrape the pot and mix the sauce into their rice. Buy ribs, get them going, cook rice while they braise, and dinner is done inside an hour. ...

Chicken simmered in water is hard to get wrong, so don’t be nervous about this one. Buy one pack of cut-up chicken, simmer it 30 minutes, and you’re done. Put mild mustard in the dipping sauce and it tastes like the dak hanmari restaurants serve. Then cook instant noodles in the leftover broth instead of kalguksu… ah, it’s good. At a glance Ingredients 1 chicken, cut up for dakbokkeumtang broth vegetables (onion 1, potato 1, whole peppercorns 20, scallion 2 stalks) seasoning (soy sauce1, salt1) dipping sauce (chicken broth4, gochugaru2, soy sauce2, vinegar1, sugar1, plum syrup1, minced garlic1, mild mustard to taste) Prep ...

When your kids won’t eat vegetables, doenjang-jjigae becomes an awkward thing to make. You can load it with zucchini, onion, and tofu, and they’ll still only drink the broth. So my three boys and I struck a deal. Potato, cut into small dice, a few pieces each. And in exchange, plenty of meat goes in. At a glance Ingredients rice water beef or pork (as much as you want) seasoning (doenjang1, noodle soup base2, gochujang0.5, gochugaru0.5, minced garlic0.5) vegetables (potato 1) optional: any vegetables you want Prep ...

Open the app — Lunar · Solar Converter Dates in old records are almost always lunar. When you meet something like the byeongja year, eleventh month, fifteenth day, what that is on the solar calendar does not come to mind. The lunar calendar also has leap months, so the same sixth month, fifteenth day can come around twice in one year. This tool holds 748,705 days, from AD 1 to 2050. Search by solar date, by lunar date or by sexagenary cycle — you arrive at the same day. ...

Open the app — Sound Editor Have you ever installed a whole program just to cut the first few seconds off a recording? You install it, make an account, and hunt for [Trim] among a wall of buttons. Then the thing you actually came to do takes thirty seconds. And the next time you need it, you can’t even remember where you installed it. There are web services that do it for you, but uploading a recording of your own voice to someone else’s server is not a comfortable thought either. ...

Open the app — Text to Speech Have you ever read your own writing out loud? Sentences that looked fine on screen suddenly snag when they leave your mouth. A clause that runs too long, a word you used twice, a phrase that doesn’t quite land. But reading aloud every time is a chore. In an office you feel watched, and with a long piece your throat gives out. It would be easier if someone else read it — though signing up for a TTS service just for that feels like too much. ...

Open the app — Classical Jukebox Have you ever wanted classical music on in the background while you work, only to burn the time deciding what to play? Streaming services want you logged in first, and YouTube cuts in with ads. All you wanted was “some Baroque, anything,” but picking an album and then picking a track comes first. Old out-of-copyright recordings are piled up in the archives, yet searching there directly pulls up audiobooks and lectures alongside the music. ...

Open the app — East Asian Chronology Have you ever stopped at a date written as Chongzhen, the byeongja year while reading an old text? It gives you an era name and a cycle year, and what that is in Western years does not come to mind. By the time you have opened a chronology table, found the era, counted from the accession year and matched the cycle, your reading has lost its thread. ...

Did you try the examples from my previous post A Taste of Regular Expressions? Practical skills (what we call “experience” or “know-how” in Korea) don’t develop just from understanding the method. You gain experience by trying once, failing twice, and getting stuck three times. This time, let’s work through some regex examples that you can use directly in real work. Regular expressions start with patterns and end with patterns. Regex is expressing those patterns using a defined syntax. ...

I used to revise a manuscript of several hundred pages dozens of times until my eyes turned red. I had to revise and re-revise things countless times—when guidelines changed, when I found typos, or when I needed to standardize terminology. Yes, that was me. Haha;;; After learning regular expressions, I finished work that would have taken a week in just 1-2 hours! For researchers who need to write papers or organize and process data, For journal coordinators who need to manage documents of dozens or hundreds of pages, For publishers who need to edit books year-round, And for translators who work with texts written in various languages— After learning regex, your world will be divided into “before regex” and “after regex.” ...