Thank you for developing and maintaining such a fantastic piece of software!
And thanks to you and @prokoudine for this great series of interviews.
I was very surprised to read:
> But we do now generally tell new users "You don't have to use JACK. And in fact, if you don't use JACK, your initial experience is going to be a lot easier". That's particularly true for MIDI devices. Most people using JACK2 have to go through some extra loops to actually get hardware to show up. Whereas if they use the ALSA backend on Linux, it just works.
>
> So JACK will be there, we will suggest and make it more and more obvious that JACK is not the obvious thing for you to use.
I recently helped a friend setting up his Linux laptop to record audio (USB interface, mics to record acoustic instruments). I installed Ubuntu 20.04 and used the great Ubuntu Studio tools to setup JACK [1]. It's still a pain, as you mention, to save/restore session states for my friend, and to setup the settings for latency Vs. xruns.
My friend doesn't need to route audio from one program to another, so I guess he could just use ALSA directly, but then how can he monitor/optimize the latency?
The latency is set in the audio/MIDI dialog that shows up when you start Ardour. You can also measure systemic (hardware analog-digital/digital-analog conversion) latency from there.
I've read several articles about this, from US, UK and French sources, and none of them mention alternatives like Jitsi. Is it just a lack of knowledge?
I've tried Zoom once, it was a disaster. I've tried Jitsi, it was much better. Moreover, Jitsi doesn't require any installation on the client side, and you can host your instance or join an existing one (you trust).
Polyglot here. I'm struggling with written Chinese (traditional Chinese, as I live in Taiwan). Written (traditional Chinese) and spoken (Mandarin) forms are very different, especially in novels but even in news articles. I've got a pretty decent level in spoken Mandarin (most of my colleagues are Taiwanese, meetings are in Mandarin), I can use traditional Chinese to type when chatting with friends online, but I'm completely lost as soon as I open any news articles shared by my Taiwanese friends.
Have you tried the Guoyu Ribao, or Mandarin Daily News? Seems like you need extensive reading practice, and that might be a good way to start.
I've also heard excellent things about Outlier Linguistics' resources for Chinese characters, assuming you're still spending a lot of effort learning characters.
I'll try 國語日報, I'm not sure where to buy it though (it used to be available easily in every 7-Eleven out there but it's been a while since I've seen a copy in a convenience store...).
I already know between 800 and 1000 traditional characters. Looking at Outlier Linguistics products, it seems more targeted towards the entry level. Their Pleco dictionary is nice, though. Reminds me of the explanations one could find in Wenlai (a desktop Chinese-English dictionary with a lot of historical explanations for each characters).
800-1000 characters is not enough. Should be about 2500-3000 characters to be comfortable with reading news and random articles online. I am at this level now, but can't handle novels yet. Need to learn much more vocab for that.
Sorry, my message was not very clear. I've studied Chinese in the past, and I'm using it daily. I already know a bunch of written characters, it's just that reading articles seems really out of reach...
And yes, I know what you mean with English... and yet, I'm lucky enough that my mother tongue (French) actually shares a lot of vocabulary with English!
This page does not show Taiwan as a separate country, which is ludicrous, but is in line with the WHO policy. Because of this policy (mostly dictated by the Chinese government), not only Taiwan is excluded from this map, but Taiwanese experts are also barred from participating in WHO meetings, even though there are already 10 cases diagnosed in Taiwan and Taiwan has a "good" history with epidemics (the current vice presdient, Chen Chien-jen, served as Minister of Health from 2003 to 2005 and was praised for effectively managing the SARS epidemic through quarantine and screening procedures [1]).
I recommend using the Johns Hopkins map [2] or Corona Help website [3] for more accurate information.
We use IRC at work, but I think when you setup an open source project community, you have to think carefully. IRC is for instant communication. If parts of your community are located in a timezone that is only online when you (the maintainer of the project) are not, that will create frustration, unless you start setting up all kind of bouncers or tools to let you be online at all time. In the end, I tend to prefer forums or mailing lists, because people writing can elaborate a bit more, and receive more meaningful feedback later on... but I guess I'm old school :)
