Google Translate

Internet

Among the many and expanding services that Google offers is Google translate. Not only can you get a web page or section of text translated into many different languages but you can also use the Google translate API to translate large amounts of text for you.

However, what you have to remember about Google translate is that it is an automated tool. It is never therefore going to give you a translation that sounds like the spoken word in a foreign language, unless the sentence is short and easy to translate.

So if you are looking for a real life translation of something then you cannot get any better than the human brain, and someone who speaks both languages fluently.

If you only want to know what something means though, you can use Google translate – at least this will give you a grasp of what is being said and you can reword it if it is then in your own language. So although useful, Google translate has its limitations.

Google translate now covers over 50 languages and the translation can take place between any two languages while passing through an English translation if necessary.

Some languages that are included in Google translate are:

French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Arabic

This is just a selection and more languages are constantly being added.

Driving Directions – Mapquest

Business, Internet, ,

Gone are the days of having a mapbook in the back seat pocket of your car and getting it out whenever you needed to find directions to where you were going. Also gone are the days of stopping and asking for driving directions as it seems that these days there are much better ways to find a map for your route.

Not only do a lot of cars now have satnav installed where you can just program in your destination and be guided there by a softly spoken voice, but also now, if you don’t have satnav then you can just look up the route in advance on a website like Google maps or mapquest.

If you need driving directions, particularly to anywhere in the US, then all you have to do is type in your start and end points on mapquest or Google maps and it will tell you the route instantly. However, the problem for mapquest is that with Google being the biggest search engine, Google maps is also getting the most use for driving directions. Even more so when Google started putting a map thumbnail using Google maps into relevant searches.

Although Mapquest have been around since before Google even existed, coming up against a giant like this is always going to be a tricky situation. Mapquest are now venturing into the Android market, going head to head with Google maps.

It would be good to find that small players with good products could still compete with the likes of Google but the next few years could be the crunch point for Mapquest.

Converting Fahrenheit to Celsius

General,

It seems that people either think in Fahrenheit or Celsius and are often unable to really ‘feel’ what a temperature is unless they have it in the units that they are used to. That is often the case with weather temperatures anyway.

But not only do we have different measurements for weather in Celsius and Fahrenheit but also when cooking, some ovens use one and some use another temperature. Often it differs from country to country but in some places you can buy ovens that read either celsius or Fahrenheit.

Anyway, to convert from one to the other manually you do the following:

Celsius to Fahrenheit
multiply by 8 and divide by 5 then add 32

Fahrenheit to Celsius
Take off 32 then multiply by 5 and divide by 8

These are not totally accurate figures but this is the easiest way to remember it if you need to get an approximate number and you don’t have google to hand! The easiest way is to just type in Google the conversion that you want like ’28 celsius to fahrenheit’ and it will tell you the answer.

 

Can I Wash a Sultan Huglo Ikea Mattress Cover?

Home & Garden,

So I asked myself this question recently. I have a nice Ikea Sultan king Sized bed but I had a lodger sleeping on it for about 4 months over a very hot summer and I didn’t feel too inclined to sleep on it after that without being able to wash it.

The instructions on the Ikea Sultan Huglo mattress cover say ‘Clean with uphostery shampoo only’. Well for a start with I don’t have any upholstery shampoo. Secondly I felt it needed a bit more than just a surface clean and thirdly I think they just put this to protect themselves.

I searched on the internet to see what the consensus was but there was not a lot of information about washing my mattress cover. I did find one person who said they they had put a similar Ikea mattress cover in the wash and it had come out OK. So I bit the bullet and decided I would wash it.

Now as I say, I have a king sized bed and the mattress cover was quite large and I figured that it would not actually fit in my washing machine so what I did was to wash the Ikea mattress cover in the bath. I dumped it in there and turned the shower on to soak the whole cover. Once I had done that I ran the bath water and put a bit of washing powder in. I kept turning it round in the tepid/warm water until i figured it was cleaner than it would have got with the upholstery shampoo.

Once I had drained the worst of the water off, I hang it over my outdoor clothes dryer to dry. Now given that I live in a place where the temperature at that time was about 40 degrees Celsius, it dried within a few hours. However, if you live somewhere cooler, be prepared to wait somewhat longer!

So, in conclusion, I think that you can wash your Ikea mattress cover if you do it carefully and don’t stick it on a hot wash or put it through the dryer. No guarantees though!

Fishing for Catfish

Recreation,

Catfish as a species are one of the most diverse range of fish, particularly in terms of the range of sizes of catfish that you can catch. There are quite a number of different species of catfish and they live in areas from caves to running freshwater.

So with the variety of species you can get catfish that are only around 12cm long but when people go out to catch big catfish, they can be fishing for catfish up to 2 meters long!  Catfish are bottom feeders and have up to 4 pairs of barbels which are what make then look like they have cat’s whiskers.

Catfish are often caught for eating all over the world and fishing for catfish is a great pastime for a lot of people, all trying to catch the biggest fish. As with a lot of fishing, in order to catch the fish the best bait is what the fish normally like to eat, which in the case of catfish is smaller bait fish but you can also use worms as bait.

Catfish are both a freshwater fish and a saltwater fish due to the number of varieties and so you have many options with regard to fishing for catfish, depending on which species you are looking to catch.