Peter Ex Texia

Recently, I started on working on making RhinoSpike a mobile-friendly website. More than half of the visitors to RhinoSpike are using a mobile device, and it’s not a great experience. This screenshot shows how bad it is:

Aw, Snap!

I was feeling great. I had just announced my bilingual word game, Bilingdle, on social media, and the immediate response was overwhelmingly positive, especially among my friends and family on Facebook. Several months of work in my free time were being validated by this pleasant reception. But then someone mentioned the game had crashed on their phone. Another person said the same and sent me a screenshot.

I first learned about Wordle in early 2022, and like so many others, I started to play daily. Eventually I discovered Quordle, which is like Wordle but with 4 words at the same time, and that became my daily game. It also has a practice mode which lets you play as many times a day as you like. I thought it would be great to play a daily game like this to help me keep up with my Spanish. I found a version of Wordle in Spanish, and even tried Quordle’s Spanish version, but I found these difficult to stick with. I felt like some of the words that were being selected as the answers were often obscure.

ClozeMaker is a small Windows application I threw together in 2017 to make the process of making cloze-deletion flashcards in Anki easier. I demonstrated how I make these flashcards in a stream on YouTube:

In 2014, I wrote a quick static site to help speed up the process of making flashcards in the way suggested by Gabriel Wyner in his book Fluent Forever. Gabriel wrote a blog post on automating your searches, but his method required some software that I did not or could not use, for some reason I’ve since forgotten.

In June 2021, my frequent co-conspirator Thomas sent me a message asking I wanted to participate in a game jam that weekend. I had never done a game jam before, but it was something I had been meaning to try for a while, so of course I agreed. And then he told me the game jam had already started, so we had less than the allotted 48 hours to make a complete game! The game jam was the GMTK Game Jam 2021 and the theme for the jam was “Joined Together.”

RhinoSpike is a site that allows language learners to get recorded audio in their target language. The audio is submitted by other users of the site who are native speakers of that language, and usually are also learning another language and seeking recording audio in their target language. RhinoSpike has been actively online since March 2010, and, as of May 2023, nearly 80,000 audio recordings in 90 languages have been uploaded to the site.

Babelhut was a blog created by my friend Thomas and myself to document our language learning journey online. Our about page from the site said this:

This page contains files and links referred to in my Polyglot Gathering 2016 presentation.

Video of the presentation

Slides

View my slides on Google Docs

This is largely a note to myself, to find later. This has already happened to me several times and I forget how to resolve this every time. The problem is that after some type of system update of one kind or another, Chrome will start causing the X.org server to crash. This sometimes happens immediately on login and sometimes there is a delay before the crash.