Software (33)

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. ...

Download — File Organizer (for Windows) Have you ever backed up your phone’s photos to a PC, then opened that folder months later? Thousands of files sit in one DCIM folder, named IMG_2381 or 20240115_143022 and nothing else. To find out when a picture was taken, you have to open it. It gets worse the second and third time you back up. You cannot tell which photos you already copied, so the same shots pile up folder after folder. They eat the disk, and you cannot safely delete any of them because you do not know which is which. ...

Open the app — Joseon Palace Maps What do you do when a hall name like Huijeongdang or Bihyeonhap turns up in the Annals or a royal protocol? You recognize the name, but where in the palace it stood refuses to come into focus. Unrolling the Donggwoldo and scanning it by eye is no small task — one small cell among thousands of tiny inscriptions. This site works the other way round. Type the name and it is marked on the painting. So far 2,503 locations have been placed. ...

Open the app — Korean Studies Toolkit (Chrome Web Store) What do you do when an unfamiliar word appears in a classical text? Open a new tab, type the dictionary address, retype the word, then find your way back. A date shows up, so you open another tab. Ten tabs later you have lost the line you were reading. Korean Studies Toolkit removes that round trip. It is a Chrome extension that docks three tools to the right of your browser: the Korean Studies Web Dictionary, the East Asian Chronology and the Unicode Hanja IME. Your page stays where it is; you look things up beside it. ...

Open the app — Korean Studies Web Dictionary When an unfamiliar word turns up in an old text, one dictionary is rarely enough. It is not in the hanja dictionary, so you open an idu glossary; not there either, so you try the medical terminology list, and end up in an encyclopedia. Half a dozen tabs later, you have lost the sentence you were reading. This dictionary searches twenty-eight sources at once. One query, and every dictionary carrying that word appears on a single screen. There are 1.14 million headwords and 1.37 million definitions. Those figures sit under the search box too, so you can always see how many sources are loaded right now. ...

Open the app — Unicode Hanja IME Have you ever been transcribing an old text and come to a full stop at a character you cannot read? Korean input converts hanja from its reading, so without the reading you cannot even open the conversion list. And once you have dug the reading out of a dictionary, the character is often missing from the list anyway. The built-in converter on Windows mostly covers the basic block. Characters from the extension blocks — common in classical texts — never show up. ...